In Broadcast - January 2016 - 44


44

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 6 - Issue 1 | January 2016

InMedia

Screen Systems Negotiates
'Sharp Bend In The Road'
The destination might be clearly in sight, but customers demand that the route
is flexible, as Dean Wales, Screen's Head of Marketing and PR, explains...

2

015 began with predictions,
warnings even of rapid changes
of unprecedented scale in broadcast
technology, and with this portent
hanging over us all, the year seemed
to end for many with a rather generous
portion of 'told you so'.
It is not as though the industry
was ill-informed and in spite of the
frequent admonitory commentaries
from industry gurus in the media,
many
traditional
broadcast
manufacturers appeared to have still
suffered a noticeably bad case of 'oeuf
sur le visage'.
The bottom line was customers
became less interested in many of the
solutions manufacturers were selling,
or to be more accurate they began
refusing to accept the all too common
single delivery method offered in
products and lack or in many cases
absence of conjoint interconnectivity
between other vendor's solutions.
An interesting notion amid all this
was perhaps that Screen could be
regarded as a barometer to industry
climate and more pertinently the
significant changes it's undergoing.
It was persuasively pointed out to
us towards the close of 2015 by an
industry commentator that if we, as a
company that manufactures subtitling
solutions - and therefore one which
resides at the culmination of the
broadcast technology process - had to
change how we provided our solutions,
then it should naturally follow that
anyone upstream to us in the process
would have been expected to as well.
If such a dramatic shift in what
broadcasters required had filtered
down to Screen then it figures that
vendors eluding the new product
expectation from the market could
already be too late in its adoption
and may have dropped out of the

customer's consideration
set altogether.
IBC2015
marked
an
extraordinary
point
in
Screen's
product
development history. As a
pioneer in subtitling and
captioning
technology,
the company has enjoyed
positive attention from the
industry since the 1970s.
Keeping
the
history
lesson
brief,
Screen
was founded as Screen
Electronics by Laurie Atkin
in 1976, and pioneered
the first ever electronic
subtitling system, providing
the first digital character generator
to the BBC. Throughout the 1970s
and 80s, Screen continued to lead
the market, developing a number of
new subtitling technologies including
fully automated transmission using
timecode, the first PC based subtitle
preparation system and the first multichannel, multi-language subtitling
systems.
In 2001 Screen took subtitling
technologies into the 21st Century with
the Polistream transmission products,
which later evolved thanks to market
demand into the Polistream BLACK
system, a revered 1U rack mounted
solution which has remained a
mainstay high-end product for subtitle
transmission. Its popularity, besides
quality and reliability was generated
from this single unit's flexibility to
meet a broad array of technical
requirements
through
varying
configurations of hardware cards and
software modules.
We travelled a natural evolutionary
road, a reasonably straight, albeit
exciting product development journey
to the point of where we began 2015.

Workflow options -
Polistream Virtual Machine

But it was clear from the myriad
articles and conferences read and
attended throughout the year, coupled
with customer insight, that last year
was going to be different. What
customers attending the looming IBC
were going to be looking for was going
to plant a sharp bend in our previously
straight development roadmap.
The challenge as a business which,
loosely described had spent years
perfecting its pivotal product by
developing a next generation solution,
was that the market was quite satisfied
with the product at the core of our
portfolio, namely our Polistream
BLACK system - a relief in some
ways as we couldn't envisage how to
perfect an already exemplary solution.
However the problem posed was, yes
customers still liked and wanted the
actual product, but, and here was
how everything changed in 2015, they
wouldn't always want it the way we
were traditionally supplying it.
Although this came as little surprise
to Screen, for an organisation that
had become comfortable with a single
delivery method for its core product,

developing and delivering it for
instance as a Virtual Machine, as an
option for customers to run it on their
own hardware, and even considering
an OPEX option meant more than just
a challenge to the development team.
In a market where tangible
hardware crosses over, or indeed
shifts completely to a software realm,
and customers no longer settle for
just what's on offer, vendors such as
Screen need to manage a degree of
culture change within the business.
At the coalface the approach of the
sales force requires some realignment.
The visual nature and messages
within marketing communications
may need to change, in Screen's case
noticeably; even the personality of a
company's brand may undergo subtle
adjustments.
Fortunately for Screen, the size of
the company allowed us to make this
turn relatively swiftly. With further
product development planned for early
2016 our ability to adapt quickly will be
key to securing a future in an industry
undergoing significant changes never
experienced before.

Screen's Conventional Polistream System - now available to rent, as a virtual machine option, or on a "Bring Your Own Device" basis.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://subtitling.com/ http://subtitling.com/
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - January 2016
