Ross Video is dropping the price of its Carbonite production switcher, offering existing customers a new set of features for free after selling 2000 units in two years, and also entering the newsroom market.
According to the company’s chief executive David Ross, a price reduction of 12.5% is being made in order to further improve the company’s market share in the mid-sized switcher market.
At the same time, a new product, called Carbonite MiniME, is being introduced and its extended feature set will be made available to all existing Carbonite customers as a piece of free-to-download firmware.
When asked by The IBC Daily whether the moves were designed to ‘blow the competition out of the water?’, Ross said: “Yeah, kind of. Why else would we do it? Also, with the volumes that we are selling, we wanted to pass some savings on to customers.”
The price of the Carbonite 2M is being reduced from $39,995 to $35,995, while Ross Video’s small sized switcher, the CrossOver Solo, drops from $9995 to $7,995.
Carbonite MiniMEs are designed to be used anywhere in the signal flow, as pre-keyers to build a layered composition with keyed graphics, or as a virtual set background with a chroma key and add an OTS DVE selected as a direct input.
Ross Video is also going after the established news production system market with the launch of its own newsroom control technology. Aimed squarely at a sector currently dominated by ENPS and Avid iNews, Inception News will allow journalists to create content not just for broadcast but also social media and the web with publication available for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flicker, Brightcove, BIM and WordPress amongst others.
When asked why Ross Video was entering the closed-shop newsroom systems market, chief executive David Ross told The IBC Daily: “We provide all the other major parts of the control room so that was the only bit left. We also had requests from various customers [to complete the circle]. Inception News puts Ross in a unique position in the breadth of news production solutions we offer.”
