Lawo announced three forthcoming Home Apps featuring the new Lawo Workspace user interface, alongside the Home Intelligent Multiviewer that minimises bandwidth and CPU usage, and the Home Power Core App, an extension of Lawo’s Home ecosystem that now also enables radio stations to create efficient, dynamic media facilities with maximum infrastructure utilisation. These new solutions help broadcasters and live media content creators to build more efficient video and audio infrastructures, and address production requirements on one open, unified platform.
Designed to run on COTS servers, all five new Home Apps take agile asset management up a level when combined with a Lawo Flex Subscription, even though perpetual licencing is also available for users who prefer to own their Home Apps.
Lawo Workspaces are a novel, mobile approach to working with Lawo’s hardware-agnostic Home Apps. They are remotely accessible user interfaces wrapped around modular microservice-based Home Apps that provide mission-specific production functionality on the go. With their HTML5-native UI, Home Apps with Lawo Workspaces can be controlled from any desktop, laptop, tablet, phone or AR headset – providing low-latency audio, video and control via any modern web browser.
Users are free to combine one Workspace-savvy Home App with the information supplied by another – eg, for audio applications that also require video, or adding a virtual VSM web panel for quick behind-the-scenes configuration changes.
Home Apps with a Lawo Workspace UI leverage the modular, platform-agnostic architecture of the Home Apps ecosystem. They are broadcast-quality applications running on remote COTS servers for workflows on the go that rely on the same authentication and authorisation systems that secure and encrypt the control and media flows of the entire Home platform.
Home Commentary claims to be ‘the most flexible approach to both off-tube and on-site commentary scenarios ever’. Commentators or contributors can monitor up to two video streams, send their audio and video to production for contribution or monitoring, and interact with production coordination via a built-in talkback function. In its most compact form, Home Commentary only requires a portable or mobile host device, a microphone and a pair of headphones for a fully functional commentary station.
The commentator’s coordination mix tunnel and talkback are processed in the Home Apps backend anywhere in the world, but can be controlled directly from the Workspace UI. A built-in audio engine provides local mixing and low-latency monitoring directly in the Home Commentary app. Engineers can access the same browser-based workspace to provide tech support in a snap.
Home Video Monitor offers low-latency video and audio monitoring anywhere. Designed for busy broadcast and A/V professionals, this app for laptops, mobile devices and AR headsets is a lightweight solution for mobile video and audio monitoring purposes. Home Video Monitor can show between one and nine concurrent video streams, with and without audio metering.
Home mc² crystal Controller is the missing link for mixing scenarios where compact crystal consoles complement the large mc² audio control surface operated by the A1 in production hubs, theatres, opera houses, live venues and houses of worship. With Home mc² crystal Controller, a tablet or laptop placed behind a compact crystal console, or indeed its optional Virtual Extension display, can display high-resolution audio meters and a video feed for the project at hand. Home mc² crystal Controller furthermore extends the crystal console’s functionality with additional on-screen touch controls.
‘In line with Lawo’s mission to assist users of its unified, open platform with their endeavor to drastically reduce the number of idle processing tools, the release of the first three Home Apps with an HTML5-based user interface represents a standalone way of interacting with mission-specific processing functionality,’ says Lawo CTO, Phil Myers. ‘Without compromising on broadcast quality or security, Lawo Workspaces enable operators to use highly affordable portable and/or mobile devices for broadcast-grade contribution and monitoring purposes from virtually any location.’
Lawo’s Home Apps platform also enables radio stations to create efficient, dynamic media facilities with maximised infrastructure utilisation. Featuring advanced audio and video processing with multi-format support – including Ravenna/AES67, Dante, ST2110, SRT and NDI – it is the ultimate solution for talk radio, visual radio and webcasts. The Lawo Home Power Core app delivers a high-performance virtual DSP mixing engine for diamond, crystal and crystal Clear audio consoles.
The Home Power Core app leverages the agility of Lawo’s Home Apps platform to provide instant processing, mixing, routing and monitoring for radio and TV workflows identical to the physical Power Core units. Users can choose among a compact, a large, and an XL instance of the app to make optimal use of the available CPU power.
Home Power Core provides exclusive DSP algorithms derived from Lawo’s mc² mixing platform for pristine audio quality. Its native NDI, SRT and Dante AV routing, encoding and transcoding capabilities will allow users to streamline their visual-radio workflows.
The app interacts with all I/O sources and destinations connected to the IP network, such as physical Power Core devices, A__line stageboxes, .edge audio streams, Lawo Virtual Sound Cards and other RAVENNA, ST2110, AES67, SRT, NDI or Dante-compliant audio devices.
Like all Home Apps, Home Power Core supports both Lawo Flex Subscription credits, for maximum ad-hoc processing agility, and perpetual licencing.
‘The Home Power Core app has been designed to meet and exceed the requirements of content producers who wish to completely virtualise their radio and TV workflows,’ says Lawo Senior Product Manager for Audio Infrastructure, Christian Struck. ‘Porting the unrivaled feature set of the Power Core, which will remain available alongside the app, to the Home Apps ecosystem will enable users to instantly spin up additional Power Core instances on a COTS server or in the cloud.’
Lawo’s Home Apps processing platform empowers broadcasters to create efficient, dynamic media facilities with maximised infrastructure utilisation. Paired with Lawo’s .edge SDI-to-IP gateway and edge processing solution, the new Home Intelligent Multiviewer minimises bandwidth and CPU usage by intelligently selecting optimal downsized video proxies for its mosaic layouts.
The Home Intelligent Multiviewer – based on Lawo’s server-based processing platform for on-prem and cloud production – is an extremely versatile and efficient monitoring solution for UHD, 3G, HD and SD video as well as audio sources. Pixel-perfect mosaics and ultra-low latency make it ideal for global events and any other agile broadcast and A/V operation.
The multiviewer is suited to high-bandwidth/low-latency ST2110 broadcast environments, SRT stream workflows in the cloud, NDI devices, compressed formats like JPEG XS, and so on. The number of PiPs can easily be adapted to the job at hand. Going from one to up to 32 splits in a real-world scenario (up 64 are possible) is a simple matter of setting the relevant parameter in Home which, among other things, acts as the GUI for all Home Apps. Multiviewer layouts – complete with customisable tallies, alarms, clocks, level meters, OSDs, UMDs and metadata – are created with Lawo’s theWALL app, which sits inside the Home cluster. All settings can be stored as user presets and applied to other Home Multiviewer instances for a unified look. Importantly, users don’t need to be engineers – nor have a scripting background – to spin up and configure a Home Multiviewer. The Home management platform makes this plain, simple, and intuitive.
The Home Intelligent Multiviewer will be released in 2025 Q2, along with an updated proxy feature for Lawo’s .edge gateway processor. The other four new Home Apps – Home Commentary, Home Video Monitor, Home mc² crystal Controller and Home Power Core – are scheduled for release in Q4.
More: www.lawo.com
