My friends at rental and staging companies are telling me that just recording live events isn’t what the clients want nowadays. More often than not, they’re getting asked to provide live video and audio streaming of meetings — to services like Facebook LIVE, YouTube and even across platforms like Zoom. Interestingly enough, one of the products I use when I do this at UNC is featured below — the Extron SMP 111. I use it to stream to Facebook LIVE and YouTube simultaneously — yep, at the same time. And, it saves a copy of the stream on a local drive, too. If this is something you’re being asked for, you should consider it as it’s small, rugged and simple to use — I use it via a web control interface but it can be integrated into a larger control system and use either via scheduling or real-time control.
One of the coolest new products in this issue is Roland’s new digital canvas-based processor — called the VP-42H unfortunately, it’s only 1080p. When they have a 4K version of this, it’ll be #awesome. But, in the meantime, check it out! It allows you to tile multiple inputs on top of each other — or display them anywhere you want — one one 1920×1080 image. Like I said, a big digital canvas.