Today, multi-media content plays a tremendous role in our everyday life and even more at the workplace. Modern collaboration concepts demand interactive sharing of everyone’s work from a variety of heterogeneous devices. Companies use showrooms with multiple large screens to present their products to interested customers and at trade fairs, large screen installations attract the attention of visitors, meeting and huddle spaces are ubiquitous across all types of companies. In short: screens are everywhere. However, all these use cases involving shared displays still require dedicated hardware solutions with their very own limitations. Wireless screencast systems found in most meeting rooms, are limited to one source per screen. Showrooms and trade fair booth installations work best with preproduced and specifically tailored content. Moreover, expensive media servers and splitters are required to drive large screen walls, including tedious and inflexible configuration procedures. In contrast, Pxio’s display as a service (DaaS) software represents a true many-to-many infrastructure solution to tackle the problem of realtime pixel transport to shared screens generically. The system enables bandwidth-friendly, flexible point-to-point pixel transfer between manifold sources (PCs, laptops, mobile devices) and any number of individual or combined displays. In contrast to established solutions, no additional cabling, no expensive media server hardware, and no special set-up is required; Pxio software runs on commodity PC hardware and the standard IP network. Even complex scenarios like heterogeneous display walls are easily configured via Pxio’s intuitive user interface. The system does not need own transport channels, but uses existing company networks (LAN, WLAN) and allows to share visual content by simple drag & drop. Pixel transport as well as all other communication is strongly encrypted and, by that, suits the needs of all modern security demands even for enterprise users. Whether viewing multiple sources on one display or spanning content across multiple screens, the system only transmits the necessary pixels, saving bandwidth and ensuring scalability. The system supports additional data channels, enabling the control of displayed content via touch input.
For the system to feel responsive and work flawlessly, low latency is a key requirement. This is especially true when considering audio signals. Therefore, a major goal within this Phase 1 project was the implementation of a robust method to transmit audio with a latency below 50ms (for telecommunication and voice over IP, less than 50ms latency is typically considered lag free). Additional objectives of the feasibility study included a detailed international market analysis, the identification of most promising market segments, and the development of a commercialization strategy based on the results of the market analysis. Overall, the grand goal efficient commercialization of our product and quick scale-up of the company.
