SVG@NAB Perspectives: Thomas Riedel Welcomes Visitors to “Closing Ceremony of Traditional Routing”

During what is likely to be the only press event at this year’s NAB Show to involve the use of a chainsaw, Riedel Communications founder Thomas Riedel applied the power tool to a symbolic wooden box router to mark what he described as the “closing ceremony of traditional routing”.

In explaining his reasoning, Riedel tracked the development of the MediorNet media signal distribution and processing family since its launch in 2009. Today there are some 2745 nodes in the market – but, crucially, MediorNet is now allowing broadcasters to implement traditional router-free, decentralised networks in their facilities. By way of example he pointed to the recent decision by AMP Visual TV to install MediorNet into a new fleet of DSNG production vehicles, with May’s Le Mans 24 race among the major sports commitments set to benefit.

Riedel also took the opportunity to highlight the role that MediorNet will play in Japanese broadcaster NHK’s 8K productions at one of this summer’s major sports events.

Above all, he stressed that the German manufacturer is seeking to support broadcasters to “determine how quickly they want to migrate to IP” from the sphere of conventional routing. But – chainsaw in hand to the amusement of the NAB press contingent – he made it clear that he feels the IP transition will only continue to accelerate.

Meanwhile, new products introduced at this year’s show included the ESP-2324 Expansion Smartpanel for Riedel’s RSP-2318 Smartpanel multifunctional user interface. When connected to an RSP-2318 Smartpanel, the compact new expansion keypanel provides an additional 24 keys and four high-resolution multitouch colour displays that are said to be easy to read even at wide angles and in bright sunlight.