Why multidisciplinary thinking is reshaping engineering roles as broadcast technology becomes increasingly software-defined, interconnected and complex
article By Rainer Sturm, Ceo at arkona technologies
Mini size, mighty power: the value of multidisciplinary thinking
Broadcast technology has a habit of putting people in boxes. Frontend. Backend. Hardware. Software. Engineering. Sales. Support. Each role neatly defined, each person confined to their corner of the organisation chart. We talk about ‘holistic solutions’ and ‘systems thinking’, but scratch the surface and the old silos are still there.
At arkona and manifold technologies, we don’t do boxes. Even as two different companies, we often think with one brain.
But when we talk about breaking boundaries, we’re talking more about the individual level than the organisational one. Walk into our office and you’ll find hardware engineers sketching UI wireframes. Software developers discussing signal synchronisation. Trainees challenging senior architects on fundamental design decisions. It’s not chaos – it’s a deliberate choice to break down the boundaries that have historically limited broadcast technology development.
The result? A team of fewer than 30 people that consistently outperforms companies ten times its size. And not just by accident.
When we were delivering as OEM partners, our technology ended up in almost every major broadcast infrastructure on the market. You may not have known our name, but you were using our work. Now, operating under our own brand, we’re quickly regaining that foothold – and doing it with a team that would be considered small for a single department at many of our competitors. Our name is known.
How?
Because when you stop thinking of people as specialists and start treating them as problem-solvers, something shifts. The person who understands the hardware intimately can also see how the software interface could be better. The developer who knows the API has insight into how the routing logic should evolve. The frontend designer has opinions about how the backend should structure data. And they’re all heard.
It also means we listen to everyone.
Some of the best features in our product portfolio started as ideas from trainees—people who’d been in the industry for months, not decades. In traditional companies, those ideas might have been dismissed. Or, at best, passed up the chain to be ‘considered’ (for that, read hijacked) by someone with ‘more experience’. At arkona and manifold, we put them to work.
Our philosophy is simple: good ideas don’t come with tenure. They come from fresh thinking, from asking ‘why is it done this way?’ and from a culture that actively encourages that question, whether you’re at the beginning of your career or five pina coladas into your retirement.
That’s how a small company ends up shaping the future of an industry. Not by protecting boundaries. By ignoring them.
Our Philosophy at Trade Shows
We took that same boundary-breaking mindset to IBC 2026. On our booth, the results of this way of working were noticeable: BLADE//planner – our graphical configuration tool that transforms processing workflows – was the brainchild of one of our interns, guided to fruition by the expertise of our long-term engineers.
Manifold’s 400GE COTS FPGA support – delivering exceptionally dense Tier One levels of media processing, and EasyIP, our turnkey solution for broadcasters transitioning from SDI to IP were showcased. Each of these developments are the product of hardware engineers and software developers working side by side, challenging the idea of ‘conventional wisdom’.
Ultimately, in an environment where FPGA-accelerated software solutions are leading and breaking through, the companies that truly lead are those that have rethought not just what they build, but how they build it. So drop by our booth during any other show and discover not just what we build and how we build it, but who we build with together.
