Andrew Cross has been in the Pro AV industry for pretty much his entire life. Now at Amazon Web Services (AWS), his resume includes 20 years with NewTek as both CTO and CEO, serving as president of global research and development for Vizrt Group, and a stint as CEO of Grass Valley.
[SCN Hall of Fame 2024: Nancy Knowlton]
However, his journey into the world of Pro AV started well before all that. "When I was twelve years old, I tried to do 3D graphics on a ZX Spectrum, which was one of the first personal computers," Cross recollected. "How computers can be used to make images has been one of the things that has always driven me."
Cross earned a degree in computational physics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) and his Ph. D in computer vision at the University of York. As he recalled, even then—much to the chagrin of his then girlfriend (and now wife)—he'd come home from his studies and spend his evening in front of the computer writing programs that made 3D images and effect; his first-ever tool helped simulate camera depth of field. "This was in the super early days of the internet, so I just put it online and sent it to people. 'Hey, if you like this tool, just send me $10 in the mail,'" Cross recalled.
His first innovation—and quite a few $10 bills later—he went to work at NewTek, where he spent the next 20 years revolutionizing video production. "We saw that the next revolution was going to be real-time video processing," Cross explained. "As the economics of that market allowed computers to get faster and faster at some point computers would become fast enough that they could be used for real-time video processing.
"We were driven by this belief that a general-purpose computer could do everything that a TV station needed," Cross continued. "If we could put all of that onto one computer, we could fundamentally democratize the production of video."
"We were driven by this belief that a general-purpose computer could do everything that a TV station needed. If we could put all of that onto one computer, we could fundamentally democratize the production of video."
Andrew Cross
One of Cross's largest contributions to the industry was the creation of NDI, but—perhaps a bit surprisingly—that game-changing technology is not the thing he feels was the most consequential. It goes back to that vision at NewTek and how almost everything came to fruition. "The products that we created in those early days of NewTek are what set in motion the revolution to enable anybody to produce a show," he said. "So, when you go onto the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Twitches—the fact that people can now all produce shows, the fact that every sports league can produce a show, every school can have a class that teaches videography in marketing events—we can all now easily produce video.
"That goes back to things that we were doing right at the beginning of NewTek and our belief that it was the power of computers that could be what makes it possible for anyone to produce video," he continued. "And those things probably went on to change the world in ways that few people completely realize."
Arguably the most interesting aspect of NDI is not how it changed the industry, but how it came to be. Cross was renegotiating incredibly high health care rates for the company—and on a run one night, he had a thought—and from that thought, NDI was born. "Everything's like balloons," Cross said. "They kind of squish, and a few times in your life they end up reaching this point where something from the outside puts them under that pressure that they burst. It is inevitable. And I realized it was totally inevitable that video would move to IP."
These days, Cross spends his spare time hiking because, as he said, it helps him think more clearly. But don't be fooled: Cross is thinking about how the video production revolution is moving and where it is heading. "People think about what it takes to get a great work-life balance, and the answer is to love your work," Cross said. "If you love what you're doing, it's not work, is it? And I love what I do. What more fun can we have than making great images? Making it so that kids at schools could go off and produce video with their friends? It doesn't get better than that."
[SCN Hall of Fame 2024: Pete Putman]
Cross's impact hasn't simply transformed an industry. He has had a hand in changing how we as humans consume information and visualize the world around us. "Before video, what we knew about the world was limited to what pictures in books showed, and that was slow," Cross concluded. "Now we know what's going on in the world in real time. The whole way humans understand the world has been as a result of this ability to produce and share video."
