Celebrating Twenty Years of Broadcast
Engineering Excellence
InSync Technology is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, starting the festivities at NAB show in Las Vegas. Before we stroll once again down Nevada’s infamous strip, we’ve decided to look back down our own path. Originally the business was founded in an annex, four friends and their young, optimistic first hire. Recently of Snell & Wilcox fame, the newly founded InSync focused on high quality, modular video processing products. Their first hired employee, twenty years on and now a Senior Director of Hardware remembers 2003 fondly, “It was an exciting and scary time, we knew we were really good at making video processing equipment we just didn’t know if there was the market.”
Whilst much of InSync’s business has been white label devices for OEM customers, InSync’s high-density modular technology became familiar throughout the industry, even if the name on the front was something else. InSync’s MD spoke briefly on the topic in an interview “…you might have been using InSync for years without ever realising it. If it was being broadcast overseas from the UK, it probably went through one of our products.”
The business built a foundation of manufacturing and production specialists to develop skills in advanced subjective analysis and image processing algorithms where InSync could see clear market opportunities. This was the unexplored frontier of video standards, there is no widely accepted standard for visual perception. Without a “ground truth”, InSync had to develop their own ways of defining what was required to meet the expectations of major broadcasters worldwide.
Today, those algorithms are available in co-branded products, and in software solutions under our own label, FrameFormer. That is important: we recognised early that Moore’s Law meant that standard computers would eventually have the power needed to deliver image processing. When we defined our flagship product FrameFormer, we said from the start that it would not just be a software solution, but software that runs in the CPU, without the need for GPU acceleration and complex architectures. That we have achieved these goals is due largely to the creative skills and expertise of our staff. In turn, that means we constantly build on our broadcast engineering heritage, evolving for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, celebrating our successes and sharing in the rewards.
As part of creating this culture of excellence, and to ensure a smooth and secure succession for the business, the founding directors marked the 10th anniversary of the company by making it an employee-owned business. Everyone on board shares in the success of InSync, growing as the strength of the business grows.
Our major goal is to keep delivering industry and world-leading products. The route is to build strong relationships with our key customers and users – including major broadcasters, production companies and sports federations around the world – to understand precisely what challenges they face and how we can support them. InSync delivers world-leading video conversion and we look forward to where the next twenty years will take us.
We’re looking forward to sharing some of that future in Las Vegas, meet us in April from the 16th to the 19th on Stand C2013 and use our code LV44839 to register for a free pass.
