By George McClure
Here’s a must-have for the performance home of any movie lover. Kaleidescape delivers a bit-for-bit identical copy of the studio master audio in lossless Dolby Atmos or DTS:X, with an audio bitrate 10x higher than typical streamer rates. Its video bitrate is also 10x higher than typical streaming platforms, which allows your video processor and display to operate at their absolute best.
We recently sat down with Kaleidescape CEO Tayloe Stansbury to get the lowdown on this home entertainment leader.
Tayloe Stansbury
“The Kaleidescape platform integrates with all the other home technologies. So, when you push play, it will bring down the lighting nicely and change the screen masking to match the aspect ratio for the movie to create the best presentation. And at the end, when the credits start to roll or when the Easter eggs are done, then it will start to bring lighting back up for you automatically.”
George McClure: How did your career path bring you to your current position at Kaleidescape?
Tayloe Stansbury: Most of my career has been leading large technology teams for public companies in Silicon Valley, so not exactly related to Kaleidescape’s business, but certainly steeped in innovation and technology. My relationship with Kaleidescape began in 2011. I bought one of their products, somewhat reluctantly, at the behest of my dealer. Then my family and I promptly fell in love with Kaleidescape and we ended up buying more for our households. It has just been a product that we’ve enjoyed at home tremendously.
I had further contact with Kaleidescape when I was serving on some boards. I’ve served on a number of public and private boards, and a couple of them had some crossover people with some studios that Kaleidescape didn’t have on board yet. I reached out to the then CEO and asked if he wanted help with those, and he said absolutely. A little while later, he was seeking investment and looking to step down, and I ended up taking over the company just because I loved the product so much and wanted to help customers like me.
George: That’s great — reminds me of the old ad for a Remington shaver where the owner says, “I liked it so much, I bought the company!” Tell us a little bit about the history of Kaleidescape.
Tayloe: Absolutely. Kaleidescape was founded in 2001 and shipped its first product in 2003. At that time the product was about downloading DVDs to a hard drive and organizing them with a really gorgeous UI (user interface) and making it really easy to play DVD content without fishing around to try to find what kid had put what DVD into what case and then see how badly it was scratched. And I really didn’t want to listen to the previews and watch the FBI warnings. I want to just get straight into the film, which is what Kaleidescape had to offer. So, at the time, that was quite innovative. The company pivoted in about 2012 to getting content directly from studios, not from DVD, but electronically from studios transcoding it, and then packaging it for use on Kaleidescape systems. And so, it’s been a digital-download-based company since that point in time.
George: In a world that seems so dominated by streaming platforms, what are the main benefits of storing the content on a local hard drive?
Tayloe: With streaming you can be subject to the vagaries of internet glitches, buffering and so on, and you’re usually dealing with a highly compressed artifact. With our system you get full fidelity content downloaded to a server in your house, and then you play back from there. We make the servers and the players that live in your house. That guarantees you full fidelity playback every single time, and at a bitrate that’s about 10 times what you would get from a streamer. So, the audio is fully lossless and the video is reference quality. It’s just a different, more immersive experience than you get from a streaming device. We’re all about getting as close to the director’s intent as possible while allowing users the experience equivalent to what you could get in the theater. It is also very tightly integrated with the rest of your theater or media room, so it can do things like control lighting and shading and have that be done automatically in synchrony with the movie.
George: Technology Designer recently gave one of our Performance Home awards for Best Product to the Terra Prime Solid State Movie server. What makes that such a compelling component?
Tayloe: Great question. As I said, my passion for home theater and reason for joining Kaleidescape was to help do a better job of taking care of our customers. Since Kaleidescape became a download-based product, the server is a pretty important piece of the architecture, so we’ve been increasing capacities of those and then also repackaging them so they could go further down market than they had before — aiming both at people with really huge collections, thousands and thousands of movies, and also at people who were more on a budget or just starting out with the platform, as I did once. We’ve done a number of innovations along those lines around the server, but this is the first ground up, re-engineering of the server.
It’s got a new board, new components, and the goal was to get to something that was much higher performance than what we’ve had in the past. The solid state variant to the server is about five times faster than what we had before with the original Terra product. That can be really useful in two different ways. One of them is that it can play back to a lot more zones. You can play up to 25 full fidelity, 4K movies at the same time, so this is aimed at very large mansions or yachts which have a lot of rooms where you may want to be playing video — all with that full fidelity, lossless performance. And the other thing is that it helps with download speeds. The downloads are down to less than four minutes per movie.
