An interview with Andrew Cross, President of Global Research and Development at Vizrt Group (USA). 

– How important are innovation and accessibility for youand your company?

I am proud that even today, we are still innovating. Staying on top of this market to this day is a huge achievement. Beyond that, in the last five years, we have also been pioneers in IP video and what we’ve done with NDI. Today, NDI is used around the world in tens of millions of installations. I think this goes back to our goal of making video accessible to everybody. I have always been driven by a desire to get more people to use video by making it accessible through using the computers they have. I think NewTek has done a lot in this area, and I feel very proud of what we’ve done.

Nothing we do would make sense if we didn’t have brilliant users making great shows with it. We make the tools to allow others to do great things. I know of schools that have used our products and changed the lives of their students – they taught them how to go out into the world and tell stories. When you see people do things like this, it makes everything we’re doing matter. Our mission is to do more than just run a company.

– As someone who studied artificial intelligence for their Ph.D., what do you think about the perspectives of AI in the coming five or ten years?

Artificial intelligence is one of the most game-changing things that has happened in computing in the last two decades. I think that it is also often very misunderstood. We are expecting artificial intelligence to change the whole way computers work. But AI on its own isn’t much. The true value it brings is not in doing entirely new things, but rather helping us to do tasks much quicker and better. I truly believe that this is going to be the cornerstone of the upcoming AI in video. AI is going to help us make shows that look better, and cameras that work better. As a result, we can allow producers to focus on the art of making a good story and not need to worry about technology. Think of it as giving us “superpowers”. AI is not going to replace us but will remove all the hard tasks from our lives. It lets us be more creative and use our time better.