Riedel eyes North American as managed technology division expands

Riedel Communications has long been a fixture in Europe, including live production services. At the 2026 NAB Show, the company signaled that the North American market is now a deliberate priority – and the acquisition of ARRI by Thomas Riedel, announced just days before the show opened, gave that ambition a considerably larger platform.

The deal was structured around a clear principle, according to Jeffrey Stroessner, chief of staff for Riedel’s managed technology division: the two companies will remain operationally separate.

“Red stays red and blue stays blue,” Stroessner said, citing the company’s internal framing of the deal. “We’re definitely going to keep these two companies separate. There’s a certain respect of the brand. You have 109 years of history there.”

The ecosystem argument

Despite the operational separation, the strategic logic of the acquisition is visible in how Stroessner described Riedel’s broader approach to the market.

The company thinks in ecosystems, he said, not individual products for individual problems, but integrated solutions that span the full production chain from competition infrastructure to broadcast delivery.

That philosophy has defined Riedel’s managed technology division, which Stroessner oversees.

Unlike the product division, which sells intercom systems, video distribution tools and replay solutions to customers around the world, the managed technology division deploys those tools as complete temporary production infrastructures for events including Formula 1, the Olympics and the Eurovision Song Contest.

The acquisition of ARRI signals that Riedel and ARRI plan to prioritize live entertainment and sports – sectors where Riedel already dominates infrastructure but lacks a camera presence, and where ARRI has historically had limited reach.

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“The customers want solutions rather than individual islands where they deal with multiple stakeholders,” Stroessner said. He described a typical major sports event as having three distinct layers, the competition infrastructure, the fan experience and the broadcast, which have historically been managed by separate vendors with limited coordination. Riedel’s ambition is to serve all three from a single ecosystem.

North America as a new priority

Riedel’s managed technology division has operated primarily in European markets, with its Formula 1 relationship dating back more than 30 years. The North American expansion Stroessner described at NAB is not a wholesale market entry but a targeted push into specific verticals where the company believes its expertise has direct application.

Sports is the primary target, with a focus on soccer and motorsports. Stroessner pointed to IMSA, IndyCar and NASCAR as series that operate in formats similar to Formula 1 but where the production infrastructure has not yet reached the same level of technical integration.

Riedel’s approach in those markets is not to compete with established production companies such as NEP or PRG but to work alongside them in areas requiring specialization that general service providers do not typically offer.

“We are not trying to replace a Diversified as an integrator or replace an NEP as a production company,” Stroessner said. “We come in when two factors are present: scalability and complexity.”

He described the managed technology model as starting where rental ends, temporary deployments that require custom engineering rather than standard kit. SailGP is an example he cited, where Riedel provides communications infrastructure integrated directly into the competition environment, including technology built into the boats themselves. The company also does custom radio systems for Formula 1 cars that integrate with telemetry and data systems, a level of specialization, he said, that a general production services company would not typically pursue.

The FIFA World Cup, which comes to the United States, Canada and Mexico this summer, represents Riedel’s most significant North American deployment to date. Stroessner said the company will handle referee communications using its Bolero wireless intercom system, in-venue signal distribution for fan experiences and the integration layer between FIFA’s own technology and the host broadcaster HBS.

“It’s going to be quite a deployment of kit,” he said.

Private 5G and the wireless infrastructure angle

Stroessner also flagged a product area Riedel began showing at NAB last year that is gaining traction on the managed technology side: private 5G solutions for temporary event deployments.

The technology originated from the company’s work on referee camera communications for live sports, where 5G was chosen as the wireless transport. Riedel is now demonstrating the infrastructure as a unified wireless layer that can simultaneously carry video from a referee camera, communications from a virtual intercom panel and additional video sources — replacing what has traditionally been separate antenna systems for audio, video and data.

“The more you utilize it with different services, the more efficient it becomes,” Stroessner said. “We came from a world of setting up antennas for audio, antennas for video, someone needs to do a data link — that’s where we see more and more integrated back.”

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