The Channel | 2009 | Issue 2

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THE CHANNEL | ISSUE 2 2009 | 47
When you are investing in our
products and services, you want to
be sure that they have a longevity
and sharing what we'll be doing
over the next 2 years and what we
are thinking of doing in the next
4-5 years gives our customers a lot
of comfort.
Is it difficult to bring products to
market before they are out of date?
Quantel has been very good at
developing base systems that have
a long life. Our iQ is just one such
machine. What we have been able
to do is allow people who bought
the first iQs to continually enhance
and upgrade their systems. If you
bought a Pablo from us three or
four years ago, you can connect the
Neo panel to it, Stereoscopic 3D
software to it, it runs 1080p, and so
on. Going back to your question:
We have got over 200 staff and
approx. 25% of those are in R&D,
and our R&D teams are very good
at getting things to the market
quickly and then moving on to the
next product.
Integrating products with other
companies' systems, is that the
way you see the industry going?
I think that is what customers are
insisting on. We spend a huge
amount of our time talking to
customers and prospective
customers around the world, and
listening. That's why we chose the
Final Cut as our first integration.
We will be moving on to other third
parties as well, we've got plans to
do that over the next year.
How is your client base changing?
We are putting more effort into new
markets, particularly places like
South America, India, we've been in
China for a while, and Korea. India
is a very similar market to our own
- the project with Gemini Labs in
India was a nice win. In terms of
different customers, we are talking
to people from the publishing/
newspaper market and we are
talking to one organisation that is
not in TV or broadcast at all but
wants to be so. Clearly as local TV
becomes more and more important
then I think that will grow too.
How successful was your "Pay as
you go HD"?
Lots of people bought systems but
very few people actually used the
HD facility. And of course since
then everything we do is SD and
HD concurrently which again is
unique to Quantel - all our
customers get SD and HD for the
price of SD. You often find that:
customers want choice and the
minute you give them choice
actually they are happy with what
you offered them in the first place.
That's one of the reasons for our
continuing success - people are able
to select Quantel even though they
are not going HD just yet, knowing
full well that when they are going
HD, basically there is no difference.
Let's look ahead…
I think the next thing is the move
away from traditional broadcast to
more IT based, so everything is files
and folders. We are doing a lot with
virtualisation – it does not matter
how we store the media, it can be
stored as any format you want but
you can just click on that file or
folder and say 'I'd like that as HD'
and it creates it in HD immediately
for you. You don't have to hold
multiple formats just in case you
need them. This year for Quantel
will be – and we know this because
we are over half way through – our
most successful year since the MBO
in 2000. So despite the recession it
is possible to perform well.
Ray Cross, thank you.
Left: Pablo in
use; right: Dino,
the technology
that allowsmedia
and workflows to
be shared
between remote
sites