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SILVER
SILVER
SERVICE
SERVICE
Trevor Nash, Managing Director
Trevor Nash saw the future after 18 holes of golf – and gambled his house on it. It was 1977 and Nash was relaxing at a friend’s house after a round of golf when he realised he was watching the evening news on TV... in the mid- dle of the afternoon.
“I was totally bemused,” he recalls. “But then my friend told me the news I had been watching was recorded on a Phillips 1500 VCR – this was well before the days of VHS, remember, so the term ‘video’ was vir- tually unheard of and there was only BBC1, BBC2 and ITV on air.
“I was stunned by the technology. But then realised that this was going to be one of the great opportunities of the time – and I knew I had to be part of it.”
Banks and normal lending sources failed to share his vision, however, but armed
with a sketchy business plan and the deeds to his house, Nash eventually managed to raise the finance for a 16mm telecine and editing 3/4” Umatics from a moneylender.
That was the beginning of Intervideo, now celebrating 25 years
as one of the world’s major independ- ent players in broadcast duplication and quality assessment.
Nash admits the first few months were tough. “It was very difficult find- ing a market for our services, but when I eventually did, things quickly took off because there were so few players in the market.”
The first contracts for the fledgling company came from Sir Lew Grade’s
ITC Entertainment , followed shortly afterwards by Thames Television. In the early days the main work was transferring programmes from film or 3/4” Umatic to Philips 1500 for trans- mission in Africa and the Middle East.
The Philips format gave extremely good picture quality – far better than the VHS format which sounded its death knell when it arrived – but was notoriously unreliable, so Intervideo
EXPOSURE • 16 & 17