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After a decade working for electronics specialist Pace, Roger Lambert is still set on transforming our viewing habits - TV will converge with the internet, he told Andrew Lee.
Roger Lambert of Pace Micro Technology is working hard to turn us all into square eyes, unable to resist the interactive delights of the digital TV revolution.
General manager for technology at the West Yorkshire-based electronics specialist, Lambert has spent a decade helping to develop the set-top boxes that convert packets of digital data into Premier League football, Sky News or The Simpsons. If you are a subscriber to Sky or one of the big cable operators such as NTL or Telewest, there is a good chance that you have a Pace box in your home.
According to Lambert, Pace's engineers tend to be fans of the latest home entertainment technology and gadgets generally. 'A lot of us are enthusiasts for the type of technology we work on,' said Lambert. 'We've probably got the biggest density of iPods [Apple's music device], MP3 players and suchlike of any demographic in the world.'
A Pace engineer is certainly far more likely than average to live in a 'networked home' stuffed with the latest entertainment technology, though Lambert admits that sometimes, after a day's work at the cutting edge of high-tech TV, he just wants to switch off.
But despite Pace's undoubted technical prowess - it is recognised as one of the world's leaders in its field - the company has recently found things tough commercially, especially in its UK heartland. The cable TV operators that Pace relies on to buy its boxes are struggling to get their own businesses in order after their dramatic expansion in the mid to late 1990s. They have had to rein in their spending, with an inevitable knock-on effect for Pace.
Another of its key customers, the ill-fated multi-channel TV venture ITV Digital, collapsed altogether.
According to Lambert, it was entirely predictable that the 'early adopter phase', in which the naturally...