Andrew Cross: We did about a hundred proofs of concept with customers before we announced any product. So, we worked hand in hand with them as we built this technology. There’s probably never been a company that’s done that much collaboration with their key partners to understand their needs – and we learned so much along the way. Unless you do that, it’s really hard to understand all the real-world problems you’re going to run into. Q : What were some of those things that you learned, and what surprised you? Andrew Cross: We initially thought that we would just need to build something that runs in the cloud. However, we quickly realised that being able to run it on prem or in the cloud – and move those workflows back and forth – is absolutely critical to customers. Often, they’re going to start locally and then grow into the cloud, starting with different cloud- based experiments. But if you can allow it to run either locally or in the cloud, you can extend your workflow without any big change. A seemingly small thing like allowing things to run within the
OUR VISION IS TO CONTINUE TO GROW AND BRING EVERYBODY INTO OUR ECOSYSTEM
customer’s compute instances turns out to be really important, because it means that the data never leaves their own environment. For some, that kind of security and control of where content can be viewed is truly critical. Customers want to be part of something experimental, and when they see an opportunity, they try something else. None of that could happen if we just sat down in a white room and sketched out what we thought the right thing to do was. Q : As your technology offering has expanded, have the types of customers you’re working with changed too? Andrew Cross: Yes, but we’ve also seen our existing customers starting to do new things. Where they’ve typically been focused on producing a main channel, now they’re producing secondary channels, and they’re
about. To them, IP is totally natural, and compute cloud-based workflows are what they’re expecting. So, we’re seeing a huge shift in the market. Q : The recent NAB saw some exciting announcements, as well as an opportunity for you to present the whole GV Media Universe to people. Andrew Cross: One of the things we announced was that we’re making the playout component of our platform free to anybody who wants to use it. We believe that anybody with content should be able to use our platform to deliver it to their customers, which is a big step forwards for the industry. We have a large number of partnerships – and some of the biggest we announced were with Vizrt, Epic Games and AWS. Vizrt is the biggest player in graphics. Between all the products Grass Valley can offer and what Vizrt can deploy, we pretty much cover every part of broadcast. Our vision is to continue to grow and bring everybody into our ecosystem – the GV Media Universe – so everyone can continue to work well together and not get trapped inside walled gardens. Q : What are your ambitions for the future? Andrew Cross: We have a truly huge market in broadcast. Those are the biggest customers in the world and we need to continue to serve them, giving them a path into the cloud. Hardware and software will still play a role. Look at a company like Apple – it’s special, as is it makes both great hardware and software. The fact that we produce great hardware and software – and can combine them into something bigger than either piece – is what is going to make us special. When you put those two things together, you have something unique in the market.
much more willing to experiment with new workflows. Alongside that main feed that’s high value, you can do all sorts of secondary feeds, small events or behind- the-scenes content. With those, you can absolutely experiment and learn new ways of working. Compute and pure IP is becoming very important in those environments. Every major company now needs to produce video, so we’re talking to companies that are not
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what you would call broadcast. Large banks or financial institutions need to produce video for both internal and external use, and the sophistication and size of those operations is often no different from what a broadcaster would have. But if you go into a large financial institution and say, ‘here’s my SDI cable, where do I plug it in?,’ they’ll wonder what on earth you’re talking
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