Get ready for the changes. If you were to ask a TV professional from anywhere in the world what kind of products Vizrt was best known for, there is no doubt they would respond with just one word - “graphics”. While that still absolutely holds true and Vizrt continues to provide its TV customers with the very best real-time 3D graphics systems, these days there is a lot more to Vizrt than graphics alone.
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For the last ten years Vizrt has been a runaway success story within the highly profitable sector of real-time TV graphics. This success owes as much to the top-quality look of Vizrt’s real-time 3D graphics as to the workflow efficiencies its products allow for. Vizrt graphics are now the mainstay of broadcasters like the BBC, CNN, Fox, Sky and many others. By templating the more routine graphics so that operators and journalists rather than designers can do the work, a Vizrt system gives a broadcaster’s creative talent the freedom to design original one-off 3D animations to catch the viewer’s eye. Starting with standard definition systems, Vizrt soon achieved the same reputation for high definition graphics, a development that has further validated recently as Vizrt's technology was selected by leading broadcasters such as Fox Sports and Sky Sports as their graphics system of choice for the new stereoscopic 3DTV platform.
Vizrt is determined to retain its leadership position for real-time 3D TV graphics and every year allocates substantial R&D resources to extend its competitive lead.
Today, if you talk to those senior managers at Vizrt who first created the company, you will learn a surprising fact. It was not through any special knowledge of 3D design technology that the company ventured into this niche area. It was rather the identification of a gap in the market and the realization that there was a significant potential demand from broadcasters’ for a high-quality 3D template graphics system that prompted the company to develop its own.
This desire to identify the need for new technologies and efficient workflows has never left the company. As soon as profits from the graphics business enabled growth, Vizrt’s management began to look for other new technologies it could develop for the same market sector.
Using the method that continues to define Vizrt’s corporate growth in recent years, the company began its expansion by forming cooperative relationships with other TV supply organizations, that were all best-of-breed in their respective market sectors. If the relationships were mutually beneficial and if it was clear there would be a global demand for their product, these organizations then became candidates for acquisition.
The first such partner was the British electronic map developer, Curious World Maps, which soon was acquired. Next was Swedish company Ardendo, which excelled in Media Asset Management (MAM). MAM currently satisfies a growing need for storage and management of digital content, enabling broadcasters to archive their video content and add sophisticated metadata to that content, for search, retrieval and re-publishing. From a desktop PC, customers can instantly search for, retrieve and edit this content for re-use for an increasing number of platforms, such as TV highlights, online video clips and now streamed video for mobile phones and other devices such as the iPad.
Visual content is the key
By applying the same far-sighted vision on TV technologies that the Company used for 3D graphics, maps and MAM, Vizrt has made two further acquisitions in the past two years. The first was Norwegian content management and Web publishing technology company Escenic. This company is acknowledged as being the best in its field and mirrored the direction in which broadcasters needed to move. By integrating both MAM and graphics tools into the Escenic CMS, Vizrt’s broadcast customers now have the ability to repurpose much of their TV content online. Equally, media groups like Escenic’s newspaper customers now publish a much richer Web offering, including many more videos and graphics.
Vizrt’s most recent acquisition was Adactus, which reinforces the Company’s diversification into new media. With Adactus on board, the company has added delivery to and video production from virtually any mobile device to its product offering. As a side benefit, Adactus provides superb video transcoding tools, converting practically any video format into any other with no loss of quality – a major asset for Vizrt’s broadcast customers.
Vizrt’s far-sighted technology strategy reflects the public trend in viewing habits from traditional TV to online and now mobile viewing. These acquisitions have also strengthened Vizrt’s relationships with its broadcast client base, and the company is now perceived as a trusted and reliable media technology partner instead of just a graphics system supplier.
Innovation is the driver
And so Vizrt continues to expand upon its original graphics origins to provide a fully-integrated set of multimedia tools to help its global client base to enhance and repurpose its media content across a broad spectrum of platforms. Vizrt has also added an important new group of print and internet publishers as customers, all of whom want to take advantage of the same integrated technology as used by Vizrt’s TV customers to enhance their own media platforms.
Whatever emerges as the next big thing to capture the public imagination for the consumption of media content, you can be sure that Vizrt will be there with another premium product, offering just the right solution at just the right time.
