rass Valley has been around for 60 years – that’s longer than Microsoft or Google,” observes Grass Valley chief revenue officer, Tim Banks. “The company has
capture, encoding and transfer to asset management and distribution. But the journey to the cloud is not one-way. Moving every single broadcast process to the public cloud is just not practical. For the foreseeable future anyway, most live broadcast is going to be an integration of on-the-ground hardware and in-cloud services. “The real value for Grass Valley is going to come from combining software and hardware together and being good at both,” says Banks. “Apple is a great example. You get a great user experience that brings together something you can touch with computing power in the cloud.” WINNING CONTENT The company aims to be the industry leader in software for real-time broadcast, but with that comes the responsibility to do more than dump a great set of cloud tools onto the market and wait for everyone to upgrade. “There isn’t a major event on broadcast TV that doesn’t use some Grass Valley equipment, and every customer of ours has different needs and problems. It’s important to acknowledge that we’re a partner to our customers, in order to help them make great TV.” Grass Valley customers are looking at how they can use the cloud to become more efficient – or experiment with new workflows and formats – but they are integrating these tools at various speeds. Companies aren’t going to risk their current business by leaping to a new model. “One of the interesting things that happens in this kind of change is that, while you’re embracing what’s new, you discover the reason things from
seen the world of video change beyond recognition in that time. Through it all, it has remained relevant – still one of the most trusted brands in broadcast TV.” The company cut its teeth providing a variety of robust hardware systems – from cameras to playout solutions – forming the technological backbone of many live broadcast facilities around the world. But the development of broadcast infrastructure has increasingly turned toward software. Why buy a rack full of equipment, spend the money to house, power and maintain it 24/7, only to have to upgrade in five years? And software brings huge benefits in terms of flexibility, distributed working and tailoring infrastructure to each broadcast’s requirements. Seeing what was on the horizon, Grass Valley applied its expertise to building a cloud-centric platform that would not just allow broadcasters to replace their hardware, but do even more in a software-as-a-service environment. Grass Valley’s Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP) rolled out a set of cloud-native microservices for building a content pipeline, from
UNLESS IT LOOKS GREAT, IT DOESN’T HAVE VALUE
@feedzinesocial
Powered by FlippingBook