Hacker News Reader

Comment by chamomeal | Hacker News Reader

This is sorta beside the point about color-grading, but I don't entirely agree about a product needing to solve a real problem.

I worked a startup that had decent tech, but a shit product. Wasn't focused enough to really solve clients' issues. Maybe alleviated some issues, but also introduced more. It was disliked by the people who actually had to use it. But our sales guy was really good at convincing those peoples' bosses that it would make the company more money.

It was a total top-down sales approach. Throw a bunch of buzzwords at the founder/CFO/boss, they force it on the people actually doing the work. I hated it, and it worked so well that fixing the product was never a priority. It was always new "features" to slap on more buzzwords to the sales pitch. I really think it could've been a good product, too!

View on HN

We're still a rather small team of mainly tech people, we don't have a single sales person in the traditional way (not yet). Ghislain was able to develop an architecture that we could count on as being reliable while being able to quickly experiment in all directions and build on top of what was started. We were never really afraid of major failures as the system has been proven to be robust after the first 2 years (everything was started from scratch, including hardware).

As we were able to very quickly respond to customer demands for anything special that they would need, they ended-up being our main sales channel by recommending the solution further. And nearly 10 years after, we're still pretty much on the same model, trying to keep up with the developments, delivering products and supporting our customers. The website is outdated and it's been years we're trying to make any progress there, eventually we'll succeed at that.

Congrats on an incredibly impressive and technically complex product.

Operating such high visibility events like the Olympics sounds pretty nerve-wracking. How much of an issue is security for you? Do you experience any attacks?

Security has been a hot topic for the past few years, but it's getting even more attention now. Fortunately, it’s mostly a concern for production facilities, and the most effective solution is often complete isolation—most production networks don’t have internet access at all.

With the rise of remote production (where the control room is located at headquarters while cameras and microphones are on-site at stadiums), broadcasters are implementing VPNs, private fiber connections, and other methods to stay largely separate from the public internet.

In our case, the only part that uses the public internet is the relay server, which is necessary when working over cellular networks. Security is one of the main reasons we haven’t expanded this service into a full cloud portal yet—it’s much easier to secure a lightweight data relay with no database, running on a single port, than to lock down a larger, more complex system.

I want to add that the relay server is never handling any customer secrets (so a low value target), and we have techniques in place to reduce the probability of DoS (increase the cost to the attacker).

So even if someone would be able to break into the server through the small attack surface, he would not be able to change any setting on any of our customer's devices. Or even read any status either. Of course, if someone can break into our server, the DoS is inevitable, but so far this never happened.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com