An Interview with NetStreams CEO Herman Cardenas

We’ve developed a switch that is a switch-controller all in one. So not only do we control the source, we also control the monitors. So literally, you don’t need a control system in order to do the video distribution and the con-trol for the video device with our system. Instead of $7000, it’ll be a fraction of that. And that’s the entry-level solution, available in January 2006.

TPV: Are you revealing anything else at CES about your future direction?

HC: We will be revealing a general concept at CES that’s even more exciting. We’re working on a product to address everything. Legacy sources or native sources. In the audio side of the world, native sources are more readily available. Everyone is now building music servers. On the video side, that’s not so readily available.

NetStreams has to be aware that land mines exist. We’ve determined it’ll be a while before all of the DRM [digital rights management] issues are solved. This encryption scheme and that encryption scheme and how we work with it. So, what we’re going to demo is the same approach we took in audio where we handle compressed or uncompressed—we always prefer uncompressed because it delivers bit for bit. So the way it comes out of a DVD player is the way you get it— raw. That’s the performance level we want to deliver.

In audio, we can do any format. On the video side we’ll do the same thing. We’ll be able to address compressed video formats, but our goal is to take uncompressed over CAT5, digitized over TCP/IP, so we can do what is not being done today, which is point to multipoint.

So we’re going to take data from the output, because we can’t get access to the internal digital data. But there’s going to be lots of connectors—component, HDMI, DVI, and other things we’re looking at as well. And we’re going to take it all the way up to 1080i. We’re going to be able to distribute point to multipoint in the home, much the way we’ve done with audio where we don’t just distribute the audio, we also integrate it seamlessly with sources. Video will be the same way. We don’t want just to distribute video, but also to control it. We want to be able to deliver any resolution, whether 480i or 1080i. And as the market puts out algorithms for encryption, it is our intention to fully protect the rights of the content developers and the artists, so we will implement those encryption algorithms as appropriate.