The Tao of NewTek

In the post NAB afterglow I've taken a little time to reflect on the TriCaster market. We (Digital Arts) have been doing this, now, for 26 years and I like to think that gives me a little perspective.

We started Digital Arts in order to help people realize their creative dreams. Originally we were an Amiga dealer specializing in creative applications like music production, 2D/3D graphics and do-it-yourself video production (such as it was in 1991).

Our store stocked a copy of almost every non-game program available for the Amiga and of course plenty of games too. So when the original Video Toaster (an add on card and software for the Amiga) was announced (by that weird company NewTek that made the DigiView and DigiPaint) we of course were going to carry it. I expected at it's $1595 price point we'd sell a few of them.

I. Was. Wrong.

We sold a ton of them, they took over our business. When Video Toaster 2.0 shipped and NewTek raised the price to $2495 sales jumped up even more. I'm still not sure if it was the additional features or hitting some sort of sweet spot in the pricing where professional buyers actually thought it was no longer too good to be true. Whatever it was it worked.

Soon after the release of the Toaster we showed it off at the ITVA convention (sort of a local NAB style event) in Indy and several TV station engineers sneeringly said, even after seeing the Toaster with their own lying eyes, that it was "impossible" for a computer to produce "network quality" video.

The next year at the same convention as I walked around the show floor I overheard several other salesmen say, with exasperation in their voice, "Yes I know the Toaster can do that but our product..." From "impossible" to market player in one year. The paradigm shifted as they say.

Since then NewTek has been on a technological march through the video institutions. In 25 years NewTek has gone from a small, weird company in Topeka to a dominating player in the video production sphere. First with the Video Toaster then the Video Toaster for Windows, the VT, then the Standard Def TriCaster line and culminating in the TriCaster Advanced Edition 2.

One thing that hasn't changed is NewTek always leverages the crap out of whatever state of the art computer they run on. Doing the impossible with a 7MHz Amiga back when Macs were mostly black and white (not even grey scale) or today maxing out fully loaded multi-core i7 machines with high-end nVidia graphics cards.

This is all a long winded way to get to NDI. Take a look at NewTek's pages on it for a good overview then sit quietly and contemplate the (im)possibilities.

That sound you hear is the paradigm shifting. Again.

It is the NewTek way.