Electrosonic held its annual technology open house in Burbank, Calif., last week. It's always a reminder of how diverse, creative — and demanding — video display can be. As a company, Electrosonic has specialized in serving video to the widest possible array of end points — all manner of display devices and screens for all kinds of purposes from digital signage to theme parks, carrying video content from film-originated large-format 3D to tiny streaming files, from uncompressed HD to varying flavors of MPEG and wavelet compression to motion JPEG.

This is a very modern way to deal with video, which is, of course, fanning out across digital end points all over the place. But for decades, Electrosonic operated on the fringes, technologically speaking. Certainly its video wall products and its Vector processing systems were industry standards, but its worldwide custom solutions business — and, more recently, its media networks division — seemed always to be doing something with digital video or HD that hadn't been done before.

Examples on hand at the open house included a mockup of the huge-screen, four-projector, edge-blended show for Hershey, as well as applications in command and control, digital cinema, and digital signage. I ran into Sam Guzman from the Shoah Foundation there and was reminded of the unusual compression and duplication systems that Electrosonic developed for the foundation back in the infancy of MPEG.

This hard-won processing expertise — especially in HD — as well as the company's deep experience in show control, seems to have yielded some interesting new products. At the open house, the company previewed its MS9500 based on its HD FrEND player. Intended for digital signage, this device was the most graphically flexible display I've seen in HD, processing text, images, and HD footage in a multi-window display that also incorporates a web browser interface. The device can live anywhere on a network; media can originate from a remote location such as a Network Operations Center (NOC), be pulled from the Web, and be readily customized for local and interactive applications. A single NOC can serve hundreds of displays as well as monitor and service them.

Also on hand was a variety of display products based on the company's proprietary wavelet compression algorithms, and an emerging motion JPEG digital cinema player (Electrosonic already has a widely deployed HD player for cinema pre-shows).

The digital cinema demo was just an informal progress report for the developing product, making a credible showing of the DCI Stem material in HD (not 2K) via a Christie projector. It's something to watch in the future from a company that has a unique fluency in HD in a world of diversifying end points.

We'll be blogging and podcasting from NAB, so check in at blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/nab.