An Interview with Pavel Potužák, CEO of Aveco
Want to know how a company born in the heart of Europe with an engineer sleeping on the floor of a TV station turned into the world’s largest independent automation manufacturer (with that same engineer now at the helm)? Read the full story of Aveco to find out…:
Aveco has its roots in the communist era in Czechoslovakia. At the time, it was impossible to import any Western goods, but everyone still wanted to watch TV. So all the equipment was supposed to be developed inside the Eastern zone.
Pavel Potužák, Managing Director of Aveco, recalls how he learned from his colleagues at an institution that was developing cameras, switchers, and all the technology needed to make television. “It was analog, but they were excellent professionals because they really understood every curve of the TV signal. All the TV stations of the Eastern bloc ran on equipment designed by these guys’.
When communism fell, it was clear that the institution would not survive. A team of five, including Pavel and Michal Skála, broke off on their own. “We decided to start a company and see where it would go. So that was the start of Aveco,” Pavel says. “In those days, we were developing linear editing system for two-inch machines.”
“The first real product we made in the early 1990s was a control system for dubbing studios,” he remembers. “We were all eager to see American movies. American film was legendary. We were not allowed to travel back then, and no one spoke English. When anyone got a hold of a movie somehow, they would bring it to a dubbing studio because everybody wanted to see the movies.”
“We were basically synchronizing the video players and audio recorders to allow them to record the voices,” says Pavel. It evolved with more sophisticated workflows from there, but that was Aveco’s first product.
“Our second product was a full-scale automation system for Czech Television, which was a big adventure because we didn’t have a product.”
He continues, “Czech TV was looking for a playout automation system, and they realized that there was nobody in the world who could offer them an automation system that included all the features they wanted. So we went to Czech TV, and we said, ‘Honestly, we have nothing, but we know how to do it.’”
“We created an automation and playout system from tape machines, and in the end, it worked,” Pavel recalls. “It was multichannel, multi-user, it had all the features, including dynamic mix of live and recorded assets, last-minute changes, DVE, and closed captioning.”
“The funny part was that if the camera in the studio had moved a few feet in one direction, it would have shown my sleeping bag. It was an air-conditioned, silent room and at night, nobody went into the studio, so I was sleeping there when I got tired of coding.”
“It was a very good product for a start,” he reflects. “But it actually was not a product. It was a solution tailored for this particular customer, his workflows, and his technology stack. So we learned from what we did, and re-wrote it with better architecture and much more flexibility, to open it to the market. And then we just keep going.”
“We sold it to Slovak TV, which was our first international sale,” Pavel says, partially in jest. “Because we used to be Czechoslovakia. And we promised the product to the Slovak part of the company. But before we finished the first project, Slovakia and the Czech Republic split, so we actually made an international sale.” It’s still running at Slovakia TV today, just about 30 years later.
The same is true for Czech TV. “We were able to convince these people to give us a contract with nothing. But they never regretted it,” he adds. “We got through it because of our stubbornness. Or maybe we just didn’t want to lose.”
“From the beginning, that’s been the culture at Aveco: let’s go, let’s do it. We always deliver what we promise,” Pavel concludes. Even now as the world’s largest independent automation manufacturer with 65 employees spread across different regions and with customers around the globe, that’s still the company culture.
That’s the culture that has led to innovations like the NAB Best of Show 2024 Award Winner, ASTRA Media Factory.
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