New dealership agreement for Hybrid in Middle East

With offices in Qatar, UAE, Oman, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, MGI (formerly known as Salam Media Cast), has served the Gulf region for over 35 years. Within the past year, MGI has entered into several notable partnerships to help diversify its business.

MGI recently signed a deal with HoloVis International, developers of advanced 2D and 3D immersive systems, as well as recent agreements with VidiGo, Visual Unity and never.no.

"I'm confident that MGI will provide excellent support and increase our exposure to potential customers in the Middle East," said Olivier Cohen, CEO, Hybrid. "They take a keen interest in the product lines they carry and make sure their sales and technical support team are well versed on each line they represent. I've been very impressed with how they work and their commitment to their broad customer base."

MGI will support and sell Hybrid's flagship Krypton 3D tracking virtual studio solution, the NEON trackless virtual set, the Chrome broadcast robotic jib, and Hybrid's entire line of robotic camera systems.

Some of the other partners MGI represents include: Avid, Axon, Canon, Christie Digital, Cisco Systems Inc., Evertz, Front Porch Digital, Fujinon /Fujifilm Global, Grass Valley, Harmonic Inc., JVC, Oracle, Quantel, ROSS, Sennheiser, Sonifex, Sony, Studer, Telestream, and Vizrt.

"Hybrid's line of robotics and virtual sets are very innovative and fit perfectly into our current lineup," said Paul Wallis, Sales Director, UAE, MGI. "We're looking forward to learning as much as we can about the technology in order to share this knowledge with our current and prospective customers throughout the Middle East. In particular, we're very excited to showcase the virtual studio in a box [NEON] system, as this solution can potentially be very cost effective, while enabling our clients to produce live shows with dynamic virtual sets. Personally, I believe there is a significant market for this product within corporations, government organizations, schools and news organizations of all sizes."

While many of the virtual studio solutions currently on the market are expensive or technically complex, the NEON trackless virtual studio solution is a user-friendly system that simply requires software running on a PC. NEON supports up to five live HD/SD camera inputs and can be controlled via Hybrid's Ozone software controller or through BPI I/O production switchers, such as Broadcast Pix, Sony, or Grass Valley production switchers.

Rather than camera tracking and calibration technology, the Neon 3D virtual studio solution enables virtual camera movements in real-time from fixed cameras on set. Despite its simplicity, the 3D virtual scenes are photo-realistic and anti-aliased. Users can either use Neon's set design tools, or import virtual sets created using 3D Max, Maya, Softimage, or other common modeling software.