Pace (company)

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Pace Micro Technology plc (LSE: PIC) is a British developer of set top boxes for digital satellite, cable and IPTV operators, founded in 1982. They took over from Amstrad as the main supplier for Sky. They were the first manufacturer to ship boxes for Sky Digital in 1998 and for a time were the only provider of Sky+ boxes.

The company started off making dial up modems, and claims to have developed the first consumer modems.

Pace's head office is in Saltaire in its home county of Yorkshire. It occupies a large proportion of the Victorian Salt's Mill site. The floor layout of the site is extremely confusing, and many employees refer to it as the "rabbit warren", due to its many passages.

In 1995, they manufactured the world's first DVB decoders for Australian satellite company Galaxy, and had shipped a million DVB units by 1997. By 1998, they were developing solely digital decoders.

Pace was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1996. The modem division was dissolved in 2000.

Being an indigenous manufacturer, UK media providers are more likely to use Pace equipment. As a result the company had, for many years, close to a monopoly on the supply of cable decoders, DTT equipment, ADSL based VOD systems and satellite decoders suitable for use on UK networks. Pace do not tend to produce retail products, but did produce the first freeview PVR, the Twin.

In 1999, Pace purchased the set top box division of Acorn Computers, this becoming its Cambridge office. As a result, for a number of years, Pace owned RISC OS, and used technologies based on it in its decoder equipment. The Cambridge office was closed down in 2003 for cost cutting reasons. [1].

In 2001, Pace announced that it was outsourcing the last 25 percent of manufacturing output which remained at Saltaire. Thus the head office is now an administration and design/development centre.

In 2005, Pace in conjunction with Australian subscription television provider Foxtel launched the first DVB-C Personal Digital Recorder with Foxtel iQ^[1]

In April 2006 Neil Gaydon became CEO, taking over from John Dyson, and Mike McTighe became the new Chairman, taking over from Sir Michael Bett.

The most recent development for Pace has been a breakthrough in the US market where it is now delivering products to Comcast and DirecTV - the largest cable and satellite operators in the world.