How Leading Technologies Builds AI Products with Video SDK

For more than 40 years, Leading Technologies has been known in Italy as a strong player in broadcast hardware, supplying equipment for radio and television. Alongside that hardware business, the company now has a software division led by Valerio Sibilla, building AI-powered applications for markets that go well beyond broadcast.

Valerio joined Leading Technologies as Software Division Manager after years in the broadcast world, including a decade at Axel Technology working alongside Marco Branzanti. That's also where he first worked with Medialooks Video SDK, starting with DirectShow and later moving to the Medialooks framework on projects like CG Live and DLG Plus.

At Leading Technologies, the challenge was different. As Valerio explains it, broadcast is only a minority of Leading Technologies' total market. The rest is spread across sectors that have nothing to do with television studios: government, transportation, retail, hospitality. His job was to take a tool built for broadcast engineers and use it to build products for a much wider range of customers.

From Prototype to Product

Valerio's role is hands-on but focused: he builds prototypes himself, then works with a small development team to turn them into finished products. Speed matters. As he put it, going from an early concept to a working product with Video SDK typically takes two to three months, not more.

That speed has let him launch several very different applications:

Lexi, a solution for government offices that captures video in real time, generates live subtitles and translations, and produces AI-generated meeting reports.
A transit announcement system for train stations, where Medialooks technology plays audio and video content while other services handle translation and message generation.
A digital signage platform, built for both Android and Windows, using Video SDK on the Windows side along with the HTML5 Graphics engine to render custom UI graphics and layouts.

The digital signage project is the one Valerio talks about most. The platform now runs inside Sky Italia's headquarters in Milan, handling the welcome experience and event displays on the company's main stage. The scheduling and graphics tool behind it is called Hermes; the player itself carries a simpler, more descriptive name: Media Server.

Building a Business Model Around AI Services

Beyond building applications, Valerio has also built something more unusual: a middleware platform that resells AI services like transcription, translation, and audio synthesis to Leading Technologies' customers. Customers buy credits, use them inside their applications, and the platform tracks consumption behind the scenes while calling out to services like Azure or AWS. It's an idea Valerio had been thinking about for years, and at Leading Technologies, with a broad and varied customer base, he finally had the right environment to build it.

Why Video SDK

Valerio has looked at alternatives, including well-known open-source options, and has stayed with Medialooks. When the cost of the SDK came up internally, he didn't hesitate to make the case for it. In his words:

"It's not expensive. It's a unique solution. We can apply it to make a great and amazing application."

He also pointed to the support experience as part of the value:

"The support is great, and it works properly."

Asked to sum up his experience with Video SDK in one word, his answer was simple:

"Amazing."

What's Next

Valerio's next target is hospitality. He wants to bring the same idea into hotel rooms: one platform that works across different TV operating systems, including WebOS, Tizen, and Android, using HbbTV technology so he doesn't have to build a separate version for each one. A prototype, including remote control integration, is planned for around September.

It's a wide range of places for one piece of technology to end up: government offices, train stations, a broadcaster's headquarters, and soon hotel rooms. But that range is more or less the story of Leading Technologies' software division so far.