"Thomson is focused on valuing content, and it has weapons to do so on three main fronts: improving production, improving distribution, and improving workflow." This ruling, simple as it seems, reflects a huge challenge that Thomson Broadcast and Media Solutions has ahead. Combine a reinforced strategy of services with products of lower price and greater reach.
At its annual pre-NAB event, Thomson announced an initiative to support the new digital workflow requirements of broadcast, cable, satellite and telco companies. The initiative, dubbed by the company as dMAX (Maximization of Digital Media Assets) involves a realignment of resources to take advantage of digital workflows. Marc Valentin, Executive Vice President of Thomson Broadcast and Media Solutions said: "We understand that the next decade will be characterised by media leaders maximising their returns on digital investments, making the most of the resources at hand and widely reusing digital assets."
The dMAX initiative includes a framework of software, middleware and critical applications such as asset management, facilities management and monitoring as well as expert systems integration and support services, to create and optimize complete workflows.
On a practical level, this initiative involves the expansion of Grass Valley's C2MD program for central facility management and monitoring, a new effort by the company to leverage Thomson's extensive experience in installing asset management technologies and news flows in large systems. in order to produce more accessible systems; and a set of service level agreements (SLAs) that can give media leaders the flexibility they need to implement multiple distribution flows.
On the applicability of these strategies, TV and Video spoke with Arnault Lannuzel, sales director for South America, who specified and clarified how to implement it in his region.
How do you see Thomson's transformation into a service provider organization in Latin America, where most of its sales are made through distributors?
In general, we are committed only to what we can deliver. We can't do it all because we're not in the United States or Europe. We have several levels of service, and customers are aware, from the simplest as Spare Parts Exchange, a type of commitment to the customer to prioritize getting spare parts. Then we have a type of contract that associates the parties with the service. There we involve the distributors. We sell the contract to the distributor, and the distributor, based on those conditions, makes a contract with the customer. This is for most customers, with the exception of telecine customers, whom Thomson serves directly through its office in Brazil.
How do you plan to implement "service level agreements")?
There are several levels of service. A level offered by the distributor, a level where we intervene the service staff we have in Brazil and a third level where our support staff in the United States participates. Each level corresponds to a stronger price and commitments.
One of the ideas with the dMAX initiative is to get closer to the customer through remote monitoring. These remote monitoring would be handled by the factory in the United States through its service department. This brings the factory closer to the customer, since it would have a control or at least a vision of the customer's system with the alarms that could be presented, etc.
We see a strong trend towards making Thomson a primarily service provider organisation; Is outsourcing in these plans?
We live in the world of outsourcing. Customers who want to value their content should be much more interested in the creation, programming or distribution of content and not in the technical part behind this market. Outsourcing consists of seeking support from external companies to supply this technical part.
We have a very positive experience with organizations like Disney in Japan, where the playout center operates entirely under Thomson's responsibility. This gives us a good reference that we would like to duplicate in other markets.
Are you already selling outsourcing? in Latin America?
A few of our clients in Latin America have already heard our proposals in this regard. On the initiative of one of them, a request appeared asking to what extent we could operate one of their facilities in an important channel in Brazil. We are studying it and we want the client to analyze if within their business model it is profitable to hand over the technical responsibility to a company like ours.
A department was created in Thomson, a business unit, to propose these businesses to chains that have affiliated stations. Through a contract called Facility Management, we commit to operating a network and we take responsibility for that. Even if we have to replace the equipment, everything is at our expense. We take responsibility for the results.
There are channels in France that have 24 hours of programming and only produce their news. They have to wonder if it's worth buying the servers and operating a master control room with ten people, when a company could do it for a fixed amount, taking care of maintenance problems and everything else.
If you leave a business of those in Argentina or Venezuela, for example, you would have to open local operations in those countries.
And we would have to present the client with a business model analyzing their costs, their income, and propose a more interesting model.
The objection may come from the control side. No one wants to lose control of their operations.
That's why Thomson is having more success in playout operations and not in production facility. The client produces and delivers to the playout to distribute, do the dubbing, broadcast. We are not involved in the client's creative decisions. He is still the designer of his product. Thomson does not interfere with the identity of the channel.
The professional market
Regarding Thomson's strategy of having product for the Pro-AV market (audio and video professionals), what can you tell us?
The Pro-AV market interests us but we do not want to sell you what they have always bought: equipment of lower specifications or duration. Thomson wants to enter the Pro-AV but with high-quality digital products. Over the past two and a half years, we have adapted the features of our products to meet your needs and this has allowed us to bring Pro AV customers into the digital world.
But this involves changing the sales structure.
Not so much ours but that of the distributors who expected from Thomson an approach to the market that they already knew. Now, these distributors will be able to sell Thomson cameras to universities.
And work on inventories, on delivery time
Yes. And in demo equipment, for example. As they are products that do not cost the same, we can have more stock and shorter delivery times. That is why we achieved so much success with products such as the M Series or the KayakDD 1, which had a sales growth of 80% between 2003 and 2004. Because we attract a lot of new customers.
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