 and I are at the Streaming Media West Conference down in Huntington Beach and we came here specifically to see the fine folks from Telestream and I'm here talking to Kevin Loudon who is a sales engineer for Telestream. How are you doing today, Kevin? I'm doing great. Thanks for coming by. Just to see us. My goal here is to see if I can keep you awake on the afternoon of the third day of a conference. Yeah, which is a hard thing to do. There you go. So Telestream is one of my favorite companies because they make some really, really cool products. One of the main products I rely on is Wirecast Studio and you guys have heard me talking about trying to get ready for Mavericks and the new machine and how I'm going to get that working and these are the guys that make that great piece of software that makes the live show possible. So everyone nod and say thank you to Kevin for that. I'm sure single-handedly pulled it off. You're very welcome. It was all me. So they also make ScreenFlow which is the best screencasting software in the universe having you've heard me whine about other applications on Windows that I just want to kill myself when I'm using. And Don McAllister makes all of his ScreenCastsOnline podcast with ScreenFlow as well. So another great thanks to the company for that. But what we wanted to talk about was a couple of, one new product and one product I just didn't know anything about before. So why don't we start with the new product? The new product, yeah. Okay, so the new product is a player called Switch and it's a media player for macOS 10 and it's a multi-format player. So like you have QuickTime player on your machine or you may have VLC on your machine to play things that QuickTime can't play. Or you may have media info on your machine to find out some information about what is this file and what can I do with it and how come it won't play or something like that. So you have this kind of grab bag of tools. And you also have to have two versions of QuickTime. You have to have QuickTime 7 and QuickTime 10. Right, exactly. Because QuickTime 7 can do some things that QuickTime 10 can't do. So what we did is we're starting to build this player that kind of combines all the functionality of all that. It plays QuickTime without using QuickTime. It plays MXF. It plays XT-CAM. It plays... I've never heard of MXF. MXF is a file format like QuickTime. So it's a media exchange format. So it's a format that you can wrap a lot of things in. So XT-CAM cameras... We're not going to talk about Codex. Let's not go down that rattle. We'll try and do this without talking about Codex. So anyway, it can play a lot of things that lots of different players... You need a lot of different players to play this and this and this and this. It combines them all into one. So one player can play them all. One player will inspect them and give you all the information you want. And one player will allow you to change it or edit it and then export it to something else. Oh, really nice. So editor as well. You can change the frame size. You can change the frame rate. Change the format. The Codex. There's that word again. I spent about seven months digging into Codex once and I tried to find out what the standard was. Just go look that up. Codex standard on Wikipedia. There is no... I printed out. It was 17 pages. Well, Telestream is a company that's been making a living off of different formats and different Codex. That's what we do. We bridge platforms. This thing uses this format and this Codex. I need to get it over here for this Codex and this format. That's what we do. And you guys are completely cross-platform in everything, right? Windows and Mac. You do it all. Some things are just Windows. Some things are just Mac. Some things are both. Most of the desktop products that you use are both. Screen flow is Mac only. Oh, it is. Okay, well... Wirecast will go both ways. Okay. So that's what we do, you know? Do video Codex. Yeah, we do transcoding of Codex. So you understand it so we don't have to? Right. So our player, exactly. So our player is built on this technology that we've been building for 15 years, right? So this is called Switch, you said? It's called Switch. Right. I believe this is a teaser, though. We can't have it yet. You can't have it yet. It will be out soon, let's say. Soon. I was accusing... One thing Telestream doesn't do is promise a date and miss it, but they don't also promise you a date. They love the word soon. If you want to know when it's going to come out, you can go to our website, www.telestream.net slash switch, and you can sign up for the beta. Oh, I'll definitely do that. So you'll get email notifications and things like that as we get close, and I'm sure there will be a public beta for it, then everybody will be notified and you can sign up and get it. Very cool. So do you have any idea what this is going to cost? The goal is to have a free player that will be available and then a few for-fee versions depending on functionality. So