First Fruits Of Vizrt’s Mosart Acquisition

Vizrt is ready to push into the U.S. broadcast market with a newscast automation system that competes with well-established systems from Ross Video and Grass Valley, the company revealed Saturday at its 2014 NAB Show press conference in Las Vegas.

Last month, Vizrt acquired production automation specialist Mosart Medialab from Norwegian broadcaster TV2 Norway. The move cements and an already close relationship between the two companies and positions Vizrt to engage in a toe-to-toe fight with Ross Video’s OverDrive and Grass Valley’s Ignite for dominance in production switcher news automation marketplace.

Unlike competitive products, Viz Mosart, the company’s new newscast switcher automation product, is “switcher agnostic,” said Knut Alfred Andersen, vice president Automation Worldwide Sales, following the press event. “We can control them [production switchers] all.”

Vizrt Mosart controls switchers and other devices via native protocols, not GPI triggers, which allow the newscast automation system to provide control at a granular level. “When you have a clip to play out, you see if it is ready in the Mosart UI [user interface] and can see the precise length of the clip because we rely on native protocols,” he said.

Andersen added that in Europe, where the two companies worked closely before the acquisition, nearly 80% of the newscast automation market is controlled by Mosart.

During the event, Vizrt also announced a series of steps it’s taken to integrate its products more closely with other vendors, including Maxon, Adobe and NewTek. The Vizrt-Maxon integration allows projects created with 3D modeling, painting, rendering and animation software Cinema 4D to be directly imported into Viz Artist. It also includes Cineware, a new live link update tool.

Virtz also has integrated it Viz One media asset management product with Adobe Premiere Pro CC and its Viz Trio CG with the NewTek TriCaster production switcher.

In addition, the company also introduced Viz Multiplay, a multiscreen studio controller, at the convention as well as announced a new concept it has dubbed Metagraphics. Metagraphics is a way to keep graphics and video separate and distinct so that underlying video can be easily repurposed for playback on various platforms and resold to multiple sponsors.