NDI, which started as a proprietary technology within NewTek, underwent a transformation to establish itself as an autonomous company with a refined business plan. Coutinho elucidates that the journey involves understanding user and licensee needs, projecting revenue potential, defining product and technology roadmaps, and fostering a robust company culture. The team has grown from a 5-person unit to nearly 30 hires, demonstrating the company’s commitment to its mission. NDI’s 5-year projection plan extends beyond media, entertainment, and Pro AV markets into sectors like communication, video conferencing, security, and healthcare.

Coutinho reflects on his favorite memory at NDI, recounting his experience at CABSAT 2023 in Dubai. He was impressed by the community of NDI users who readily shared insights and solutions, showcasing the flexibility of NDI. The platform, designed as an almost LEGO-like piece, allows users to explore various applications in a highly flexible manner. Challenges faced by NDI include the demand from millions of customers worldwide, each with unique needs. The company aims to perfect a universal standard, addressing different requirements across industries while maintaining interoperability and compatibility between NDI-enabled hardware and software.

As Coutinho delves into NDI’s core features, he emphasizes its role as a platform for connectivity, acting as the invisible glue in an expanding ecosystem of products and users. The instant discoverability and registration of devices on an NDI network, along with the control of multiple devices remotely in real-time, are highlighted as key features. NDI’s technology has evolved over time by reducing complexity and expanding possibilities, supporting multiple video formats. The recent announcement of NDI 6 signifies an update to the core tech platform, allowing NDI to support high-end applications that require superior image and color depth.

Significant milestones for NDI include its adoption by the corporate and video conferencing industry, integration into products by major OEMs and ISVs, and its presence on over 600 different hardware SKUs, approaching a million devices. Customer success stories underscore NDI’s flexibility, finding applications in professional broadcasting studios, AV installations, healthcare, education, retail, and entertainment. NDI’s Total Addressable Market (TAM) is assessed as multi-billion, spanning professional to consumer markets, aiming to provide a video connectivity solution for the entire universe of video devices.

Coutinho distinguishes NDI from its competition by solving a broad spectrum of challenges and offering a unifying video connectivity platform. Looking to the future, NDI’s goals involve releasing updates targeted at specific sectors and enhancing WAN connectivity. The company is actively working with major cloud providers to enable support for NDI connectivity and workflows, aiming to break down barriers between local and wide-area networks. In conclusion, Coutinho emphasizes NDI’s role as a unifying standard, making video connectivity equally accessible to all content creators, users, and consumers across brands, products, technical knowledge, and contexts.

Read the full blog post by Amit Chowdhry for Pulse 2.0 HERE

Learn more about NDI HERE

Meet PLAY, the newest and smallest 4K NDI Player on the planet with full support for NDI® 5. Now connections are a breeze, simply connect PLAY to your NDI network, plug it into your TV via HDMI, and use your own remote to browse the new and gorgeous interface.

BirdDog PLAY Features:

• PLAY supports all NDI 5 functions including high bandwidth NDI, NDI HX2, NDI Remote, NDI Bridge
• 4K UHD. HDMI 2.0 – Receive NDI in resolutions all the way up to 4Kp60
• PLAY is powered by standard USB-C for maximum flexibility
• The built-in CEC control lets you use your own remote to browse and play NDI sources
• Magnetic Base, Non-slip grip ring
• RESTful API, Crestron control module, Zoom API, Q-SYS API

Watch the full video HERE:

Learn more about BirdDog PLAY HERE

Learn more about BirdDog HERE

“The NDI platform has evolved for years since its initial launch in 2016, and the 2021 launch of NDI 5 provides users with a more straightforward, efficient, and flexible workflow with many key developments. Briefly stated, NDI 5 gives control to the users who can now specify which network interface will be used, reducing the potential for network resource conflicts with other protocols or applications. With NDI 5, it’s easier and faster than ever to set up private NDI networks to ensure NDI streams or inputs can only be viewed by your selected production team. NDI 5 also supercharges post-production workflows and makes collaboration between sites easy and secure.”

Roberto Musso

“A huge game-changing benefit of NDI is its ability to empower creative teams of any size to achieve big show results as there are no limitations from specialized upgrades, networks, or hardware. NDI enables multiple video sources to work simultaneously on Gigabit Ethernet networks and grows to 10Gbit and beyond for massive scaling to almost unlimited streams and resolutions. NDI can even use Wi-Fi networks as another complementary path to utilize smartphones, tablets, and other compatible products as content sources.”

Roberto Musso

“While there are many other specific use cases, it would be impossible to list them all. The reality is that NDI enables more video capabilities to exist. For in-studio, remote or live events, NDI provides an elegant solution that merges the many elements of a production to accomplish any creative vision. With unrivaled ease of use, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, NDI means almost any space – work, schools, churches, homes, venues, or even sports fields – can become a location for live video, and this is a very liberating industry development, both for creativity and for business.”

Roberto Musso

Check out the full article here!

Learn more about NDI here!

Check it out here!

In the full episode on NDI.tv they speak with Karl Soule from Adobe about how the NDI plug-in helps creatives connect and collaborate on post-production projects globally in Adobe Premiere Pro & Adobe After Effects.

Check it out here!

Learn more here!

Lumens 3-Min AV University is designed to help audiovisual technicians develop new skills and keep up-to-date with the latest advances in technology. In our second video, we look at the NDI technology, a popular high-efficiency protocol that transmits video at low bandwidth across Ethernet networks.

My Lumens

The Streaming Alchemy Show is always up to date on the world of streaming, and the latest technology being used. Check out their first look at NDI Bridge.

“NewTek officially released the highly anticipated remote component of NDI 5 BRIDGE. We had a few days before that to work with it and have come away quite impressed with where it is for a first release. On today’s show, we’ll go through the process of setting up NDI BRIDGE connections between our studio and an AWS instance and demonstrate the range of capabilities this brings to the remote production space.”

