Acquisitions Help the Industry Grow

Business acquisitions happen every day. But every so often, one happens that makes an industry sit up and notice. With the purchase of Elemental Technologies, Amazon has done just this. Once merely a helpful website for last-minute holiday shopping from the comfort of your living room, Amazon is now the leading lifestyle website. On top of what they started with, they have diversified into mobile phones, e-readers, content programming, and much more. With this latest purchase, Amazon is extending itself even further.

What Does Elemental Technologies Bring to the Table?

Elemental is a company that specializes in processing and delivering video feed, for customers ranging from broadcast television, to Major League Baseball, to ESPN, and even NASA. It is not solely concentrated on broadcasting though, and has been a pioneer in developing software for multi-screen content delivery. This includes:

•  Multi-format content that works on televisions, tablets, smartphones, and other formats.
•  App-delivered video offerings.
•  4K TV service
•  Internet device support partner for the 2012 Summer Olympics

Elemental has regularly been named amongst the best technology companies year in and year out and is also known for being innovative, always on the cutting edge of digital media.

How Does This Affect Us at Telairity?

As the leading providers of SD and HD Broadcast Encoders, acquisitions such as this give us hope for continuing growth in the industry, which equates to continuing growth for us as a business. While Elemental brings the software to the multi-screen world, both Amazon and Elemental need hardware providers to handle the demanding up-front task of real-time encoding. This is where Telairity looks to come in, by using our expertise in providing real-time hardware encoding solutions to capitalize in this growing field. After all, if Amazon is looking to invest in the multi-screen field, there are sure to be others not too far behind.

For Those Who Were Sleeping: Justifications for the Digital Age

Somewhere, online or in print, at any given hour of the day on any one of the settled continents, there is a headline blaring the catchphrase “digital age” somewhere in its midst.  It’s a phrase that has already lost any sense of novelty in speaking it or writing it – it just seems to come with the territory, a distant piece of primeval etymology. To say, “Digital age!” almost anywhere on Earth would be the equivalent of saying, “Cars and trucks!” in the middle of a freeway traffic jam. Yes, we all know how “information” has become “digitized” to the nth degree. But what are the advantages of this means of record-keeping over, say, the libraries that civilization has painstakingly accumulated over the course of hundreds of years? What are the practical gains of being able to record sounds and images “digitally” as opposed to the analog formats we all grew up with?

Is this a case of technology taking over by sheer force of traction and advertising? Is the digital age a “necessary” age?

Well, the short answer is that like it or not, the digital age is upon us. For those who choose to ignore the implications of its technological achievements, they stand to lose out against those who have dedicated their lives and careers towards “mastering” the new formats.

Binary code enabled us to enter the 'Digital Age,'
by breaking everything down into bits from the blogs we read
to the pictures we send friends. 

But there’s a longer and more logical answer as well. The digital age has standardized the flow of many different types of information – telephone calls, photographs, television sets, libraries, billboard advertising, and advanced communication – into a single flowing river of zeroes and ones. The images you take (via digital camera or smartphone) of your friends and family on vacation in Brazil are formed of the same “bits” that comprise the online blogs you read while bored at work, back in your New York cubicle. Unlike the Eastman Kodak photo albums of just a few years back, these images are easily printable – and furthermore erasable. Likewise, the graphic quality of digital images far surpasses the finest film developing facilities that America ever produced. The 8-megapixel camera on a $99 smartphone already is capable of displaying graphic resolutions that the human eye, for all its sharpness, fails at discerning.

The digital age has done for information what the industrial revolution did for material parts: information that would have been hard to find 20 years ago is now easily replicable. You can now balance libraries more extensive than the Library of Congress in your lap as you sip your latte at the “bookstore.”

Just like any other major technological revolution in human history, the digital age has its detractors and naysayers. But it is here to stay for the foreseeable time being, and should be welcomed – at the very least – out of sheer necessity.