Tom Veite Catches Up with SVG to Talk Tech, Trends and HDR10

Last week, our central region sales manager, Tom Veite, caught up with SVG’s Kristian Hernandez as part of SVG’s Sports Tech: On Demand series. Watch the video, or read our summary of the transcript below, to find out what they got up to when talking all things live sports and sports production.

Kristian Hernandez (SVG): Tom, how's 2021 going so far for you?

Tom Veite (Adder Technology): Well, 2021 has been outstanding so far!

Kristian: Good to hear! I hope everyone is staying safe at Adder and I'm glad you can join us. KVM is important to the venue and production space in general. Before we get into finding out how Adder has evolved in the past year to help its customers, can you please give us a quick company overview of Adder and tell us what you do in the KVM space?

Tom: Sure, Adder was established in 1984 and is now a global leader in high performance KVM connectivity solutions. Connectivity is Adder's sole focus, and our solutions stretch from high performance IP and direct-connect KVM all the way through to desktop secure KVM and some very nice remote-access solutions.

Kristian: Awesome, thanks Tom! We are all very interested to hear who you guys are working with in the sports video production industry. Can you tell us about some of your recent installs or more about people that you are looking forward to working with this year?

Tom: Well, believe it or not, a lot of companies and venues have decided to upgrade during this period of down time, so it has actually been a pretty busy year for us. The ADDERLink™ INFINITY (ALIF) range continues to be our primary go-to solution for live sports and sports video production. This year, we installed ADDERLink INFINITY at five major league baseball parks before the start of the season. Many NBA arenas are already using the ALIF range, and we have more scheduled for installation at the end of the current season. One of those facilities is running all 4K, with the ADDERLink INFINITY 4000 series (ALIF4000), so that has been exciting to see come together. We are seeing a great deal of implementation within NFL stadiums - the most recent being a very large one in the California area where they needed all HDR-compatible solutions. The last year has also seen us work with several universities on upgrades.

Kristian: You mentioned the ALIF4000 series is one of your go-to products for these venues and teams. How are you continuing to improve that product?

Tom: Well, the ALIF4000 has got so much functionality built into it and we are not even tapping into all of it yet. As well as just introducing dual-head 5K over a single fiber link, we now also support dual-head HDR10, SDR10 and SDR8 - all of which have hugely important to support stadiums and arenas. We have also added multigigabit Ethernet connectivity which allows you to use your current copper infrastructure. Previously, the solution only ran over a 10Gb connection, so you had to run fiber. But now, with multigigabit Ethernet, you can keep your copper infrastructure, get a multigigabit Ethernet switch and some multigigabit SFP modules, and you are good to go! We also added 16-channel audio and dual-HD high frame rate video up to 240hZ which is great for e-sports. A nice little feature called local feed through enables you to bring your laptop into the control room and just connect it to another network port on your receiver. As the local user, you can independently access that laptop while getting to all the other KVM that you're authorized to get to. With the ALIF4000, you can connect to every single transmitter whether it's a single-head dongle that's hanging off the back of a rack, or the full dual-head 5K set up. If I can, I might sneak in another product that we have recently released. The ADDERLink INFINITY 101T (ALIF101T) is a new introduction to our ZeroU™ range of KVM transmitters. It doesn’t require a PDU port - you just power from the computer. And what is even better, you don’t need to take up any rack space to display 2560 x 1600 video at a max of 1440p. The new additions mean there is now the option to choose between different connectivity and audio types.

Kristian: It is great to see that Adder is continuing to innovate to support sports production and venues. We have a couple of minutes left, can you tell us about the tech trends that you are seeing in the industry? What do you think will be the focus in the next year?

Tom: We've talked to several of our sports customers, and despite the vaccine roll out picking up speed and life slowly returning to normal, they are not planning to have everybody back at work immediately. Many are going to keep a hybrid work environment where some work at home and some work on site, so I think remote working is going to stick around for a while. Another thing we are seeing in the sports networks and facilities space is a growth in virtual machines. To meet this growth, we introduced the ADDERLink INFINITY 3000 serieswhich allows you to access and control all of your virtual and physical machines from your on-screen display. Finally, we can’t finish up without mentioning HDR as it looks like that is going to become a must-have for all the sports production and live sports venues this year.

Kristian: Great – we have covered so much there from remote workflows and virtualization, through to HDR capability. For now Tom, thanks for your time, we appreciate you stopping by to say hello and we really hope that we can say hi in person when things get safe enough to do so.

Tom: Sounds great Kristian, appreciate it.

For more information about the ADDERLink INFINITY range, please visit www.adder.com/infinity