The Next Best Thing Since Peanut Butter and Jelly: The MDS Streaming Appliance
By Jim Bask
My son is allergic to peanuts. I, on the other hand, can’t fathom a world without peanut butter, specifically peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Although he’ll likely never eat that perfect sandwich himself, I have hope that he’ll understand the perfection of the peanut butter and jelly combination. That hope lies in the forthcoming all-in-one streaming appliance from Wowza and NewTek that simplifies the workflow for people who want to produce high-quality live video and distribute it seamlessly to their global audience.
Peanut butter and jelly. Hardware and software. The two powerhouses of the condiment world. The two industry leaders in streaming. It just makes sense.
IBC Booth 7.K11, Amsterdam, September 9, 2016—NewTek™ and Epic Games, the creator of the Unreal Engine and numerous award-winning series of games, today announced that NewTek Network Device Interface (NDI™) will be implemented for Unreal Engine 4. Epic joins the industry’s largest IP video ecosystem of products and the rapidly expanding number of companies enabling IP-based customer workflows. NewTek NDI will enable Epic Games to easily bring live video sources into UE4 without adding support for multiple codecs and video cards. Video signals are converted to NDI and made available to any Unreal Engine on a standard local or wide area Ethernet network.
Instant replay is an essential part of quality sports programming. New lower budget options are now available to help smaller venues and schools do instant replay. This is giving these smaller production added entertainment value while also providing officials the ability to review plays.
NEW YORK, NY (September 8, 2016) – NewBay, publisher of TV Technology (TVT) and Creative Planet Network (CPN), has announced the launch of NDIcentral, a live social media hub designed to educate and inform the industry about NDI™, the Network Device Interface standard from NewTek. NewBay has partnered with NewTek on the hub, which goes live today, as the industry awaits the latest news from the IBC Conference in Amsterdam.
IBC Booth 7.K11, Amsterdam, September 9, 2016—
NewTek™ is pleased to announce a second-generation Network Device Interface (NDI™) technology with a host of new advanced features, performance improvements, and full compatibility with all existing versions of NDI. Among the enhancements in NDI version 2, available in Q4 2016, is support for all modern operating systems (Windows®, Linux®, macOS™) and mobile devices, the latter making NDI the first software IP video production standard to fully embrace the mobile market. NDI uses about 1/15th of the bandwidth of other IP standards, allowing it to run on existing network infrastructure.
Rob Moser could be in trouble. He’s working on the TV crew for tonight’s United Soccer League match between the Pittsburgh Riverhounds and FC Montreal, it’s three minutes to game time, and Moser is still in his kitchen. Worse yet, he lives more than 120 miles from the soccer venue.
NewTek provides several NDI applications for all NDI users at no charge. Some are watermarked trial products, but for this article we will look strictly at those that are fully-functional free applications. These will assist any production workflow that uses products that are NDI-enabled. Such workflows include NewTek’s TriCaster and 3Play, of course, but today there are NDI-enabled video production systems and software from many other manufacturers as well. 
In our modern digital lives, we have an endless number of ways we use our computers, including using them to produce video. We may want to send full-screen output as video to a switcher or recorder to make training or demonstration videos. We may want to send just the output of one program as a video source like a dedicated text or graphics program specifically for broadcast production, or it could be a program used daily for common business or personal tasks.