TVBEU R O PE T H E B U S I N E S S C A S E
No fear of glue or IT
Enabled largely by the acquisitions of
Oxtel in 2001 and Vertigo last
summer, Miranda has become one of
the industry’s fastest growing
companies. No longer solely a ‘glue’
specialist, it now derives 30% of its
turnover from media playout and
graphics technology, and another
30% from its monitoring and control
division. George Jarrett examines
The Business Case behind the growth
Along with president and CEO
Strath Goodship and CTO Michel
Proulx, one of the main drivers
behind Miranda’s continuing purple patch has been Darin Crosby,
who came back into the company
as president of Vertigo, after leaving two years before. Now the MD
of Miranda’s European business,
Crosby started out in the video
industry with Matrox in the mid
90’s and moved to Miranda when
it had less than 40 employees.
From sales person number two he
became president of Miranda
MTI, responsible for distribution
and sales for the Americas.
Over that seven years the old
focus on selling interfaces to
North American customers had
come to look like the road to
nowhere. “We were primarily glue
in post and broadcast, and decided to look at the buying cycle of
our clients,” says Crosby. “We
said, the client is doing a build
out. They are going to buy a new
master control switch, a new
router, and possibly new automation. They make those decisions.
They get it all done, and then they
say, ‘Hey, we need some glue
products to make it all work’.
“We recognised that whoever
controls the project, whether an SI or
a vendor, has the tremendous ability
to corner the glue sale as well,” he
added. “So we recognised that our
core business would be under
tremendous threat. It’s not what
clients wanted — the power of our
competitors to simply remove those
sales opportunities off the street. So
we had to become an owner of some
of these vectors. We had to get
involved with clients when they start
thinking about a project, not when
they are going to implement.”
Miranda needed the expertise
to develop new technologies inhouse — as it did with its monitoring control line. It also needed
the tactical skills to acquire the
right companies — which it did
for the branding and master control stuff.
“We ended up acquiring several
of the core vectors that fit into the
strategy of how the customers
buy and how they think,” says
Crosby. “Master control and
playout is now a huge component
of our business, as is monitoring
control, and they are the wedges
we didn’t have. When we sell the
master control we often sell the
surrounding glue products too.”
40
“They don’t want to buy from 15
different companies to build a TV
station. You are seeing very fast consolidation, and that’s global. They
want to know that their vendor has
someone in the same time zone and
that they can get service people on
site at very short notice,” he says.
“And they want additional services. What they are clearly after is
ideas from us on how they can
build a better plant, and how they
can address some of the new challenges they face with IP and mobile
TV. How do they get into that?
Users are looking to us to bring
solution ideas and concepts, and
quite often we are expected to draw
diagrams and detail how a new type
of production can be implemented
at their site and within their workflow,” he adds. “This is taking on
parts of what system integrators
have traditionally done.”
You run like hell
Darin Crosby: “We recognised that whoever controls the project, whether an
SI or a vendor, has the tremendous ability to corner the glue sale as well”
The seed was planted
If the Oxtel acquisition put
Miranda into an area it had identified as one of the big growth
drivers, the VertigoXmedia deal
announced at NAB 06 was a thick
layer of icing on the same cake.
How did it happen?
“When I left Miranda to join
Vertigo it was a very synergistic
move in many senses because I
had been a small investor from
day one. They had been around
for ten years, and they were
already in a strategic partnership
with Miranda,” said Crosby. “It
was a software-based graphics
automation company, primarily
for newsrooms, sports, and elections. Everything it did was a
customised speciality project.
“Vertigo did Super Bowls and
some Academy Awards, and basically it was trying to commercialise its products and get away
from just doing custom turnkey
projects,” he added. “The seed
was planted many years previously,
that perhaps when the company
was in a position to properly commercialise its product offering
that I might join.
“One of my last conversations
with Strath was that he should be
looking at buying this company. I
certainly felt that what Vertigo
did would be very complimentary
and synergistic to what Miranda
was doing with the Oxtel products. And sure enough, it’s kind of
precisely what happened. I came
back into the Miranda fold as
president of Vertigo.”
Retaining the viewer
Once the Vertigo line was consolidated into the graphics and playout division, Crosby moved to
his new job in Europe, where
Miranda had owned a base for
several years through its earlier
acquisition of AAVS, a distributor and source of Miranda’s
audio interface line.