-Streaming Alchemy

Check out the video on YouTube HERE.

Learn more about NDI HERE.

Recently, techtelegraph.co.uk posted a great article explaining to beginners what NDI is and some of the advantages it promises. Check out some highlights from that article, below.

NDI is a network protocol that enables audio, video, and metadata signals to be sent over standard networks in real-time. NDI is bidirectional, low latency, and can transmit video up to 4K and beyond. It is used in some of the largest broadcast environments in the world and many pro AV integrations. It is also used by individual users for video presentations or game streaming on single PC setups.

The second thing to know is that NDI is free to use. While some solutions – such as hardware with NDI built-in or specific software and applications – may come at a cost, the ability to access NDI is absolutely free. You can access NDI and its features immediately using tools you may already own.

The third key item is that NDI is more than just a transport. It allows for control of devices like PTZ cameras, capturing video feeds directly from the network to use in editing, and defines a standard for encoding and decoding. NDI is friendly to software applications, delivering high quality video. While all NDI is compressed, there is also a high efficiency option called NDI|HX that includes an easy way for devices to find each other on a network.

About the author

Michael Namatinia is President & GM of NDI at the Vizrt Group

The history of NDI

NDI began life as a way to bring broadcast quality video to more creatives. During the creation of NDI, the broadcast industry was still largely reliant on SDI cabling to transport audio and video signals. SDI has been reliable for high-cost productions but difficult to manage at scale, cumbersome to reroute or transport, and limited by only being able to carry one signal in one direction, one at a time.

The idea behind NDI was to move video signals onto existing networks – and make it free to do so. NDI can operate on standard Ethernet. Even a 1 Gigabit connection allows multiple NDI streams to pass from sender to receiver. This enables more streamlined and elegant workflows in the broadcast and digital video worlds. NDI helps lower the cost of broadcast and video creation, and further democratizes access to high-end production capabilities.

These capabilities also spread to the pro installation space. Countless houses of worship, schools, live sporting and music venues, and enterprises have added NDI feeds to their workflows to improve communication. The free-to-access model allowed NDI to quickly move into the consumer space as well. A third-party developer created a free OBS plug-in that quickly became one of the most downloaded add-ons for the software. Free tools for Adobe software and VLC were created. Video meeting platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams became NDI-capable.

Hardware was also developed. Manufacturers such as Sony, Panasonic, and Canon now offer NDI-enabled PTZ cameras. NVIDIA has enabled NDI capabilities that remove the need for traditional capture cards in videogame streaming.

Check out the full article HERE.

Learn more about NewTek HERE.

Check out MediaCast TV’s Video on NDI 5, below.

Great job by Mediacast TV!

Welcome to NDI in Two Minutes, the show about NDI for those that have busy schedules, short attention spans, or both. NDI 5 is a quantum leap in IP technology. Making NDI 5 the best NDI ever!

MediaCast TV

Our top 3 new features are:

1- NDI Bridge
2- NDI Audio Direct
3- NDI Remote

Check out that video, below.

Learn more about the M4250 Series Managed Switches at www.netgear.com/m4250
NDI and NETGEAR have joined forces to develop unique profiles for NETGEAR’s M4250 Series Switches.
Find out how easy it is to configure the new M4250 AV Line of network switches to use with NDI 4 and the new NDI 5.
The new AV GUI on the M4250 series switches sports a profile-based configuration so all you have to do is to select the profile and select the ports. That’s it.
For more info on NETGEAR’s Pro AV products and services: www.netgear.com/proav
For more info on NDI products : https://www.ndi.tv

NewTek & NDI

Check out the video on YouTube HERE.

Learn more about NewTek HERE.

Sportsvideo.org recently posted a great article discussing the industries reaction to NewTek’s NDI 5. We’re taking a look at some highlights from that article below.

Several major technology providers in the professional AV and broadcast industries have reacted with excitement to the NDI 5 announcement. NDI 5 allows anyone to easily share live, high quality, low latency video with anyone else in real time, using billions of devices.

“NDI has always been about the community, from individual visual storytellers to global software houses and manufacturers,” says Michael Namatinia, president, NDI. “I simply cannot wait to see the amazing ways they employ NDI in this AV-over-IP revolution.”

Further indication of excitement behind NDI 5 is highlighted by NDI’s limited time offer of 10,000 free downloads of the NDI ∣ HX Camera app for smartphone users. The 10,000 free downloads were consumed in less than 2 hours on Wednesday following the announcement. NDI later announced that both the iOS and Android NDI ∣ HX Camera app will be 50% off ($9.99) through June 16th, 2021.

Some of the reactions from around the industry:

BirdDog:

“NDI 5 is a steep change in what it can achieve. It allows for more efficient processing and global reach,” says Dan Miall, Co-Founder and CEO of BirdDog. “It also brings to market new types of products. Thanks to the power of NDI 5, we’re able to announce the BirdDog Play device. This is the world’s smallest and lowest cost NDI decoder supporting high bandwidth NDI, NDI|HX, and the new NDI Bridge and NDI Remote protocols. Thanks to the NDI team, we’re really excited about today and into the future.”

PTZOptics:

“We congratulate NDI on another major release,” says Paul Richards, Marketing Director for PTZ Optics. “We’ve been following NDI since its release in 2015. It’s incredible that we are already on version 5 after almost six years of improvement. NDI 5 is coming at a time when there has been more use of video around the world than ever before. The new NDI Bridge and NDI Remote applications are welcomed additions to the NDI toolkit. We can’t wait to see how users and our customers are going to be using these tools not just from their local area networks but from around the world!”

Check out the full article HERE.

Learn more about NewTek HERE.