Hitomi MatchBox Glass is honoured with Emmy® Award

Hitomi Broadcast has been recognised with an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy® from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The award honours the remarkable achievements of MatchBox Glass, Hitomi’s revolutionary latency generator in an iPhone app, transforming complex production set-ups with virtually instant access to true lip sync measurement.

With live productions and remote operations becoming ever-more complex, so the challenge of maintaining perfect lip sync across large numbers of sources has become a major operational challenge. Broadcasters and production companies worldwide recognise the effectiveness of the Hitomi MatchBox solution, providing precision measurements in Analyser or Panorama.

MatchBox Glass eliminates the need to find insertion points for test signals by putting the precision audio and video test pattern into an app. All the operator needs do is hold the iPhone or iPad in front of the camera and microphone: whatever the signal path, end-to-end latency and lip-sync measurements are accurately captured, without the need to interrupt signal flows and using the non-specialised hardware in everyone’s pocket.

In supporting the Emmy submission, leading engineers from major broadcast operations said of MatchBox Glass “This technology gives us ease of use and tremendous mobility, allowing us to go live from any venue we wish on the spur of the moment”; “We couldn’t be without Hitomi Glass for our studio operations”; and “We rely on Hitomi to make the impossible task of eliminating lip sync errors for live sporting events a simple one”.

James Robinson, CTO and co-founder of Hitomi, said “This is a tremendous honour, and we are extremely grateful to the Television Academy. We are a small British company, dedicated to making lip sync errors a thing of the past. The causes of latencies and lip sync shifts are buried deep in the technology, but every single viewer recognises the problem when they see it, which is why we are so passionate about it.

“Our solutions are used by the major players in outside broadcasts, large studio operations and live productions worldwide, and we are very grateful for their trust and appreciation for our developments,” Robinson continued. “The Emmy, and the recognition by the industry that it implies, is the icing on the cake. As a team we shall celebrate before going back to the lab to make the MatchBox environment even better.”

James Robinson will receive the Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy at a ceremony in Los Angeles on 14 October, hosted by the Television Academy.

For more information on MatchBox, Panorama and MatchBox Glass, you can visit Hitomi on IBC stand 10.A40 or go to hitomi.tv.