At this year’s Centennial NAB show, Lawo will exhibit in excess of 10 new products and major updates to its existing audio, video, control and monitoring portfolio. After successfully integrating the entire Lawo product catalog, opening up to third-party vendors, and paving the way for comprehensive NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 compatibility, a new, exciting building block will be unveiled for HOME. It will provide the broadcast community with maximum flexibility and agility (“elasticity”), based on a ground-breaking business model. The first items within this new block will be video-related. On the audio production side, Lawo will officially launch version 10.6 for its mc² and A__UHD Core platform, which provides a state-of-the-art immersive audio mixing feature set with multi-channel processing and downmixing. V10.6 will support the new, optional, Pooling 8 license designed to share one A__UHD Core among up to up to eight mixing surfaces. In line with this development, Lawo is rumored to also unveil a new console model at the NAB Show. Lawo’s radio product line welcomes a new processing core, a new software version for its radio portfolio, an additional I/O card for the Power Core’s rear-panel bays, an extension for its entry-level R3LAY radio software, and the first radio app to run directly with HOME. Finally, Lawo will announce that its broadcast control system, VSM, is on its way to becoming a key first-class citizen within its HOME ecosystem for forward-looking broadcast and AV applications.

Lawo is especially curious to see how other vendors will address the most pressing needs of broadcasters and AV service providers regarding flexibility. Amid a new wave of consolidations in the vendor and channel camps, we hear clear signals that operators are wary of investing heavily in new hardware to stay ahead of the curve. Mostly idle hardware only makes your services more expensive and should therefore be avoided. Lawo believes the time has come to look at a new paradigm where all-round flexibility will play the leading role.

Keeping up with new formats and accepting that top-notch production quality may not be necessary in all cases going forward has triggered a discussion centered on the flexibility operators expect from their processing tools and the way in which they should ideally be available to cover upcoming events and assignments. Remote and distributed production scenarios will be even more important in the future than they are today.

While we obviously like to see what the competition is doing, Lawo is even more interested in discovering fresh approaches to both existing and upcoming production challenges. Flexible workflows with a minimal amount of dedicated hardware would benefit all operators. Embracing formats that are able complement open standards when budget considerations point in the direction of viable alternatives should cease to be a no-go area. Lawo hears the concerns of broadcast and AV operators and would like to continue supporting them with the right tools for the job, whether big or small.

Lawo’s product portfolio will be on display at booth C4111.