Frederic Rose, Chief Executive Officer of Thomson, commented: "Today we announce the refocusing of our business on content creators, leveraging our technological expertise and our positioning with network operators. Strengthening our balance sheet is the precondition to implementing this strategic framework."

The Board of Directors has approved the Chief Executive Officer's proposal to divest its non-strategic operations. These assets, which include Grass Valley and PRN, accounted for approximately 1 billion euros of sales in 2008.

Quantel CEO Ray Cross said: "It's not a decision that we've come to without a great deal of thought. However in the current general economic climate we quite simply can't justify the $1million+ investment that exhibiting at NAB would require. This year we're being prudent; I'm sure our customers are too.

"Not going to NAB in this challenging year will allow R&D to focus fully on delivering for our customers. This year delivery, not marketing, comes first," Cross concluded.

Harris announces the launch of the new NEXIO Browse suite, a comprehensive portfolio of tools that facilitate H.264 proxy viewing and editing, enabling broadcasters to implement an affordable and scalable low-resolution workflow.

1920 x 1200 Resolution Monitor Offers Wider Color Gamut with Six Color Settings, Ideal for Print, Graphics as well as Broadcast and Production Environments.

Omneon has appointed Suresh Vasudevan as the company's president and CEO and as a member of the board

Vasudevan joins Omneon having most recently served as senior vice president of product operations at NetApp and as a member of the company's executive team, leading all product management and engineering for the NetApp product portfolio.

First Call is a traditional managed service for Avid Technology's iNEWS NRCS.

Usually management of newsroom computer systems is held in-house. New technology permits remote administration of broadcast newsroom computer systems around the clock.

Bitcentral has taken an industry-leading position by advancing the news production workflow with such innovative products as its Precis 4.0 News Production System.

Precis, which manages the tapeless HD news production workflow spanning media management, editing, and archive, is used by several Bitcentral customers in conjunction with a Maximum Throughput's Sledgehammer, a high-performance network-attached storage (NAS) device, to fulfill their high-speed online storage needs.

GenArts Inc., a provider of digital visual effects software for the film, broadcast and video industries, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SpeedSix Software

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has selected Pebble Beach Systems to provide an automation solution as part of a new facility built to digitise their entire video archive.

With a legal obligation to retain copies of all material that has been certified and a library of 200,000 VHS tapes the race is on to create a permanent digital archive before players are no longer available or the tape stock becomes unplayable.

Neil, who will be based at the Pro-Bel Reading headquarters, has recently returned from the US where he was President of Pro-Bel operations for the Americas.

Prior to his role in the US, Neil was CTO of Pro-Bel