Red Bee Media has opened a new research and design lab at its facility in West London.
Red Lab houses a private Cloud platform for remote testing, as well as meeting and collaboration space for broadcast and network engineers and solution architects.
The company is planning to open additional Red Lab facilities in Sweden and the Netherlands during 2019.
The new London-based centre has already been used to test the control of remote platforms in other UK hubs and across mainland Europe. In testing customer demos, Red Bee Media said it was able to show full integration between media management, playout, distribution and OTT platforms – with content flowing between all platforms and across five countries. The Red Lab was also used while concluding testing for the world’s first software-only playout deployment.
“We are transforming the way we are thinking as broadcast engineers,” said Iain Shields, technical product manager for playout at Red Bee Media. “We have never been able to experiment this quickly before, and to come up with an idea and try it without worrying about impacting a running service is very liberating. Previously we could only test on individual system components or copies of an entire system, which is expensive and only applicable to one customer. All successful ideas can now be of benefit to all of our customers.”
