Quality Is Never An Accident

There is an apocryphal tale of a motorist from London getting impossibly lost on rural West Country lanes. Seeing an elderly man repairing a dry stone wall, he asks for directions. The man straightens up slowly, rubs his forehead with a dirty calloused hand, sucks air through his teeth and replies with a shake of his head, "If I wuz going there, I wouldn'a start from 'ere," writes Graham Pitman, Executive Chairman, Vidcheck.

This feeling of arriving in an unhelpful place is one that many experience when investing in new technology. Confident assurances made by a supplier regarding 'future proof' scalability sometimes prove to be overly optimistic, if not downright false, when the time comes to actually expand operations.

Expensive expansion ports not specified on the original order suddenly become necessary, or new expansion options aren't compatible with the hardware/software you bought less than a year ago. Worst of all is when you want to grow your business only to find that your technology supplier no longer provides support for the core product upon which your business depends.

That's not just poor support, it's poor quality.

However, there is a West Country company that believes quality should embrace everything it does. Quality is, in fact, Vidcheck's core business. It produces software that doesn't just perform automated QC and media file correction, it provides support as solid and long-lasting as a dry stone wall – and is imminently more scalable. Vidcheck customers on product maintenance contracts always have the latest product. Users will never discover after the fact that the new software they just bought is incompatible with a previously purchased version.

Moreover, users that have Vidchecker-post or Vidfixer-post software that QC's and corrects one file at a time, but new business requirements necessitate expanded capacity, they can simply upgrade for the net price difference to a full Vidchecker or Vidfixer licence. This quadruples capacity without any need for retraining, and the investment of time in creating templates and integrating Vidcheck into the workflow remain valid. In other words, your existing product may have been depreciated on your balance sheet, but it retains its full value on trade in. If only that held true with our cars.

And here is where we come to the extent of Vidcheck scalability. If continued success warrants even greater capacity a Vidcheck Grid configuration using either Vidchecker or Vidfixer as nodes adds simultaneous QC processing of a further four files for each additional node.  Vidcheck Grid installations provide huge capacity and can conduct QC on thousands of hours of material daily. An expansion of this size makes full use of existing software. i.e., none of the existing investment in equipment, training, template creation or previous integration has been wasted.

Aberdeen Broadcast did just that, and illustrates my point. They started with Vidchecker and upgraded to Vidfixer for the price difference. Aberdeen Broadcast's CEO, Matt Cook, told me: "We use Vidfixer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for hundreds of thousands of files, for hundreds of clients. Couldn't live without it."

So if you are making a concerted effort to improve quality and need a file QC solution or need to expand an existing Vidcheck system, you can get there easily without getting accidentally and impossibly lost.

In other words, Vidcheck will never stonewall your expansion.

This article is also available to read at BFV online.

(JP)