Orad Adds Touchscreen and Power Wall Products

By Debra Kaufman

Orad Hi-Tec Systems arrived at the NAB Show with some surprise products, including Interact, a high-resolution interactive touchscreen, and the 4K-resolution Power Wall.

According to Shaun Dail, Orad VP of sales and marketing, North America, Interact allows up to five live HD video streams, 12 live SD streams, or clip sets from the ClipPlayer (which is on boards with the Orad HDGV hardware).

“Interact works with a variety of touchscreens, and its functionality is not unlike the concept of the iPhone in which the user can move around and interact with elements on the screen,” says Dail, who declined to name the price for Interact.

Interact was also shown installed in a virtual set. “It’s taking one application and putting it inside another,” says Dail. “The talent touches the screen or activates via a remote. It’s extremely flexible and adds a lot of power to the virtual studio.”

Power Wall is a modification of the HDGV core hardware that allows a 4K-resolution output and as many screens as desired. “There’s no size constraint because of the resolution,” he says. “In the past, broadcasters couldn’t do camera movements or close-ups, because you’d have a big degradation in the resolution. When you’re running at 4K, the degradation is eliminated.”

With Power Wall, the broadcaster can also run a scroll on the bottom of the screen, because Orad uses a single machine (3D Play) for the four outputs. “If you control four screens with four separate machines, you can’t synch them,” says Dail, who notes the applications for Power Wall could also be news or weather or elections.

Orad also announced that it has teamed up with ProConsultant Informatique S.A. to optimize the management of broadcast graphics. The logic of Orad’s Maestro graphic system will be integrated with the Dynamic Branding Module of LOUISE, which is a fully automated process to create promos, program tags, and teasers based on the LOUISE programming schedule.