Extron just announced that it has purchased Entwine AG of Zurich, Switzerland. A software company, Entwine specializes in building end-to-end video capture and presentation capture solutions using an open source software called OpenCast Matterhorn, as well as HTML5 and WebRTC.

Of course, Extron’s been in the lecture-capture hardware market since last summer when they debuted its SMP-351, but this purchase of Entwine gives them a complete package as they now control the software side of things, too. Thus, current market leaders Sonic Foundry and Echo360 will see a big company, Extron, not only validating their market but also competing with them directly. The benefit to everyone is obvious as lecture capture has always been a niche market and Extron can mainstream it with more solutions as well as grow the overall market opportunities beyond what is mostly limited to higher-ed.

Although some of you may not have heard of Entwine, it was founded in 2011 and has offices in Zurich and San Francisco. According to the company’s website, it has decades of real-world experience designing, developing and deploying a wide range of video capture and distribution across across various industries. Its focus for lecture and presentation capture has been in the education, corporate and healthcare industries.

“Entwine has proven expertise developing software for enterprise-scale presentation capture systems, including Europe’s largest lecture capture system at the University of Manchester in the UK, which involves over 300 classrooms,” said Andrew Edwards, president of Extron Electronics. “With this acquisition, we are excited to add a software engineering group with many years of expertise in the field of network based presentation capture systems to Extron’s industry leading engineering team.”

In a joint statement, Andy Wasklewicz and Tobias Wunden, founders of Entwine said, “Extron is the market leader for AV systems products, and with the SMP 351 Streaming Media Processor they have set a new standard for high performance streaming and recording hardware. We are excited to join the Extron team and are thrilled at the opportunity to offer customers end-to-end presentation capture solutions that leverage the strength of our combined hardware and software technologies.”

Extron is here and the company’s SMP 351 is here.