Omneon Foresees Industry Growth in 2010

The tone of Omneon’s NAB press conference this year was significantly more upbeat than the 2009 edition. Although CEO Suresh Vasudevan conceded that the growth of the economy is still in its early phase, 2010 is almost certainly not going to be as bad as 2009, and Omneon is in a unique position to continue to increase its market share.

“Many of the growth drivers in our industry are still in play,” he said. “HD penetration in maturing markets has a long road to travel, and arguably even the most sophisticated customers have not reached the tipping point in moving away from tape to file-based workflows. These are fundamental growth drivers that are not going away.”

To take advantage of those drivers, Omneon has set two major themes for expansion: make its customers more efficient in how they produce, manage, and distribute content; and simplify workflows by making the company’s own products work better together and facilitate integration with other products.

To that end, new at NAB this year is the Omneon MediaDirector 2201, which delivers more channels and IP bandwidth than the legacy MediaDirector 2102B.

“We raised the bar in terms of available bandwidth and IP performance,” said Geoff Stedman, SVP of marketing and business development. “The cost-reduced version began shipping a few weeks ago.”

As part of its message of workflow simplification, Omneon emphasized the interoperability of its products — specifically, the Omneon Media Application Server — with outside vendors like EVS, Sony, Starfish Technologies, Interra Systems, and ZenData, among others.

“Third-party applications are taking advantage of the common architecture that the Media Application Server provides,” Stedman said.

Also new at NAB is the ProXplore clip- and metadata-management application for the Omneon platform. Based on physical or user-defined metadata properties, ProXplore offers multisystem search, content organization, and movement.

“This is adding intelligence to active storage,” explained Product Manager Simon Eldridge. “You can set rules for processing and managing content, transcode presets, notification presets, and virtualize the file system. The operator can be completely unaware of where the content is residing while they’re working on it.”

Omneon is offering demonstrations of multiple products, including ProXplore, at its new North Hall booth location, N5106.