Alan Larson, 65cubed

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT 65cubed makes and markets a technology solution that has the triple benefit of making commercial displays, like big roadside LED boards, look better, last longer, and still use substantially less energy . The company has a small box that plugs in between the media player and display controller box of a display set-up, using a ton of graphics capabilities, smarts and supporting technology to make, it says, even lower-end, lower cost product from China look great. I had an interesting chat with 65cubed partner Alan Larson about the technology - which I suppose is a form of video wall processing. It gets a little technical in parts of the discussion, but Larson does a good job of not taking listeners too deep into the technical weeds. Color reproduction and image quality are important to brands, but the really intriguing aspect to this is the ability to get another year or two out of the capital investment in a big screen, while also reducing the month to month energy usage bills. Power usage is a much bigger issue in Europe at the moment, but it's something that every media owner with big, bright displays should be looking at, as energy bills rise and, in Europe these days, energy availability is constrained. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Alan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your company 65cubed is all about? I just came across it literally a couple of days ago and don't know a lot about it.  Alan Larson: 65cubed is a color management server product designed for LED walls and other video sources. Its roots are better than a dozen years old in the high-end color management space that you might see in a very eclectic home setting, or more commonly post-production studios where color has to be absolutely spot on. What we discovered a couple of years back as LEDs came on, was that as we modulated the color signature, there were significant changes in the power signature. So we started experimenting with that and discovered that we could apply our technology combined with some aggressive time of day, environmental conditions style algorithms to create an aggressive product for an environmental impact on LED walls and that's what sort of got us started. We can make the color on a digital wall look very amazing, we've gotten literally cinematic events on walls before. We usually range between 18-20 to the low 30s on average for a digital wall, especially outdoor settings that are on 24/27 and it varies based on how the customer wants their image and what the foot traffic or automobile traffic might be.  So when you say 18 to 30, what do you mean by that?  Alan Larson: If you are using say 100 Amps peak on a digital midsize wall, the second we turn our system on at the same brightness and color correct it, it'll usually drop that peak amperage, down to 75-80% max, more typically it's sitting in the 60s, I would suppose because most people don't wanna blow their eyes out with the brightness, and a byproduct of that is we've noticed that a lot of people that sell wall time, the arbitrage people go through for the bids, is they request about a 10% grayscale on whites to lessen the risk of their walls being overloaded.  By definition, when we take the power signature down, the advertisers are free to do what they want. We don't care what they do because we're not on that side of the game. But that's a byproduct. You simply don't get the power swings that you would in a wall that does not have our product. So the advantages are both energy savings and better-looking visuals? Alan Larson: Yes, and the byproduct of energy is that because you're not stressing those LEDs as much, they run cooler. We contend that lower stress on the system and its ability to react to external conditions of interest that that'll extend the display life and what that means is that the display owner is in it for keeps, in other words,