Userful announced seven enhancements for its Infinity Platform, launched in the spring of 2023. Userful’s software-defined AV over IP platform provides a full suite of integrated AV applications built on an IT infrastructure that is centrally managed, scalable and secure. Userful says it eliminates the operational silos and complexities inherent in traditional AV deployments, and operates on IT standards and protocols, reducing TCO and frees customers from the constraints of restrictive proprietary AV hardware.

Userful’s new enhancements include:

1. A New Video/Audio Processing Engine: Userful has integrated NVIDIA’s GPU, Ada Lovelace, with its Chronos Video Engine on its Infinity Platform, making Userful’s solution a software-defined AV-over-IP platform.

2. An End-to-End 8K Platform: Userful’s engine can now deliver 24 8K60FPS. Userful is also announcing the launch of its 8K performance uClient adapter, which they say is an enterprise-class 8K decoder. This pairing can aggregate multiple sources into an 8K stream, ready for delivery through 8K LED controllers and/or to 8K LED walls and LCDs. Through Userful’s aggregation technology, the creation of a single 8K output enables a lower-cost deployment for control rooms and video walls.

3. A Browser-Based Soft KVM for Operations Centers — Secure & Low Latency: After several iterations and improvement in latency and security, Userful announced its operations-center-class soft-KVM, uConduct 2.0, as an augmentation of Userful’s quad-play for modernized control rooms. Userful’s browser-based approach can be operated offline (air-gapped from the Internet) or online. uConduct provides operators with simplified workflows while ensuring secure access and low latency performance (<100ms depending on network design). uConduct provides enterprise-class security for most commercial (non-military) deployments. Moving to a soft-KVM architecture enables customers to reduce their cost-per-operator by as much as 75 percent.

4. Browser-Based AV Controls: Userful’s new uControl 2.0 enables both layout switching and whole-enterprise environmental switching. With the touch of a single button, different layouts and sources (audio/video) can be activated on different screens and rooms. Scalability testing has confirmed support for up to 200 active screens and LED walls.

5. Next-Gen Audio Service Management: In partnership with Dante Audio, Userful’s AV engine becomes the first that can map a single audio source to many enterprise AV applications. Userful has brought its leadership and years of experience in source management into the audio world, enabling more effective and intuitive mapping of audio sources, including the integration of Dante Audio.

6. Centralized IT Management of Distributed AV Services – Global Cluster Manager (GCM): A private management system, Userful’s Global Cluster Manager is a secure cloud-based solution for AV over IP deployments for distributing, monitoring and managing capabilities. GCM empowers IT departments to oversee and scale their organization’s AV over IP servers efficiently. As the enterprise expands its infrastructure, GCM becomes indispensable, providing secure server management, resource distribution, and comprehensive monitoring across the organization. Capable of managing up to 10,000 clusters, comprising up to 5 video engine servers per cluster, yielding 50,000 servers for a total compute of up to 10M CPU cores and 400,000 GPUs under management. Translation: Unlimited platform scalability.

7. Broadest Software-Based End-Point Management in Industry: Userful supports endpoints running WebOS 4.1 and, later, Android 12, Tizen, and API management of Novastar and Megapixel controllers. By deploying soft clients at the edge, Userful is able to reduce adapter hardware and decoder hardware while enabling admins to monitor and manage displays as nodes. Management functions on the corporate network include screen power management, scheduled update groups, locking of peripherals and image quality management.

Userful will showcase these innovations at Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) in Barcelona.