Q&A: NDI’s Daniel Nergård on navigating the evolution of live production and broadcast tech

As the media and entertainment sectors rapidly adapt to the cloud-based era, Daniel Nergård’s appointment as NDI president in January marks a strategic move for the video connectivity technology company.

His background, including a significant stint at Vizrt, equips him to guide NDI through an expansion phase, aiming to deepen its impact across the broadcast technology and video over IP sectors. 

In conversation with NewscastStudio, Nergård outlines a strategic vision for NDI, focused on strengthening its role in the video over IP ecosystem through enhanced partnerships and a commitment to customer satisfaction.

This strategy includes embracing cloud technologies to facilitate interoperability, ease of use and efficiency in live production and broadcast environments. Nergård’s leadership is guiding NDI through a significant transition period, aiming to address the growing demand for cloud-based video solutions and position NDI as the preferred standard. 

What are your goals for the year ahead in your new role?

One crucial goal is continuing to collaborate closely with our existing partners and the new ones that we’ll be onboarding throughout the year. NDI had a fantastic 2023, and we saw new partnerships grow 130%. These relationships will offer valuable feedback, and we will be able to learn more about our partners’ connectivity needs so NDI can improve its offerings while continuing to focus on ease of use and interoperability.

Another pillar for the success of NDI is our passionate, ever-growing community of users. NDI remains committed to learning from the various use cases where they are harnessing the power of NDI and amplifying these stories and knowledge to educate the rest of the community.

What do you hope to bring to the NDI team? 

By combining my software experience with my leadership track record, I can help clarify how we can get to where we want to go. I’m excited to get the team aligned on that journey of continuously improving our technology and business.

Since my experience is primarily in customer facing roles in the software industry, having worked in various segments of software with different business models I will also be able to provide insights into how we can improve our offering and customer satisfaction.

How do you envision the role of NDI in the evolving landscape of Video over IP?

Adopting Video Over IP in many video-based industries is not just a trend but an unstoppable transition. However, many users are still looking for “the standard” that offers ease of use, flexibility and performance across any context. NDI is quickly and consistently becoming the answer for more users and use cases due to its seamless interoperability, low costs, and unparalleled ecosystem of products. I envision that NDI will become much bigger than it already is.

In 2023, we added 250 NDI-enabled hardware models to our ecosystem, and this rate will continue growing as we make it easier to integrate NDI capabilities into existing products and products in development. NDI Certified, the certification program we implemented in 2023, ensures that this growth is sustainable and offers more legitimacy to our hardware vendors.

As our expansion in hardware continues, we are confident NDI is a key ingredient for the future of cloud-based video, and the high interest from the major cloud vendors only confirms it. Since 2023, we’ve seen an increase in tests and proofs of concept from different companies and we expect to have exciting news to share on this topic in the upcoming months.

Lastly, I anticipate a continued surge in the adoption of NDI within the segment of live production in all Tiers of the industry. Everyone is placing greater emphasis on user-friendliness, lower costs and higher efficiency. As live production needs in Broadcast and Pro AV continue to converge, we will use our strength and experience in the broadcast space to play a leading role in the democratization of quality, cost efficiency, and interoperability.

How does NDI plan to address the growing demand for high-quality, low-latency video streaming in broadcast environments? 

The development of NDI has been rooted in live production broadcast since the beginning. We constantly receive feedback from customers and partners within all Tiers in the industry and keep innovating to answer their needs.

NDI 6, the next step in our core technology, which we plan to release later this year, is evidence of exactly that. 10-bit color depth and fully native HDR support are requirements from our broadcast clients, and we are currently beta-testing with some of them to guarantee our release will make a difference in the broadcasting space.

What challenges and opportunities do you foresee?

Our biggest opportunity, the rapid adoption from an expanding user base, also offers us the biggest challenge.

There’s a universe of segments and users presenting different needs, requiring more features, and demanding innovation that fits into their use cases. The challenge here is prioritizing and understanding how to build a roadmap that fits into the whole community as much as possible. With development, we focus on key areas to address feedback and invest in improvements on a timeline that makes sense for all.

How do you plan to engage with the broader broadcast community to drive NDI technology adoption and awareness? 

Continuing innovation fueled by our leading industry partners’ input helps us improve and strengthen our technology which will eventually allow us to get more granular with personalized solutions to meet the specific industry needs of current and prospective partners.

We also will be expanding NDI’s library of educational content. This will include more initiatives to make NDI knowledge available for vendors, systems integrators, resellers, and users. For instance, we just released updated documentation regarding NDI Tools. We will continue hosting NDI webinars and live seminars with partners. We intend to keep amplifying successful use cases that showcase the power of NDI workflows to inspire creative possibilities on how NDI can be applied.

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