Red Bee Media opens R&D facility in London

Red Bee Media has opened a new research and development facility in London, with plans to open additional R&D hubs in Sweden and the Netherlands during 2019.

The company said that it is formalising its R&D efforts under one name, Red Lab, and plans to eventually have multiple connected facilities across the globe.

Red Lab, London is based at Red Bee Media’s West London office and houses a private cloud platform for remote testing and collaboration space for broadcast engineers, network engineers and solution architects.

“Red Lab, London allows our multi-disciplinary teams to experiment and collaborate so that we can proactively drive innovation across our services,” said Alex Dubiez, Red Bee’s head of playout solutions.

“We used to have engineers dedicated to each customer or project, but with the migration of all of our customers onto a shared software-based technology stack, we need to organise in a very different way.”

Red Bee’s technical product manager for playout, Iain Shields, said: “We are transforming the way we are thinking as broadcast engineers. We have never been able to experiment this quickly before and to come up with an idea and try it without worrying about impacting a running service is very liberating.”

“Previously we could only test on individual system components or copies of an entire system, which is expensive and only applicable to one customer. All successful ideas can now be of benefit to all of our customers.”