“We also have APIs to enable customers to build on top of AMPP, but no coding is required to get basic things running.” The CTO reveals that below the surface of any platform is a great deal of ‘undifferentiated heavy lifting,’ namely “licensing, upgrading, deployment, building toolchains, debugging and routing”. AMPP’s architecture addresses much of that hidden burden. Take software commissioning, for example. “With traditional software systems, you have to send people on-site, and they spend a lot of time installing and configuring on servers or desktop machines for client applications. Traditional software upgrades are also painful – it takes months and you often have problems and need to roll back. AMPP applications are instantly deployable. Being HTML5-based, they only require a browser, there’s no software installation on the clients.” EASY INTEGRATIONS Integration is another traditional headache. “The industry spends about $50 billion a year on media solutions, and we estimate about 25% of the total spend is on integrating all the systems and getting them to work together. “Say you had an asset management system from vendor A, and a playout system from vendor B. Someone’s got to design and commission both systems, get each installed, then up and running. Planning and commissioning can take months. And then they have to integrate those systems through protocols or APIs,” he continues. “With AMPP, it’s all built into the platform. You don’t have to instal anything and there’s no integration required. Just log in to the service and fire up the applications you need.” As the name suggests, AMPP delivers agile resource management. “You can have one set
loud computing has taken the media industry by storm, boosted by the pandemic effect on remote operations.
With a heritage in broadcast engineering, Grass Valley’s Agile Media Processing Platform (GV AMPP) – a scalable SaaS solution of management tools, applications, microservices and intelligent technologies – is set to take full advantage, with a raft of new applications and support from partners. But AMPP is not just another cloud platform, and some of the benefits for media customers – and the wider media production ecosystem – may not be fully appreciated at first glance. FULL SERVICE PLATFORM AMPP provides a base for the Grass Valley Media Universe, developed to allow Grass Valley and partner media solutions providers to give customers access to an end-to-end cloud ecosystem for all production needs. Partner vendors, in turn, can benefit from a frictionless method of getting services to the cloud. “We said let’s build a common platform to host everything – not just for us, but the whole industry,” says Grass Valley CTO Sydney Lovely. “There are other cloud offerings out there, but they’re not set up to meet the demands of live production.” AMPP enables a set of applications built using a common microservices architecture, so they all work together. And unlike many cloud-hosted solutions, customers can easily use applications without ever having to get into code. “The AMPP resource manager lets you spin up and spin down applications as required,” says Lovely. “We’ve added a System Dashboard that lets you visualise complex workflows, and a Usage Portal where you can interactively track and manage your application consumption.
LET’S BUILD A COMMON PLATFORM THAT CAN HOST EVERYTHING, NOT JUST FOR GRASS VALLEY, BUT FOR THEWHOLE INDUSTRY
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