Artel has long had a presence in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), but in late 2021, we doubled down on serving this region when Egor Tyagunov joined our team. As Artel’s primary sales contact in EMEA, Egor is an expert in broadcast technology and has relationships throughout the region. (Some of you might already know him.)

In this conversation, Egor tells us about Artel’s plans for supporting EMEA broadcasters in 2023.

You’ve been with Artel for just over a year now. Tell us about your first year.

I spent a good part of my first year travelling the whole EMEA region — from Siberia to Spain and throughout the Middle East — meeting the resellers, getting to know the market, and figuring out how Artel could help soothe broadcasters’ pains.

My travel coincided with the end of lockdown in many places. Business was starting to get back on track, and people were anxious to get back to “normal” networking practices. Those in-person chats that take place at different trade shows and events and facilities from country to country — that’s how you see the trends and understand which projects are using which technologies in which places. And since I’m looking at all of this with fresh eyes, I can perhaps identify new strategies that will help move Artel and the industry forward.

Based on what you’ve learned from your extensive travels, what trends do you see?

Since Europe is made of a community of smaller countries, certain technologies take off in Europe first before they expand to other parts of the world. We’ve seen that a lot with media over IP.

Many European production facilities have already migrated to IP or are deep into it. They’ve taken their media transport infrastructures from old-school copper video cables to video over IP and uncompressed audio over IP. The SMPTE ST 2110 standard format is becoming more and more popular. Artel’s switching products serve as the core of an IP infrastructure.

Contrast Europe with Africa, Pan-Asia, and some parts of the Middle East, where some broadcasters haven’t even begun to think about IP because their budgets aren’t yet ready for ST 2110. Some very old studios will need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

What are your plans for the region in 2023?

Even though we’ve been around a long time, Artel is a small company, and we’re not well-known in every country in the region. So generally speaking, my goal is to build personal relationships and establish trust with regional channel partners and with integrators that promote our products as part of their solutions.

I mentioned earlier that Europe’s transition to IP infrastructure is already complete or well underway. Take audio. Artel is a Ravenna partner, so in areas where Artel’s Quarra PTP switch might be a fit, I will continue to strengthen relationships with audio console manufacturers that are also Ravenna partners.

In terms of video and data transport, Artel’s SMART Media Delivery Platform, with the latest tech compression implementations, is available in our DigiLink and InfinityLink frames. Now that it is also available in an openGear card, we’ll work with my friends within Ross (developer of openGear) to find strong channel partners in the various markets that might need our openGear technology for J2K and JPEG XS.

It’s all about building trust, and that starts with offering the right mix of Artel products in the right places to help solve whatever problems resellers and their customers face. Then we have to demonstrate how Artel technology is better than the competition at helping companies stay ahead of the industry. This involves sharing proven implementations. Not only do we have many examples of successful end-user implementations, but several of our manufacturing partners own our products and use them in their R&D labs and networks, so they can vouch for the performance and benefits.

Incidentally, none of this is easy to do exclusively over Zoom. That’s what makes travel and face-to-face interaction so important.

Will you focus on a particular region or market segment in the coming year?

Given the need for massive infrastructure changes in Africa and the Middle East, that’s where I’ll be focusing much of my effort in 2023.