This is the ninth in a series of articles about some of the findings from the 2011 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of broadcast industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of broadcast technology vendor brands. More than 8,000 people in 100+ countries took part in the 2011 BBS, making it the largest and most comprehensive market study ever done in the broadcast industry.
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Each year, as part of the Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), we ask broadcast professionals worldwide to rank a variety of technology vendor brands on a wide range of metrics. We use this information to create a series of reports, which through benchmarking and industry “league tables” enable each vendors to understand its position in the market relative to their the industry as a whole as well as their direct competitors.
In previous articles we wrote about the 2011 BBS Overall Brand Opinion League Table, the 2011 BBS Net Change in Overall Opinion League Table, the 2011 BBS Brand Opinion Leaders League Table, 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Innovation League Table, and the 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Quality League Table.
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This post continues follows on from the 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Innovation League Table, by focusing on one of the most important metrics for any technology company – reliability.
Broadcast technology products are purchased by discerning customers for what are often mission-critical applications. Thus the reliability of products is a paramount concern for buyers of these products.
To measure the rankings of the reliability of vendors, respondents were asked to rank broadcast technology vendor brands for “Reliability” on a scale of 1-10 – with 10 being best in the market, and 1 being worst in the market. The top 30 ranked brands for Reliability are shown below for the global sample of all respondents.
In all cases, these results are shown in alphabetical order, NOT in the order in which they are ranked in the 2011 BBS market study.
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The 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Reliability League Table
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As with previously published rankings, this list contains a broad mix of vendors including large and small firms; single product and multi-product firms; global and regional players; and audio and video technology providers.
In order to better understand what drives the perception of reliability in the broadcast technology industry, let’s look deeper at the vendors on this list, beginning with the type of products produced by each vendor on this list.
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Frequency of Product Category – Hardware Products Dominate Rankings
What about the product categories themselves? Are some product categories inherently perceived as having higher reliability? If so are these products evaluated differently than others types of products by customers who are evaluating them for purchase?
As shown in the chart below, there are a very broad range of product categories included in the 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Reliability League Table – indeed vendors that make products in 22 of the 26 product categories that were covered in the study.
However, when you look at the frequency of the product categories produced by these vendors, it’s immediately apparent that the top categories are hardware-oriented products.
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2011 BBS Reliability League Table — Frequency of Product Categories:
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As with the previously published quality rankings, the top two products categories for reliability are both from the audio side of the business – with microphones and audio consoles. This is an interesting data point, especially when one considers that out of 26 product categories covered in the 2011 BBS, only 5 were in the audio space. Camera lenses, signal processing and video editing are next with three appearances each.
As mentioned previously, this list is dominated by hardware-oriented products. Video editing is the only software product in the top 10 rankings on this list.
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2011 BBS Reliability League Table — Number of 2011 BBS Product Categories per Brand:
When considering what drives the perception of reliability, one question to consider is which type of vendor appears more often in the above ranking – those that are focused on a single type of product, or large multi-product vendors.
While our research does not evaluate each product produced by every vendor, we do we put vendors into categories based on their product lines. This gives a good representation of whether a particular vendor has a narrow or broad product-line-up.
The table below shows the number of 2011 BBS product categories produced by each brand (as defined by the segmentation used in the 2011 BBS).
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As with previously published rankings, the majority (22/30) of the brands on the above list provide products in just one of the product categories we measured as part of the 2011 BBS study.
Please note that this is not a measure of company size, but rather a measure of how many product categories each of the above vendors was included in the 2011 BBS. For example some of the “single product category companies” on the above list — such as Adobe, Apple and Dolby – are quite large.
Yet with 22 out of 30 vendors on this list producing a product in only one 2011 BBS category (out of 26 measured) it appears that that focused, specialized companies are regarded as reliability leaders in the eyes of the market. Nevertheless it’s also worth pointing out that many multi-product companies are well regarded for reliability. For example, in the 2011 BBS and Evertz and Snell are covered in five product categories; Sony is in 4 product categories; EVS is covered in three categories; and Canon, Cisco and Rohde & Schwarz appear two times each.
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Please keep in mind when reviewing this information that all data these charts are presented in alphabetical order, not in the order brands were ranked by respondents to the 2011 BBS. Also, the charts in this posting measure the responses of all non-vendor participants in the 2011 BBS respondents, regardless of their company type, company size, geographic location, job title and budget for broadcast technology products. Finally please note that this study evaluated a total of 118 brands.
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In order to get full value from this data, it is necessary to evaluate these results on a granular basis. If you would like more information, please contact Devoncroft Partners.
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This article is based on the findings from the 2011 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of industry trends, technology purchasing behavior and the opinion of vendor brands. With more than 8,000 people in 100+ countries participating, the 2011 BBS is the largest and most comprehensive market study ever done in the broadcast industry.
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Devoncroft Partners has published a variety of reports from 2011 BBS data. For more information, please get in touch.
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Related Content:
Ranking Broadcast Technology Vendors Part 5 – The 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Quality League Table
Ranking Broadcast Technology Vendors Part 4 – the 2011 BBS Broadcast Technology Vendor Innovation League Table
Ranking Broadcast Technology Vendors Part 3 – the 2011 BBS Brand Opinion Leaders League Table
Ranking Broadcast Technology Vendors Part 2 – the 2011 BBS Net Change in Overall Brand Opinion League Table
Ranking Broadcast Technology Vendors Part 1 – the 2011 BBS Overall Brand Opinion League Table
Where is Money Being Spent in the Broadcast Industry in 2011? The 2011 BBS Broadcast Industry Global Project Index
Tracking Changes in Broadcast Industry Trends — 2011 Versus 2010
Broadcast Industry’s Most Comprehensive Market Study Reveals Top Trends of 2011
More Information About the 2011 Big Broadcast Survey from Devoncroft Partners
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