A few months ago, Clear-Com released a revolutionary new virtual intercom system called Gen-IC. It premiered during the ISE 2024 in Barcelona. This was where we saw it for the first time and had the opportunity to speak to Clear-Com’s Vice President of R&D, Marco Lopez. Today, we are meeting with Marco again after a few months to discuss Gen-IC in detail and see how it’s been performing since its release.

Marco Lopez is the VP of Engineering at Clear-Com. With nearly 30 years of professional experience, Marco’s career is closely intertwined with broadcast and engineering. He played a key role in the transition from analog to digital signals during his time with Miranda Technologies. The project he was involved in won an Emmy Award in 2011 and was subsequently adopted and standardized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

Later, Marco contributed to bringing IP standards to the broadcast world through his involvement with the AIMS (Alliance for IP Media Solutions), laying the groundwork for what is now SMPTE 2110. Following Miranda Technologies’ acquisition by Belden, Marco was appointed president and tasked with leading the acquisition of Grass Valley. Eventually, he managed the company’s Live Production business unit.

Iwona [AV Tech Magazine] Hi Marco! Great to see you. Since the last time we met, things have moved forward, and the Gen-IC has already been launched. So, how is it going? Do you already have some feedback from the users?

Marco Lopez [Clear-Com]: Yes, we have been using it with several real-world applications. The most recent one that we’re quite happy about was the NFL Draft. Here in North America, we’re crazy about American football, and the NFL is the largest of the sports leagues. They hold an annual draft.
We were able to use the system with three different locations around the world because some of the players, as I found out, are even in Europe. They needed to be connected to the comms systems while all the negotiations were going on for picking the players. We saw that it was, again, a remote or distributed production. At one point, we had up to 40 virtual clients connecting to the system. We were very happy that it has been working well.

Great to hear you’ve had a chance to use Gen-IC in advanced environments already. I’d like to go back to the beginning and ask you: what was the idea behind creating the virtual intercom? Were you responding to the needs of the users?

Yes, I would say there’s an operational need and a need for the evolution of technology. First, talking about the operational need, it’s clear that everything related to remote and distributed production has been increasingly requested, especially since COVID. The rise of hybrid working has created more opportunities for individuals to work remotely rather than coming to the office or the production site. Keeping everyone collaborating, especially those working remotely, has become crucial. In the past, remote production was more exclusive for journalists that had to fly to a location because of some event that occurred there or for the sports industry during major events like the Olympics. Now, the ability to do remote production extends to local events as well.

For example, we spoke with a customer in motorsport racing, where one of their goals is to develop a strategy to achieve net zero emissions. While electric vehicles and e-racing are concepts being explored, they are still far from being widely adopted in most motorsports. And so one of the ways that they’re attacking this is by greatly reducing the travel of staff, and operational people.This requires a robust production system that supports collaboration in a distributed fashion.

From a technological perspective, the cloud is an important technology that can be either disruptive or highly beneficial if utilized effectively. We aim to stay ahead by implementing our Gen-IC and Skyport portal fully in the cloud as a cloud intercom system. This makes deployment and management much simpler, and users can easily stop using the system and turn off the compute resources when not in use, avoiding unnecessary costs. This also supports environmental strategies to reduce computational costs. By simply pressing a button, all computational resources are released when not needed and can be reactivated when production begins again.

These two areas—operational needs and technological trends—drove the development of Gen-IC and the Skyport portal. I think we’ve been able to help our customers take advantage of those benefits

Can you tell us a bit more about the available user plans?

The way we’re starting off with the first offer is to go to market with two subscription plans. One is the essential subscription plan, and the second is the premium subscription plan. The main difference between the two plans is that the premium plan allows you to connect to on-premise devices. These on-premise devices could be either our Clear-Com devices or other intercom systems.

If someone wants to build a fully virtual intercom system running in the cloud, they can simply choose the essential package. They connect our virtual clients, of which we have two. One is called Station-IC, ideal for desktop applications running on Windows or Mac. The other is Agent-IC, a virtual client running on either iOS or Android. We also have the application working on smart devices, including smartwatches, so you can use your Apple Watch to communicate with your team anywhere in the world.

For the premium package, the connecting device that allows you to integrate with on-premise equipment is called the LQ. The LQ is not a new device, but we’ve upgraded the software running on it so that it functions as a gateway for cloud-to-ground and ground-to-cloud communication. This makes it very easy for our customers to deploy. They can simply place this fairly inexpensive LQ close to their on-premise equipment. From there, they can fully utilize the Gen-IC cloud-based communication system.

Can you tell a little bit more about the processing within the Gen-IC?

Clear-Com has been offering two approaches to intercom for some time. One is our conferencing party line systems or platforms, and the other is the matrix system. In the case of our Gen-IC product, we based the processing technology around the conferencing party line system. This system runs either on purpose-built hardware, such as our Arcadia product or our HelixNet product. Now, we’re taking that same computational software and algorithms and putting them in the cloud to offer a cloud-based party line system.

