New Apple M1 Chips + 4K collection

With Apple quite obviously about to take over the entire market with its new M1 chips, specifically of interest for Tacx/Garmin should be the way it can handle H245 decompression, it could be a good time to think about offering a higher cost much higher quality option for the film collection. It would be a way to fire at least one salvo back at the competition?  

Apple TV + M1 has to be on the way, near everyone now has a 4K UHD TV, if you plan for it now then we could have easily the coolest most realistic simulation out there. Recent rides from the last year are being brought back into the editing software to combine the lower quality redacted 4K versions with the original content to produce much sharper higher quality finals (when there are no cars or faces visible)... it's more time-consuming but we do have a way to make often 90% of the rides look as good as before some paranoid discovered Tacx Apps ;-). 

If nothing else, having at least the option for customers to jump to a higher quality would remove oxygen from the competition, as we do for sure lose a large % to Fullgaz for example due to them offering a horrible-looking very compressed 4K...

We used to have 4K in RLV Beta for the PC version, some of the testers were totally addicted to the clarity & more true to life looking out of a window aspect of the 4K... Earlier this year I was offered what we make right now to film for a very high end London company to make 6K films....there is a market there & a huge hole in it waiting to be filled.

  • With Garmin & its software that's not the actual case,  Connect for example makes the company zero cents, Strava & the myriad of 3rd party apps could in a heartbeat take over its role & save the company millions in costs. They would just need a way to update firmware..! But they see value in it still because I guess it helps lock customers into their product, gives them a direct starting block for the many that do not want to search for alternatives.  Perhaps for the prestige? So for them to offer a very high end product that would possibly even come with a Hard drive of very very high quality content for Gyms/BikeShops/Expo's/Wealthy UHD owning customers that want the best etc... Would that help sell bucket loads of Tacx trainers to & from these Gyms & high end shops? I know there is a market for this content & some are willing to pay a fortune for it. It can be obviously costed to guarantee a profit. Customer would simply pay what ever the cost was. The work has already been done, there is really nothing extra cost wise then bandwidth.

    With the Trainer Software, Im not actually sure if they ever plan to make a profit.  You have that question of - do they regard Tacx Apps in the same light as Connect? Is it a helpful thing to have for its Trainer Sales? 

    On a positive note - They are finally heading in the direction of one of the options I have always passionately pushed but I can't say what. But on that side Im at least hopeful that next winter (not this coming one)  I might actually use Tacx Software again for my own fitness & enjoyment rather then just the odd test of road feel while lusting after the social contact & fun of the competition

  • For showroom, yes its lossless quality on a hard drive, most of the scenery content is actually DSLR photos stitched into Timelapse, that way you can produce incredible quality as your literally looking at a moving High res photo.  For us even if they simply played the quality of the uploaded files it would be quite a jump in quality. Or simply doubling the bitrate of the HD..just now on my imac its utter garbage just now, I can cry when I see whats being delivered....your not getting the bitrate of 720p in TTS4 for HD, it cant be.

  • Actually, Its worth pondering just how brilliant the product could be with a little imagination, on an optimized M1 Mac/ipad/AppleTV linked to a high-quality UHD display...imagine our content being the uploaded master files? , running off a hard drive perhaps a wifi hard drive? so it actually costs Garmin not a single extra cent in bandwidth cost...would actually be more profitable then streaming, but a customer could have access to something incredible Mike....nobody here has seen what I get to see, Its such a shame as you actually do get WHY SHOPS THAT SELL TVS HAVE HIGH QUALITY CONTENT PLAYING TO SELL TVS!  (shouting so hopefully someone else reading this may get where Im heading with this ;-). For me its more a case of making the films so at least someone out there can see then at their best, rather then a showcase of what compression can do.