Techex welcomes Tony Orme

We're pleased to announce Tony Orme has joined us as Head of Product Engineering, a position which will see Tony working with our software development team to bring new functionality to tx edge, tx core and the award-winning tx darwin.

Tony has a wealth of experience having begun his engineering career at the BBC, London, where he trained as a broadcast engineer and successfully completed the network’s intensive and highly selective three-year training program. While the BBC gave Tony an impressive grounding in broadcast engineering, moving to independent television and satellite broadcasters, including Sky and ITV, provided him with a deep understanding of live media workflows, especially in news and post-production. During these early years of workflow automation, Tony embraced the opportunity to understand how live workflows transfer to computerised systems and developed his deep insight into IP and ethernet networks.

Committed to improving and developing systems, Tony has dedicated his career to understanding real-time video, audio, and metadata processing allowing him to dig deep into broadcast infrastructures. He has designed and built interface solutions that solve problems others have been unable to accomplish by designing and programming highly complex embedded RTOS C/C++, DSP assembly language, and FPGA/VHDL systems. Empowered with this knowledge, Tony has now turned his attention to exploring the potential of asynchronous processing found in the public cloud and COTS IT facilities and is working to accelerate the progression ofreal-time and post-production workflows to software defined infrastructures, thus providing a massive opportunity for broadcasters whowill benefit from the resilience, scalability, and flexibility that COTS IT networks have to offer.

As well as heading up the Techex software team and crafting new functionality in award winning tx darwin alongside tx edge and tx core, Tony is currently studying for his PhD at the University of Surrey, UK. The subject of his research is reducing latency in IP networks for video, audio, and metadatastreams through machine learning. This research is leveraging ensemble-LSTM neural networks and modelling uncertainty through mixture density networks to accurately pre-empt heavy hitting media streams and signal them to the networks SDN controller, thus providing more efficient and highly automated network routing to improve signal latency, especially fortime sensitive flows.

Tony is a prolific author and has written many industry papers and articles describing how the power of IP networks and COTS infrastructures can be leveraged by broadcasters to deliver greater resilience, flexibility and scalability. His most recent paper “Improving the Broadcast Viewer Experience Through Rapid and Early Elephant Flow Detection and MachineLearning” was published by IBC Tech Papers in September 2023 for the IBC international conference. Tony was a previous chair of the Royal Television Society’s Technology Centre and continues to be a committed and enthusiastic contributor to the broadcasting community by giving industry talks and lectures, especially when describing the benefits of software defined networks and infrastructures.