Latest advances drive efficiency in all playout workflows, including mix of ground and cloud
DENVER — April 3, 2025 — At the 2025 NAB Show (April 6-9, Las Vegas Convention Center, Booth W2067), Imagine Communications is introducing new capabilities across its broad playout portfolio focused on enabling media companies to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and simplify increasingly complex media workflows. Visitors to the Imagine booth can explore premium playout and automation solutions that fit any budget and support all current and future channel origination needs in on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments.
Media companies around the world have long relied on Imagine solutions in playout environments spanning from public television stations and broadcast networks to complex multisite operations. Today, more than 5,000 channels at 700 sites worldwide operate on Imagine’s ADC™ playout automation platform, and global usage of the company’s playout solutions currently exceeds 26 million hours per month.
“Our customers’ playout requirements continue to evolve — many deliver live linear content in multiple locations, most deploy a mix of traditional TV channels and streaming, and all are under pressure to increase efficiency and reduce costs,” said Brendon Mills, chief product officer at Imagine Communications. “To ensure our customers are equipped to keep pace with changing viewer demands, Imagine continues to invest in our widely deployed playout solutions. This includes ongoing enhancements across our on-prem platforms and evolutionary migration paths to next-gen solutions that enable a practical mix of ground and cloud resources based on economic considerations.”
At the 2025 NAB Show, Imagine will demonstrate the latest advances in its Versio™ premium integrated playout platform, which is available as an on-prem server or deployable in cloud-hosted environments and supports all formats from HD-SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 to MPEG-2 transport streams. New features in Versio include a dedicated preset bus for advanced graphics workflows, as well as increased channel density options (up to four channels per physical server), which deliver quantifiable benefits in reduced power consumption and rack space per channel while maintaining a strong blend of features and functionality needed for top-tier channels.
Imagine will also introduce new capabilities in its industry-leading ADC on-prem automation solution, which integrates with more devices and business systems than any other automation product. A new RESTful API in the ADC business services layer provides a more modern interface for interoperability with third-party systems, such as traffic, scheduling, and media asset management. In addition, ADC has been validated on a widely adopted endpoint protection solution to help safeguard customers’ mission-critical operations. Also new, ADC now enables customers to schedule recordings more than 24 hours in advance, even over an entire weekend, reducing the burden of having to ensure daily entering.
Imagine also offers ADC customers a practical path to the cloud via integration with the company’s next-generation Aviator Automation™ platform, which enables multisite channel origination through a unified platform that manages ground and cloud resources from a single pane of glass. Customers can sync ADC to Aviator Automation to enable capabilities ranging from simple content synchronization to cloud-based disaster recovery and on to full cloud-based channel origination and FAST channels.
One longtime Imagine customer, Nebraska Public Media, relies on the company’s playout solutions to support five live broadcast and 12 live streaming channels. Al Krause, network operations manager at Nebraska Public Media, said, “I’ve been working with Imagine Communications products since 2000 to ensure our master control infrastructure meets our changing needs. As time goes on, our services keep developing, and Imagine products enable us to grow alongside them. Like most of our broadcast peers, we are starting to plan for the inevitable transition to IP, and we know that Imagine gateway products enable a hybrid environment and gradual migration to ST 2110.”
2025 NAB Show attendees can get hands-on demos of Imagine’s full playout portfolio at the company’s West Hall location, Booth W2067. Further details about Imagine’s presence at this year’s event are available at imaginecommunications.com/event/nab-2025.
About Imagine Communications
Imagine Communications empowers the media and entertainment industry through transformative innovation. Broadcasters, networks, video service providers and enterprises around the world rely on our optimized, futureproof, multiscreen video and revenue enablement solutions every day to support their mission-critical operations. Today, nearly half of the world’s video channels traverse our products, and our software solutions drive close to a third of global ad revenue. Through continuous innovation, we are delivering the most advanced IP, cloud-enabled, software-defined network and workflow solutions in the industry. Visit www.imaginecommunications.com for more information.
