More than 50 years ago, with his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from McGill University in hand, Lorne Trottier was looking to discover his career calling. He got his start in the television broadcast equipment industry working with John Ross, who would later launch Ross Video (and whose son, David, is a Hall of Fame honoree this year as well).
[SCN Hall of Fame 2024: Sam Taylor]
His initial experience was critical when Trottier founded Matrox, known for its pioneering hardware and software solutions for various high-tech industries. It led to the development of innovative product lines, first supporting the broadcast industry and eventually crossing into the world of Pro AV.
“I'm proud that we've mastered many of these technological transitions over time, and we're still open for business and having fun.”
Lorne Trottier
"You look today and there are quite a few companies that make products that overlap between broadcast and AV, and there's a lot of commonality," said Trottier. "We've been making broadcast products for many years, and AV is a natural extension of that."
Trottier founded Matrox in 1976—and his most significant sense of pride is that they are still delivering innovative solutions after all this time, especially considering the technological advancements that have occurred in the industry.
"There's been some very dramatic paradigm shifts," he added. "I'm a tech geek at heart, so I enjoy the challenges presented by our technological advances and learning to develop products and innovations based on those things. I'm proud that we've mastered many of these technological transitions over time, and we're still open for business and having fun."
With the industry experiencing a major continuous shift to AV-over-IP, Matrox has focused on the development of IPMX, a proposed set of open standards and specifications that address the need for a common set of ubiquitous standards and protocols in the transition to IP infrastructures. The company is investing in a new product line of AV infrastructure products based on IPMX, which it will introduce over the coming year and preview at ISE Expo 2024 in Barcelona.
"Many proprietary standards are on the market right now," Trottier explained. "I'm very hopeful that this IPMX standard will be widely adopted. The products we're developing around that have a lot of innovation in them, and I'm hoping we'll be very successful with that."
[SCN Hall of Fame 2024: Andrew Cross]
With many developing proprietary codecs and streaming protocols, Matrox is also honing in on standardized codecs that are more universally available within its IPMX products. Many graphics processing units on the market today contain a powerful built-in codec engine, but these capabilities are not widely used. "That's one of the things we hope to bring to the market and help shake things up a bit," Trottier added.
For those looking to grow within the industry and contribute to future innovations, Trottier recommended being like him: a self-proclaimed tech geek at heart. "It's good to love technology because you have to keep learning new things all the time," he said. "You have to be prepared to be learning all the time and figuring out how to innovate with the new technology that comes along."