“Over the last few years we’ve
introduced different, á la carte
service packages, what we call
Miranda Care, and we also started
up an entire team of project man-
“In a PVR and VoD world more and more
consumers aren’t even aware of what channel
they are watching — so having more and more
graphics on screen is vital”
Crosby inherited engineering,
manufacturing, and sales and distribution activities. Are there big differences between the US and EAME
markets, in terms of the customer
base and competitive vendors?
“We see that the desire to purchase from local vendors, or at
least continental vendors is quite
strong. In interfacing, in graphics,
and in playout there are the common international brands, but they
are complimented by many more
regional brands,” says Crosby.
“The client requirements are
also slightly different, and that’s
driven all the way down to their revenue model. The US customer has
been more likely to experiment with
content, more likely to use graphics
as not just a branding tool,” he
added. ‘We are starting to see this
here — graphics and branding
being about retaining the viewer.”
Headline tickers and all the junk
we now see coming onto European
screens require a different infrastructure and a different workflow.“Things
have to be automated. We have to
offer a workflow that allows for the
addition of all this graphic content
without adding more staff or equipment, because the revenue model
doesn’t support it,” says Crosby.
“From how our customers in
the US versus here receive their
revenue really dictates the decisions on the type of gear they buy
and who they buy it from. Service,
which is 24/7, is a very important
component of the business.”
Crosby detects a desire for
vendors who provide fuller solutions, which is why we have seen
the recent rush of acquisitions
and emergence of super vendors.
they are watching. They did not
switch to a certain channel at a
certain time, so having more and
more graphics on screen is vital,”
he adds. “Richer and richer
graphics need to be automated
and integrated into business case,
so very early on we were presenting tool sets that were more
advanced than anything our competitors were offering.”
Presumably the acquisition of
Vertigo was very much a part of
the strategy to maintain leadership in master control and playout. What exactly did it bring to
the party?
“A very broad set of workflow
tools specifically tailored to the
graphics environment,” explains
Crosby. “We brought asset management specifically for graphics
in newsrooms. We brought a
strong link to connect your creative teams with your editorial
and newsroom teams, to the production control studio and all the
way to your master control.
“Vertigo was founded by engineers who worked previously for
Discreet Logic and Canadian
Aviation Electronics. A flight simulator is live 3D graphics with
realtime data,” adds Crosby. “It’s
an incredible 3D game that’s getting live feedback from all sorts of
inputs, and that’s what Vertigo
brought to the industry — a
Vertigo Xplay GUI: ‘Vertigo brought a tremendous knowledge of graphics
and how graphics get rendered with live dynamic data”
agers,” he added. “Recent contracts with NBC Universal and
Danish Radio are good examples
where there is a single point of contact through the entire life of that
project. They manage everything
from the initial drawings to the
very customised documentation,
and from the hand over to the customer to the after sales servicing.”
Like many other vendors you
might be able to think of,
Miranda claims to hold a ‘market
leadership’ position in master
control and graphics. How does it
hang on to this prestige?
“You run like hell,” says
Crosby. “It’s very much about
talking to your clients to find out
what they think they need to do
next, and going a fair bit beyond
that because they are often looking for us to tell them.
“Branding and graphics have
become so important for retaining
audience share. In a PVR and VoD
world more and more consumers
aren’t even aware of what channel
tremendous knowledge of graphics and how graphics get rendered
with live dynamic data. Link that
kind of expertise with the former
Discreet Logic graphics and post
people and that’s really where
Vertigo got its origins.”
Inside that box
Miranda’s big news in monitoring
has been the KaleidoX, which takes
the company into new ground.
“Monitoring for very large installations was a category of the market
that we were missing with our
Kaleido product,” says Crosby.
“KaleidoX allows us to go into
those, and it’s very unique in the
way it integrates the router directly
into the processing system. Again,
it came from just talking to clients.
