30 TVBEurope The Business Case
From Eindhoven to EVS - a new era
After playing major roles at Philips, Thomson and Vitec Group, Joop Janssen has taken charge at EVS and tells Adrian Pennington about plans to keep the Belgian company in the big league
IN A 25-year career which has taken in some of the biggest names in the broadcast equipment business, Joop Janssen, a formidable volleyball player and deal maker extraordinaire, has landed at EVS. “EVS will continue to play an
enormous role in sports because that’s where its experience lies and where there is clear demand for greater individual control over the viewing experience, but EVS’ heritage in very fast turnaround technology can be applied to all manner of genres,” he says. With a Masters in Electronic Engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Janssen specialised in video compression and entered the industry at the end of the 1980s in the early stages of Europe’s digital transmission transition. At Philips Business Electronics he worked as lead engineer developing algorithms, prototypes and products for digital TX, which led him to a secondment at BBC R&D Kingswood Warren. Between 1992 and 1994 he
switched divisions within Philips to help pioneer solid state digital audio products including, he says, the first ‘iPods’ for theme parks and was also part of a team which developed the first touchscreen tablet. “We didn’t have Apple’s user-friendly software but the concept was there,” he says.
Joop Janssen: “If you look at where EVS’ strengths are, apart from the pure technology, it is in adding a lot of value to content in a very short timeframe”
Instead of going after EVS though, Janssen decided Grass Valley was a better fit, convinced Thomson’s board of the same and was integral to Thomson’s $172m acquisition and integration of the company in 2002. A year later and Janssen
was off again, this time to run the Vitec Group’s Videocom division as chief executive with a position on the Executive Board.
More and more brands “The overall market was shrinking in 2001-02 and having a tremendous impact on the Vitec Group,” he says. “Under new management, the strategy was to bring the brands closer together and provide a coherent set of solutions to market.” At that time there were eight
broadcast brands in the Group including Vinten, Sachtler, Anton Bauer, Clearcom, Drake, OConnor and Rademec. Janssen led deals to acquire a further 10 companies including Autoscript, Litepanels and IMT — more than doubling the Group’s size to “provide most if not all the professional accessory solutions around the camera. “I learned a lot at the Vitec
On the horizon Following a stint with another Philips team developing videoconferencing systems with PictureTel (now Polycom), Janssen relocated to Philips Electronics Digital Networks in France to oversee the design and manufacture of some of the first MPEG-2 encoders/decoders. Having accumulated
experience in factory work,
R&D, sales and engineering in 1995 he was handpicked to turn around the fortunes of Philips’ struggling North American operations. This coincided with the Dutch group’s acquisition of German broadcast systems manufacturer BTS. His success as VP and general manager over a five-year period led to an instrumental role in divesting the entire
Philips Broadcast division to Thomson Multimedia in 2001. “We had to sell ourselves
as well in order to lead the successful merger of Philips within Thomson,” Janssen says, noting that it was at this time that EVS first came to his attention. “I focussed my attention on the server end of the business and it was clear that EVS was already on the horizon.”
Group. While it is obviously less about electronics and software, the mechanics and engineering was no less high- tech. We were filing 10 to 15 patents a year in my division. The Group has gone global, into Brazil and China for example, and being directly responsible for that expansion is something I am proud of. “Being on the executive team
of a public company, talking with shareholders and analysts and the City is something I enjoyed. While it helped that I had knowledge of working for big master brands like Philips, Thomson and Grass Valley, managing a dozen or more brands was consistently challenging and exciting to do.”
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www.tvbeurope.com September 2012
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