This explains where the technology comes from. It uses our patented IP core technology, or Instant Voice Core technology, which we patented several years ago for multicast audio over IP functionalities, specifically built for intercom systems or mission-critical communication systems. Currently, Gen-IC and SkyPort are running in the Google Cloud environment. We partnered with Google because we believe they are a very strong cloud provider with worldwide data centers.

Additionally, one of the key aspects we negotiated with Google is that we are on the same high-resiliency network that runs YouTube. Everyone knows YouTube well and understands that it is built on a high-availability, high-bandwidth, and resilient network, designed to handle the large amounts of data required for audio and video distribution. In our case, we’re only using the audio portion, but we’re still benefiting from all the advantages Google can offer.

That’s interesting! And since we are already speaking about data centers, you’ve achieved very low latency in Gen-IC. Can you elaborate on that and tell us about other technological achievements?

That was another part of the vision and strategy during the conception or incubator phase of the Gen-IC strategy. We recognized the growing need for remote or distributed production. In the case of distributed production, where teams are working in different locations around the world, it made sense for us to move the compute or processing closer to where those teams are physically located.

With our platform, customers can first purchase the plan or subscription they want to use. Once they purchase that subscription, they can then deploy it to a data center around the world that is closest to where their team will be working. Currently, we have six data centers available under the SkyPort management service. We may increase this number, as it is quite easy for us to do so. For now, we have placed these data centers in strategic locations where most of our customers are using our virtual client system. This includes places like Japan, Brazil, North America, and Western Europe. These are the areas where we are now offering customers the ability to deploy their systems.

Is the latency low enough to enable seamless live productions without any issues?

Exactly. So now, let’s say you have a team going to Paris for the Olympics. With our platform, you can take the plan you’ve purchased and spin it up in the Europe West data center of Google. This ensures very low latency between the team in Paris and the data center. They would benefit from this minimal latency, unlike some other systems where, typically, a US-based company would use a US data center and a European company would use a European data center.

Taking the example of the Olympics, if you have a team in Paris, there would be a significant amount of latency to cross the ocean to reach a data center in, say, the western United States. The physical properties of how quickly data can travel across a fiber connection would be increasing latency. With our system, you can deploy the service closest to where the work is being done. In this case, you would use our Europe West data center, resulting in very low latency between Paris and the data center.

Amazing! We’re already providing some application examples to our readers, so I’d like to use this opportunity to ask you: what are the desired and typical applications of Gen-IC?

So this is a nice talking point that highlights the flexibility we offer to customers. For example, let’s take an event like the Summer Olympics. Typically, the event isn’t covered by the same number of people throughout the preparation phase, the event itself, and the post-event phase. The post-event phase often includes the Paralympics, which usually occur right after the Olympics.

With our system, you can adapt to these changing needs. Suppose your technical teams are doing the pre-work and setup. You could start with one subscription for, say, 48 users for one month. As the event approaches and talent starts arriving on site, you might need an additional 64 users. You can then purchase another plan for 64 users for the second month. This way, you only pay for the 64 users when you actually need them, rather than paying for the whole month in advance.

Moreover, you can link these two subscriptions together. To the users, it will seem like one seamless system, even though it’s composed of two different plans that started on different dates. This combined system would support over 120 users (the original 48 plus the 64), all collaborating together across the two plans.

You can purchase plans with different numbers of users, and you can link up to six plans together. Currently, the maximum number of users we’re quoting is 384.

It seems like it could be tempting to sell Gen-IC without distributors. How does the sales and support process work?

Yes, that’s a very good point. Our CEO and president have spoken about this many times. Part of Clear-Com’s success is the strong network of channel partners we have all around the world. We believe these partners are best positioned to be closest to the customer, in the same time zone, understanding the culture, applications, and often the language, allowing them to communicate easily with the customer.

Additionally, we’ve structured the sale of our managed service, Gen-IC, in line with our existing go-to-market sales process. The vast majority of our products are sold exclusively through our channel partner program. Therefore, our channel partners, who have experience in selling Clear-Com products, will be able to subscribe to or “opt in” to selling the cloud-based product. We provide authorization to these partners through training and other elements to ensure they are comfortable selling the product and serving our customers effectively.

Through our SkyPort platform, authorized partners can make purchases on behalf of customers and offer the service directly to them. So I think it’s a win win situation for all our customers, who continue to receive support from trusted partners they may have been working with for 20, 30, or even 40 years in some cases.

Our commitment is to ensure the uptime and quality of service of the cloud-based offering are always at or near 100%. We strive to make this happen consistently. In terms of support, there is no change in the way we support our customers. We offer online and phone support, and we have applications engineers deployed worldwide. These engineers have been supporting our channel partner program and will continue to support them for the Gen-IC product as well.

Great! Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you!

Thank you


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