Month: September 2020

David Kicks appointed VP of Sales for North America and LATAM
Weybridge, UK, 28th September 2020 – Pebble Beach Systems, a leading automation, content management and integrated channel specialist, today announced the appointment of David Kicks as VP of Sales for the North America and LATAM regions.
David brings 40 years of diverse industry experience to his new role, having begun his career in engineering roles at Pro-Bel in the UK and then taking on sales responsibilities with Pro-Bel and Chyron. He moved to North America in 2004 as part of an MBO, and went on to hold senior regional and national sales roles with Snell Group, Vidcheck and Telestream.

David said, “It’s such an exciting time to start working with Pebble, with a young, enthusiastic, driven team of bright engineers with energy and purpose. At a time of rapid technological change, they are bringing new thinking and energy to the table. The strong problem-solving and collaborative ethos of the delivery team gives me great confidence in our ability to satisfy the specific needs of both the North American and LATAM markets. I’m excited to share details of our ambitious programme with my network, and look forward to evangelising our new Oceans technology platform, and more.”

Peter Mayhead, CEO, Pebble Beach Systems, commented, “David’s rich experience and strong set of competencies will serve us well in these regions. As Pebble looks to consolidate its position and add new offerings into the market, we’re pleased to have him on board.”
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Oceans is the latest platform for broadcast solutions built for cloud-friendly and on-prem technologies – TVB Europe BEST OF SHOW WINNER
Weybridge, UK, 10th September 2020 – Pebble Beach Systems, the leading automation, content management and integrated channel specialist, has announced the next wave of media orchestration with its new platform, Oceans.
Oceans is Pebble’s next generation service-oriented technology platform. Built for all clouds, but equally happy on-prem, Oceans will enable broadcasters to deploy, manage, host and upgrade their broadcast workflows and services from a single intuitive unified interface, now and in the IP future.
Designed to handle complex broadcast workflows in a simple and intuitive manner, thanks to common core services across multiple functional applications, Oceans provides enhanced visibility and control of the playout infrastructure. And regardless of scale, Oceans will enable broadcasters to expand their deployment as new services are released. The platform allows them to write and integrate their own functionality using Oceans’ open and secure APIs.
Oceans’ ‘virtual’ container-based platform management ensures that users are running the most efficient solution for the scale of their operation, delivering the optimum provisioning, management and usage of available resources for their requirements at any given time.
Oceans has been designed with four key principles at its heart:

• To help broadcasters and media companies transition towards IP-based technologies, including the cloud
• To bring existing Pebble customers along and offer access to the new functionality
• To offer agile and reactive technology for changing business and external developments
• To easily support new technologies with iterative, flexible, modular solutions at all scales, from single channel infrastructures to multi-channel, multi-site, geo-dispersed operations

As the broadcast industry moves towards increasingly widespread adoption of IP protocols, and expand to include VOD services and other OTT offerings, broadcasters and operators are increasingly exploring ways of working within the cloud that makes both practical, and financial sense.
There are multiple drivers are work. The broadcaster may want to monetise linear content on VOD, for example, without the cost of building a whole new infrastructure, or they could be looking at implementing Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery without incurring unmanageable costs. Making good decisions around technology refresh cycles is key, as always. And there is little doubt that decisions made in 2020 need to have the cloud at the heart. The service-based, agile, scalable solutions that cloud deployment has enabled provide broadcasters, and now the new users of the Oceans platform, with a significant range of advantages:

• faster development cycles to adapt to changing needs
• robust, comprehensive security and logging
• the ability to write a company’s functionality and business logic, or ‘Build it Yourself’
• smooth and unobtrusive update processes

With the ability to be agile and reactive to changes affecting broadcasters worldwide, Oceans will integrate into workflows with ease, supporting evolving technologies, and enabling current Pebble customers to build further on their current infrastructures and benefit from new functionalities and efficiencies.

“Interoperability is in our DNA,” says Daniel Robinson, Head of R&D at Pebble Beach Systems. “As experienced solution builders, our business is implementing playout infrastructures and taking customers on air in testing and diverse environments. Oceans will provide the broadcast community with flexible, easily upgradeable solutions, which are tailored to every workflow. Creating Oceans from the ground up, we took a rigorous approach to security, authentication, and resilience, building the platform the industry needs with the right building blocks for more functional services to further enhance our automation offerings.”