NAB Perspectives: With Venture Into Product Sales, BSI’s Norton Describes ‘New Era’ for BSI

Less than four months into 2013, Broadcast Sports Inc. has already made a splash in the new year. The company recently celebrated its 30th anniversary and, as promised, made a huge announcement at NAB 2013.  Long known for prowess in RF coverage of NASCAR, golf, horse racing, and much more, BSI has launched, for the first time in company history, a product line available for purchase.  

“We’ve been in the business for the past 30 years and never sold, and we looked at the market, and we were at the time where we need to actually start looking at getting new equipment to actually support our efforts,” says Lee Norton, VP, product sales, BSI. “We looked at the competition, we looked at our own products, and we needed something slightly different we couldn’t find elsewhere, [so] we started designing it ourselves. Essentially, we’re going to be our own biggest customer at the end of the day because we’ve actually used this product line extensively ourselves.”

BSI’s Real Freedom system will incorporate next-generation features into an integrated, wireless camera link. The company is designing the kit to be one of the most easy-to-use products of its kind on the market with a simplified user interface and setup. The Real Freedom family of components will offer users the highest resolution and video quality available in a wireless camera system with 1080p/60 and 10-bit, 4:2:2 sampling. It will also feature H.264 encoding and DVB-T2 modulation.

The company plans to gauge interest in the coming months, and, if foot traffic through Booth C11449 is any indication, interest in the Real Freedom product line will be high. BSI plans to put the finishing touches on the line before making it available for purchase this summer.

“It’s the first time the business has ever sold before, apart from ourselves and our services to our customers,” says Norton. “So many people have asked us over the years, ‘Can we buy this?’ and it’s always been, ‘No, we can’t provide that.’ Now we’ve taken that leap of faith moving to the manufacturing side for mass production and sale, and it really is a new era for the business. We’re looking forward to it.”