Among this year's Technical Emmy award recipients will be Ross Video, for invention and leadership on openGear. openGear is a modular frame platform that has enabled EEG, and many other independent broadcast industry vendors, to help our customers make efficient use of rack space, power, and software control systems, while providing them with greater choice in building modular best-of-breed solutions.
When openGear was first announced, we at EEG were very excited at an opportunity to partner up with Ross's open design concept and make a high-density HD caption encoder frame card for the first time. This type of economical form factor for SDI broadcast gear had previously been only for the "big boys", companies with a very broad range of products to fill a 10- or 20- card frame. At that time, in order to get the efficiency of a frame design, a customer needed to sacrifice their freedom to choose components from independent specialty vendors who could offer the best product and expertise in an individual field. The competitive products offered by proprietary frame companies were often comparatively disappointing.
OpenGear changed all this, and today there are over 60 partners making compatible cards. Like EEG, many of these partners offer a well recognized highest-quality product in their individual field, but are not the type of vendors who provide a one-stop shop for an entire video plant.
In addition to the added rack and power efficiency, a side benefit of widespread OpenGear adoption has been greater uniformity of broadcast gear UI designs made with the Dashboard configuration toolkit. Dashboard provides an incentive for vendors to produce more standardized user interfaces that make it easier for engineers and operators to quickly learn how to use each piece of the modular system, without needing to remember too many "quirks" for each vendor's UI.
Congrats to Eric Goodmurphy, who has always been great for us to work with, and the rest of the team at Ross behind OpenGear!
This article from the Broadcast Bridge is a good longer read on the history of OpenGear with some perspective from Eric and from David Ross: http://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/4418/ross-video-wins-technical-emmy-for-opengear