Snell Limited, branded as Snell Advanced Media or SAM, was a company that designed and developed solutions for the media production market including applications for central operations, live production, post production, playout and media management. They were headquartered in Newbury, UK. SAM delivers agile technology across Live Production, Production, Editing & Finishing, Playout & Delivery, Infrastructure & Image Processing, all running under enterprise-wide Management & Workflow automation. Snell Limited, owned by bankers LDC, was created from the merger of Snell & Wilcox and Pro-Bel in 2009. In March 2014 Snell was acquired by another company owned by LDC, Quantel Ltd. Following LDC's replacement of Snell CEO Simon Derry with Quantel CEO Ray Cross, the process of merging the companies began. LDC had previously in 2006 appointed Cross to replace Quantel CEO Richard Taylor. However within a year LDC then replaced Cross with new CEO Tim Thorsteinson. The company was rebranded as Snell Advanced Media in September 2015. Following the rebrand, SAM continued to carry the Quantel name on its Quantel Rio, formerly Pablo Rio, line of post-production solutions.
History
Snell & Wilcox was founded by Roderick Snell, in 1973. In 2007 Snell and Wilcox Ltd. was awarded the for the Kahuna Multiformat SD/HD production switcher. In April 2009 Snell & Wilcox merged with Pro-Bel. The resulting company took the name Snell. In March 2014 it was announced that Snell had been acquired by Quantel. Following on from the departure of Quantel CEO Ray Cross and, Tim Thorsteinson was appointed CEO in February 2015. Tim held senior roles in the media technology industry including twice as the CEO of Grass Valley, President of the Broadcast Communications division of Harris Corp., and President and CEO of Enablence. The company was rebranded as Snell Advanced Media in September 2015. In June 2017 it was announced that Tim Thorsteinson was stepping down as CEO and being replaced with Eric Cooney On 8 February 2018, it was revealed that Belden had acquired SAM and that the company was to be brought under the Grass Valley umbrella.