like you can buy a WMV plug-in for QuickTime, but you don't have to. It's free and then there's the studio which has important export capabilities and then another one. So I think the initial version is actually going to be a commercial version, so it'll be for-fee, but there'll be a free player that will come along eventually. So you also told me that the QuickTime is being deprecated. Tell me about that again. For some time Apple has been telling everyone, especially software developers, but also users, that QuickTime is slowly going to make its way out of the operating system. Wow. And I did not know that. Maybe it's because I'm not a developer. And there's, yeah, perhaps. And there's other technologies that are coming in behind it to sort of take up at least some of the functionality. So there's things like AV Foundation and Core Audio, things like that, that are more modern frameworks. QuickTime is getting a little long in the tooth, I guess. It's very old, right. I can't speak for Apple, but I think they sort of had a decision whether they could keep tagging this along and sticking tape on it and wrapping wire around it to try and make it work. Or every now and then, sooner or later, you have to cut the strings. And they're pretty good at cutting those strings, aren't they? They go to something else, exactly. So one of the things that everybody's really worried about is, what am I, I need QuickTime 7. I need QuickTime Pro to do certain things. What am I going to do with it? That's where Switch comes in. That's one of the ways that Switch comes in, exactly, right. So it's there to bridge that gap and have that functionality. Definitely looking forward to that. Now, I want to make sure we leave a little bit of time because you have a product and now I forgot the name of it. Episode. No, Switch. Episode. Tell us about episode. Right. So episode is a multi-format transcoater. So it is a reformatter. So it'll take content from one format, ProRes, for example, and turn it into H.264, or Windows Media, or MXN. So it's a video transcoater. Video transcoater. Right. So it's a file-based transcoater. It's available for Mac and Windows. Who would be the customer for this kind of product? The guy behind the camera just raised his hand. Yeah, just about anybody here. You know, we live in this file-based world. There's no more videotapes and things like that. You've got a file that's coming out of a camera or it's coming out of an edit system. AVCHD and you've got to turn it into something else. And it needs to be something else so you need to transcode it. So that's what this does. Now, does that take advantage of all the multi-core cool hotness and that sort of thing? Absolutely. Yeah. It's a desktop application that's also scalable. So you can actually scale it into a large sort of rendering cluster. You can gang a bunch of machines together. And if you need to do high volume. Like we have UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship, those guys that get in the ring and they meet each other up. They have a huge cluster of this software and it transcodes 18 cameras at 4 hours for one of their live events. All right. So when Steve starts doing his 4K on 12 GoPro's, that's when he's really going to need that capability. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sure. So how much does... I keep forgetting the name of the product. Episode. Can you say it again? How much is episode? There's actually three different versions. There's like a $500 version and then a $1,000 version which can do some more pro formats. And then there's a $5,000 version which is sort of a high volume, stick on a server, put it in the rack. Okay. So a normal person would be more on the $500 end. Okay. But they can all work and kind of work together and collaborate together and share work. Very cool. Yeah. I do like your pricing strategy that you have different tiers. So it's not, you know, it's screen flow starting in at $100. You can get your foot in the tele-stream stream. Screen flow is very accessible. Oh, it is. It's very accessible. And really... Price accessible. Price accessible. Is it accessible to the bind, you know? Oh, that I don't know. No, I would say no. I haven't ever checked. I always have to. The word accessible is pretty important to us. What I meant was price accessible. But I think it's very accessible in the fact that it's got a very short learning curve. Yeah. Yeah. You can be moderately capable with it easily. Right. If you're interested in Don McAllister's screencast online you can learn how to use it well. Exactly. Well, I really thank you for your time, Kevin. This has been really enjoyable. And again, the company name is? Telestream. Over at? Telestream.net. All right. Thank you. This, just in, we found out that Telestream has run the Reader's Choice Awards 2013 Streaming Media Magazine winner for a webcast presentation solution on premises. Congratulations. Thank you very much. We couldn't be more proud. Thank you. Thank you.