George: Oh, wow. So even for a 4K movie?
Tayloe: Yes. Full Kaleidescape 4K fidelity movies.
George: Really nice to be able to download things that fast. Moving on to some other products, what’s the difference between a movie server and a movie player?
Tayloe: The server is where the movies get stored once they’re downloaded from our collection of movies in the cloud. We have about 14,000 movies that come from 50 different studios. So, the ones that you’ve owned or that you’ve rented get stored on that local server for immediate and high fidelity playback. Then, connected to each projector or TV in your home or yacht, there would be a player that feeds directly to the video and audio of that playback zone. So, you might employ one server or multiple servers if you have a lot of content, and then as many players as you have TVs or projectors in your home or yacht.
George: Where are your products designed and manufactured?
Tayloe: Most of our engineering team is in Waterloo, Canada, which is home to probably the best computer science university in Canada. One of our founders was a professor there and hired all of his best students.
George: Makes sense.
Tayloe: Yes, it does. And we manufacture in the U.S., in Fremont in Silicon Valley. So, it’s all locally manufactured. Then we warehouse and ship from Mountain View, California.
George: That’s a nice story to be able to tell these days.
Tayloe: There’s some U.S. parts and some global parts, but all the board manufacturer and final assembly is done right here.
The other factor is the supply chain, right? We actually have a lot of inventory and it’s housed in our Mountain View office, so we’re ready to ship. When an order comes in, we’re generally ready to ship the same day.
George: I’m sure that keeps dealers and clients happy. Over the years I’ve seen a number of demos on systems equipped with Kaleidescape, and there’s an undeniable “cool” factor in being to pull up your whole movie collection on screen and scroll through it all.
Tayloe: Yes, it’s really nice if you’ve collected a number of movies, to have it all just be right there ready to play in an interface that makes it super easy to find what you want to watch in full Kaleidescape fidelity.
Plus, the Kaleidescape platform integrates with all the other home technologies. So, when you push play, it will bring down the lighting nicely and change the screen masking to match the aspect ratio for the movie to create the best presentation. And at the end, when the credits start to roll or when the Easter eggs are done, then it will start to bring lighting back up for you automatically.
George: Since you’re now doing the download model, does each movie come with all the metadata and extras?
Tayloe: Yes, all the extras for the movie are typically downloaded with it.
George: I was perusing your website and noticed the Ultimate 4K system, which kind of looks like nirvana for movie lovers. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Tayloe: That’s a fun offering. We’ve had a number of customers buy that. In fact, we just shipped one the other day and we’re working on another one. It’s basically all of the movies that we have in 4K. It uses up two of our largest servers — two 88-terabyte Terra Prime models — and gives you just a ton of choice, in the highest possible fidelity.
George: Yeah, that’s very cool. Two 88-terabyte servers. Isn’t that amazing? Remember when you were excited if you had a couple gigs of storage?
Tayloe: Yeah. The movie files, for these 4K Kaleidescape movies, are quite large, so it does eat up some space, as you say.
George: Anything else you’d like our readers to know about your company or products?
Tayloe: I would say there’s really nothing exactly like Kaleidescape. There are clearly lots of source options that you can have to connect to your TV or your theater, but nothing at the fidelity that we offer. Discs come closest, but discs are starting to go away, as I’m sure you know. We’re the only downloadable source offering full fidelity. The rest of the industry recognizes that, and most A/V manufacturers tend to use Kaleidescape as a source when they’re demonstrating video. So, for example, at the last CEDIA Expo, we had 42 different manufacturers showing their stuff on the show floor with Kaleidescape as the source. You pretty much couldn’t get away from a Kaleidescape wherever you went!
George: It’s definitely the pro standard in the industry.
Tayloe: That’s right. If you want to make your stuff look good or sound good, you put Kaleidescape in front of it.
George McClure is a Senior Editor for Technology Designer magazine and the Technology Insider Group. Previously he was the General Manager of Fidelity Communications and most recently a Marketing Manager for Denver-based ListenUp.
