IBC2024: Appear celebrates 20th birthday with two major initiatives
Appear is stepping up its pace of innovation with two major new initiatives set to be unveiled at IBC2024. The first of these is the launch of a flexible, open software platform providing high-performance media processing for live production. The second is a solution ecosystem comprising Appear’s own capabilities alongside other industry-leading solutions, enabling best of breed workflows.
“2024 is Appear’s most innovative year in its 20-year history,” said Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO at Appear. “Our first wave of innovation provided the media industry with the most flexible, powerful and functionally versatile hardware-based live production solutions. At IBC2024, we will complete the live media jigsaw with a software platform that allows media organisations to operate at the highest quality and robustness levels, regardless of their choice between hardware, on-premise software, or the cloud. The launch of our new solution proposition alongside this will provide further technical, operational and commercial flexibility.”
In addition to these launches, Appear will also unveil important features and functionalities for its X Platform, flexible and highly dense hardware solution. These include the newly launched 100G IP Gateway Switch module for the X Platform, which drives cost efficiencies and sustainability by increasing density and significantly increasing media flow throughput.
Latency is critical in live event content production. Appear has further optimised the latency of the AVC and HEVC functions of the X Platform, now delivering end-to-end contribution below 100ms.
In addition, the new double density JPEG XS module enables Appear to deliver eight full HD channels per module, enabling a possible 96 JPEG XS full HD channels across a single 2RU chassis, while the new HEVC/AVC X Platform module delivers a significant processing performance increase, combining encoding and decoding, delivering new levels of audio with Dolby Atmos support and HDR/SDR conversion.
“For much of Appear’s lifetime, private circuit connectivity has been pretty much the only choice for operators connecting the world’s most prestigious live events, initially over satellite and leased lines, but this is changing fast,” said Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear. “Thanks to the increased accessibility of high availability ISP infrastructure and our own 2023 launch of hardware accelerated SRT delivery over higher quality internet connections. At IBC this year, we are introducing the next generation of Appear by initiating an all-tiers live production software platform and enabling operators to take advantage of our new solutions portfolio. Individually, both are important, but together we believe that we are building the live production workflows of the future.”
David Walker, VP of pre-sales at Appear, will also be taking part in SVG Europe’s Sport Production Summit on 12 September, speaking on the panel ‘Advancing Sustainability in European Live Sports Production’. Find out more and register for Sport Production Summit here.