I'm Sam Bogoch, from our Interplay team. I’m a product designer, which means I try to figure out what our products should do, what they should look like, and how they should come together as systems. I love well-designed, cool products (both hardware and software) and have been a longtime fan of tablet computing systems (at various times, I’ve lived for Newton, Palm, Tablet PCs and now my iPad). My colleagues sometimes kid me for actually enjoying trade shows like NAB, but I love the fact that they let me get input from a wide range of customers in a short time. I’ve been in the Media Asset Management space for over 15 years now, the last 3 with Avid. It seems like the pace is continuously accelerating instead of tapering off… and not just because we have over 800 Interplay customers. Managing media files just seems to occupy a more and more central role, so customers keep asking us to do more.
A great example of a feature driven by customer input is our WAN (wide area network) browse feature in Interplay Production. Until we developed it last year, the Interplay system’s power was limited to a local network and high-end PCs. Many of our customers told us that if they could access Interplay from outside the local network, and from both Macs and PCs, it would dramatically add to the value of the system for them. We developed a standards-based WAN browse system, built around QuickTime and Java, that runs on almost any Mac or PC laptop – even some netbooks. Now, almost every Interplay customer can choose to extend the reach of their system to producers, loggers and legal departments wherever they are located. One of the networks covering the recent Vancouver Winter Olympics was able to use this system to bring many more editors and producers into the workflow, many of them thousands of miles from Vancouver.
At NAB we were also able to present the latest versions of our applications in the booth, meet with prospective customers (especially for our new Interplay MAM product line, from our Blue Order acquisition in January) and get a broad sense of where the industry is headed for the coming year. We also try to meet with a number of key third party partners and developers, who increasingly view Interplay as a platform they need to plug into. With all our SOA “hooks”, they can build fully custom systems around our core, so it’s helpful for everyone to sync up when possible!