Pace (Company)

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Pace Micro Technology plc (LSE: [PIC]) is a British manufacturer of set top boxes for digital and analogue satellite television, 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 many years 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 manufacturered the worlds first DVB decoders for an Australian satellite company, 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.

In 1999, Pace purchased the set top box division of Acorn Computers Ltd, 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. [link].

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 April 2006 Neil Gaydon became CEO, taking over from John Dyson.

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