about eyeheight

Pioneers in digital video

Eyeheight was founded in 1992 by Steve Crocker and Martin Moore, both BBC trained broadcast engineers who were then working as chief engineers in the post production industry. From its inception eyeheight focused on the then fledgling digital broadcast equipment market and began supplying innovative solution to broadcast and post production industries. An early major success was an SDI serializer/de-serializer which could be easily fitted to existing parallel digital equipment to make it compatible with the newly developed SDI transport.

A legacy of compliance

Eyeheight soon developed a modular range of products called Unibox which could support two units in a 1RU chassis and which included an RGB legalizer, aspect ratio converter, logo inserter and safe area generator. In 1999 Simon Pegg joined eyeheight with a background in reconfigurable high speed digitial processesing and development began on a second generation of modular products called geNETics which expanded the chassis capacity to six cards per 1RU and added an industrial grade control network to enable multiple control panels and products to exist on a single network. The geNETics systems supports over 50 products and was so sucessful that it remains a significant part of eyeheight's ongoing infrastructure.

The first geNETics products were a safe area generator and a legaliser and started eyeheight on a path of developing compliance solutions for the broadcast and post production industries which has seen the development of eight generations of increasingly sophisticated and capable legaliser including the development of eyeheight's proprietary "Clobbering" technology which proactively reduces the incidence of tape rejection. There have also been six generations of safe area/cursor generators including support for dual link and 2K1080 formats.

The birth of playout

In 2003 eyeheight produced a suite of cost effective modules optimized for cost sensitive automated channel playout applications which were selected by the BBC to form a key part of their innovative mulit-streaming system. The modules went on to form the basis of the playout compact and playoutHD systems that are currently installed worldwide with major broadcasters.

Playout and compliance

In 2009 eyeheight refocused on its core competencies of modular playout solutions and compliance products. The playoutHD family was released offering an easy upgrade path for existing SD playout/playoutCompact systems to multi-definition and the new CW-2 added advanced information and branding capabilities to the SD and HD playout ranges. Eyeheight enhanced its compliance offering with the release of a dual-link 4:4:4 capable legalizer and safe area generator.

The future

With its renewed focus on playout and compliance the future see significant enhancements to the playoutCompact/playoutHD and vista systems as well as eyeheight compliance technology becoming available on a borader range of platforms