It’s easy, in an industry built on pixel pitch, processors and panel finishes, to lose sight of the people actually making it all work. LED Studio’s Life Behind the Screens is where we step away from the spec sheet and introduce them properly: the engineers, the project managers, the people quietly solving problems most customers never see. Each instalment is a chance to find out how they got here, what they’re working on, and how their part fits into where LED Studio is headed next.
Behind the Screens
Even a very well-planned LED project can take a completely unexpected turn. A spec that looked fine on paper and doesn’t hold up on site. A manufacturer that owns the product but has no idea how to price the installation. A display that works perfectly in testing and then needs a callback within the month.
Most people in this industry learn to work around those problems.
Michiel Hettinga spent years being the one who had to fix them.
Now, as CEO of LED Studio Europe, he’s on the other side of that relationship, and it shows in almost everything he does.
A Career That Started By Accident
Michiel didn’t set out to work in LED displays. He studied Business Administration at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and an internship took him to Philips in France, advising on Satellite Master Antenna TV Systems. Philips then placed him with a consultancy in Amsterdam that happened to work with LED screens.
“Nobody really chooses this industry on purpose,” he says. “You just end up here, and then you stay.”
Almost thirty years later, he’s still here. Early on, he was part of the team that pointed Philips toward a small, pioneering LED manufacturer in Ipswich at a time when tiled LCD and CRT-based screens were still the industry standard. The technology was genuinely ahead of its time. The company still couldn’t turn it into a lasting business.
It was an early lesson that stuck. Good engineering isn’t enough on its own. Somebody still has to deliver it.
Learning From the Other Side
In 2014, Michiel founded Via Visual in Germany, building on years of groundwork he and his brother had already put in from the Netherlands. Via Visual wasn’t a systems integrator itself. It worked so closely alongside integrators, taking on the LED portion of a project as a specialist partner, that for most purposes it operated as an extension of their teams, across corporate signage, digital-out-of-home advertising and a run of banking installations across Germany.
One decision was deliberate from the start: no event or rental work.
“My holidays were never really holidays,” he laughs. “You always knew the call was coming. Some rental company needing another processor fifteen minutes before kickoff.”
Those years on the integrator’s side of the table taught him exactly where the industry kept falling short. He watched a major brand win a sponsorship deal for a stadium screen and have no real idea how to price or execute the installation, despite owning the product. He watched his own team out-tender manufacturers directly, not on price, but because Via Visual’s proposed subframes and schedules were simply better thought through. Even with his own factory acceptance testing in place, product arriving into Germany’s quality-driven market sometimes fell short on the basics, costing deals outright.
Finding LED Studio
By 2023, those problems had become a real cost to the business rather than just a frustration. At the ISE trade show that year, Michiel came across LED Studio and started following what the design team had been building. The EDGE 55 had just launched.
“I could see exactly where it fit,” he says. “Banking, digital-out-of-home, all the sectors I already knew. And it was made in Europe, by a company that controlled its own quality. I didn’t need to negotiate consistency from the other side of the world anymore.”
He made the first approach himself. That relationship grew into what’s now LED Studio Europe, with Michiel at the helm.
What Integrator-First Really Means
Ask Michiel what Integrator-First means today, and he doesn’t reach for a slogan. He breaks it into three parts.
The first is the relationship itself. “We want to be part of an integrator’s own operational force,” he says. “An extension of their team, not a separate one standing next to it.” Where possible, that means a project-exclusive relationship rather than quoting several integrators on the same job, not out of restriction, but because in his experience a split bid has never once won a project. It only confuses the customer. The relationship bends to the integrator’s terms too. If they want LED Studio Europe to run the service agreement, it will. If they’d rather keep it in-house, LED Studio Europe hands over spare parts and trains their engineers instead.
The second is the product itself, and where it fits into the wider service around it. Michiel has spent enough time on the other side of a spec sheet to know the market usually offers integrators one of two flawed options: a big branded supplier with local presence but limited product knowledge, or a manufacturer with real technical depth but no feel for local market requirements, whether that’s power distribution standards, service expectations, or simply being reachable when something goes wrong.
“We are an a la carte full-service provider,” he says. “You don’t have to take everything from us. You choose exactly what you need.”
That flexibility is deliberate. Whether it’s a full turnkey installation or just the display hardware and technical support behind it, the aim is the same: reduce the time an integrator spends on site, protect their margin on the project, and give them something dependable to hand back to their own customer. It extends to the product design itself too, displays engineered to install cleanly and verify easily on site, closing the grey areas, like a disputed faulty module, that the wider industry has mostly just learned to live with.
The third is structural. “It’s the same full circle we built at Via Visual,” Michiel says. “Just now it sits inside the manufacturer itself.” LED Studio Europe’s own team is deliberately shaped the way a systems integrator’s would be, covering engineering and drawings, project management and logistics, on-site installation support, after-sales and pre-project visualisation, all in-house.
Looking further ahead, that same instinct, understand the whole job before trying to fix a piece of it, is shaping something bigger. Michiel talks about a future built around a network of dedicated centres, each one focused on manufacturing, R&D, quality control and testing for a specific part of the industry, indoor, outdoor, rental, rather than one factory trying to be good at everything. The plan is to grow that network into Europe and the US, with secure, verified production lines able to serve the customers who need it most: finance and banking, command and control rooms, military and defence, and critical infrastructure like water, electricity and power.
“A lot of our customers work in very high-end, high-security parts of the market,” he says. “To follow them and deliver what they actually need, we have to be able to produce and manufacture closer to home.”
For those customers, provenance is as much a part of the specification as performance. It’s a problem Michiel has spent his whole career getting closer to solving, one relationship, one product, one project at a time.
Beyond the Office
Away from work, Michiel is more likely to be found on a mountain trail than anywhere near an office. Weekends usually mean a long walk, and food and drink is a shared passion with his wife, cooking as much as eating out. Reading is a constant for both of them, and city breaks are built around culture and museums rather than beaches. Together they have five children, all adults now, which keeps plenty of family time in the diary regardless.
As a kid in the Netherlands, Michiel was a genuinely serious chess player, competitive enough to be his county’s under-12 champion.
“I haven’t played much since my student days,” he says. “But I still love the game.”
Music runs just as deep. Opera and jazz concerts are a regular fixture, off the clock, in a life that otherwise revolves around getting things exactly right, on time, and on the other side of the table from where he used to sit.
Michiel’s story is one part of a bigger one. Behind every LED Studio project there’s someone bringing their own experience to the table, and Behind the Screens exists to introduce them properly, one instalment at a time. Keep an eye out for the next one on our News & Blog page.