“In most of our Kaleido sales
we would see they had also
bought a router. Worse still, the
router was feeding that and
they are controlling it through a
Continued on page 42
www.tvbeurope.com F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 7
TVBEU R O PE T H E B U S I N E S S C A S E
AD
INDEX
37
Advent
www.adventcommunications.com
32
BAL www.bal.co.uk
7
Blackmagic
www.blackmagic-design.com
41
Dan Technologies A/S
www.dantechnologies.dk
20
DB Broadcast
www.dbbroadcast.co.uk
14
Dektec www.dektec.com
2
Digital Rapids
www.digital-rapids.com
22
DK Technologies
www.dk-technologies.com
18
DTL Broadcast
www.dtl-broadcast.com
24
elquip www.elquip.com
27
EVS www.evs.tv
35
Fjord Media
www.fjordmedia.com
9
For-A www.for-a.com
3,44
Grass Valley
www.thomsongrassvalley.com
1,16
Harris www.harris-broadcast.com
39
IBC www.ibc.org
26
Just Edit www.tapeless.tv
43
Korea E and Ex
www.eandex.co.kr
30
Link www.linkres.co.uk
11
Maxell www.maxell.co.uk
29
MediaGenix www.mediagenix.tv
8
Murraypro www.murraypro.com
36
NAB www.nab.org
33
Network Electronics AS
www.network-electronics.no
21
Omneon www.omneon.com
31
Omnitek www.omnitek.tv
5
Panasonic Broadcast
www.panasonic-broadcast.com
12
Pebble Beach www.pebble.tv
28
Photon Beard
www.photonbeard.com
25,32, Playbox
38
www.payboxtechnology.com
23
Pro-bel www.pro-bel.com
34
Rohde & Schwartz www.rsd.de
19
Quantel www.quantel.com
13,15, Sony
17
www.sonybiz.net
Beauty & style at Fashion TV Arabia
Graphics Case Study
In August 2006 fashion television
station, Michel Adams-owned
Fashion TV in Paris, launched a new
channel called Fashion TV Arabia,
dedicated to the Middle East region.
Naji Bouhabib, the head of MT2 in
Beirut, the systems integrator
behind this project and one of the
main Harris agents in the Middle
East, explains why this application
and how MT2’s own software solutions based around the Harris
Inscriber RTX system were used to
enhance the look and feel of the
new channel
Fashion TV Arabia is the only 24hour, seven-day-a-week channel
dedicated to the world of fashion,
beauty and style in the Middle
East region. Like its parent company, Fashion TV Arabia’s programming includes exclusive coverage from the glamorous world
of fashion, with features such as
reports from fashion shows, profiles of established and up-andcoming modeling talent and fashion photographers and features
on general entertainment trends.
Since the inception of the first
Fashion TV channel in 1997, the
station has established itself as a
leading authority for this genre.
In just eight years, Fashion TV
has become a leading medium
and one of the five biggest channels
broadcast
worldwide.
Fashion TV is received in 130
countries on six continents and is
broadcast worldwide over cable,
satellite, IP-TV, and 3G (UMTS)
to over 300 million households.
As the systems integrator
behind the Fashion TV Arabia
project, MT2 supplied a turnkey
Harris playout solution, which
included two Nexio transmission servers and two storage
arrays, as well as four remote
stations with Nexio PlayList
manager and content management tools. The installation also
includes an Inscriber RTX custom broadcast graphics system
to handle all the on-air graphics
for Fashion TV Arabia, a
Panacea 16x16 router and a wide
range of timing, distribution
and processing products.
Because MT2 has been a pioneer in the area of interactive television solutions, we were asked
to provide Fashion TV Arabia
with a solution that would add
value and help generate new revenue streams for the channel. As
branding is an extremely important element for a channel like
Fashion TV Arabia, we installed
the Harris Inscriber RTX system,
which, with realtime 2D/3D animation and multi-layering for the
simultaneous display of text,
graphics, video, DVE moves and
animation, is widely regarded as
the most flexible and capable
graphics platform on the market.
Naji Bouhabib: “we were asked to
provide Fashion TV Arabia with a
solution that would add value and
help generate new revenue streams
for the channel”
Inscriber RTX is ideally suited
to live productions — or indeed
any programming in which the
delivery of realtime information
is vital, as is the case at Fashion
TV Arabia. By integrating with
streaming data sources, Inscriber
playout, and monitoring and
control — there are still plenty of
holes that we need to keep stuffing
with the right products,” he says.
