Quantel should not be confused with Quantegy.
| Type: | Limited |
| Fate: | Rebranded as Snell Advanced Media following consolidation |
| Founders: | Peter Michael, Arthur Graves, Anthony Stalley, John Coffey |
| Successor: | Snell Ltd. |
| Hq Location City: | Newbury, Berkshire, England |
| Hq Location Country: | United Kingdom |
| Key People: | Richard Taylor OBE (Former Chairman), Paul Kellar MBE (Former Research Director) |
| Industry: | Broadcast television, video production and motion picture |
| Products: | Digital production equipment |
| Num Employees: | 1,000 plus (1995) approx 250 (2014) |
| Footnotes: | [1] |
Quantel was a company based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1973 that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production and motion picture industries. It was headquartered in Newbury, Berkshire. The name Quantel came from Quantised Television, in reference to the process of converting a television picture into a digital signal.
Quantel acquired Snell Limited in March 2014.[2] Following a period of consolidation the two companies started operating under the Snell name, trading as Snell Advanced Media or SAM, from September 2015, following the staged removal of the Quantel board of directors by incoming CEO Ray Cross.[2]
Quantel was purchased by Grass Valley, who were taken over by Cayman Island-registered Black Dragon Capital in 2020 who decided to close down Newbury factory in 2023, the 50th anniversary year of Quantel.
Around 50 legacy Quantel machines are known to still exist in museums and private collections around the world, several of which have been restored to working order by enthusiasts.
Quantel founder, Peter Michael, had previously founded Micro Consultants Group (MCG). MCG had pioneered a range of fast data conversion products that could be used for converting video signals from analog to digital and back to analog. These devices found use in many early Quantel products.
In the 1980s, Michael merged Quantel along with his other interests such as Link Electronics Ltd into the UEI Group of companies.[3]
Michael became chairman with Quantel remaining a privately owned company of the publicly quoted UEI.[4] Under the leadership of Richard Taylor OBE, chairman from 1975 and Paul Kellar MBE, Quantel made several pioneering firsts in video:
This period until 1998 marked the high point of the company's profitability, size and market position, placing it in the top handful of broadcast vendors. The company had a global presence with major offices, staff, and facilities on the east and west coast of the US; in Paris, Tokyo, London, Seoul, Hong Kong and Sydney; plus other overseas resources. There was a private air operation (Quantel Aviation) based in Farnborough, which included a private Cessna Citation executive jet. However, as software-based products began to gain ground in Quantel's then core businesses of compositing, graphics. and news editing, the company was not able to maintain this position.
In 1989 Quantel had been acquired from UEI by Carlton Communications which had also acquired high end sound console manufacturer Solid State Logic as part of the same deal. This relationship ended in 2000 when Quantel management bought the company back for $76.6m funded by Lloyds Banking Group venture capital arm LDC.
From 2000 to 2005, Quantel then specialised in:
December 2005 saw the forced departure from the board of long-standing chairman and chief executive Richard Taylor OBE by owners LDC in conjunction with Ray Cross, who had worked as an external consultant with Taylor and LDC to create the business plan to present to Lloyds for the 2000 management buyout from Carlton. Taylor was subsequently diagnosed with cancer in December 2008 and died in June 2009.[6]
Research and development director Paul Kellar MBE, who had been key to Quantel's previous technology leadership, immediately resigned on hearing of Taylor's ousting and Neil Hinson was promoted to replace Kellar by Cross. Hinson had joined Quantel in 1980 and played a pivotal part in the design of many of the most successful Quantel products including Harry, Henry, Mirage and Clipbox as well as the later generationQ family of products but was also quickly replaced by Cross with another Quantel employee, Simon Rogers in December 2008.
