Why revolution and evolution are not mutually elusive in technology?
The world of business always has an appetite for business buzzwords. Two popular but polarising concepts are that of ‘disruptive innovation’ versus ‘incremental improvement’. But at Bridge Technologies, we’ve been thinking – why does it have to be one or the other?
From a disruptive innovation perspective, we count ourselves as one of the earliest and staunchest supporters for the idea of broadcast over IP. Even 15 years ago when the concept was largely alien, we saw the potential of ‘disrupting’ how things were done, and we worked tirelessly from that point to hasten a real paradigm and mindset change in the industry.
We did the same again with our VB440, where we saw the incredible potential that network data – presented intuitively – holds not only for diagnostic engineers, but also for creatives. Through the power of IP – which all but eliminates factors of distance and time – we had the capacity to turn ‘conventional’ monitoring on its head, and create a first-of-its-kind tool that is now indispensable in the production space.
But we also see the benefit of incremental, ‘lean’ improvement – tweaking things to perfection and trimming the fat. We apply this in our product development philosophy every day. This has led to our most recent software release: 6.1. What is notable about this is that it’s a release across (almost) all of our probes, and across the embedded, appliance and software versions. By leveraging the same essential code library and architecture across our full product suite, we cut out bloat and excess, and we avoid duplication of effort. The net result is a joined-up, holistic suite of probes that can all work seamlessly with one another; delivering end-to-end monitoring solutions that work across complex media chains comprised of IP, Satellite, OTT, Cable and Terrestrial elements.
At the same time though, each probe series is tweaked to leverage its maximum potential – which we deliver to customers in incremental upgrades, rather than in shiny new boxes with fancy new names (and accordingly unnecessary price tags). This can be seen on three different levels: in relation to constantly expanding capacity – for instance, in the expansion of OTT, ETR and content monitoring from 100 streams to 1000, the support of increasingly diverse standards and protocols; including SRT, SCTE 35/104 and JPEG XS, and increase in functionality (particularly in our VB440) with signal generation, HDR preview through SDR monitors, and 7.1 to stereo audio downmix.
So for us at Bridge, it’s not a case of one or the other: revolution and evolution have a role to play together. Sure, it’s a complex relationship – but then at Bridge, we’ve always been about making the complex simple.