DTS Looks To Gain Market Share Via Partnerships

By Dan Daley

DTS came out swinging at the NAB Show. Along with hardware and master distribution partner DaySequerra, the company debuted its DTS Neural Loudness Control with Analytics, a real-time measurement and correction method with new displays and scopes, as well as DaySequerra’s iLM8, loudness meter.

According to DTS VP of business development Mark Seigle, partnering is a key strategy for getting its products into the market. One prime example is the DTS Neural Loudness Control embedded in the NEO and 6800 product platforms at the Harris booth.

“We’re starting out on the professional side. For instance, we spent many, many hours with sports mixers developing and fine-tuning our mono-to-stereo box solution,” Seigle explains. “We’re putting our mixing, imaging, and loudness solutions in at the affiliate level. Ultimately, the goal is to get the results — higher-quality audio — into viewers’ homes.”

Seigle concedes that loudness solution has become a crowded space, with offerings taking many forms from a growing number of companies, most notably Dolby, possibly DTS’s most direct competitor in this regard.

“Yes, we’re looking to take market share, but we also believe we have a better product,” he says, referring to the proprietary algorithms developed by the DTS engineering team led by DTS chief scientist James “JJ” Johnston. “We believe that you can’t fool the human ear; you have to engineer for it, not around or against it,” he says. “That’s what our solution does. But there are a number of possible solutions out there, and we take them and the issue we’re all trying to address quite seriously.”