Making a Difference in Wireless Transmission

Lukasz Malankowski

Published 16th July 2019

Making a Difference in Wireless Transmission

We are very proud to say that we are the only company that provides a highly specific service, and that is the hire of wireless video transmission solutions operating in the licence exempt spectrum.

There are other companies that provide licensed equipment and offer a diverse range of wireless solutions based on different modulations, but our products, coupled with the offerings of others rather than competing with them produce a wireless workflow that is greater than their separate capabilities.

The benefit of that is that clients who use our products and customers who opt for transmission over licenced wireless frequencies will, for the most part, be able to work with both types of products without needing to choose one over the other. Different use cases require different equipment choices.

Most large rental houses are aggressively trying to carve out the biggest possible share of the available market, so they chase everything. Cameras, wireless transmitters, mixing desks, tripods, lighting… everything.

We don’t do that. We serve everyone. We have our niche in wireless video transmission and wireless camera control, and we like it there. We don’t waste time and money chasing projects or sales that are outside of our speciality.

As a result, our client base includes all of the large camera hire companies because they come to us when they need to fill a gap in their hire kit, and that’s a gap in the market we are happy to fill.

But it doesn’t end there. Our equipment can be used by anyone, especially now that newer systems such as Boxx Atom are as simple to use as a mobile phone. We are very successful at capitalising on this aspect and month-by-month our client base grows in numbers including professionals, sole traders, private companies big or small and the list goes on.

In the past, film sets were filled with miles of obtrusive cables strewn about, connected to a video village, gallery, or trucks. Not only were they a nuisance, they were cumbersome and costly to transport, deploy, and retrieve. Advances in wireless technology have changed all of that, and as remote productions continue to take advantage of wireless technologies, our business is growing right along with it.

What we offer replaces the cables between camera and vision mixer, gallery or director. This provides the much-desired freedom to roam, and an ease of use for those at the other end to get the shots they want without worrying too much about whether it can be reached with a wired camera system.

We have technology that has a delay of less than one millisecond, which is considered zero delay in the trade. Whatever happens in front of a camera appears at the receiver, for all intents and purposes, instantly. This is perfectly acceptable for live television events like concerts or live studio productions.

Over the past ten years, production and the way people film has changed so much that today, wireless equipment, especially for video transmission, is a must. If you don’t have a wireless camera system, you need one.

The majority of our bespoke wireless solutions result from customers coming to us for answers several months in advance, saying “We want to do X, Y, and Z, and we want to do it wirelessly. How can we do that in a way that actually works?”

We work closely with them from the first phone call to provide all of the planning, specifications, and, ultimately the wireless hire kit in a way that takes a detailed account of precisely what they want to achieve and we then build a bespoke solution for it. Yes, other companies do a bit of that too, but we take great pride in the individual, comprehensive care we provide in advance, rather than trying to resolve issues in the heat of a production with off-the-shelf solutions, when it’s often too late. We’ve staked our reputation on a particular kind of service, and that reputation remains intact.

In short, on the day that we arrive to deliver a solution, it works.

For example, the organisers of last year’s Farnborough Air Show came to us – as they had in the past – wondering if it would be possible to put a camera at the very front of a V-22 Ospry, which is a cross between an airplane and a helicopter. They wanted the front shot, as the aircraft was flying past the crowd, to be transmitted to the large LED screens on the ground so the cheering crowd could see themselves from, let’s call it a plane’s-eye view.

We were asked whether this was possible, and of course, for us, it was. For safety reasons the distances between aircraft camera transmitter and the screen were significant, but with planning it was a well-met challenge that turned out to be an amazing success. The show organisers loved it.

And that’s the key, getting involved from the start with a view to helping people do something spectacular, or even if it’s run of the mill, make the hire process and production easy and, if appropriate, interesting… perhaps even challenging, which is what we enjoy most.

We love being asked if something is possible and saying, “Yes”.

The ability to say that stems from a dedication to planning and attention to detail, often for months before the actual solution is delivered.

Last year we provided wireless technology for ‘Carnage’, which aired on Sky One. Carnage was a type of game show set in a quasi-dystopian world of high octane, post-apocalyptic car battles.

The series was technically very impressive. The producer’s choice of a South African desert as the shoot location gave us the challenge of providing technology that would work in extreme weather conditions in the middle of nowhere.

Those extreme conditions meant that the microwave links we installed inside the vehicles had to be able to handle temperatures of at least 60C. And what we provided all worked flawlessly. In fact, the transmitters delivered over and above what could be expected of any wireless system in such an environment.

So, in the end, there are plenty of hire companies out there who will hire whatever you want. However, there are very few these days who offer you a human being every step of the way. We always give our clients time and attention in the same way you would offer those values to good friends.

For us, they’re one and the same. To them, zero means everything wireless, every time.

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