NAB Perspectives: Rimage’s Evans Reveals Two New Deals

A new booth location has been quite beneficial to Rimage at this year’s NAB show. After just two days, the company has already inked deals with the Tennessee Titans, delivering them a 5400N publishing solution, and with XOS for a DVD authoring solution.

The Titans purchased the 5400N for archiving to DVD and BluRay, as well as for player distribution copies.

“One of the new features that we have added that was a big selling point for the Titans is we can transcode the raw files to author product, so it’s a playable disk in a matter of minutes,” explains Jason Evans, sports video specialist for Rimage. “Before, they were using a system that records on a DVD recorder, so if it’s an hour, it takes an hour. We can speed that up to 15 minutes and he’s got it in his disk dock.”

Evans says the San Francisco 49ers also showed interest in the product at the show.

XOS, which owns the archival rights to content from college conferences like the SEC, approached Rimage about creating an online store to purchase DVDs of that content.

“They want to set up an online library where people can buy the 1988 game between Georgia and Florida, for example,” Evans explains. “They want the Rimage system to work with that library to pull the content off, make a DVD, and mail it.”

Rimage is also previewing a new virtual distribution product, Signal. Although not yet public, Signal uses a publisher subscriber relationship to do automatic transcode in the cloud.

“It then pushes content of any type out to any type of mobile device,” Evans says. “If someone has an iPad or a Droid, it transcodes into the native format for that device and then pushes out, so when they receive it, it looks like it was sent just for their device.”

The push technology, as opposed to pull, means that users do not have to download the content or deal with buffering issues; they do not know that it is being downloaded until it’s all there,” Evans says. “The publisher then has all the analytics and the DRM control so they can schedule it to expire at a certain time or look at the analytics at any point.”

Rimage is currently holding one-on-one meetings to introduce Signal, and clients have already suggested new ways to implement the yet-to-be-released product.

“The Carolina Panthers suggested ways to make the in-game experience much better with the product, which I hadn’t even though of,” Evans says.