37 SPONSORED CONTENT Grass Valley
AMPP is fully browser-based and allows users to spin up or spin down a variety of broadcast-optimised applications on a pay- as-you-go basis. AMPP was started as an incubator within Grass Valley that looked at best practices across multiple industries. Incorporating a lot of DevOps methodology, it offers broadcasters of all sizes a gateway into an improved way of producing and distributing content. “There’s a lot of IT knowledge within Grass Valley,” says Mike Cronk, Grass Valley’s VP of advanced technology. “We didn’t have to go out and hire an army of new people. We had people here
working within the broadcast industry who understand the pain points. “One of the tenets of DevOps is you need to understand what infrastructure you’re deploying on, making sure that there’s methodology such as infrastructure-as- code and ways to monitor remotely. Some traditional deployments aren’t necessarily geared for that now, so there’ll be a change over time as more and more people go to DevOps. But the ability to make changes, to be agile, to connect the customer and developers more closely are all positives that will keep growing over time.” Using DevOps and CICD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), Grass
Valley is able to update and improve the platform, responding to customer and market needs in the most efficient and agile way possible. “We’re working with people now who are going to air every weekend and they’re totally comfortable upgrading their software, getting new features,” says Cronk. “In the past, when you went into the beginning of a sports season, you locked your software down. Even if there are some bugs or you want an additional feature, you can’t because you want to preserve your stability. Now that’s no longer an issue, allowing for more collaboration and greater satisfaction from the customer side.” With an SaaS solution like AMPP, users can save a snapshot of their configurations and preferences – which in a traditional infrastructure might have taken weeks to properly configure – and call it up instantly in the browser with a single click, and do this no matter where they’re working. A NEWWAY FORWARD “The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect different results,” says Lovely. “If we keep approaching software development the way we have for the last decade, it’s not going to get any better. So that’s where these new techniques allow us to be more efficient and make it easier to address these pain points for customers.” A lot of the concerns about moving to SaaS services like GV AMPP have melted away in the post-coronavirus world. Companies have been forced to embrace remote production and have discovered that live productions can be done almost as easily from the dining room table as from a central master control room. “At Grass Valley, we’ve taken special care in how we deploy software, to let customers take it to air when they’re ready. If you’re a broadcaster, you don’t want to have a button move on a GUI after you’ve trained all of your operators on how to use the system. We’ve put special processes and technology in place to deal with version management, to allow customers to take new versions of our applications as it suits them, while in the meantime we continue to roll out new versions as fast as we need to. “It’s about giving the customer a better experience, but also about making ourselves more productive in the process. But it takes a modern way of designing and deploying software to do that.”
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