IBC 2012 is a very intense cuvée for Allegro, as we are exhibiting a very thick product line. Our flagship products are currently AL2400 High Density Transcoder and ALMosaic IP/Multiscreen Mosaic Generator. We have put a strong R&D effort on developing what we think are the right products for multiscreen delivery, and both of these products are now into production.

– Allegro DVT has been selling AL2000 for quite some time now, how does AL2400 differ from AL2000/AL1000?
AL2000 & AL1000 are our software-based encoder appliances. AL2400 benefits from these products maturity but adds hardware acceleration, and scales up to more demanding convergent deployments, where software encoding is just not an option. We don’t believe a company only providing software encoding appliances can be successful in the current technological context.

– The market is already very competitive on the multiscreen market segment, what do you think puts your products aside from the competition?
AL2400 is built from the ground up on two axes that we thought could be added on AL2000 to reach perfection. These are: high density and aggressive price. We’ve done our homework and come back with the most scalable multiscreen transcoder currently available on the market, which price grows as your project, since chassis can be progressively populated with transcoding modules.

– AL2400 is marketed on density, but really, what does this mean for a broadcaster?
Density, as the number of channels that can be transcoder per 1RU (currently 84 IPTV or 48 multiscreen channels on AL2400), is really the sinews of war in the encoders market. More channels per RU means less overall rack space needed, less energy consumption and less demanding cooling systems, which are recurring costs not to be skated over.

– AL2400 is hardware accelerated, does this mean Allegro DVT renown fast development cycles will be affected?
In fact, AL2400 is based on a hybrid architecture, which can be seen as the best of both worlds: the H.264 encoding core is hardware based, the fragmenter and embedded origin server use an embedded general purpose CPU. This allowed us to closely follow developments of MPEG-DASH, CDN delivery, such as Akamai, among other features. This also makes AL2400 benefit from the same customer support responsiveness as our other products, what Allegro DVT is often remembered for.

– What gave you the idea to add multiscreen delivery to your existing IP mosaic generator?
We actually had a few customer requests for the replication of all existing IPTV services (including Mosaic Channels), to multiscreen delivery. Since we already had distinct products for multiscreen transcoding and mosaic generation, we thought it’d be far easier for an operator to manage a single box rather than having to cascade a transcoder and a mosaic generator to reach OTT enabled devices.

AL2400 and ALMosaic will be live demonstrated on our booth at IBC: 1.A46.

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