Inside the deal: Why Ross Video acquired Lama and what comes next

Last week, Ross Video announced that it had acquired Lama, the developer of advanced audio production software known for its innovative live mixing solutions. The deal bolsters Ross’ efforts to provide end-to-end solutions for live production, and gives the Lama team greater backing and support.

Nigel Spratling, vice president of production switchers at Ross Video, spoke with SVG Europe about the deal – and what happens next.

SVG Europe: How does Ross Video plan to integrate Lama’s software into its existing product portfolio? Will it remain a standalone solution, or be embedded more deeply across Ross platforms?

Nigel Spratling: The reason we’ve acquired Lama is because we’re looking at this from the customers’ point of view. Obviously, the people we deal with are producing media, which is video and audio.

One unusual thing in our business is the divide between video companies and audio companies. Even today, if you look at us and our competitors, we all build great video production equipment, but customers have to go elsewhere for audio production equipment. We’ve long felt this doesn’t make sense, because there’s a real need for tight integration across these products.

Years ago, we even created an audio control protocol, called RAP, because no one else had one. Companies like Calrec still use it today. With our new video solutions, where we’ve done a lot of control integration, we’ve also been looking at the audio problem for several years. We had a couple of false starts, but then customers introduced us to Lama. This wasn’t just our idea. Customers said, ‘These guys are cool. They’ve got stuff we need, and it would fit really well with you. Go talk to them.’

Lama has done the Olympics and other big events, though they’re still a small company working in a niche. By combining their software skills with our production solutions and control technology, we believe we can offer a true solution for anyone wanting to integrate audio and video.

Another important factor is virtualisation and cloud. Lama had already been focusing on combining audio and video in a virtual environment, whether on-premise or in the cloud. Personally, I’m very excited about this. Even though my title is video production, I used to be an audio guy, so I’m passionate about making audio and video the right combination for production tools.

We’re not going to focus Lama’s audio on music production, at least not initially, because that’s a different field. For now, it’s about broadcast-style media production. In fact, we’ve already had some integration between Ross and Lama in recent years. Lama has incorporated the RAP protocol, and we can already control Lama through our OverDrive production automation systems.

This makes sense for both us and Lama – and clearly for our customers too. Since the announcement, we’ve already had a lot of feedback from customers saying, ‘What a great acquisition. That’s perfect. Now we can get the whole thing from Ross.’

SVG Europe: What specific new capabilities will customers notice as a direct result of this acquisition, particularly in hybrid or cloud-based production environments?

Nigel Spratling: There’s something unique about Lama – or now, about us. Their original product, Lama AutoMix, isn’t just an auto mixer – it’s a context-sensitive, machine-learning-driven mixer that, once set up, can deliver excellent audio output without the need for experienced operators.

That’s why it was used for the Olympics, along with Eurosport, handling thousands of hours of broadcast. From a virtualisation point of view, that’s significant. The product is intuitive and unique. Other companies also have auto mixers but Lama Auto Mix goes further: it can mix backgrounds, music, commentary, interviews – everything – smoothly and effectively.

This ties directly to our own cloud video production offerings. For the past couple of years, when we’ve talked with clients about cloud or virtualised video production, audio has always been the biggest concern. They’ll say, ‘Okay, that’s great, you’ve got all this video stuff. What about audio?’ We’d answer, yes, we have basic audio mixing. But the response was, ‘No, we don’t want basic audio mixing. We want good audio. How do we get good audio?’

That’s actually why we were pointed towards Lama. People told us, ‘We’re going to do this, but the only people we know who can deliver the audio we want in the cloud is Lama. Can you work with those guys, please?’

SVG Europe: Can you share any details on the roadmap for joint development between the Lama and Ross engineering teams?

Nigel Spratling: There are a number of roadmap items we need to move on quickly. Already, colleagues in other product divisions have been saying, ‘We need to talk to Lama about integrating with this.’

In our Hyperconverged group, where we have large routing and production systems, there are also very large audio routing fabrics. They have some mixing capabilities, but they’re limited. That’s where Lama Connect fits in.

Lama Connect

It’s essentially a big audio patching system that also provides format conversion, so it’s transparent to the customer. They can put in Dante, AES, or whatever else they want, and take out whatever they need on the other end. This integrates perfectly with our Ultrix routing and control systems, and we definitely need that.

The Cloud team also wants tighter integration. At IBC we’ll likely demonstrate what we call the Cloud Provisioning Service, building instances using both Lama and Ross video products.

SVG Europe: How will this acquisition affect Lama’s existing customer base? Will there be any changes to support, pricing, or licensing models now that it falls under Ross Video?

Nigel Spratling: Everybody that’s a current customer will hopefully remain a current customer under Ross as well. We will honour any contracts, licensing agreements, etc, that they have for the pricing they’ve got.

We haven’t yet had the opportunity to thoroughly analyse their current pricing structure, whether changes are needed or modifications required. There almost certainly will be adjustments, as we plan to add more capabilities.

So if, over time, those prices change, essentially, the current Lama customers are kind of going to be grandfathered in, and they’ll keep their structure unless we make changes and they want to adopt those changes.

SVG Europe: What kind of presence will Lama have at the Ross stand at IBC2025?

Nigel Spratling: They’ll be there. We’ve actually got them in the production switcher area because we want to show people that no longer is video and audio divorced. They need to work together. If you’re producing media, video and audio are now combined.

At the moment, we have very simple interfaces between production switchers and audio – the same ones we’ve used for years. But going forward, we know we can make that interface much more useful for production teams.

For me, being an old audio guy, it’s exciting times. Finally, we get to combine the two.

SVG Europe: And finally, when the deal was announced, it was characterised as reinforcing Ross Video’s commitment to providing end-to-end solutions for live production. What else is needed to achieve that aim?

There’s always things we need to achieve to get our solutions better and better in terms of capabilities. Is Lama the final kind of piece? No, I don’t think so. But it’s certainly a very important piece. 

Some other missing pieces may be obvious to your readers, but our focus has always been live production.

For me anyway – and I’m speaking personally rather than for the company – this is the final piece of a live production solution. Not the complementary pieces or everything else. It’s the actual tool we’ve not had. We’ve got tools for video production. We didn’t have a tool for audio production – until now!