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Norway-based Nevion plans to help broadcasters face the future by transitioning them to a virtualised media production workflow.
"Our sales guys used to say they would come and visit us at the factory - that was the perception of Nevion. But over the past five or six years we have gone through a fairly significant transformation," says chief executive Geir Bryn-Jensen.
Media transport firm Nevion used to operate two factories but in 2012 it outsourced all manufacturing. "The core business of Nevion is not to manufacture, it is to develop innovative solutions to help media companies become much more flexible in how they produce their content," says Bryn- Jensen.
"And we can do that through software development and building networking solutions." The Norway-headquartered company started out 20 years ago with the aim of "revolutionising" the broadcast industry with a set of compact video routers that would challenge the established range that dominated the market.
"They did it successfully and got a good footprint and market share fairly quickly," says Bryn-Jensen. Today, the company styles itself as "the architects of virtualised media production", providing network and broadcast infrastructure for the transport and management of video, audio and data for clients including BBC, BT, AT&T and NBC Universal.
"Broadcasters are meeting a different type of competition from the new media players. So the source of revenue, from subscription to licensing to ad revenue, is under pressure," says Bryn-Jensen.
"Over the past three or four years, [broadcasters have faced] increasing pressure to produce more competitive content to compete with these new media players. But at the same time, they don't have any more resources to do it, and some even have less with which to do more. That is when we see that the interest in new technologies is increasing - technologies that can help them become more agile and focus more on the content side than the plumbing," he says.
Nevion's exit from manufacturing was part of its new approach, born out of a reappraisal of...