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Business lessons from tennis

It was interesting reading Rachel Bridge’s article in the Sunday Times this week, whilst watching Andy Murray lose to Roger Federer in the final of the Australian Open. Rachel is the paper’s enterprise editor and her column is always worth a general look (though I sometimes wonder, cheekily, if she plagiarizes my articles). And now you are wonderin...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

Eye to Eye: Lighting and lighting control

In 1985 I visited the Paris HQ of France Regions 3 with Arthur Garratt, a freelance science broadcaster who worked mainly for BBC World Service. FR3 was one of the first European television networks to make full use of high-efficiency ENG and EFP. We learnt a lot and were able to offer one recommendation in return. Watching a news presentation by t...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

Tv-bay industry recruitment special

The last 12 months have proved to be challenging times for businesses in our industry and there has been mixed reactions on the best way to tackle the issues facing companies. Having been a part of the most difficult economic climate within the last decade a number of businesses are simply focussing on survival, staying afloat and consolidation. Ha...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

SATIS in a day

Aware that several French distributors had pulled out of this year's SIEL & SATIS, I chunnelled to Paris on day two of the October 20-22 show with minimal expectations. The small size of the Guide de Visite (20 pages A5) added to my misgivings but the event itself proved respectably large, crowded and buzzing. Nearly 280 companies occupied stands i...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

Eye to Eye: Content Protection 2009

In the early days of audio and video recording, the limitations of analogue devices provided a fairly high level of content protection by ensuring that any captured signal was either inferior to the original or fairly soon became so. Optical digital media changed all that, allowing practically perfect copies of speech, music, still images and movin...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2009

OLED vs LCD

There was a rapid change in image display technology within the last few years. Nowadays CRTs are history, flatpanels substitute them everywhere. Even in the broadcast industry. Different technologies dominate the market;Plasma - a self-lighting principle - mostly used for large screens;TFT-LCDs - a concept that always needs a backlight - most comm...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 September 2009

From little acorns....

So what do we do? We have done little for television – our market place is much more modest. Parafotos has its origins in the early sixties when I started filming free fall parachuting– having to cope with a Bolex H16 strapped to the side of my helmet during the opening of the parachute was an interesting experience which no doubt accounted for an...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 May 2009

Fancy a trip from Beijing to Paris in our Landrover?

That’s more or less how it happened, not months of planning or deciding I needed adventure in my life, just “Fancy the trip”. Of course no money in it (when is their ever?) but who could pass up such an offer. Dave at Broadcast Services in Chertsey had been preparing a Landrover for the journey for some months having acquired a left hand drive mode...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 September 2008

Getting up to speed with IPTV

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has been gathering pace around the world for the past few years and is major competition to cable and satellite broadcasters. As a satellite subscriber its something I seem to have largely overlooked and the recent IPTV World Forum prompted me to get up to speed on this emerging format of TV delivery and called f...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 August 2008

An airport more dangerous than Death Valley

As far as Insurance Companies are concerned, Airports can be a greater risk than some of the loneliest places on the planet. Airports in the UK lost a million items of luggage last year, and that was just for the holiday makers. We know of a claim, which cost an Insurance Company over one hundred thousand pounds, when camera equipment being returne...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 June 2008