“Outside of that there are many
categories of technology that our
clients would look to us to provide.”
No fear of
glue or IT
Continued from page 40
IT hurt the industry
different system. You see that frequently enough and you say, ‘that
router should be inside that box,
because they go hand in hand’. We
put the multi-format router directly
inside the monitoring system.”
This is all about integrating
signal processing and workflow,
something Miranda has also
cracked with its Xstation ‘channel
in a box’ product.
Commenting on the continuing health of the low cost play
out sector, Crosby says: “What
we are seeing here is the continuing encroachment of the IT
world into how TV is done. And
you are seeing an explosion of
channels, many of which are
still experimental.
“Certainly the revenue streams
that are generated off these channels
are much lower than from primary
42
Miranda at NAB: ‘Users are looking to us to bring solution ideas and concepts,
and quite often to draw diagrams and detail a new type of production. This is
taking on parts of what system integrators have traditionally done’
channels. So to add the 21 or 23
channel they cannot stump up to do
it with traditional equipment,” he
adds. “That is expensive, but the IT
world presents many dramatic
means of lowering cost. Combine
that with automation, bring in your
branding and your graphics, bring
in your play out scheduling, and
you have this entire, very low costs
channel block.”
According to Crosby, Miranda
has accelerated its R&D commitments — currently about 15% of
sales income is channelled into
R&D — at a time when many rival
vendors are pushing 10% or less
into product development. “Internal
R&D just continues to grow in the
amount that we invest. If we look at
any one of our three primary product categories — infrastructure,
There is no point wondering if these
categories fall under the headings of
MPEG, automation or server technology. IT thinking will be prevalent, and on this Crosby says: “Very
few operators are running in a completely IT-centric manner yet, but
no-one’s afraid of IT any more.
“The major players have a
considerable percentage of staff
that are IT savvy, and when you
talk to them about their new
build outs and their new plans
they will be highly IT-centric.
The fear and uncertainty that did
exist for quite a while, and indeed
hurt the industry, has passed by,”
he adds. “People did not want to
invest and build out if they
thought everything was about to
change, so it certainly slowed
down some categories of business
more than others.”
RTX enables Fashion TV Arabia
to simultaneously provide its
viewers with up-to-the-minute
information, as well as dynamic
graphics and effects, within its
programs. As a Harris certified
developer, MT2 has been able to
use the NEXIO API, combined
with its own software library built
for RTX, to control and automate
combined effects such as video
clips, animations, tickers, rolls,
crawls, clocks and timers.
The ability to layer screen elements on an almost unlimited
number of overlapping layers
provides Fashion TV Arabia
with maximum flexibility and
creative control over its screen
output. Another advantage is
that the RTX system has the ability to perform the multi-layering
within a desktop environment
instead of requiring a graphics
output. Material can be previewed while coding, so as to
reduce errors and eliminate additional costs for a separate output
board and monitor.
The Inscriber RTX system
also allows the user to generate
cascading effects. This means that
for the first time, users can add an
effect or transition to another
effect that is already running. For
example, Fashion TV Arabia can
include an animation or video
clip in a crawl, or dissolve a roll
on and off the screen. There are
no limits to the number of running effects, and each effect
can be introduced or removed
individually, as a group or even
automatically, using the MT2
automation software solution
built for the Nexio/RTX system.
The way that Crosby paints the
overall market suggests that Miranda
itself might be ripe for acquisition at
some point.
“Well, it’s certainly an option
that could happen, but it’s not
one that we are investigating,” he
says. “Acquisitions amongst our
clients are happening a lot, as we
see the consolidation of broadcasters and service providers.
“What we are seeing right now
is a few super vendors, with
Thomson and Harris providing
much bigger pieces of the puzzle,
and we agree with that model.
Over the years we have done a
number of acquisitions that really
built out the breadth of line that
Miranda offers, and we expect to
continue to do so,” he adds. “It’s
very much in our interest, and we
believe we can be successful at
being one of the acquirers.
“The challenge we are facing,
and our competitors as well, is
trying to find the new talent. As
you continually expand and ramp
up your engineering groups, you
are perpetually looking for more
and better kids — and so is everybody else.”
www.tvbeurope.com F E B R U A RY 2 0 0 7