LONDON -- With a new venue at London’s Excel Exhibition Centre in East London, visitors to this year’s BVE will benefit from infrastructure put in place for the 2012 Olympics. More space was needed for the show, as organizers expect 16,000 visitors to walk through the doors between Feb. 26 and 28. These delegates can visit 350 stands – 40 more than last year.
The extra space has also allowed for three new theaters. They will cover Cinematography, Live Events, and Connected@BVE. This last theater will focus on multi-device digital delivery for developing services across connected TV, Web and mobile devices.
“Moving to our new venue has given us the freedom to grow,“ said BVE event director Anita Pal. Delegates will include around 500 international visitors, most of whom fly in from Italy, France and the Netherlands. “Excel makes it easy for them to attend, as London City Airport is only five minutes away and flies to 30 international destinations,” Pal said.
Key speakers include former BBC Controller Grey Dyke, now chairman of the BFI; Chris Johns, BSkyB chief engineer; Francesco Donato, vice president of Broadcast Operations of Sky Deutschland; and Andy Wilson, head of the BBC’s Centre of Technology.
Carl Zeiss AG, Deluxe Media Technologies, Ravensbourne Ltd. and WTS Broadcast are among BVE 2013's new exhibitors. Existing stalwarts include JVC, Avid, Snell, Sony Europe, Miranda and Newtek.
“Moving BVE to the Excel complex is an interesting development,” said Paul Nicholls, Phabrix director of sales and marketing. “It is an important show to meet our U.K. customer base. It is essential that we participate.”
Phabrix will be releasing a new loudness option for the Rx range this year, further enhancing the functionality of its modular rackmount products. The new option boasts simultaneous monitoring of four independent channels.
Hamlet marketing diretor, Steve Nunney, believes that BVE is an important industry meeting place. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to garner interest in stand sales, and opinions on the industry,” he said. Hamlet will be launching ‘DigiTek’ a new test and measurement platform from the same stable as the company’s DS900, plus a new range of “Precision HDW” portable monitors with test and measure built-in.
OmniTek’s main item this year is the latest version (V3.0) of the company’s software for its OTM and OTR waveform analyzers. This version features the addition of Picture Quality and Audio Quality Assessment on OTR rasterizer models, together with a new In-Service Lip-Sync Delay and Loop Delay measurement.
“BVE is a great chance for direct contact with our users, who can get hands on our kit,“ said OmniTek’s David Ackroyd. “It will be interesting to see how the demographic changes – especially now that BVE North has become more established.”
U.S.-based Cobalt Digital is using BVE as part of its European expansion, and the company will demonstrate its extensive range of 3G/HD/SD-SDI conversion gear alongside a new line of throw down boxes, terminal gear, and control panels.
“With the recent appointment of Digi-Box as Cobalt Digital’s master distributor for the U.K. and Southern Ireland, it is vital that we support their efforts in this region,” said Chris Shaw, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Cobalt. “BVE provides an ideal launching pad for this new partnership.”
Cobalt’s LMNTS multi-stream loudness processing will also be shown. It performs automatic loudness processing across many transport streams making it ideal for situations where a large number of diverse programming sources must be simultaneously controlled.
For Sony, the timing of BVE 2013 couldn’t be better. “It’s the first major industry show of 2013, allowing people to get hands-on with Sony products,” said Danielle Couch, marketing communications manager for the U.K. and Ireland.
Sony’s stand will have product specialists and Independent Certified Experts on hand to pass on their expertise to attendees, enabling them to get the most out of their Sony products. Products range from the PMW-F5 and F55 -- which caused such a stir at the end of last year – right up to the Sony F65 CineAlta 4K camera. The event will also be the first UK showcase for Sony’s PVM-X300 4K LCD monitor.
