INNOVATOR PROFILES Introducing the visionaries shaping the future of the AV industry. Every issue, LIVE profiles innovators, trendsetters and leaders revolutionising the sector – from transformative strategies to groundbreaking product designs, we meet the driving forces behind our fast-paced sector INNOVATOR PROFILES 74
OLLIE NEWLAND Job title Product manager, live and location-based experiences Company Disguise
How did you get into AV? There were two key moments that led to me doing what I am today. The first was working at an IT consultancy company called Extech, which started as work experience when I was 15 and went on to become an out-of-term job up until I graduated university. I spent my time doing everything from rebuilding servers and computers for clients to chasing up the payment of invoices! The second was completing a year- long industrial placement, as part of my degree, with the media entertainment team at Panasonic. I was fortunate to be offered a position to join their marketing team when I graduated from university, working on products including digital cinema and PTZ cameras, vision mixers, projectors and displays. I look back at these experiences as being critical to my position at Disguise today, and I still practise a lot of these learnings every day. What are you currently working on? We are developing various product outcomes for 2025 that will enable our users to better handle content demands, monitor increasingly complex integrated systems and provide a greater level of usability. On a personal level, I’m super excited to get these into the hands of our users, so stay tuned! Favourite project? Until starting work at Disguise, my interaction with Eurovision was mainly an eye roll. However, I soon began to understand the sheer complexity in
producing a show of this magnitude, and after that point my perception completely changed. Disguise has played a major role in powering the Eurovision Song Contest on six occasions. We were appointed as an official technical events supplier for Malmö 2024, which also celebrated ten years since Disguise first powered Eurovision with the V2.5! We worked on providing a full SMPTE ST 2110 workflow from the media server to the LED screen, which made it the first large-scale live broadcast event to achieve this feat. The video system was also split into two separate red and blue systems for full redundancy. Working on this project was such an incredible experience and made me appreciate how fortunate I am to work with some of the brightest and most capable minds in M&E. What do you think the future holds for the AV industry? Something I’m particularly passionate about is the need for diversity across the entirety of the media and entertainment industry. Diverse teams lead to more diverse decisions, and these decisions lead to better outcomes for all. I believe that both the AV industry and society as a whole can continue to make strides in this area, and with the many open-minded people that I’m fortunate enough to work with every day, I know we can make a difference. What advice would you give to someone starting a career in AV tech?
Being curious is such a powerful trait because it enables individuals to better understand problems and find good solutions” Being curious is such a powerful trait because it enables individuals to better understand problems, which facilitates finding a good solution to said problems, which is why we’re all here, right?! My second piece of advice is to always be a nice person. Be respectful to people and they’ll be respectful to you, and if they’re not, then use it as an opportunity to show them how much better it is when everyone in a room maintains a mutual level of respect and appreciation for one another.
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