At Screen Africa’s annual industry golf day, held on 12 May, Sony Professional Solutions MEA had a very clear message for Africa’s broadcast industry.
Head of Marketing Peter Kyriakos, who travelled from Dubai to attend the golf day, said: “South Africa is an exciting and important market for us and we are very keen to further develop relationships with our partners and customers”
PSMEA’s involvement in the golf day for the second consecutive year was part of the company’s drive to spread this message as well as to network and meet industry peers. Ever since Sony’s consumer products division withdrew from South Africa some years ago, PSMEA has faced a challenge in making the local market understand that although a part of Sony is no longer here, the professional division is very much active and involved within the South African market.
Sony’s advantage is that it is a solutions provider with a 70 year heritage in technology and innovation; a provider of scalable, far-ranging solutions. “Kyriakos says. “While other manufacturers might provide a camera or a mixer, what Sony has is a vast range of equipment that all interlinks together: from cameras, mixers, displays to archiving solutions and everything in between. So when people look at Sony, they need to understand that it is an end-to-end solution provider. We consult with customers and then create a solution that is tailored specifically to their requirements.”
Kyriakos says that Sony’s primary marketing drive, in terms of specific solutions for the region in the wake of NAB 2016, is its pioneering storage system, Optical Disc Archive (ODA). Together with its partners, Sony has been hosting a roadshow across South Africa to educate the industry about the benefits of the system, which is set to replace tape-based LTO (Linear Tape-Open) technology. Making use of Blu-ray optical discs, the system offers considerably expanded storage space, as well as ease of access to information and a high level of interoperability between past, current and future generations of the technology.
