Another BluBox?
Bluebox Video UK Startup Profile
Published Aug 06, 2018 14:51 PM
One UK startup, Bluebox Video has designed, developed and is manufacturing their own streaming video wall appliances.
To the right is a picture of their CTO, James Doolin, who designed the PCB mainboard, next to 24 Full HD cameras output from their BB appliance.
We spoke with co-founder Richard Lince about their plans for moving forward with a product launch, challenges, and their fit in the market.
Company ********
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VMS ******* / ****** *******
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**** **** *** ******** ******* **** be:
- **-****: * ******* @ ***** *** 30fps $*,*** ****
- **-****: * ******* @ ** ** 26-1080P *** ***** $*,*** ****
**** ** ******* ******* ******** ** most ********** ******** *********, *** ************* cheaper **** ******** **** ***** ** Christie, ***** *** ***** ** *** $10,000-$15,000 *****.
Product ** ***********
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** **** *** **** ** ***** their ******** ** ****** *** ***** a ****** ***** ** ******* ******** who ***** ** *** ***** **** installation ******, ***** ******* ** ********** enough ** ** ***********/**********.
Comments (8)
MM
Michael Miller
Aug 06, 2018JH
John Honovich
Aug 06, 2018Yes, though technically they are "BluBØX". Related, spelling your name in a counterintuitive way might be clever but a pain for people to remember / look up.
Related: BluB0X - The Most Ambitious Security Startup in Years. @Rhodes where they at now?
Brian Rhodes
Aug 06, 2018I'll check in with BluB0X and give a short update in that post. I know the company has lost several key executives in the recent past, so outwardly the signs aren't great.
U
Undisclosed #1
Aug 06, 2018Not sure why people would be leaving, they are projecting a $373M valuation in a little over 1 year from now.
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #3
Aug 11, 2018I am interested in what their situation is also. While outwardly they seemed promising, inwardly it looks like they have a lot of really senior industry people, but not a lot of grunts to do the actual work. Have they taken on VC money at all?
Richard Lince
Aug 06, 2018Thanks for the post Jon & Sean, a couple of points to add:
We expose/use NVDEC silicon from NVIDIA for decode, pixel shaders are used for functions such as radial lens correction in 360/180 degree IP camera's. We do 'dip' into CUDA cores, but only for color space conversion using our software anyway. This does indeed leave us plenty of head room for other developments such as analytics.
Our appliances are FCC and CE certified, no UL, this is something we do plan on.
As Jon and Sean suggest, the primary purpose of the two units is to cover the VMS software already available on the market that contains hardware acceleration after our research.
Note, our hardware uses professional grade graphics (Quadro Not Geforce), memory and main board.
Questions and feedback are welcome
Cheers,
Richard - BlueBox Video.
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #2
Aug 06, 2018$6500 to run 26 1080P streams on a single machine is a good deal. Im wondering how licensing would work though. Many VMS have a licensing structure to use a virtual matrix software and integrator uses whatever hardware they want. Is Bluebox charging licensing to use their UI? Appliance decoders are becoming much less expensive and typically require no license fee compared to server decoders.
Richard Lince
Aug 06, 2018Hi, from my experience of VMS packages ( please correct me if I'm wrong) the current virtual matrix system 'usually' employs a concept of virtual screens. VMS software licenses are then tied to the virtual screen areas. In this model with BlueBox hardware providing six 4k outputs, the user would have the opportunity to purchase a single license to create a single virtual screen. This can be a financial advantage, but consideration must be made into the number of users accessing this single screen area with only a single set of credentials at any one time. Also, under this single virtual screen / license model, layouts would correspond to the single area, not permitting multiple areas to be updated individually, however, individual streams certainly could be. Nevertheless, if you need more virtual screens to act like the current solution (which uses multiple machines), you have the option of purchasing more licenses for the single surface. With this in mind its also worth mentioning the the hardware is a single Windows desktop, allowing streams to be moved, positioned or even stretched across the entire desktop surface at a single Windows OS platform cost.
BlueBox Video do provide an SDK with our our hardware, allowing developers / VMS vendors or new providers to get the most out of NVIDIA & Intel hardware. The SDK supports RTSP from Live555 and other transport formats from FFMPEG, all decoding and display is done by our SDK and not FFMPEG. We also support accelerated web browsing for you tube news channel content for example or 3d Maps, our SDK is provided free of charge with the hardware. Many more features are also provided in the SDK such as support for ONVIF playback standard when requesting RTSP streams and radial lens correction for fisheye camera's.
If you do not require a VMS for the display of your video onto a wall, you could use this SDK, we also provide a simple TCP server and client for access over the network into one of our feature filled compiled sample apps. The TCP Server supports saving and retrieval of xml layout files. This can then be easily integrated with many VMS servers no different than many other third party integration's.
Rich.