Belden’s Stroup: No One Wants Proprietary IP

John Stroup has seen it all before — an entire industry upset by competing communications protocols designed as much to gain competitive advantage as they are to move data packets.

During an interview at the company’s 15^th floor corporate office in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, Mo., the CEO of Belden, which owns Grass Valley, explains that the TV industry is heading down the same path as manufacturing and food processing did in the mid-1990s.

“Factory automation 20 years ago was a complete mess…. If I am Anheuser Busch, and I am trying to make beer for a living, I’ve got machines coming from all over the world. Every one of these machine builders had its own protocol,” he says. Rockwell, Siemens, Mitsubishi and others were “all running around trying to convince customers that theirs was the best protocol,” he says.

Having plunged into the deep end of TV technology with the purchases of Telecast-Fiber Systems, Miranda Technologies and Grass Valley, Stroup sees the same dynamic in television.

The existence of multiple, competing IP protocols to transport video, audio and data is an indication of a fundamental failure in the television industry, and broadcasters are savvy enough to recognize it, Stroup says.

And the TV companies don’t appreciate it, he says. “What I hear from customers is, ‘Please don’t use this as a way to create division. Can’t you compete on quality, delivery and cost rather than trying to create this wedge with your communications protocol?’ ”

“Nobody wants proprietary IP,” Stroup says. “With proprietary IP, you’re not allowing customers the opportunity to be open and make decisions about where they want to go.”

There’s a negative economic consequence of having multiple protocols, he says. “One customer bluntly told me: ‘I realize I am paying for all of your failures because five of you decide to go out and do this [implement different IP protocols]. You have to recoup your investment, and you are going to recoup it through the prices you charge me.’

“What they want is really simple. They want one standard, and they want everyone to compete on quality, cost and features that hook up to that standard.”

Many media companies are under intense competitive pressure, Stroup says.  “This is creating … what I call destructive capitalism where there is not going to be capital flowing to these business ventures or proposals [for new media businesses] because customers aren’t going to support them and investors are not going to support them.”

As a result, broadcasters and other media companies will seek to wring every economic inefficiency out of their operations, which translates into an aversion to competing IP protocols, he says. But there is still time for the industry to settle on a unified approach before IP media transport splinters permanently into several interoperable camps, he says.

Grass Valley has thrown its support behind AIMS, the Alliance for IP Media Solutions. Together with other alliance cofounders Imagine Communications, Lawo and Snell Advanced Media, Grass Valley has adopted open IP protocols for media in an effort to rally the TV industry around a standards-based solution.

The Alliance’s initial emphasis is on SMPTE 2022-6, the Video Services Forum’s TR-03 and TR-04 protocols and the AES67 audio-over-IP protocol.

The AIMS camp isn’t alone, however. Evertz and more than 30 vendors, OEMs and broadcasters are backing an alternative IP framework called ASPEN, or Adaptive Sample Picture ENcapsulation. And NewTek is promoting its own IP transport protocol called NDI, or Network Device Interface, which also has a sizable user base and strong support from vendors.

While it is possible to build gateway products that translate from one protocol to another to address interoperability, Stroup suggests broadcasters take matters into their own hands to stop, and ultimately reverse, the splintering before it broadly takes hold.

“Given the kind of economic pressures our customers are under, given the reality they are facing, I would advise them to be a lot more forceful with their vendors.

“I would be a lot more prescriptive with them about the fact that this is the path [IP protocol] I’ve picked. And if you are not on this path, you’re not a vendor — whatever one they pick,” he says.

Stroup does not fear customers playing this sort of hardball.  “At the end of the day, we have to adapt. I think one of the things our customers appreciate is that we’ve designed our systems in such a way that if we have to make a left turn, if the approach that we are offering and supporting ends up being something different than what they want, we can more easily make that turn.”

Stroup offered comments on several other issues.

On the success of the Grass Valley acquisition:

“I’d say mixed. On the positive side of the ledger, we think we have put together a unique and comprehensive portfolio of products [with the Miranda portfolio] that is so complementary.

“It’s also incredibly expensive to be global. It is really not possible unless you are big enough.

“So Miranda and Grass Valley were both reasonably sized companies, and when we brought them together we had enormous scale opportunities as it relates to go-to-market as well as R&D investment.

“The thing that has been disappointing is the demand environment. It has not been what we thought it would be.

“We had a good fourth quarter. In fact, we enter this year with $15 million more backlog than we had last year at this time.

“We booked seven IP projects in the fourth quarter, and we shipped four. That is important because I think it means customers are beginning to feel comfortable making investments in IP-enabled technology.”

On Grass Valley research and development:

“The R&D budget for Grass Valley for the year that we just ended was about $70 million….

“For us, you kind of split the R&D investment into three categories. Category one is making certain that you continue to develop and support your existing product lines.

“Secondly [is] customization. We’ve got a lot of customers, particularly big customers, who will say, ‘What you have is almost exactly what I want. I just need you to change this, this, this and this.’

“And then, of course, breakthrough. For us, a big, big chunk of the breakthrough has been our investment around IP products.”

On securing broadcast content in an IP environment:

“Securing content is absolutely important.

“We made an investment in a cybersecurity company called Tripwire about a year ago, and before that a small investment in a company that was the first to make a SCADA-based [supervisory control and data acquisition] industrial firewall.

“I think this is interesting because once you decide you want to go to IP, you’ve also decided your network is not closed.

“We have integrated Tripwire into other platforms and have a Tripwire-secured [Grass Valley] iTX platform that we are going to announce at NAB.”

On 4K:

“Right or wrong, we are all in on 4K. We will see if that investment ends up being a good one or not.

“We are seeing that [sports teleproduction] customers seem willing to make investments in 4K cameras today. We think this is because eventually 4K is going to happen. I think they are concerned if they don’t buy a 4K camera, they are not going to get the full life out of the camera.”

On Belden’s commitment to Grass Valley:

“We are not flippers. When we buy a company, we are buying it for the long run. We have no intention of selling it ever.”

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