What impact have the current global uncertainties had on the company’s R&D and product development in recent months?
While I certainly don’t want to sound smug, the challenges we see for the broadcast industry have not really affected our R&D roadmap. We have been focusing on moving all production and processing aspects to what is called the app-based ‘Dynamic Media Facility’. Staying the course will get Lawo to where it needs to be in the near future. Also known as the second wave of IP, the Dynamic Media Facility is all about finding a healthy mix of standard IT compute, blended with edge processing to efficiently on-/off-ramp and process legacy signals into a modern IP core. Multiviewer video proxy generation, incidentally, is a great example of processing that makes sense at the edge. The ability to intuitively deploy, manage and interact with such an agile solution is critical to users.
Our goal is to enable users to get ever more mileage out of their standard-server hardware and, where desired, the cloud. This involves the ability to change their media production facility from one collection of functionalities for task A to a completely different set of functions for task B, at the press of a button. This is what HOME, HOME Apps, VSM and the Lawo FLEX subscription model have been designed for.
What do you foresee as the biggest challenges in R&D and product development/deployment in the coming years?
People who know Lawo will confirm that we take customer feature requests to heart and fit them in with our other R&D activities for a speedy response. Product-wise, I believe we are in a good position to help our customers navigate present and future challenges.
Yet, technology keeps evolving at a mindboggling pace, and this presents both challenges and opportunities. Each new generation of CPU and GPU typically offers an increase in compute of 30~50 per cent, PCI backbone speeds are rising, and there appears to be no end to the bandwidth that new NICs cater to.
Ultimately, this hardware evolution will allow users to achieve more processing with less hardware. Simply put, if the compute capability doubles, users should be able to get twice the density of apps.
It is also worth noting that, as high-end compute increases, the low-end is also going to increase. So, for smaller installations, the hardware entry point drops at some point, and our technology becomes more accessible to a wider audience.
As compute power increases across the spectrum, this presents opportunities to tailor the software deployment model. Whilst it is considered good practice to separate the control plane from the data plane, in some circumstances it might be appropriate to run both HOME and HOME Apps on the same server. This is absolutely possible with a container-based solution, although it does require changes and options in the deployment process.
Furthermore, there are many forms of invisible developments, including the aforementioned deployment process, security, licensing, logging, and so on, which put demands on our time. R&D has always been a balancing act between meeting one’s visible objectives—strategic goals and customer-facing commitments—and the developments the outside world may not notice right away but very much appreciates.
To us, the direction the industry is going is clear enough, but predicting when it’s going to get there is much more challenging. The last thing we would want to do is focus on something that comes too early to be fully appreciated by the market, as there will be an opportunity cost to that decision.
We also need to acknowledge the changing quality-assurance dynamics that come with a unified, open platform: to maintain a high degree of consistency, we constantly need to fine-tune our approach. By their very nature, containerised microservices can be upgraded and downgraded, but this presents an infinite number of combinations for QA, which could potentially slow down our release cycles. Maintaining velocity implies that bundles of software are tested and released simultaneously, which, of course, can come at a price to customers in 24/7 operation and their narrow maintenance windows. We are constantly refining and improving this process.
Then, there is elephant in the room: security. As outfits ease into the ‘new world’ where we have more influence over security—thanks to the coherence of our unified, open platform— this goal will become easier to achieve. The real challenge lies with fitting in equipment that was built before security was on anyone’s radar.
The Dynamic Media Facility approach, finally, sparked the Media Exchange Layer (MXL) initiative according to which software by one vendor can share essence data (video, audio and metadata) with software from a different vendor running on the same server, via a common memory sharing protocol. This shared memory access could be between apps running on the same server or across the network fabric. The former would, of course, require a multi-vendor solution such as Nvidia Holoscan or Intel Tiber to facilitate orchestration and provisioning of apps from different vendors. This process is ongoing and poses new challenges we are currently tackling. Lawo has committed to contributing to this initiative.
Where do you see the most opportune areas for innovation in your area of the market, and what tech/solutions will drive that development?
The Dynamic Media Facility concept according to which countless processing apps can be started and stopped at the press of a single button, thereby reconfiguring the entire tech stack, already works today. Our single-button demonstration at NAB 2025 resonated as it enabled everyone to actually see the power of our dynamic platform.
In combination with the EBU’s Media Exchange Layer, which will do away with latency-inducing encapsulation and decapsulation, it is clearly the future: customers can respond quickly and flexibly to changing requirements, while they also avoid vendor lock-in, because they are free to choose best-of-breed apps for every block in the chain.
Lawo’s HOME Apps work both on standard servers and in a public cloud, by the way, as our internal tests have confirmed. Choosing Lawo—perhaps initially on standard IT servers—would therefore provide a stepping stone into the public cloud for those who wish to go there. Stay tuned for more news in this area.
What are you working on currently that excites you as a product team, and what can we expect to see at IBC2025?
We are proud of the agility of our entire product portfolio where everything comes together in a coherent way. Just imagine: users can run video, audio, and metadata apps on the exact same server. With the addition of the HOME mc² DSP app and the HOME Power Core app, we now have a comprehensive and compelling solution that covers both video and audio.
The standard servers we recommend keep evolving, with 256-core CPUs and 2 x 400Gbps network interface cards already on the horizon. That said, a 1RU server with a 192-core CPU and 2 x 200Gbps is already able to provide up to 16 UHD multiviewer heads with 16 PiPs each, complete with all the intelligence afforded by the combination of the HOME Intelligent Multiviewer app with our .edge gateway and its built-in video proxy generation for a more efficient use of CPU capacity and network bandwidth.
Lawo Workspaces are no less exciting, as is our customers’ ability to consistently pick the right tools for the job, be it a hardware device or an app. There is so much to look forward to!
