42 TVBEurope Feature
It’s going to get more technical One of Quantel’s key global market sectors has been high-end post production: is it shrinking or growing?
“I do not think it is shrinking. It depends what you mean by high-end. If you mean high-quality technical, then it’s going to get more technical and more high-end because it’s 4K. We are doing some work over in Japan with a company that is doing an 8K project,” says Cross. “The technology part of high-end post is going to get more complex with higher frame rates, high dynamic range, and going to 8K from 4K. That’s where we play best. We worked on the World Cup and I think we were the only company in the world that could do what was required with 4K (realtime post production),” he adds. “The costs are coming under attack, and clearly they have to come down. But at the same time, the complexity of what is required and the frame rates, and the resolutions are all increasing, increasing, and increasing.” Television news is another strong market for Quantel. It is unlikely to see much further consolidation and it is going low-cost in the field with freelancers the key risk takers and content gatherers. “We have a massive foothold in news, and we have not seen anything yet that would suggest that is going to change.”
Serving a much bigger stretch of the value chain will pitch Quantel against the likes of Imagine and Grass Valley. Looking forward a few years (after the next acquisition), where does Cross want to be? “We have strong growth aspirations, and the reason for the Snell acquisition was that it became obvious we were not going to achieve those aspirations organically. We want to be, if not the market leader, one of the market leaders across the whole value chain,” he says. “In order to do that there are some business changes that need to happen. We were fortunate this time because we have been profitable for quite a number of
years and we’ve harvested our cash. Nonetheless, to secure the acquisition we had to borrow a small amount, and if you are borrowing cash from a VC it is going to be more expensive than it is if you went to the open market,” he explains. “Inevitably, that’s going to lead us, if we want to achieve our growth aspirations, to probably becoming a PLC. We will probably float on the US stock exchange, and that will give us access to cash in order to fuel our growth.”
Standards have to be made flexible
Becoming a PLC will take 18 to 24 months. Having already heard about tying LiveTouch to the switchers, which areas of Quantel and Snell product development as we know it work best together? “There is using Morpheus to drive SQ through to ICE transparently. There is using some of the standards conversion technology with our editors, which would give a better result,” says Cross. “We are going to talk to people at IBC and explain these are the things we could look at. We will ask what are the user priorities, and hopefully feedback will identify benefits we have not yet seen. It’s like IP: nobody uses IP for IP’s sake. They use it to drive efficiency and bring down costs, so why wouldn’t you use it? Throughout the summer we have had the development, management and marketing teams working together and we now have a list of a dozen things that we think would be interesting for people to explore. We are hoping the market will prioritise them in terms of business benefits,” he adds. Standards, under pressure in this fast moving software age, are bound to impact on the enlarged group and its ‘one technology’ proposition. “It is no different from 30 years ago,” says Cross. “Standards have always lagged behind where the industry has been. Always. Technology changes come along so quickly;
inevitably, standards have to change. It used to be all hardware, and now it is all software. The standards have to be made flexible enough to accommodate change.”
Are there any small areas where the Quantel and Snell cultures have to resolve anything? Perhaps in servicing?
“I want one vision across the entire company, but yes. We have quite a few joint customers, and a number of Snell users have asked when we will be applying the Quantel approach to service,” says Cross. “It is great buying a Quantel system, but it’s got to operate; it has to be a great system for 15 to 20 years. We offer service cover 24/7/365; the Snell model was slightly different, and we are going to move to our system over time.
“The technology part of high-end post is going to get more complex with higher frame rates, high dynamic range, and going to 8K from 4K”
“It all goes back to a service level agreement with the customer. That was something I was used to in IT, but when I first came into this business there was no such thing as service levels. Now, because there are a lot of IT people in the business, you are going to have a service level with customers,” he added. “We are never ever going to make, build, or create everything,” says Cross. “Increasingly, partnerships will be a way of getting products to market much quicker than we could have done on our own. Finding top flight engineers is always difficult, and therefore it might simply be that if you are going to take so long developing something, it is not worth doing. Find a partner.”
www.tvbeurope.com September 2014
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