Boxx TV talk with Becky Taylor from Page Melia PR at NAB 2019 about the history of the company and the vision for the future including the launch of sub-frame 4K wireless technology. Click here to listen
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Becky: Hello I'm Becky Taylor here at NAB 2019 and I'd like to thank NAB Show and Broadcast Beat for producing this podcast. Today's guests in the Broadcast Beat podcast studio is Darrell Bilton CEO and Scott Walker CTO, and they both join me from Boxx TV, who were the first company to bring zero delay wireless solutions to the broadcast industry. Good afternoon to you both. Scott so, the big news for Boxx TV this year is the announcement of a breakthrough in 4K wireless link. Tell us more.
Scott: 4K, 16K, 32K at what point do we stick a retina inside our eyes and become unlimited I don't know but yes we have, we have broken the 4K barrier kind of 10 years ago, I suppose we shot ourselves in the foot a bit because we invented HD with zero delay and at that point that was like the holy grail of microwave or wireless and so now everyone expects that but in a higher resolution and it's a little difficult to do. This year we have broken the one frame need for most uses, so we're under a frame, sub frame on our 4K system and that kind of opens the window to be able to use it multi camera for staging for where those very low latency needs are.
Becky: Great stuff. Darrell, where do you see the broadcast market today and where does a wireless 4k solution fit into that?
Darrell: Okay, well we've seen exponential growth in the last 10 years in the broadcast market and of course you know we always have to have something new. As Scott said I think you know we're at a stage where HD to an ADP is there and we've got to come up with the next thing which of course is 4K, four times the resolution and that's where the market demand is. In terms of answering that question about where our wireless 4K solution fits into that I think that's a difficult one. I certainly recall around 2009/2010 when we first had our SD solution and the cut over to HD was just overnight, literally overnight and you couldn't sell a standard definition solution for love nor money and I think that we're at a different stage today in so far as the 4K market is there it's just going to be having a little more sort of slowly than we thought it would. And I think a lot of the reasons for that are you know things like the FCC repealing net neutrality. So in terms of delivering 4K content there might be a little bit more muted response because of the sheer cost of distributing that. So whilst Netflix has gone for acquiring everything in 4K I think that you'll probably find that they might back off that little bit and we might find that not everything is done in 4K and I think a lot of the other guys may or may not choose to do it in 4K. So I guess what I'm saying is that there is a 4K market there it's just going to happen in a slower sort of way rather than actually happening overnight in the way it did from SD to HD.
You know our solution, we came up with a 4K solution because as usual we're going to be the first to market, we're the guys that came up with this first. And you know as Scott said I mean sub 1 frame latency is tough to do and it's not something to my knowledge that anybody else is actually doing, so we're very proud of that, we're able to sort of show that we can do that. In terms of making that affordable and going into our market space where you know we're not going into sports, we're not going in for that market of people who've got massive budgets to do this. We're going into a market where we want people to be able to access our technology for a reasonable price in the way that we always have done. The way we plan to approach the market with this, is to give people effectively a 1080 an HD system which is fully upgraded able to 4K and that way people can adopt the technology now for a reasonable price and for a reasonable price again hopefully we we're going to let them upgrade to 4K from that. So I think that's where we're at and that's how we're going meet that market.
Becky: Scott, Boxx are renowned for designing products that work in licensed free channels. Will the 4K product do this too?
Scott: Certainly to start with it will. That's I suppose the difference between what we've always done and what you would suppose you'd class as the more traditional microwave companies. There is a limited amount of clients out there that can afford a license and if you're in that world then that's exactly what you should do, but it's certainly not the majority of the users out there that need to be wireless and so license exempt is really the only option. I find, like I've been doing this for a long time now and being on set on things like X Factor and Britain's Got Talent and Brit Awards and you know all these top end live to air shows where the wireless is mission critical that you know these shows are scripted, the cameras are scripted, if we lose the wireless you get a lot of screaming from the director and for good reason, it really causes a problem, so whatever you do with wireless on these big shows needs to be pulled off the roof. In my 10 years of being on these shows I've never been in a position where I haven't been able to find a clean frequency. There is a lot of spectrum up there in the 5Gb range depending on what country you're in there's around 500Mbs a spectrum so yeah I certainly have never had a problem with being in the license exempt that if you're doing the Olympics or you know you're in a stadium like that then absolutely that's the way you should be licensed but that's certainly no
