LAS VEGAS – As Ross Video’s CEO/CTO David Ross was hosting the press Sunday morning at NAB in Las Vegas, he mentioned that the little town which the company calls home, Iroquios, Ont., has about 1,200 people in it.
That’s about the number of just the trade press that attend the massive NAB Show, which regularly pulls in well over 80,000 delegates.
Despite the tiny town pedigree, Ross Video has been growing by leaps and bounds of late as its gear is now being deployed on a global scale. Ross the CEO reports the company has grown to nearly 400 employees (spread from its HQ, to Ottawa to the Netherlands to Australia), and is seeing a 50% growth in revenue so far this year over last. The company is also about to double the size of its manufacturing facility in Iroquois, David told the assembled media, has instituted an employee ownership program, and will be maintaining its practice of spending 25% of sales on research and development.
The company was founded in 1974 by his father John and built its name on its productiion switchers – the first of which John built on his own in his basement. The company had just 25 employees when David joined it in 1991.
However, over the past 20 years, Ross Video has grown its product lines (motion graphics, openGear, video servers, automated production control and routing), and is making serious inroads with many broadcasters with a wide array of broadcast gear. It has been helped along recently with three acquisitions, Media Refinery in 2009 as well as Norpak and Codan Broadcast in 2010.
“Not bad for a no-venture-capital-we-actually-earned-every-cent-every-step-of-the-way private company,” said David Ross (pictured).
For some, the company is best known for openGear – an open architecture standard with 25 partner companies also involved. openGear provides the industry with flexibility, where broadcasters can select products from a range of tech companies, all in one platform under one control system.
But despite how it’s grown so strongly beyond switchers, Ross Video’s “big news” at NAB is the release of its new line of mid-priced switchers, named Carbonite (there’s actually a 40-foot banner announcing the new product line out front of the Las Vegas Convention Centre). “There is a hole in the middle of the market,” said Ross, as he explained Carbonite. “It’s a cost-effective, in-between switcher for the majority of the market.”
“We’ve been working on this for two years,” he added, saying the original idea dates back to 2006.
The Carbonite series includes two choices on panel size combined with a 16 or 24 input chassis. Carbonite 1 is a 1MLE panel with 16 direct access source buttons, full panel mnemonics and Ross ‘PanelGlow’ RGB buttons. This control surface has direct access to two full MLE’s, giving producers the operational benefits of a multi-MLE production in the same physical space as a traditional 1MLE switcher. It’s top price is $24,995.
Carbonite 2’s panel (left) harnesses the horsepower of its production engine and features 24 direct access buttons, full mnemonics, PanelGlow, 3 axis joystick – and Ross faders are all standard. Carbonite also includes a browser based, multi-user GUI that can be accessed from a Mac, PC or an Apple iPad. The GUI provides comprehensive graphics management for Media-Stores as well as control switcher setups and remote operation. The Carbonite 2’s top price is $39,995.
“Some of its competitors cost that times a factor of five,” Ross noted.
Ross Video can be found on the NAB Show floor at booth N3807.
