74 Saturday 08.09.2012 theibcdaily We all need a little Forward Thinking
In a television broadcasting industry industry experiencing fundamental changes, planning for the future is ever more important says Peter Blatchford, sales and marketing director, Starfish Technologies
Many people in our industry are now working under extreme time pressures like never before. The drive to improve efficiency and reduce overheads has resulted in significant staffing reductions in many organisations. This has reached a point
where valuable people are regularly focusing their energies solely on dealing with ‘today’s urgent issue’. The consequence of these time pressures result in little opportunity for any forward thinking, and in an industry that is now experiencing fundamental changes, planning for the future is ever more important to ensure operations are competitive and able to exploit every new opportunity.
At Starfish we have focused
our product developments in a number of quite different technology areas, but with
similar themes of doing something as efficiently as possible, and by using as much automation as possible. In Audio Description technology, our focus has been on developing very sophisticated tools for file based processing and keeping the human touch points
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straightforward and targeted to the application.
Using this philosophy has allowed us to offer customers easy to use systems with very efficient workflows – it’s critical however not to associate efficiency with a rushed and poor quality result, they not inextricably linked. Our target has been to allow users to focus on the creative activity, and wherever possible to
automate the complex technical processing tasks. For a legislated delivery
requirement such as Audio Description, where there is no incremental revenue for a broadcaster, efficient workflows are critical, and forward thinking management appreciate that investment in technology today will save significant costs in the future. Another technology area
where we have a core competence is with Regional Insertion Systems – which are designed for ad insertion and local TV programming. Our focus has been to build flexible solutions which maximise the integration possibilities to existing operational workflows, and to offer sophisticated automation and high reliability through good product and system design, and using automated failover redundancy.
Peter Blatchford: ‘Our target has been to allow users to focus on the creative activity’
When implementing our systems – which also include multi-platform delivery capabilities – the revenue
opportunities are huge. However, the senior management at the broadcaster need to be prepared to embrace the opportunity and plan accordingly if that potential is to be realised. Properly considering new services, with automated workflows, and exploiting new revenue opportunities requires serious strategic planning. Such an activity is almost impossible without devoting dedicated and quality time. As a manufacturer of technology, our challenge is to continue to offer the tools that broadcasters will need to face their significant future challenges, but the future is tomorrow, not next year, so forward thinking is an activity to which we all need to devote significant time – in our very busy schedules. 8A23
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