FROM THE INDUSTRY
You’re deliberately avoiding vendor lock-in? Exactly. No single vendor can do everything better than everyone else, and trying to force customers into a closed ecosystem doesn’t reflect how live production actually works. Our aim is to provide open interfaces so customers can deploy the tools they want, alongside ours. That philosophy also underpins my work with the EBU’s Digital Media Facility initiative. Tell me more about that. It’s an industry-wide effort to define open, interoperable, compute-based production architectures. For nearly a century, television production has been built around linear, hardware-centric workflows. Compute is now powerful enough to handle live production, but the industry hasn’t fully embraced software-native ways of working. This initiative looks at not just standards, but architectures and workflows; how data is handed off, how tools interoperate. How mature is that work? This year was really the launch year. We demonstrated some of the concepts at IBC for the first time, and I expect 2026 to be the year we start seeing real-world deployments. It’s a significant shift, but it’s necessary if the industry is going to evolve. AI inevitably is in the mix here. How is Appear approaching it? There are two sides to that. Internally, AI helps our teams work more effectively, not replacing people, but removing low-value or repetitive tasks. Around half of Appear’s workforce is engineering, and we’re continuing to grow those teams. Externally, we’re developing AI-driven tools as part of our software roadmap. We don’t have anything to announce yet, but it’s very much part of our future platform thinking. And I always like to clarify that when we talk about AI, we’re mostly talking about intelligent machine learning rather than artificial intelligence in the science-fiction sense.
Finding and retaining talent is a big issue across broadcast
and telecoms. How does Appear address that?
We’ve actually been very successful there. Particularly in Norway, where we have strong relationships with universities and run summer placement programmes. Typically, we take 10–12 students each year, and more than half go on to join us permanently once they graduate. That’s really impressive! Our engineering attrition rate is very low, around 2-3%, which is mostly people moving for personal reasons. That combination of retention and new talent gives us a healthy pipeline. Sustainability is another growing priority – how is Appear tackling that? Density and longevity are the key factors for us. Our platforms are modular, so customers don’t need to replace entire systems to gain new capabilities; they can upgrade individual blades. We still have previous-generation products in service after 12–15 years, which is something we’re very proud of. That long lifecycle reduces waste, supports sustainability goals and protects customer investment. It sounds like Appear has a very clear sense of where it’s heading. We do! It’s an exciting time. There’s a lot of change happening in the industry, but that also means a lot of opportunity. We’re enjoying being part of that evolution.
www.appear.net
Volume 48 No.1 MARCH 2026
51
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