In addition to integrating and selling technology, Artec has developed two systems to support content production.
Although it began as a production company, the evolution of the business made the Artec company in a few years become an important representative of brands, technology integrator, professional training school and develop its own systems, adjusting more than three decades of experience in the industry.
In conversation with TVyVideo+Radio, Jaime Tovar, founder of Artec, recalled that the company began as a production house based on video toaster and made the animations of molecules for the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the Polytechnic. At that time there was no video to present them, transparency projectors were used.
Then, the Institute decided to buy all the equipment they had for animation and with that money they acquired the first Avid equipment for video editing that was in Mexico City, thinking about the world of digital video. After providing support to the distributor that at that time had Avid in the country with the demonstration of the equipment, they ended up as representatives of the brand. Thus, they began to make integrations for Televisa, with integration being the main focus of their business and having a relationship with all brands.
After selling the equipment, they trained customers. Thus they formed a school of digital arts in which they taught photographic retouching, animation, among other subjects, and that today continues to offer a wide variety of courses.
Technology and development
According to Jaime Tovar, "today in Mexico there is a high level of production, there is the equipment, but I think two things are missing: first of all that the Mexican knows the equipment better, there are usually many operators who learned to use the equipment empirically, did not take a course or read the manual. This causes the equipment to be underused, especially in those who do television."
Second is media cataloging and archiving, a point at which they have specialized in Artec, to help publishers who receive large amounts of daily materials. Its founder assures that these two topics are presented in general in Latin America, due to various aspects, including cultural, lack of resources and language, because many technicians do not speak English.
Another important part of the company's business is software development. Today they have two products of their own, one of them in Continuity, which has won several engineering awards and is aimed at ensuring the continuity of telenovelas. The system today has a bridge in which metadata is shared between Masstech and Avid technologies.
The second own product is A + B, which allows the sending of finished commercials to Internet television stations. Each station has specific characteristics to receive the material and this program allows that when uploading the commercial, you select which television stations it is directed to and automatically prepare it in the required format.
Trending
For Jaime Tovar, "the rapid technological evolution that the industry is experiencing today benefits the business from the sale of technology and in Mexico there is the economic capacity for the big players to evolve rapidly along with technology".
In that sense, he highlighted some trends on which the industry should be aware:
- Cloud, is a trend for television across the board
- IP interconnectivity
- Continue to increase the resolution. He pointed out that today there are already televisions in 8K although there is no production. For this it is necessary to improve the bandwidth, the interconnectivity, that is why the tendency is to go to IP. "Although this is not infinite, we have to reach the limit of the eye, to be able to have absolute perfection on screen from the capacity of the eye. You also have to keep in mind that the new ways of consuming video make it look a lot from the phone, affecting the quality of image and sound."
- OTT audience gain. In this regard, he indicated that this type of distribution is gaining ground to live distribution, which will be focused on sports and news, while drama and entertainment will have OTT the preferred platform. This has allowed there to be many more production houses.
