This year, we celebrate 20 years of 25-Seven Systems, and some first-person reflections are in order to tell the story of a little company that has had a profound impact on the broadcast industry. Like most company biographies, this one is really about a group of people who came together to build first one thing, then another, setting off on a path that eventually led to our forever home as part of Telos Alliance. What held it together wasn’t a single genius or a big pile of money, but the creativity and personal glue of a self-selected team.

20 years later, it's still about time.

Joining together with the band

If 25-Seven was a band, it would be fair to say the players had already been on stage together in earlier incarnations. I certainly didn’t start as lead singer; more like a studio gopher and super-fan to the talent in the room. Meeting Dr. Barry Blesser in 1990 and Derek Pilkington about a year later was a life-changer.

25-Seven's Derek Pilkington (left) and Dr. Barry Blesser (right).

Starting on the AKG DSE-7000 team as a software tester and eventually becoming product manager for the Orban Audicy workstation, I was privileged to work and learn with industry greats. Continuing the band metaphor, we produced songs (products) under different labels (companies) while our playing got tighter. When Harman International decided to sell its Orban brand, it was like our contract expired – but the music didn’t stop.

Extra time in your (broadcast) day

Never losing touch with each other, the idea for the Audio Time Manager (ATM) became the product goal/excuse to get the band back together. Originally, this novel time compression box was going to be called “25-Seven” due to the “extra” air time it could create. But we liked the name enough to adopt it as the company moniker! Notably, ATM was the very first third-party hardware device to integrate the Axia Livewire protocol. You might say that adopting Telos’ brilliant invention of AoIP brought us closer to our future home. Initial work on ATM started in 2004, and Paul Shulins put the first unit on the air at Greater Media in Boston, right before our NAB show debut in 2005.

Audio Time Manager: the miracle that put more spots in your inventory.

Other players need to get mentioned here: Rick Sawyer, Neil Glassman, Mark Phillips, and Ed MacKenty would stay with our company through some lean times. Dan Griscom joined a couple of years after we started.  Relatives lent us money, and we all worked on hope (with an occasional check and Cool Stuff award), and the manufacturing floor was Derek’s garage.

Program Delay Manager (PDM) came along in late 2007, applying Barry’s time compression tech to a more mainstream use. Its successor, PDM II, remains a top seller today.

Program Delay Manager (right) made sure F-Bombs (left) didn't blow up on-air.

Cool stuff, lean times, big ideas

A turning point for our team happened in 2009 when an industry friend asked us to look into Arbitron’s PPM system. His station had a talk show with a popular host, lots of callers, and all outward signs of success, but ratings were awful, as though the PPM system just stopped working when this host came on the air.

We started a research project, almost as an academic exercise, seeking to explain what we were observing. Barry Blesser’s paper “Technical Properties of Arbiton’s PPM System” was published in Radio World. The response was immediate. Our phones started ringing with calls from stock analysts, a mystery caller with an accusatory question asking “who funded this?”, show hosts who felt they were being penalized by the ratings system, storied programmers, and more. 25-Seven Systems became a clearinghouse for others interested in PPM.  While this research didn’t pay the bills, it became a powerful calling card.

Something in the (Volt)air

Making sure you got credit for every PPM listen:
The original 25-Seven Voltair M watermark processor / monitor.

In 2011, Telos executives called, asking if we would consider joining the Telos Alliance. In many ways, this was an answer to a prayer. 25-Seven had tremendous engineering and management talent, but our product line was thin and sales didn’t cover costs, let alone fuel our expansion goals, including our aspirations to build a product based on all our PPM research. Talks with Telos continued over the year, and Frank Foti, who had been doing his own research into PPM,  funded us on a handshake until the deal could be consummated at the end of December 2012.

25-Seven Systems was a classic case of a company whose assets went home at night. We had a few products, some modest debt, and no hard assets. Besides obvious like-mindedness with counterparts at Telos, what clinched the deal was our business plan for Voltair. Combining our team with Telos engineering resources gave us the velocity we needed to get into orbit. Voltair was THE industry news story of 2015, and that story could be a book in its own right. Telos' investment in 25-Seven paid off handsomely, and the 25-Seven team landed at the home where they belonged and seemed they’d always been part of.

Culture Is the Real Invention

Ready for the next breakthrough: Geoff Steadman, 2025.

It is amazing to think that 25-Seven has now been part of Telos for longer than it existed as an independent company. Our crew married into a bigger family and are now part of a larger mission, spanning different roles, products, and brands within Telos Alliance. Perhaps 25-Seven’s greatest contribution has been cultural. We brought smart people, good processes, and great experience with us to Telos, and those pieces have been readily absorbed and integrated, creating a greater whole.

About the author: Geoff Steadman co-founded 25-Seven Systems and has been riffing on broadcast audio ever since. These days, he keeps the band tight as a Product Manager at Telos Alliance. Less frontman, more producer (the kind who makes the hits happen).