Joshua Rush, chief marketing officer for Audinate, the company behind Dante, sat down with SCN to discuss the advances in its audio networking solutions and the expansion of its video business.
SCN: What are you most proud of with the evolution of Dante AV from where it started to where it is today?
Joshua Rush: I would say the widespread adoption by the industry. When I joined in 2014, Dante certainly had a lot of momentum. Hundreds of manufacturers had already adopted it by then, but it hadn't become the de facto standard. Seeing how manufacturers and especially end users, through their product and project install requests, have embraced Dante has been great. There's a report that RH Consulting does on the adoption of networked audio, and Dante has upward of 70 % market share in networked audio products. It's encouraging to see that.
I'm also proud of our foray into video, which we've been at for about four years. As we saw in audio, these things evolve in waves. There's the initial licensing by a manufacturer, a manufacturer getting a product to market, and then there's the sell-through and adoption of that product by the integrators and the end users. So, it's been fun to watch that same wave happen on the video side we saw on the audio side in the early days.
SCN: What’s new with Dante Audio?
JR: Starting with the manufacturer side, one of the significant shifts underway before the pandemic was the move to software. More and more, you're seeing AV products that use off-the-shelf components, whether just processors or full servers, and they essentially want the software.
Before the pandemic, we introduced Dante Embedded Platform, a way to run the Dante functionality via software, and we were working with several manufacturers to get Dante Embedded Platform to market. When supply chain challenges occurred during the pandemic, and not everyone could get the chips they wanted, there was increased interest in offering Dante as software. We saw a real uptick in customers transitioning from chips, cards, and modules to software. Dante Embedded Platform is just one example, but we also have our IP core product. We also have a product called Dante Application Library that's more for software developers, but again, a way to incorporate Dante into software.
We're also offering end users more tools and the capability to manage their Dante network through Dante Domain Manager. This powerful software suite allows customers to see all the Dante products on their network, divide them into zones that make sense for their particular installation, and establish user permissions. While that spans audio and video, that's an example of Audinate providing more value than just the pure networking component.
SCN: What do you see in the future for Dante Audio?
JR: We always have things in the pipeline that we're working on. At NAB this year, we introduced a product called Dante Connect. It uses the idea of remote production or distributed workflows across different geographic locations, a trend we saw before the pandemic but has since accelerated.
“Audinate’s Dante Audio is an industry standard when it comes to audio-over-IP, and the Dante Controller software provides a familiar integrated control experience for thousands of users already working with Dante Audio. Being able to convert and route reliable broadcast quality video, which is what AJA is known for, over that same network makes our partnership with Dante symbiotic—and will benefit many AJA users in the Pro AV space.”
The idea with Dante Connect is to take everything customers love about the Dante network on the local area network and offer that over the cloud. Then you can use Dante Domain Manager to manage it globally—because once it goes into the cloud, you can create your domains wherever those might be in whatever cloud instance you're accessing. It's vital in the broadcast world because of distributed workflows, which became more prominent during the pandemic, and is here to stay with skeleton crews on site at venues, etc. This allows you to produce those events either at a different location where you have your mixing hardware in your studio or even mix it in the cloud.
One of our early beta customers is a big corporate client with over 100 facilities around the globe, and they want to be able to do coffee talks and different presentations and seamlessly get that routed between locations through the cloud. We're excited about where that technology can go, and it’s certainly the wave of the future regarding getting audio and, ultimately, video wherever it needs to be for customers.
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A big push for us during the pandemic was rolling out Brooklyn 3, one of our main modules manufacturers use to incorporate Dante into their products. With Brooklyn 2 having some supply chain challenges, we migrated to Brooklyn 3, which has allowed more headroom to add additional features to enable manufacturers to continue adding and growing their Dante capabilities.
We're currently investigating media confidentiality or encryption, and having that additional headroom and processing capability in the next generation of parts will allow us to do that in the future.
SCN: Now, let’s discuss video. What’s new with Dante Video?
JR: One of the things that makes video different from audio is that everything is uncompressed in the audio world, so you don't have to worry about codecs and different compression algorithms. Everything is essentially uncompressed; therefore, it works together.
Early on, when we got into video, we recognized that there are different use cases and technologies for various problems customers are trying to solve. We knew that as we got into video, it wouldn't look like it did on the audio side, but at the same time, we wanted to provide some key benefits.
One was the seamless integration of audio and video. We kept hearing from customers that they wanted network video to look and act like Dante Audio—super simple to use and discoverable as soon as you plug it into the network. So, we have delivered on that on the video side.
"Audinate has a deserved reputation for improvement and iteration. They won't sit on any technology they bring to the market. I fully expect the same thing with Dante AV. It's going to be more than just a one-and-done thing. They will continue to improve and refine, and we are excited to be part of that journey."
We have also been actively working on different flavors of Dante AV. First, it was Dante AV Ultra, which ensured we were first solving for the highest quality, lowest latency, and tightly synchronized use case. Last fall, we introduced Dante AV-H, which supported the opposite end of the spectrum—markets like corporate or higher education, where those video signals were ending up as a feed into Zoom and didn't need the horsepower of something like Dante AV Ultra.
We recently introduced Dante AV-A, in partnership with ASpeed, which falls between Dante AV Ultra and Dante AV-H. It is used primarily for video distribution for use cases like houses of worship or overflow rooms in performance venues with multiple screens around a concourse—any venue that takes high-quality video sources and repeats that across various displays.
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We're also excited about the number of known brands in the AVoIP space that rallied behind Dante AV. We're now up to 35 manufacturers that have adopted Dante AV, including several big names.
SCN: What do you see in the future for Dante Video?
JR: Dante Video is earlier in its lifecycle than I described on the audio side. We have a lot of manufacturers that have licensed it and are in the process of building products and bringing them to market.
I'm excited to see the products they are bringing to market, what kind of use cases and applications they solve, and how they use Dante to help solve problems. We have thousands of products on the audio side, so we look forward to seeing that same ramp-up happen on the video side.
We use software on the video side called Dante Studio, which allows you to get video signals into or out of a computer. When you talk about getting a Dante signal into Zoom or vMix, Dante Studio helps bridge that.
We also want to ramp up our management, control, and software tools to complete our video ecosystem. We want to offer things we have on the audio side for the video side that round out solutions for our customers.
SCN: Are there any industry changes that could impact Dante AV?
JR: Cloud and cloud workflows are a big trend right now, which we've stayed close to and worked with some pilot partners during the pandemic. There's a lot of upside regarding what that can do in the future, not just from workflows and where you can access your Dante products and media signals, but from business models like the ability to rent Dante for a particular event. By having software-based Dante in the products and then having these cloud workflows combined, we can support some interesting business models in the future.
Another one that everyone's talking about is AI and what that means for the AV industry. We are looking at it, especially around management and control suite of our products, analytics, and providing information on Dante networks. The more we use the data to make those systems smarter and work better for customers, the more everyone benefits.
