NewTek: ‘Latam presents amazing opportunities for our channel partners’

Prensario interviewed Will Waters, Global VP Product Management of NewTek.

About the NewTek’s priorities for Latin America this year, Waters said: ‘The last few years have seen tremendous growth for NewTek and much of that contribution is due to a planned international growth strategy’.

‘My long tenure at NewTek has taught me that the LATAM market is rich with creativity. Potential areas of growth in the region include media, sports and entertainment companies as the desire for video tailored to individuals shows no signs of stopping’.

‘The unique challenges that traditional producers face come from increased competition for viewers from virtualized sporting events and small production livestreaming. These competing factions always produce opportunities for those that are willing to adjust to the new realities in video production.’

‘I see that studio productions and live events will need to rework their production designs and only the flexibility of IP networks will be able to meet those requirements’.

Demand for content is rising across multiple industries. Social media, corporate communications, direct vendor-to-customer engagement, and e-commerce are all industries that are incorporating video into their businesses.

‘Brazil is a top-10 world economy and developing industries in all the previously mentioned sectors. This presents amazing opportunities for our channel partners to deliver creative solutions to these new and emerging markets’.

Also Waters highlighted the ‘very strong relationships’ with their distribution and channel partners in Latin America.

‘Some of them have been with us, or rather I should say, we have been with them for over two decades. Our success completely depends on the success of our channel partners, and we know this’.

‘The current work in the region has much to do with the local partners and the challenges they face in the region. Overall, I am optimistic. We have a good sales leadership team, and our connection with Vizrt Group allows us more resources for both pre- and post-sales support, and our continued commitment to international expansion gives us a strong mix to service and grow in Latin America’.

Talking about Vizrt Group, Waters said that ‘is a diverse company but a has a common goal: ‘more stories, better told’.

‘There is definitely a synergy to the brands being they are all strong creative businesses, built on innovation and grown by our talented, amazing people’.

‘The synergy on felt through content-centric product development and IP first solutions are most easily seen in how each brand goes to market’.

‘Vizrt services and delivers solutions for the biggest brands in broadcast around the world’.

‘NewTek gives a voice to all storytellers through video, and NDI advances creative workflows by providing a technology ecosystem where developers, manufacturers, and individuals alike can leverage the power of the network’.

‘We are very proud of NDI but more importantly, we are amazed at how the industry has expanded and evolved the ecosystem’.

When NewTek launched NDI in 2015, ‘we wanted to make the flexibility of IP networks available to everyone. That was important to the mission of NewTek to create tools for storytellers to deliver their stories through video’.

‘We have seen amazing growth both in the production ecosystems enabled by NDI and the software driven productions built around the TriCaster, 3Play, and NewTek’s Connect line of products’.

‘NewTek and NDI are separate business units but share the same DNA so to speak’.

NDI focuses on innovating and delivering technology and tools enabling flexible, scalable production workflows to the entire industry and beyond.

NewTek focuses on developing software-driven products that appeal to producers to get their stories told. Collaboration between the groups is natural because software natively speaks the language of IP.

The bestseller solutions during the pandemic

NewTek saw significant growth throughout the pandemic due to multiple reasons.

‘We were already known for software-driven live production tools and remote calling integration.

The launch of the TriCaster 2 Elite coincidentally occurred in the early summer of 2020 which was at the height of everyone figuring out quickly how to keep productions going without everyone in the same room.

Our remote calling integrations, combined with NDI KVM, PTZ camera control, video switching, and streaming delivered when there was a desperate need. Better yet, the TriCaster 2 Elite allowed new and exciting production workflows to develop as the pandemic dragged on.

The full story of success in the past few years involves the entire TriCaster line. No matter how large or small the production, the software-driven approach to live production combined with IP connectively via NDI, allows for sources placed anywhere the network touches’.