Development into a video brand posted: 13/01/2023
by Uwe Agnes
Rik Hoer e
In December 2021 Rik Hoer e was appointed CEO of the Riedel Product Division. In the interview, we looked back together on the first year in his new position and found out in which direction he believes the company should develop.
--
Rik, you are about one year in your new position as the CEO of the Riedel Product Division. Looking back, what would be in your view the most important events and developments in your area of responsibility during that time?
The most important event was definitely the supply chain disruption, which was not exactly what we were looking forward to. But that obviously was a very, very big challenge to handle from day one. Luckily, this problem is a bit like in Formula One: if it rains on the race track, it rains for every driver! That was exactly the case for the supply chain problem here. All our competitors had exactly the same problems.
The very good thing is that we were able to manage our way through this challenge and still overachieved our projected targets for this year. There are huge increases in the cost of goods, because of brokers in the middle, which drive prices up to absolutely crazy levels. For example an item which usually costs one US-Dollar dollar a piece is now sold for 250 US-Dollars. That s literally what happens. And then you have the choice to either stop supplying and let down your customers or you continue to supply your customers and take the hit, because you cannot charge the total increase in cost to your customers. So, we decided very early to share the pain and carefully managed expenses, and still ended the year with a significant overachievement in revenue while being able to ship everything our customers wanted.
What was, besides the supply chain issues, your main agenda as the new CEO of the Product Division?
I started this new position with some context, because I have known Riedel for quite some time. In my previous company, I was the Riedel distributor for a few regions in Europe since 2003 and joined Riedel 10 years ago and have worked in several roles since then. So there has been a long relationship with Riedel.
Nevertheless the first thing I did was listening to a number of people, leaders in the company as well as people on the shop floor. Which issues would they like me to work on and what would they want to see handled differently moving forward? You try to get an understanding of the status quo and continue to work from there.
We are in the middle of big changes. There is a lot of disruption in the industry, from the way viewers consume content up to the war on talent and the supply chain disruption, with vendors either experiencing big problems or disappearing altogether.
But also also there is a change in technology, for which we need to prepare our customers. What does that mean in particular for Riedel? Riedel used to be a hardware-centric company, and is evolving into a much more software-centric company, both on COTS as well as cloud-native, still with a decent amount of own hardware in the future. This change is not just a technology change, but also requires the organization and our customer centric end-to-end processes to change. The change process is embedded in a digital transformation project, which is led by the group CFO, Frank Eischet and myself.
Personally I'm someone who loves change but change may also create uncertainty. It's one of my main targets as Product Division CEO to implement those changes, with respect for each and everyone in the company who has contributed to the success of today. That needs to be honored and continued to be built on for the future. Its a bit like with the US Marines: we leave no one behind. That's my main set of targets.
advertisment --
How would you describe the situation of the Riedel Group at the moment?
I would describe our situation as amazingly good! After the Covid 2020 year, we have had two very strong years. Obviously the market is picking up, some of that will be down to investments being done now that had been delayed previously. For 2023 the order backlog and pipeline are very strong
Riedel has still a lot of growth potential worldwide. First of all, from a geographical or lateral point of view, there are regions in which we are not yet present to the right extent and where we don't have a large team yet. But also then from a vertical point of view, we we are growing our video business worldwide. This has significantly increased over the over the past years already and we are taking further steps, one of those being the acquisition of two new companies in order to to further fuel our software strategy on one hand while also investing in a broader video product portfolio.
You are referring to the acquisition of SDNsquare and SimplyLive which both happened last September. Could you expand on what you hope each company to contribute to your strategy?
Lets start with SDNsquare, a technology start-up based on university campus in Gent, Belgium, which started as a spin-off and developed a lot of know-how about SDN orchestration. With broadcast production going increasingly IP, the orchestration of these IP networks is a core ingredient and it was thus also an important building block identified in our product strategy.
When the opportunity came up to acquire a core competence center which had experience and had provided already the biggest productions worldwide with their technology, we acquired the technology and the core people in that team.
The focus of the team is now to take that product from where it is today, enrich it to where it is needed for the future and integrate it into our ecosystem.
With SimplyLive we had a very different reason for our acquisition. Like I said, we intend to grow our portfolio of video products a
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Development into a video brand posted: 13/01/2023 
