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46
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ISSUE 2 2009
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THE CHANNEL
etween September
and March there
was a huge amount
of uncertainty in
the market, some
of that has gone
away. I think
people realize that life has to go on
and that you can't suspend
investment and upgrade decisions
forever. I see it in our sales – our
sales dipped in that first six months
and have recovered strongly.
How is the Quantel business split
between the film and the
broadcasting industry?
It divides pretty equally actually.
On occasion broadcast will be 55%
of our business and perhaps post
45% and then on occasion it
switches. We have three main
products, our broadcast market,
our post DI market and then we
have a professional services
division, and each one of those
contributes equally to our revenue
and our profit. But of course the
professional services is generally
split 50:50 between broadcast and
post DI.
At the high end of broadcast we
pick up quite lumpy contracts, for
example if you look at the last 12
months our top five contracts gave
us something like £17m - when you
are hitting a few of those then it can
skew things tremendously.
Has the economic downturn been a
catalyst to make changes?
Like lots of businesses I think the
recession brought about a more
urgent need to look at everything. I
guess we evolve continuously at
Quantel but maybe we have been a
bit quicker to respond than we
would normally.
The industry has gone through
some tough times but I think the
fact that our systems do many
things rather than just one thing –
our colour corrector, our Pablo,
doesn't just colour correct, you can
edit, you can do effects, you can do
deliverables - that's made a massive
difference in the recession because
you can do more business from the
same machine.
What are the latest developments?
The next big thing is Stereoscopic
3D – everybody who has seen 3D
gets it immediately. We have now
got over 50 Stereoscopic systems
for post and DI out in the market.
The Stereoscopic option that we fit
to our Pablo system isn't a very
expensive option. It's a software
change and therefore we pass on
that ease of enhancement to our
customers as well. We are seeing a
significant increase in the number
of 3D features that our systems are
involved with, and we have also
worked with one major broadcaster,
Sky, to help develop 3D material -
they are proposing to launch a 3D
channel next year.
Another development is the
Final Cut Pro integration into our
sQ workflow – it's going to be
available by IBC. Many customers
wanted to be able to do that - we
have already received significant
orders. Another one is Dino,
basically 'Distance is no object', it's
a way of enabling individual sites
to communicate, so two or more
sites can actually share media and
that includes the meta-data as well.
We see that as a major tool for lots
of broadcast businesses around the
world, we have a lot of interest in
that product already.
We will be delivering 1080p on
our servers by the end of 2009, and
other things are in the pipeline
which we can't tell you yet because
we haven't told our customers! We
do share on an NDA basis with our
customers our roadmap and our
vision for the future - it's a different
way of working but it is very
successful.
Our
systems
domany
things
rather
than just
one
“
”
BEAUTIFULLY
When you were watching 'Stars Wars' or 'Lord of
the Rings', did you know that those major movies
– and many others - were created or manipulated
using
Quantel
technology? Quantel CEO
Ray
Cross
believes one of the reasons why the
company is performing well in the recession is
sharing its future vision with the customer
B
ENHANCED
THE CHANNEL
|
TECHNOLOGY