Value-added partners

Value-added partners

Nestor Schpaliansky, general manager of VAP, a division of the Verité group, answered the TV and Video questionnaire.

-VAP comes from Value Added Partners, value-added partners, a division of the Verité Group. We are a wholesale distributor and in many cases, representative of different brands of products for the professional video and broadcast market. VAP was created as a division with the aim of focusing the effort that this business unit requires:

• Select and work with certified resellers of high level and knowledge of the problems of television channels, post-production centers, news production, commercial automation and automation of television channels.
• Have resellers who can provide added value through technical and sales support in each country of the territory, in addition to providing training on applications, installing turnkey products and solutions, offering specialized consulting by phone and in person and, very particularly, with the human quality that makes this group the elite of the market.

-VAP was born as an idea when the Verité Group achieves the wholesale distribution of added value of Apple Computer for the professional video segment. That's why 70% of our focus is on serving the professional video market that uses Apple products to solve their problems. Likewise, one of our main objectives as a company is to conquer a greater part of the professional video market so that they can use the Apple platform in their solutions.

-VAP is in charge of the distribution of several products in the territory of Latin America. In most of them we have no restrictions. As for Apple, we are not authorized to sell Pro Video in Venezuela and Mexico.

VAP is actually more like Verité Broadcast than Verité Broadcast Solutions. Verité Broadcast sells traditional video and audio equipment through resellers. VAP sells products and solutions through resellers. Verité Broadcast Solutions is a company that sells products and services to mostly television customers. It does not represent or distribute any product, it is a system integrator.

-VAP has representative offices in Argentina, Brazil, Panama and Miami. From there our sales managers and our certified supports serve the entire territory of Latin America. Soon we will establish a base in Mexico to sell and serve products that are not Apple but are complementary with Apple in some cases, as well as others that work on other platforms. In Argentina we have the sales management for the south of South America, which includes, in our case, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru.

There we have two sales managers, Ariel Mindiuk and Renzo Imhoff. We also have a certified technical support manager, Diego Ucha. In Brazil we collaborate André Tácito, who worked for Apple Brazil for 6 years, and 3 years for the consultant and integrator Interface, today one of our best resellers in Brazil. André is also certified, mainly in Apple Pro Video products.

In Panama we have Ezequiel Vasallo, general manager of Verité Broadcast Panama, and Materno Wong, recently certified in Apple Pro Video support.

In Miami there is Fernando Della Torre, head of technical support of VAP in Latin America and the Caribbean, who is also my right hand in everything that refers to strategy, logistics, product marketing, etc.

Of course, we have the shared structure of administration, finance, human resources and IT of the Verité Group, which gives us the necessary support to conduct the operation in a transparent and neat way.

-The question is very good. We have five pillars: Apple, Broadcast Pix, Focus Enhancements, Octopus News and Squid. Each of these products benefits from complementing the other products that complete workflows for real problems of the professional video industry, such as commercial insertion, channel automation, news automation, asset management (or Media Asset Management), digital signage(or Digital Signage), non-linear editing and media sharing. All add-on products can work (mostly) on both Windows and Mac OS X. Each product we distribute was carefully chosen to cover one aspect of the workflow we want to solve.

For example, Squid can use Apple's Final Cut Studio non-linear editors to pre-edit content ingested via satellite or air. Broadcast Pix 2000 (or the new Slate 1000) can be the broadcast switcher that is connected to Squid via GPI and that controls the shooting of commercials or programs recorded on the Squid server, and then apply effects, titles and over-the-shoulder clips.

Squid and Apple can share, for example, a unique content server based on Apple's Xsan on a 7TB Xserve Raid array, using software that allows you to combine different platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, called Adic StorNext.

Apple can use Building 4 Media to automate the playout from a purely Apple platform, and it can connect with Octopus News to create the news rundowns . Reporters have offline versions of Octopus News, called Octopus Field Reporter, with which they can create the scripts that will later become news, directly on their Apple MacBook Pro, where they also have Final Cut Express HD and can create their timelines for the production of clips.

Of course, all editions can make use of Genarts Sapphire to enrich the quality of their productions with the use of low-cost effects plug-ins , and they can also make use of Proximity ArtBox to create an automatic Media Asset Manager with every content that enters the server, both on Mac and Windows.

-As of March of this year we noticed an increase in investment, as well as in the acceptance of our key systems, such as Squid and Apple, in several countries in the region. Squid, our system of insertion of commercials and automation of programming is, without a doubt, the leader of the Argentine market, and little by little it is becoming the system of choice for most of the channels that have regional stations where ease of use is important, the simplicity of the solution, interaction with existing equipment, and reasonable costs. Squid is, perhaps, one of our best-sellers. It is being adopted in countries such as Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Dominican Republic and other Caribbean islands.

Very soon we will present Squid in Mexico, where we expect an almost immediate success. The references we have to support the sale of Squid in the territory are first class: engineering and operations managers of important channels in the region available to all our potential customers, who do not want to hear the sales story but the reality of their problem and how Squid solves it, told by those who know.

As for Apple, it is being accepted in professional television installations more and more, due to the quality of its products, the reliability and robustness of its solutions and the availability of applications that produce similar or better results than on Windows platforms, at much lower prices and acceptable by the market. We are convinced that Apple's vertical segmentation strategy is yielding the expected results and in no more than two years we will see an unparalleled market takeover by Apple in this segment.

Focus Enhancements has managed to impose Firestore FS-4 as the removable disc recording standard for all video camera brands on the market. FS-4 succeeds because it provides three shortcuts in the work of recording, ingesting and editing: 1) records in 'slave' mode from the camera to the FS-4 via Firewire cable; 2) record the content in the format of the non-linear editor, which will be used at the end of the recording; 3) automatically becomes the removable hard disk of the computer where non-linear editing will be done, without the need to copy material to the local disk.

In the world of digital signage, we noticed a considerable increase in investment. Firefly is a key product in this market segment because it is a self-contained playout server; that is, it does not require a computer to work. It is installed on a single channel or multiple channels. Each channel can broadcast at different times, different content according to the audience that will see the content. This technique makes it possible to do what is called narrowcasting, as opposed to broadcasting, since it captures the attention of captive audiences safely and at low cost (for example, in hospitals, supermarkets, electronics stores, shopping malls, etc.). This technique will forever change the advertising business in the next five years.