4 TVBEurope Opinion


www.tvbeurope.com February 2013


“SDNs will provide a revolutionary degree of IP network control”


New IT workflow


An industry veteran with a track record of innovation takes a new look at the relationship between the IT and broadcast media worlds. Fergal Ringrose talks to Larry Kaplan


IN THE same January week that the established vendor community saw Tim Thorsteinson (re)joining Grass Valley as CEO and Jeff Rosica joining Avid as VP Worldwide Operations, it was intriguing to see a high-profile US industry veteran roll the dice and launch a start-up company with a new approach. Larry Kaplan’s provenance


runs from Sony and Tektronix through Omneon, which he founded with Profile guru Don Craig in 1998. There were bumps along the way, but Kaplan successfully steered Omneon through the dotcom bubble and subsequent Nasdaq crash to become a world leader in broadcast video servers for a decade.


The company was acquired September 2010 by close Silicon Valley neighbour Harmonic in a $274 million cash and stock deal. Kaplan continued as an advisor to Harmonic before officially stepping down in November 2012. In mid-January, he revealed


what he intends doing next. “Today I’m very excited to announce the formation of a new company, SDVI Corporation,” he posted. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while. More recently I decided to take the steps necessary to establish a company capable of turning thoughts into reality. Now it’s time to let people know what I’m doing. “SDVI will provide software solutions to address the needs of technical facilities in the Media and Entertainment industry, with a focus on making them more agile, flexible and efficient. The industry is in an unprecedented time of change, and SDVI will capitalise on significant advances in IT technology that enable innovative new approaches to video facility design and management. “For example, Software Defined Networks (SDN’s) will provide a revolutionary degree of IP network control ideally suited to video applications. In the near future (and to a much greater extent than possible today) media facility


functionality will be defined in software, mirroring the broader trends in the IT industry


Larry Kaplan: “You have to come at it as a new company. To me it was irrestistible”


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A familiar sight at IBC and NAB for over a decade: can SDVI Corporation occupy a similar industry position in coming years?


towards software defined data centres.” Later in the month, I called


Kaplan to find out what the reaction had been to his first SDVI announcement. “The reaction has been kind of amazing really. We seem to have hit a spot, more than I ever thought we would. People are looking for something and they’re not finding it with existing vendors,” he said. “I


driving them nuts! “That’s the operational


problem. The economic problem is they need to reduce capex and convert the cost of the infrastructure to match the cost of the content – in other words, associate the cost of the infrastructure required to support their programming. “They have a technology


problem and an economic problem. How do they solve


“We wanted to put a stake in the ground now. To do this as an existing company would be extremely difficult, if not impossible”


don’t know how many people [this month] have said to me, ‘we need to talk!’“ He then explained the


background to the establishment of the new company. “Major [media and entertainment] users have had the horrible problem of having to transition their facilities, and not knowing how to do it with existing technology. Let’s take the example of a broadcaster managing an array of content, with perhaps an unpredictable requirement for what will be needed and when; where people sometimes make mistakes; and where there’s just so much complexity involved. This facility needs to be reconfigured, and the problem is


those with current [broadcast] technology? They really can’t,” said Kaplan. “But if you look at the IT


world, it’s going through a revolution. They’re dealing with all these issues, and there are technologies and methodologies providing solutions – which if assembled properly, can virtualise the infrastructure and associate cost with utilisation. “We believe we can go over to the IT side of the fence and pick and choose for our world. Virtual video infrastructure in software; associating cost with utilisation; and using IP to do it. All in software. “What’s the missing link? SDNs. The idea of the


intelligence of the IP router being extracted from that router. Previously, control was embedded in the router. Now, that control is external and you can assign attributes -- a big bucket of bandwidth where you can pick your attributes, for instance bit rate or redundancy. “That can be done in the


video world? Wow. That’s what we have wanted. That was the spark [for our start-up]. Can it be done – can we replace the SDI router – on Day One? No. But over time, we can replace what we assumed had to be done with crosspoint-type environments, and associate it with the content that’s being managed,” he said. “We wanted to put a stake in


the ground now. To do this as an existing company would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. How can you move from being a hardware company depending on capex, to the software-based and opex models? You have to come at it as a new company. To me it was irrestistible. “I cannot remember a time


when there was so much change in the marketplace,” Kaplan told me. “And change means opportunity! How could I not get involved?” SDVI is currently working with beta customers during product development. The company is planning to introduce initial products and services at IBC2013.


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