Research and Development

Innovation is part of our company culture and we take every opportunity to push the boundaries on what is possible technically whilst at all times ensuring that risk to the event and the customers’ brand is mitigated.

Time, attention and resources spent on R&D have proved time and time again to be good investment. We appreciate the leap of faith that some of our customers have occasionally taken with us on new ideas and their trust has been repaid many times over.

Measuring the ROI on GG LABS and Innovation

By any benchmark, the results speak for themselves. Our innovations make a real impact on people’s lives. For example, we were the first (and to our knowledge the only) company to provide live, unscripted subtitling services. This functionality, embraced by the Disabilities Rights Commission (DRC) allowed disabled viewers to benefit from watching live webcasts.

In addition, the effort put into R&D that pays dividends is usually transportable to a different industry, even if they don’t yet realise they have a problem that our innovations solves!

Our Innovation methodology is a process

Innovation for innovation’ sake is pointless. We work with our customers in partnership to ensure that we understand their business and where they are trying to innovate themselves. For example, we work intimately with our Digital Agency partners (who tend to have a lot of interesting and challenging projects) to not only tell them about what is possible, but also to attend early customer meetings to ensure that a good idea is not passed up as being “impossible”.

In general we approach a challenging project using our “possible, feasible, doable” methodology.

Anything is possible if you commit enough resources to it, however in the real world, this is not realistic. We work with our customers to ensure that the technical solution we present is feasible and then based on the constraints of time and money, we suggest a compromise and commit to what is doable. For example, we would agree that having something work 99.9% of the time is better for the customers brand than having a “wiz-bang” solution only work 85% of the time.

Give us a Challenge

Whilst we sometimes focus on “just making things better”, we tend to really shine when we are given a real-world challenge to solve. Our most successful results are usually as a result of applying lessons learnt and applications devised from different industries to create a new innovation.
 
We have set up a testing lab at two facilities in London. GG LABS at our head office in Holborn, in central London, where we not only experiment with webcasting and “neighbouring” technology but also test the integration of our ideas within the production market and with our partners. Having our own webcasting studio affords us the unique opportunity to test out innovations in anger in  real-world scenarios’ and get instant feedback. It’s this constant cycle of “innovation, feedback, tweak and try” that hones the new products and services we offer, ready for application in the real world.

Our other GG LABS test facility in part of our sister company www.SatStream.com. Based in Vauxhall in London, this broadcast-standards facility allows us to test our broadcast industry innovations not only to reach set-top boxes and other devices but also to bring traditional broadcast experience to the web. For example, porting the red button functionality from digital TV to the web but ensuring that it’s appropriately used and not just a straight like-for-like replacement. Our extensive experience in the broadcast industry has shortened the development life-cycle of many of our projects.

Going from R&D to Mainstream

We have a formal process that we follow to move an innovation from “R&D” status to “Production” status. Some of our innovations are very personal to us and it’s akin to letting our children go and fend for themselves in the big wide world sometimes! We have recently set a number of solutions for mobile devices and HD solutions “free”.

Disclosure

Whilst we are obviously playing some of our card close to our chests for strategic reasons, our current formal innovations are focused on leveraging our award-winning Live Presentation System (LPS) to cater specifically for the unique needs of the medical / pharmaceutical industries.  We are also working with a number of global industry-leading Live Event specialists to integrate our systems with theirs.

We can provide you with consultancy, support and development capability on pretty much anything related to streaming media and live webcasting.
We'll be happy to discuss your project and tell you honestly what we think.
Whatever your requirement, our experience and expertise are at your disposal.

Contact us to find out more.