Simon Hailes

Technical Director at Yella Umbrella Ltd. - Bringing Pay-per-use Audio Description, Subtitling and Dubbing Systems and Processes to the masses....

Órgiva, Andalusia, Spain

About

Look for Stellar by YellaUmbrella in use at a home or office near you... whether for Audio Description scripting, recording, and production; Subtitle Create/Edit/Conform; Full multi-role Dubbing, or other timed metadata, the Nebula/Stellar combination can't be beaten on flexibility and efficiency. Dedicated to Broadcast since 1990, we started YellaUmbrella in August 2016 to bring broadcast related processes to the masses at cheap pay-per-use pricing with no up-front cost, and no commitment... - this means that everything we do must be relevant, quality, and efficient, otherwise you won't continue to use it? I've been involved with everything in broadcast from preparation/production, automation, to set-top box decoding, so my experience is very broad, and I have a good understanding of all aspects of both traditional broadcast and other forms of media delivery. Moving on was not an easy decision after 24 1/2 years at Screen; The hardest part was leaving my established customer base; but Screen will do them proud, and YellaUmbrella will now give me the opportunity to service the industry in different ways.

Experience

  • Technical Director/Owner at Yella Umbrella Ltd
    Aug 2016 - Present · 10 yrs

    From small seeds, large oaks have grown.... At Yella Umbrella/Yella BVBA we have created what we feel is a world beating framework in Nebula, and built on that to create Stellar and numerous Nebula processes used by users all over the world every day. One of Yella's primary goals was to create a pay-per-use ecosystem, enabling use of technologies by anyone without any initial outlay, whilst keeping the costs low to keep them using it. We've achieved that, and are now expanding the range of functionality to bring in more users and more variety of use cases.

  • Owner at Simonetics
    Aug 2016 - Present · 10 yrs

    Simonetics is my private trading name; It's a vehicle through which I can pursue interests outside of Yella Umbrella, including but not limited to IOT and Robotics. I also contribute to Open source projects, including Node-Red and Tasmota

  • CTO & Technical Director at Screen Subtitling Systems Ltd
    Apr 1992 - Aug 2016 · 24 yrs 5 mos

    In 24 1/2 years, we developed the business from one which had a basic subtitle preparation product and a very hardware orientated single file subtitle playback solution to where it is now, with a highly competent range of products utilising software approaches in distributed architectures; basically natively cloud, offline and online tools to achieve results not limited to subtitling, although we have that very well covered.... With the Award of CTO of the year in 2016, for many people I WAS screen. I architected the very successful Polistream product, allowing us to use the multi-platform, resilient, modular approach to create adaptable and varied systems, dragging the company from a very hardware-centric history to a have much more software focussed approach; allowing us to move faster and be much more efficient - both in systems design, time to market and in supporting the systems we created.

  • Senior Software Development Engineer at Basys Automation Systems, formally (Connolly Systems)
    1990 - 1992 · 2 yrs

    Broadcast Automation systems, controlling various broadcast devices including LMS, Odetics, GVG Switchers. Experience in OS9 on 68000 and TurboC PC control and databasing systems.

  • Software Engineer at Thorn EMI Electronics
    1986 - 1989 · 3 yrs

    Underwater systems, sonar, electro-optics, etc. Worked on everything from bespoke power supply monitoring, cooling systems, graphical sonar displays, data analysis, Hydrophones, telemetry.