Bridge Technologies January Blog Post

24/01/2020

Where We Have Been

Dunno where I'm going, Dunno where I've been

When guitar legend Rory Gallagher sang that, he obviously hadn't been keeping meticulously detailed accounts of his history like we have in the Bridge Blog. Cause we know exactly where we've been. And we've got a good idea of where we're going.

Don't look back (in anger)

If you're the kind of person that still finds themselves shocked that 2050 is closer to us now than the original release of Jurassic Park, you'll probably be able to relate to this blog. The fact is, life can become a little bit of a blur, and it's difficult to keep it all in order. And the same goes for business.

Sure, there are annual accounting reports, data-driven marketing stats, tedious chains of mind-numbing emails. But they don't necessarily give that intangible insight into the rich tapestry of business across the years - as it evolves, changes and rolls with the punches of a fast flowing market.

Which is why we're so pleased to have our News and Blogs page on our website. Whilst we often use our December or January blogs to recap the progress we've made over the course of the year (in part to show off, and in part because we're really immensely proud of the progress we're making), this year we thought we'd dig back a little deeper.

The Bridge Technologies Timeline

Records on our own news and blog page go back to 2012. We have a fair few internal bits and bobs knocking about the office from before then, but there's a surprising dearth of information about what got us all started. An article we wrote recently for the SCTE Journal about the roots of monitoring in broadcast - with a little bit of our own personal history thrown in, inspired this blog.

Interestingly though, our wider internet presence was also fairly undeveloped. A not-exactly-comprehensive google unearths an interesting interview from SatMagazine as far back as 2012, where the biggest concern on our radar was the stability of the euro and European markets in general oh if only we'd had a crystal ball!

Amazing to think that was all a full decade ago. But even more amazing is that in 2012, we were already eight years old. An archaeological dig through the internet yields more of our history before then, though we thought we'd be here all day if we didn't put down our shovels, brushes and buckets.

And, we'd also argue it might be around about 2012 where the way we were perceived in the industry began to gain some serious pace. We started off with a pretty visionary perspective when it came to the role of IP in the broadcast industry but like any visionary, it can be a bit tricky to find recognition in your time. There's a small chance you'll be labelled the loony in the corner'.

And whilst we carried some serious heft in terms of the expertise of our founding members, and we were by no means dismissed in the market, our IP is the future of broadcast' message was sometimes met with little more than an indulgent smile and a chuckle.

But 2012 is perhaps the year when the industry stopped saying don't mind them, and started to say do you know what, I think they could be on to something'. With Netflix just hitting UK and European shores, suddenly the impending IP expansion was an unavoidable inevitability.

From there, momentum gathered pace. But what exactly do the records show we were up to?

2012: We gathered up some new Business Partners - especially in the expansion of our Asian market, and our good friends SHM also joined us to enhance our presence in the German market.

We also started to really push forward in the field of OTT; the VB330 added a Bulk OTT engine and we launched the portable VB12-RF probe (now NOMAD), and as a result the awards really started to roll in; Streaming Media Europe, the TVTechnology STAR award, and SCTE, to name but a few.

2013 and 2014: 2013 started with a bang: we introduced the PocketProbe - allowing monitoring to be achieved from anywhere in the world (well, anywhere with 3G). This was a real head turner - nothing really drives home just how much flexibility IP provides like the ability to demo, real-time network monitoring just by getting your mobile out of your pocket.

For all of our probes - including the VB273 and VB288 - we made both incremental and fundamental improvements. One of the big ideas that we were pushing - and continue to push - is the idea that Quality of Experience is as vital, if not more vital, than Quality of Service: it's all very well discovering your network is doing what you think it should be doing according to lots of geeky engineering metrics- but what if your customer doesn't!? What if the fundamental experience they are having is undermining your reputation with each passing minute?

Content extraction is the big tool here; seeing what the final set of eyes sees, not the image you've sent out on a wing and a prayer And the integration of content extraction into our key probes was the big focus for some of our major industry awards in 2014.

Our recognition of the centrality of QoE seems pretty obvious now (as, of course, does our IP mantra). But moving into 2014, we were starting to get some real attention for the way we were promoting monitoring not as some niche engineering concern, but something that was fundamental to the strategic decisions underpinning the business model of organisations as a whole. From in-the-moment routing decisions to annual boardroom contemplations, Bridge was showing just how important monitoring metrics were about to become - especially in an industry where with each passing year, one extra second of latency or delay meant one extra customer lost. Don't bolt it on, design it in!

Resultantly, more and more eyes were becoming fixed on us: both NAB an

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