Changes in technology do not always follow the smooth path that history books explain in retrospective. Economic events, political changes or in this case a catastrophic pandemic can cause a sudden change in the paradigm. This has happened now in front of our eyes with the COVID 19. The possibility of using internet resources for broadcast purposes have been quietly brewing for years but only the advent of COVID 19 has created a disruption strong enough to force the mainstream broadcasters to fully adopt it.

One of the products that this leap puts in the limelight is the VectorBox In/Out.

The VectorBox In/Out solution

VectorBox In/Out is a high end ingest system with some unique twists that make it the natural heir of the previous generation. In/Out is not a product that has been migrated to work in cloud, it was designed and programmed from scratch to work in cloud. As computer engineers know, a product created to work in the cloud makes a big difference regarding efficiency, performance and flexibility. At the same time, a cloud native product when installed on premise remains better because nowadays “on premise”  does not just a box in a corner. “On premise” today means to work on LANs driven by SDN platforms that have more similarity with cloud than with a rack room of the past century.

VectorBox In/Out is able to leverage the new IT environment in two crucial ways. First its fully distributed architecture liberates engineers of the physical and geographical constrains, allowing operators to access and share the ingest ports and coding resources throughout a building, a campus or the whole globe. Secondly, In/Out can truly cope with the decline of the satellite links as the main mean of sending images. In/Out can ingest from SRT, HLS, NDI or any of the streaming formats that are used today to create real time links through the wild Internet. SDI is welcomed but for many broadcasters is no more the staple. Of course In/Out has all the standard features such as metadata management, proxy streaming or proxy recording in real time, top&tail editing, subclips creation, etc… but what makes it be ahead of the pack is the new conscience of how far we are from the old world of two years ago.