The Switch Celebrates 25 Years
NEW YORK—MAY 9—2016 marks the 25th anniversary of The Switch, which was co-founded by Scott Beers and Eric Pfaff, both of whom still serve as Chief Executive Officer, and Executive Vice President, respectively.
The Switch was launched as a local television switching service in New York City following the first Gulf War in 1991 and has grown to become a leading provider of high quality video and data service across the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Today, The Switch continues to serve the media industry with a wide range of transport products as television consumption continues its migration from a single-screen experience to a multi-platform and interactive environment.
“The Switch has always strived to be one step ahead of the industry,” said Scott Beers, CEO and Co-Founder of The Switch. “While planning The Switch expansion we have always anticipated the customers needs. That has driven us to build a world-class network, with customer-control, that is capable of transmitting 4K signals today. Our customers have also motivated us to create non-traditional products like home runs, and our newest service offering, fully redundant remote transmission trailers (Point-Of-Presence (POP)-In-A-Trailer) that extends the reach of our network in a highly dynamic and flexible way. The Switch is a 21st century service provider committed to meet the needs of customers that are at the forefront of media technology today.”
Currently, The Switch boasts more than 220 network-node-points across the network and is built at MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL and NHL sports venues in the United States. In addition to its 4K and Home Runs service offerings, The Switch also offers a scalable Ethernet product from 20Mbps to 5Gbps for media applications that include telephone service, and broadcast intercom communications, Public Internet Access and rich File-Transfer-Protocol (FTP) applications. Most recently, The Switch was awarded a U.S. system patent for its customer-controlled video network (U.S. patent no. 9,306,873).
The Switch formally recognized its 25th anniversary last month at the 2016 NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“I am so proud of what we have built these past 25 years and look forward to continuous growth,” said Beers.