BUSINESS: COMPANY PROFILE
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The Brompton Technology team
Caroline Moss interviews Brompton Technology about becoming one of the UK’s fastest-growing export companies and setting up a Chinese division to work with LED panel manufacturers
WHEN BROMPTON TECHNOLOGY LAUNCHED IN 2011, THE whole team led by Richard Mead and Chris Deighton was confident its Tessera M2 LED processor would address a vital niche in the live events market. Selling the initial six-month run before production began, then seeing the Tessera M2 deployed at the Academy Awards a few months later, could be seen as beginner’s luck. However, Brompton Technology has continued to hit the heights. Last year, the company was listed in the Sunday Times Tech Track 100 as one of the fastest-growing private tech companies in the UK for the second year running, as well as in the publication’s Export Track 100 for fastestgrowing international sales. And, in April, it was announced that Brompton Technology had won the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade. Brompton’s founders were part of a team of designers, software developers and hardware engineers at lighting control manufacturer Flying Pig, going on to found Carallon in 2004 following Flying Pig’s merger with High End Systems. In 2011, Carallon set up Brompton Technology, with Mead and Deighton as managing director and CTO, respectively, continuing in a symbiotic relationship with Carallon, whose R&D team they can access for product development. “Carallon morphed into a product development hub that generates spinoffs where it’s identified an opportunity, and Brompton was one of those spinoffs,” explains Mead on the Zoom call that replaced our planned face-to-face interview. “We were having lots of conversations with video techs working on live events who weren’t happy with the usability of their equipment. Often, it was repurposed broadcast and consumer equipment because video products weren’t being specifically developed for the niche live events market. We had the skills and the experience of developing products for live events, so we saw an opportunity to develop something specifically for that space.” The challenge Brompton identified was that of touring LED walls, sometimes consisting of hundreds and even thousands of panels. “Products for install applications were being used for the fast-moving live events market, so that was the core starting
Brompton Technology MD, Richard Mead point,” continues Mead. LED wall processing formats a video signal to the size and shape of the screen, adjusting colour and brightness depending on the application and environment and splitting the signal to correspond with the individual panels. “The data is transmitted via Gigabit Ethernet, and keeping it synchronised with the lowest possible latency is a huge part of the challenge. We rely heavily on FPGA technology and work with just one or two frames of latency, so it’s very fast.” A collaboration with VER, now part of PRG, but at that time a large, privately owned rental company, was an early coup for Brompton. “They were aware we were developing our flagship Tessera M2 processor before we launched it and bought our entire first production run,” Mead recalls. “It was enormously helpful in getting the business started – our first six months of products had sold before we’d built them. VER was using our products on some of the biggest jobs in the world: we launched it in the middle of 2012 and it was being used on the Oscars at the start of 2013. That was extremely useful for proving the
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product was strong and making people aware it existed. It was also a mutually beneficial arrangement: we helped them solve a problem and in return got some early investment.” Although Brompton had planned to develop a range of video products for live events, the M2 was so widely accepted that they have remained focused on Tessera LED processing. “We’ve developed more and more features and capability within our Tessera processing range,” says Mead. All processors benefit from software updates for the product’s lifespan, including recent upgrades to HDR, where Brompton’s Dynamic Calibration technology helps deliver extremely lifelike image quality. The M2 LED processor was followed in 2016 with two smaller family members, the T1 and S4. Another major milestone in early 2018 was the launch of the SX40 4K processor. “That got a fantastic reception and resulted in Brompton effectively doubling in size,” Mead continues. “We saw the step to 4K as about more than a new video format, with the amount of extra processing and infrastructure this required, and we wanted to make life easier for the people setting up the screens. So, we decided to output 10 Gigabit Ethernet from the processor and created a separate distribution box that hangs on the LED wall truss, taking in the 10 Gig signal and splitting it down. Some perceived us as late to market with our 4K product, but we stuck to our mantra: we’d rather take the time required to do it right. And the market response has told us we were correct to do that. We were massively backordered from the day we started shipping, and for 12 months sold them as fast as we could build.” 2016 was a big year all round for Brompton, which relocated to a larger West London premises to accommodate its growing team, as well as winning New Company of the Year at the Electronics Weekly Elektra Awards and hiring Elijah Ebo as general manager, Asia. Ebo was appointed to address Brompton’s other client base besides the rental and production companies to whom it supplies the LED processors: the panel manufacturers themselves, into whose technology the Tessera receiver card is fitted. This precipitated setting up an office in Shenzen,
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