Ross Video

Ottawa, Canada, September 23rd 2021 – Headquartered just north of London in the U.K., ES Broadcast is a Ross Diamond Elite Partner and was the first Ross partner to specify and order the Ultrix FR5 routing/AV processing platform when it was launched in 2018. Over the last three years ES Broadcast has been a strong advocate of the Ultrix platform, specifying it in an impressive number of systems integration projects. As a result of this success, it's perhaps no surprise that ES Broadcast has now decided to add the Ultrix platform to its extensive and growing dry hire catalogue.

"We're very proud of the projects we've completed that feature the Ultrix," comments Jonathan Lyth, Group CTO of ES Broadcast. "It really has been one of our top performing solutions because of the flexibility it offers and the breadth of the feature set. We've used it to solve a wide variety of customer challenges, and our decision to add Ultrix to our existing dry hire portfolio has also been based on customer challenges, albeit new ones caused by the pandemic." With customers forging ahead with their plans for 2022, the team at ES Broadcast has been receiving an increasing number of requests for dry hire solutions, with uncertainties around Capital Expenditure budgets the major driver. "We've had quite a few customers coming to us with a need for additional resource but without the signed-off CapEx budget to support it. As our dry hire offering has grown, adding the Ultrix makes perfect sense because it can provide video and audio routing, clean/quiet switching, MultiViewers, frame synchronizers and UHD gearboxing all from one chassis. The software-defined nature of Ultrix means we can easily configure it for specific customer workflows via the different software licenses. Our systems team knows the Ultrix very well and so we can offer very high degrees of customization along with custom-designed DashBoard control panels that will perfectly meet the customer's requirements. In this sense, we're bridging the gap between systems integration and traditional dry hire and using our expertise to deliver a solution that's extremely tailored."

With customers in the live events and broadcast markets already signed up to Ultrix hires, and the rental diary beginning to fill up, Jonathan Lyth is pleased that the investment is bearing fruit. "With Ultrix, we can rent one single product that can sit at different points in the production chain and in different production environments, and that's a powerful proposition. Customers really appreciate that flexibility as well as the 12G UHD capabilities of Ultrix. I can really see us expanding this side of our business and offering more specialist infrastructure rentals in future. We succeed by adapting what we offer to the needs of our customers, and I think there's exciting potential growth in this area."