25 Years of Roland Video Switchers
Roland video mixers are some of the most popular tools in the live streaming arena, and have been since they began production 25 years ago. Roland recently posted a great look back at how their products have followed the evolving landscape since the companies inception, from their older products all the way to the new V-600UHD.
Roland Video switchers were a subset from Roland, Japan- a world class electronic musical instrument manufacturer. This company grew to produce excellent audio mixing devices, and expanded into the video switcher land scape.
Roland's video products are for business use, and when it comes to commercial use there is a certain standard broadcasting gear must live to. Roland has been something of a trend setter and standard.
"At first, I used to make audio products like mixers for DJ. However, VJing began to get more and more exciting around 2000. As our first video-related product, in 1994, we put out a video editing system called “Video-kun Editing Studio.” Still, I thought that I could pull something out of the product for VJs. This was the first trigger for video equipment."
-Takamitsu Shimizu, Executive Officer of Roland RPG 1st Development Department
One of the first popular video mixers from Roland was the V-4 which was introduced in 2002. This item targeting video DJs, and the customer base who was already mixing audio, and wanted video to go with it.
North America proved to be a huge area of growth for Roland Video Mixers. For areas like houses of worship, or education, the task of marrying video and audio together at a high quality was a niche Roland met. In January or 2011, the Roalnd VR-5 was introduced for these users.
Today, Roland Mixers are advanced, intuitive devices that fit in any live streaming workflow. They are popular in houses of worship, corporate video, education streaming and more. One recent addition to their product line is their VR series of switcher/streaming devices. In addition, Roland is ahead of trends with their V-600 UHD, which was introduced in 2019, at the forefront of 4KHDR supported switchers.
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