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Professional Video Hardware for Every Application

Whether you are a sole content creator, a church AV volunteer, a broadcast engineer at a national television facility, a university lecture capture manager or an AV integrator building complex IP video infrastructure — the right hardware exists for your exact situation. The challenge is knowing which product from a range of over 50 devices actually matches your workflow.

At iView Data we supply professional video capture, encoding, streaming and conversion hardware to organisations across the UK — from single-room installations to multi-site broadcast networks. This selector tool cuts through the technical complexity and points you directly to the hardware that solves your problem.

Who Uses Professional Video Capture & Streaming Hardware?

Common Video Challenges — and How to Solve Them

How do I stream live to YouTube or Facebook from a professional camera?

Professional cameras output HDMI or SDI — not USB. To stream directly to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch or a custom RTMP destination without a PC, you need a standalone hardware encoder. These connect directly to your camera output and stream independently over your internet connection. They support simultaneous streaming to multiple platforms, local recording and remote management via a browser. For a single HDMI camera this is a compact desktop unit; for SDI cameras there are dedicated SDI encoder models; for multi-camera setups there are multi-input encoder options.

How do I get my camera into OBS, Zoom or Microsoft Teams?

Professional and semi-professional cameras do not appear as webcams in software like OBS, Zoom or Teams — they output HDMI or SDI, not USB. A video capture device bridges this gap, taking the HDMI or SDI output from your camera and presenting it to your computer as a standard capture source that any software can use. These range from compact USB dongles for laptops to multi-channel PCIe cards for workstations handling multiple simultaneous inputs.

How do I send video around a building without running long HDMI cables?

Long HDMI cable runs are unreliable over distances greater than about 15 metres. The professional solution is to convert your video signal to IP — NDI or SRT — at the source, send it over your existing network infrastructure (Ethernet or Wi-Fi), and decode it at the destination. PoE-powered encoder and decoder units handle this without requiring a PC at either end. This approach scales from a single camera-to-display link to a full multi-camera IP network across a campus or multi-site organisation.

What is NDI and do I need it?

NDI (Network Device Interface) is a royalty-free protocol for sending professional video over standard IP networks. If you are building a system where video needs to travel over Ethernet — between rooms, floors or buildings — NDI is the modern standard. It supports low-latency, high-quality video distribution and is natively supported by most professional production software. If your workflow is entirely local (camera directly to a single PC or streaming device), you do not need NDI. If you are distributing video across a network, NDI is almost certainly the right approach.

What is the difference between a capture card and a streaming encoder?

A capture card connects to a host computer and presents video to software running on that computer. The computer does the encoding and streaming work. A standalone streaming encoder is a self-contained device — it takes a video input, encodes it internally and streams directly to the internet without any PC required. Capture cards are the right choice when you want to record, edit or use the video in software on a computer. Standalone encoders are the right choice when you want to stream reliably from a fixed location without a PC in the signal chain.

Frequently Asked Questions