These sound like MVP..........................
Pro Video Manufacturers Tap Strength of Consumer Markets
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Manufacturers of professional video gear are finding new opportunities in the consumer market as the demand for low-cost, simplified video editing and graphics technology increases.
But early entrants to the market are finding that creating a hit product for the consumer sector is not as simple as stripping a high-end system of advanced features just to hit a suitable price point. Instead, successful companies are building consumer products from the ground up, leveraging underlying technologies used in their pro gear whenever possible.
Some companies view the expansion into consumer products as a crucial step to maintaining traditional profits levels.
"In the short term, companies like Pinnacle are profiting greatly from the transition from black boxes to computer video," said Bill Loesch, vice president of the consumer products group at Pinnacle Systems [PCLE], which just released the VideoDirector Studio 200 to the consumer market. "But if we really want to continue to grow, we need to think in terms of getting more people involved in video content creation. We must open the door to the mass market."
Not Enough Seats
"If you look at the audio marketplace," he added, "the transition from analog audio mixing to digital has essentially lowered the cost per seat of audio editing by a factor of 10. But the number of seats has not gone up by 10. I don't think that when you look at the professional video market that the growth of video editing seats has gone up by as much as 10 percent a year, and yet with digital video, we are driving down the cost of editing by something like a factor of 2 every 18 months."
Consumer Desktop Editing Market
U.S. Homes with PCs: 40 million
U.S. Homes with Camcorders: 26 million
U.S. Homes with PCs/Camcorders: 17 million
10% market penetration would net 170,000 customers
Source: Pinnacle Systems
Desktop editing is the most likely application for a hit consumer product, although none of the solutions on the market today can be classified as a runaway smash. In addition to Pinnacle's Studio 200, which was released to the PC market at less than $300, Avid Technology [AVID] launched its Avid Cinema product last fall for the Apple Macintosh at a price of $459. Both companies claim to have shipped more than 10,000 units.
Schools of Thought
Although the two systems are similar in a lot of ways, there are some key differences in the way each company approached the market, and therefore the design of their respective product.
The Studio 200 is the grandchild of GoldDisk's VideoDirector, which Pinnacle purchased in 1995. The company took the machine control and tape segment identification and copy functions of the VideoDirector and added its own effects, titles, graphics and transition technology. The system is built around the same custom Pinnacle chip used in the high-end Genie video processor and the 3DExtreme 10-bit DVE.
According to Loesch, the company designed the product with three premises in mind:
it must be able to output a VHS tape;it can't require digitizing taped material for storage on the hard drive;it can't require the user to open the PC for installation.
"Consumers don't want to spend a lot of time (editing)," Loesch said. "It has to be easy, fun, slam dunk-kind of editing. The perception (among consumers) is that if it is very expensive, very hard and very time-consuming, then it won't be a worthwhile endeavor."
To that end, Pinnacle designed the Studio 200 as a tape-to-tape editing system. No digitizing is necessary, so users do not require gigabits of storage on their PCs. VCRs and camcorders are connected to an external mixer with a parallel port that then connects to the PC.
Functionality-wise, Loesch said Pinnacle wanted to prevent the user from performing mundane and repetitive tasks. The system features an auto scene detection function that automatically inserts log in and out points at each scene change. Users return after the tape has played to find a full set of thumbnails to work with.
Editing functions are simple drag-and-drop of clips into an editing window where they can be trimmed and transitions, graphics and titles can be added. Editing is accurate to +/- three frames, an abysmally poor spec for professionals, but perfectly acceptable for consumers.
"Three frames is 1/10 of a second. How many non-pros would spot that?" Loesche said.
Keep it Simple
Loesch said Pinnacle avoided loading the system with advanced options, such as various output formats for Web streaming. Those functions can be added to future versions if a market for them develops.
"You have to generate an end result that people are happy with," he said. "You have to be able to generate a VHS tape."
This is one of the key differences between Pinnacle's approach and Avid's.
Bill Holding, group product manager for Avid Cinema, said the company delivered the system with video digitizing and optimized file outputs for Web, intranet and PowerPoint applications because those are the types of uses that will drive the market.
"These days, people are bringing in digitized content from the Web and corporate intranets. They might not want to just send it to tape. They might want to stream it to someone on their own," he said.
"It will probably be a few years before the backbone of the Internet can support video streaming to a large extent and before the streaming products develop as well. But already, people are setting up streaming servers in corporate intranets, and this can be an effective way to share information within a company."
However, Holding rejects the notion that Avid Cinema is aimed at a more video savvy "prosumer" than solutions like the Studio 200.
"We are getting many emails from fifth-graders working on science projects," he said. "If you've ever used a computer to control external devices, that is just as difficult, if not more so, than digitizing. We want mainstream use with the Avid Cinema line."
Avid borrowed a number of technologies from its pro editing line, but based the product on the Apple [AAPL] QuickTime Engine, rather than the Avid Media Engine.
If there is one thing that Loesch and Holding agreed on it is that developing a consumer product is not a simple matter of stripping professional gear of high end components just to hit a price point. Instead, consumer products must be engineered from the ground up, utilizing underlying technologies of pro systems whenever possible.
"Stripping stuff off a professional product does not give a consumer product," Loesch said. "You have to start designing for the consumer. You can use bits and pieces of technology that you have. Many consumer products have incredibly complicated technology underneath, but at the user level it's point and shoot." |
