SVG Sit-Down: Evertz's Mo Goyal on the Studer Acquisition and Broadcast's Migration to IP

SVG Sit-Down: Evertz's Mo Goyal on the Studer Acquisition and Broadcast's Migration to IP How the audio-console manufacturer fits into a cloud-based strategy By Dan Daley, Audio Editor

Monday, March 22, 2021 - 11:29 am

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In February, Evertz Technologies Ltd. closed on its acquisition of Studer's technology and related assets. Studer, once a leading brand of broadcast-audio consoles, had lost much of its luster in the past decade and slipped further as corporate giant Samsung subsumed Studer parent Harman International, impacting budgets and R&D. In addition, industry consolidation, particularly around the console sector - for instance, Calrec, SSL, and DiGiCo now share common ownership - presented stiffer competition.

Sitting down with SVG, Mo Goyal, senior director, international business development, live media production, Evertz, discussed why the acquisition took place, what a reimagined Studer means as Evertz moves further into cloud-based broadcast media, and the landscape of broadcast in an increasingly IP-based environment.

Evertz's Mo Goyal: We're going to leverage the brand and the knowledge that we gained from the Studer acquisition to advance the industry.

Audio hasn't historically been a very large part of Evertz's product lines. What's behind the Studer acquisition? Is audio going to become more integral to Evertz's broadcast strategy?

The evolution of the business for us has been moving in a couple of directions. One is this growing desire to create content and build more content and deliver more content in different places. So we started to invest into a lot of the production tools and things like that over the last seven, eight years, starting with our DreamCatcher platform. And one of the things that had started to become clear, especially over the last year and a half, was the transition to cloud production.

The question that kept coming up was, how are you going to handle audio? We saw an opportunity with Studer to see how we can leverage some of that technology and do things in the cloud as part of our larger production-tool sets within Bravo and DreamCatcher. Studer had been on our radar for a while. I think this just became an opportunity for us to pick up the assets from Harman at a fairly reasonable cost and take a look at what was there. We saw an opportunity and figured that this was a very good investment on our part.

An Evertz press release says, Evertz will invest in Studer to develop next-generation products to meet broadcast customers' future needs while creating synergies between its current product suite and the Studer product environment. What are the potential synergies, and how do they engage with its current product lineups?

In the last couple of years [at Studer], there hasn't been a great deal of investment in terms of product development and such, but there's still a lot of great IP and technology there: [for example,] the Vista One platforms and Glacier. We saw this as part of our strategy of enhancing our live-production-tool sets. From the video or the visualization side, we've got DreamCatcher; we've got a whole bunch of other technologies that solve that part of the production problem. The pieces that we found within the Studer library excite us because a lot of those can be migrated and fit into that overall strategy of content creation and [we're] able to do that both on-premises and in the cloud.

Is Evertz going to become an audio-console manufacturer?

That's part of what we're evaluating right now. At this point, we've taken a look at the portfolio that we've acquired, and we're identifying the [products] that we think are best-suited for us moving forward. Then we'll start to invest some time and resources into those that we think have the best success.

Studer had moved much of its manufacturing to China and Eastern Europe. Any changes expected there for manufacturing or R&D?

Harman is part of a larger Samsung family, so they were able to do that. We manufacture everything in-house as much as we can, and we have assembly and manufacturing here in Burlington [ON] as well. That's one of our value-adds. We have control over our own production and everything else here. That's a key differentiator in the market, and we want to continue that. We're in the midst of evaluating the relationships with the current providers, and we're seeing which ones make sense to continue with and which ones we're just going to bring forward in-house.

Will current Studer product lines and existing warranties continue to be supported?

That's something we're looking at as well. The ones that we want to move forward with will likely be the ones that we're going to continue to support. We are acquiring some distressed assets, meaning there wasn't a lot of investment put into them. There will be likely a part of the existing Studer portfolio that we won't be able to continue to support. We're in the process of finalizing which ones move forward and which ones we aren't able to continue to support.

How many Studer employees are part of the acquisition, and what departments are they from?

That part I unfortunately can't share. We did get a team from them, but I can't divulge too much detail

Can you tell us if they're U.S.-based or Europe-based?

They're internationally based. So, a combination.

Evertz is a Canada-based company, and Studer is already a favored brand there, with consoles and related systems in 512 Canadian radio stations. How important was that installed base in the acquisition?

The reputation and brand recognition of Studer was always important. That gives us confidence in the brand, the technology, and everything else. What was always

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