Pebble – 25 years of playout, then and now
Peter Mayhead, CEO, Pebble
25 years ago, many were simply relieved that their businesses had “survived” the millennium bug. Audiences were glued to George Clooney in ER, and Breathe by Faith Hill was the Billboard bestselling single of the year. TV Technology magazine published an article headed What’s Digital Television?
2000 was also the year that three colleagues set up a new business, Pebble. They had worked for the then market leader in playout automation Louth (acquired by Harris, now Imagine), and they wanted to bring their extensive experience to bear on a new generation of systems.
It is worth remembering that there were technical challenges back then that have largely gone away. The biggest, of course, was that a lot of playout was still from tape, in large robotic libraries from Sony and Panasonic, Ampex and Odetics. The automation system had to look ahead to ensure the right tapes were loaded into VTRs, then cue them in advance for pre-roll.
Tektronix introduced the Profile video server in 1996, but it took a long while for large-scale disk storage to become practical and affordable.
The other big issue was that each device talked to the automation over individual serial links. Engineers of the time will recall soldering the fiddly D-connectors. System architects will recall the necessity for dedicated real time machine control hardware. PCs at the time – Pentium processor, memory measured in megabytes, integral disk maybe 20 gigabytes – certainly did not have the horsepower to synchronize multiple devices.
Pebble’s first products were designed to be ready for the future, a view which chimed well with the industry. Sales success quickly followed, with major broadcasters like ZDF in Germany.
This was a time for big investments in broadcasting. The first HD channel in Europe launched in 2004, and every broadcaster recognized that this was a transition they had to make.
Digital television created the capacity for many more channels, and everyone was keen to exploit the new revenue opportunities. Traditional broadcasters were forced to shift from offering one or two channels, perhaps with the odd regional opt-out, to becoming multi-channel delivery machines.
This, empowered by the rapidly growing capabilities of playout automation systems, created a completely new business model: the dedicated playout center. Probably started by Red Bee Media and rapidly followed by others like Ascent Media and Encompass, the playout center brought economies of scale by handling all the delivery requirements for multiple clients. Today, virtually every broadcaster across Europe outsources playout.
These new businesses valued agility, because it meant that they could quickly add outputs, and broadcasters in turn recognized that they could be much more flexible in what they offered. This was particularly important as competition grew ever fiercer.
This competition was not just from traditional rivals: in 2005 some engineers at PayPal developed a video sharing website, which they called YouTube. Couple that with Steve Jobs in 2007 waving the first-ever iPhone in front of an adoring audience, and the way in which video is consumed changed forever.
Pebble, meanwhile, was quietly successful. By 2013 revenues were around £6 million, and the founders looked to an exit as the next logical stage. This was when I joined the company.
In 2015 it was acquired by Vislink, at that time a leader in specialist hardware like wireless camera links. Vislink had a corporate vision to move towards software, recognizing that there were long-term concerns around industry-specific hardware.
This was a time of strong growth for Pebble: the business doubled in size from 2015 to 2017, partially on the back of mainstream HD transformation and thoughts of Ultra HD ahead. But it masked serious business issues elsewhere in Vislink, and in 2018 Pebble found itself the only trading entity of a publicly-listed company.
Taking over as CEO, I knew that we had to refocus Pebble’s business to escape from the financial instability that had been forced upon us.
The idea of an integrated playout device based on a workstation PC was well established. It was a key technology in giving large playout businesses the scale and agility they need. But by 2018 there was quite a price war going on in this part of the market, and I knew that price wars are impossible to win.
So we took the decision to focus on tier 1 customers, the major broadcasters and playout centers which had always been our core market. Of course we have an integrated channel product, but we see it as part of a larger architecture.
Then 2020 came along, and covid changed everything. We were forced to work remotely, and we have never gone back. There is no Pebble office or development center: we save the time, stress and carbon footprint of commuting and contribute from wherever we are. And it is a great insight to support our customers who also want remote capabilities for their businesses.
Looking forward, it is hard to see anything but uncertainly for legacy broadcasters in the face of competition from Netflix, Prime and the others. On the other hand, I see governments becoming quite nervous at the thought of losing “the national broadcaster”. If there is a crisis – and the world is in a pretty bad place at the moment – how do you address the nation?
Looking forward, and this may seem a strange thing for a company like Pebble to say, technology is no longer the primary issue . Modern computing power can do anything you want it to.
For broadcasters, the one question is how do they make money? How do they remain financially viable? How can they manage their operations and services, to an audience that now expects interactivity, multiple screens and “background television”, in an affordable way?
Broadcasters today, as they always have, believe that they are unique and their challenges are special, despite every single one of them doing pretty much the same thing: a seamless stream of programmes and commercials. The streaming giants, as they move into sports and event programming, are discovering the exponential complexity curve: live television is really hard.
The future for the media industry is still shadowy. But it will continue to be exciting and stimulating, and I strongly believe that Pebble will be around for the next 25 years, at least.