In the autumn of 2008 Cross made a sizeable round of redundancies, saying that the company was moving towards being more software-based. Cross engaged in another round of redundancies in April 2009, giving the reason that the global recession has been deeper than had been planned for. Cross made further redundancies in October 2012, as quarterly results were not as good as expected. In March 2014 Quantel acquired Snell Ltd. (also owned by Lloyds), and began the consolidation of the two companies. Cross made further redundancies, primarily in the former Snell organisation.[2] Like Quantel, Snell (as Snell and Wilcox) had formerly been a major player in the broadcast space, but also like Quantel, had seen a long-term decline in its market position and profitability. Although both companies produced media technology, each had quite separate but complementary products.[7]
In its heyday under Taylor, Quantel was ranked in the top four broadcast vendors and had one of the strongest brand names. Finally after almost 10 years of Cross downsizing Quantel and after apparently several failed attempts to sell the business, Cross himself was forcibly removed in March 2015—allegedly partly following senior staff complaints about Cross to backers Lloyds Development Capital—and replaced by former Grass Valley CEO Tim Thorsteinson, chosen on a "proven track record of value creation". Thorsteinson subsequently sacked the entire Quantel board of directors. Finally, in September 2015, the Quantel name was dropped and the residual business placed inside the Snell operation, branded as Snell Advanced Media (SAM). Thorsteinson has previously been involved in downsizing and restructuring other broadcast companies, such as Grass Valley and Harris, in order to prepare them for sale, which was the role LDC had originally brought Cross in to Quantel to achieve.
Quantel was based at 31 Turnpike Road, Newbury, Berkshire, England since 1982. The 126000square feet building was built on the 6.7acres site in 1940 for Vickers Armstrong and manufactured Spitfire fighter aircraft during World War II. Air raid shelters are still present in the grounds of the site. Other users of the building included the Post Office and the Ministry of Transport.
A large part of the site was dedicated to manufacturing. It is now very rare that companies manufacture their own products due to the complex nature of multiple layer circuit boards containing high density surface mounted components. It is more common now to design complex circuits on a computer and await delivery of a ready built board or simply use off the shelf IT.
As part of restructuring during the 1990s, Quantel decided to outsource support of legacy products to a separate company Effect Systems. Also based in Newbury and staffed by many ex Quantel staff, Effect Systems took over support for products. These include Editbox, Henry, Hal, Paintbox, Picturebox, Domino as well as older products dating back to the 1980s including Mirage, Harry and Encore. On 1 October 2008 Quantel ended the outsourcing contract with Effect Systems. Effect continued to offer independent support for Quantel legacy equipment (Paintbox V, Picturebox, Henry, Editbox and Domino) but has now ceased that support and in 2016 disposed of the inventory of spare parts.
Traditionally, Quantel systems were based around proprietary hardware and software. With the introduction of the generationQ range a number of Quantel products were based on Microsoft Windows and standard PC hardware with occasional use of custom hardware.
Despite Quantel holding hundreds of Patents for inventions that many other companies utilized, such as the pressure sensitive stylus first used on the 1981 Paintbox, the company only ever sued three other companies for Patent infringement. Due to the high profile of the cases against Spaceward for their Matisse, which was marketed as a cheaper version of Paintbox and Adobe Systems for Patented elements within its Photoshop software, Quantel were unfairly accused of trying to suppress and control competitors. Quantel won their case against Spaceward in London and blocked further sales, though let the company service the systems already sold.[8] Adobe already having been punished for various anti-competitive practices such as buying and closing down CorelDraw in 1994 as it competed with Illustrator but Quantel was portrayed as a British company trying to destroy Adobe. The case partly hinged on first use of a digital airbrush. Adobe's lawyers, who were provided and funded by Apple, found a prior use of the airbrush by academics at NYIT which predated Quantel's Patent, therefore invalidating it and greatly influencing the judge's decision to dismiss the case.
The majority of Quantel products used code names for some parts of their systems before launch. One source of code names was the television series The Magic Roundabout. The Dylan disk system and the Zebedee processor take their names from characters in this series. Quantel's product names often seemed random but Henry, Harry, Harriet and HAL were chosen as they stood out in the broadcast arena where technology was named in a more mathematical acronym way.
As well as news, sports and weather graphics, Quantel video technology was used extensively in production of a wide spectrum of TV shows, from Top of the Pops in the UK, to the American television series .[9]
Many of the major movies released since 1999 were created or manipulated using Quantel technology, including Star Wars episode 2 and 3, , The Day After Tomorrow, and Sin City. Users of sQ server based systems include ESPN in the US, Rogers Media in Canada, and BBC, BSkyB and QVC in the United Kingdom.
Quantel effects appear in many TV Commercials and music videos, including the winner of the first MTV Award and most famously, Dire Straits' Money For Nothing
Quantel-designed technologies include: