Red Bee Media announces R&D facility in London
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Joseph O'Halloran
| 19 February 2019

In what it says is the first of many connected and collaborative research and development laboratories for broadcasting and media, global media services company Red Bee Media has opened a new R&D facility.

Located at Red Bee’s hub in Broadcast Centre, west London, the Red Lab will house a private cloud platform for remote testing, as well as meeting and collaboration space for broadcast and network engineers and solution architects. This says the company is an approach to R&D that led to the creation of the world’s first software-only playout deployment.

Before its official opening, Red Lab was already used late in 2018 to test the control of remote platforms in other UK hubs and across mainland Europe. In testing customer demos, Red Bee Media claims 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 software-only playout deployment.

“We used to have engineers dedicated to each customer or project, but with the migration of all of our customers onto a shared software-based technology stack, we need to organise in a very different way,” remarked Red Lab’s head of playout solutions Alex Dubiez. “London allows our multi-disciplinary teams to experiment and collaborate so that we can proactively drive innovation across our services.”

“We are transforming the way we are thinking as broadcast engineers,” asserted Iain Shields, Red Bee technical product manager for playout. “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.

Red Bee Media will now be formalising its R&D efforts under one name – with multiple connected facilities planned across the globe. Additional Red Lab facilities are due to be opened in Sweden and the Netherlands during 2019.