Posted: 27/11/2015
So I’ve just spent the last couple of days at BITAM in Madrid – an “International show of broadcast, IT, audio and media”. It’s comparable to BVE although on a much smaller scale. Probably more like BVE North for those that remember. BITAM has only been going for three years and it is muscling in on the more established Bit (Broadcast IT), which has apparently faded slightly in recent years.
I was there with Avcast – our Madrid based Spanish reseller. Jesús and his team have over 20 years of experience in the broadcast industry and they were showcasing a variety of other products and services that they offer along with Forscene.
“Hablo Espanol un poquito”
So the value of having native speakers with ‘feet on the ground’ cannot be understated, which is why we will continue to build our relationships with our Forscene resellers and support them throughout the whole sales process and beyond, and if that means a few days in Madrid for me, then so be it!
The show is naturally quite small at the moment as it is trying to build itself up to be the main broadcast show in Spain and substantial yearly growth has shown promise. It is Avcast’s first time here and Jesús can see the value in exhibiting, but of course “time will tell”. The booths are small to allow for the smaller budgets available to the exhibitors. The organisers are still happy to fleece on the Internet charges though (€500 for a 10 Mb/s connection!) That will sound familiar to anyone who has exhibited at a show like this. Captive audience indeed!
A different kind of trade show
The broadcast industry has taken quite a hit in recent years, with an estimated one third of companies going under, and people have had to react to lack of funds and work accordingly. Production in Spain is much more of a one person operation, with the same person directing, producing, filming and editing content, for a variety of outlets – low budget Spanish television, web publishing and corporate videos for example. This is where a cost effective solution like Forscene will be a valuable asset to the Spanish industry and why Avcast requested our presence at BITAM. There is still a palpable concern about the current state of the industry and people are rightly wary of committing financially to anything new, but as Jesús informs me, confidence is finally growing and with it the knowledge that the recent years of despair have necessitated a change in attitudes, and Forscene is well equipped to accommodate those changes.
The concept of cloud computing is no longer new to people in broadcast but the ones that I met were still very impressed that our cloud solution can provide such depth of functionality, with no latency, over a modest bandwidth. They were also very interested in our web upload function and consequent native format publishing, and I think that Spanish production will benefit from our continued improvement and support of ‘in the field’ upload and conform features. There isn’t really a post-production industry in Spain and people are not inclined to buy servers for transcoding media so this is another area where Forscene can provide the solution.
BITAM was a lot smaller than the shows I am used to, but the general consensus about Forscene was very positive, with one web developer saying it “was the best thing he had seen at the show”. Bear in mind that there were at least 3 stands showcasing just drones, and very cool ones at that!
Forscene is now in a better place than it has ever been and our international resellers are helping us to make the world aware. We’ll continue to build our relationships with them and help reaffirm what we already know: that with our continued developments, improvements and integration, the industry is pretty much ready for us now. After all, as I heard more than once this week: “es el futuro”.
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Jon Hanford - Group CTO, Deltatre