Interview: Nevion's Geir Bryn-Jensen on the shift to IP

“Our sales guys used to say they would come and visit us at the factory – that was the perception of Nevion. But over the past five or six years we have gone through a fairly significant transformation,” says chief executive Geir Bryn-Jensen.

Media transport firm Nevion used to operate two factories but in 2012 it outsourced all manufacturing.  “The core business of Nevion is not to manufacture, it is to develop innovative solutions to help media companies become much more flexible in how they produce their content,” says Bryn- Jensen.

“And we can do that through software development and building networking solutions.” The Norway-headquartered company started out 20 years ago with the aim of “revolutionising” the broadcast industry with a set of compact video routers that would challenge the established range that dominated the market.

“They did it successfully and got a good footprint and market share fairly quickly,” says Bryn-Jensen. Today, the company styles itself as “the architects of virtualised media production”, providing network and broadcast infrastructure for the transport and management of video, audio and data for clients including BBC, BT, AT&T and NBC Universal.

“Broadcasters are meeting a different type of competition from the new media players. So the source of revenue, from subscription to licensing to ad revenue, is under pressure,” says Bryn-Jensen.

“Over the past three or four years, [broadcasters have faced] increasing pressure to produce more competitive content to compete with these new media players. But at the same time, they don’t have any more resources to do it, and some even have less with which to do more. That is when we see that the interest in new technologies is increasing – technologies that can help them become more agile and focus more on the content side than the plumbing,” he says.

Nevion’s exit from manufacturing was part of its new approach, born out of a reappraisal of how a production environment might be more flexible and agile through the use of generic IT kit and practices.

That included building a professional services division to advise customers, with system architects and project managers who work with regional and local system integrators for large projects.

“Three or four years ago, people were interested [in IP], and they listened, but they said: ‘We’ll call you’,” says Bryn-Jensen.

“A couple of years ago, the interest became a bit stronger, and their source of revenue was put under even more pressure. At IBC and NAB last year, the interest was immense and everybody wanted to talk about new technologies that could help them become more productive and agile in competition with those new, emerging media players.”

Nevion has partnered with the EBU and VRT on the LiveIP Sandbox project, which was a “perfect fit” Bryn- Jensen says.

“They wanted to build something that was the core of what we believed in.” He describes the two projects to date as a “massive success”.

“If anything, there has been surprise that a group of vendors could come together and build something in a collaborative fashion,” he adds.

Nevion is now involved in around 10 IP-based projects in Europe and North America, according to Bryn- Jensen. The projects can be split into two camps: established facilities involved in migration exercises that want to add scale by building a software- defined network, and those that are building new facilities that don’t want an “old-fashioned MCR, or linear, static production set-up”.

“Many broadcasters have invested heavily in infrastructure that is still working. It is not dead. So what do they do with that investment? And that is where the biggest value proposition exists, because all that equipment and gear may be utilised to 5%, 15% or 20%.

“The rest of the time it might be idle, which is a waste. So if you can take that kit and, instead of having it as part of a static production set-up, plug it into a software-defined network, then you can make that asset available to any production anywhere.

“And that is where you can increase utilisation to 80% or 90%. We label that as one of two dimensions of virtualising media production,” he says.

“The other dimension is to move that purpose-built gear to a generic piece of kit that can do anything you want, whenever you want. That is the second piece of what we talk about when we discuss virtualisation. That is probably a bit further ahead until it is all generic hardware, but it is getting there. We are getting there.”