AV Specialist - Africa Edition Vol 92 - (Page 27)

2010. If growth forecasts are met the broadcast business will be close to $17.6 billion by that date, so IT will be a mere 84 times the size of the broadcast business. One possibility we all have to face is that the IT industry will simply swallow broadcast whole. But I do not think that is likely to happen. While some parts of our industry are becoming more and more IT-like, there are some which are unique, and depend on skills and experience built up over the last 70 years which would be hard to recreate. percentage than we should expect in a mature industry. As can be seen from the chart, there are just under 100 companies with revenues of over $10 million a year, or 200 if we lower the bar to just $1 million a year. What fascinates me is that there are only 200 companies turning over $1 million or more in broadcast, but I have just checked the NAB website and it is claiming 1500 exhibitors will be making their way to Las Vegas this April. These figures suggest that 1300 of those companies will each have a turnover from the broadcast industry of less than a million dollars. Taking space at NAB is a big investment for them – I would say they are making another Las Vegas gamble. precisely every 40 milliseconds with no exceptions” – is tough for computer people. The answer is to co-operate. Products and systems of the future will use a mix of conventional broadcast and IT techniques and technologies, almost certainly developed by joint teams. Take a look at the network for Al Jazeera English. Production centres in Washington DC, London and Kuala Lumpur exchange content as files over high-performance IP circuits with the headquarters in Doha. IT industry servers and tape archives are seamlessly integrated into a realtime 24/7 HD broadcast station. Co-operation is the answer To turn back, finally, to the IABM market report, it firmly underlines the need for companies to work together, not just between broadcast and IT suppliers but also within the traditional broadcast market. The vast majority of manufacturers make products within a single product category. Often these are very innovative developers of closely targeted, niche products – think Omneon and its servers, Hamlet and its test gear, or Genelec and its loudspeakers - and their skills need to be retained in the industry. At the other extreme, despite some very large suppliers in the business there is not a single onestop shop available to us – no manufacturer can supply everything. But customers now want to buy solutions not point products. Broadcasters want to concentrate on their core activities of making programmes and attracting audiences and advertisers to pay for them. They need to trust suppliers to deliver them systems that work. The result is that suppliers have to work together to deliver what the customer wants. Sometimes this will mean that potential competitors will have to work hand in hand on one job while fighting tooth and nail on another. The report calls this “co-opetition”: competitors cooperating to deliver a working solution. As buyers of technology you have the right to demand this – the manufacturers will find a way of making co-opetition work if it means they can win the deal. Broadcast specific requirements There are some obvious broadcast specific requirements, of course. While video cameras are mass-manufactured around the globe, the build quality of a broadcast camera is rather higher. I visited the Grass Valley camera factory in Breda, Netherlands a year or two ago. In the heart of the factory, in an extremely clean room, very skilled and patient people take anything up to eight hours to build the optical block for a top-end HD camera, aligning the prisms and CCDs with submicron precision. It is impossible to imagine an IT major wanting to get involved in that. But our tolerances in other areas are hard for the IT industry to get its collective head around. A playout centre for premium channels will be looking for five nines availability: the system should be running at least 99.999% of the time. That – and our definition of real time as “a new picture Getting together So we know how much the industry is worth, broken down by sector and product group. We know what the growth is likely to be, and we know how many businesses are pitching for that growth. Obviously that helps the planning and marketing people at the manufacturers to know where they are in the pecking order and where they have prospects for taking market share off other companies. But is this information of use to anyone else? I think we can all benefit from knowing these numbers. Let me go back to that bottom line figure of $11.6 billion. That sounds like a lot of money. But consider this: it is about the same as the research and development budgets of Intel and Microsoft added together. The whole turnover of more than a thousand companies in broadcast is equivalent to the R & D spend of just two manufacturers in IT. A recent survey by IDC suggests that the IT market will reach $1.48 trillion by 27

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AV Specialist - Africa Edition Vol 92

Larger than life
Mediatech Aftrica shines bright in local market
HD camcorder runs with the wild dogs
Divers Down pursues tapeless workflow
Broadcast industy feedback

AV Specialist - Africa Edition Vol 92