FEED issue 29 Newsletter

36 SPONSORED CONTENT Grass Valley

Grass Valley’s new cloud-based media services platform is a game changer A UNIVERSE OF POSSIBILITIES

arlier this year, Grass Valley released GV AMPP: a SaaS platform to help broadcasters harness the power of elastic

“For almost 50 years, broadcast TV was the pinnacle of media technology,” says Sydney Lovely, senior vice-president of worldwide products and technology at Grass Valley. “As an advertiser, if you wanted to get your message out to the broadcast audience, the most coveted vehicle for doing so was television. People who had content rights had relatively few channels they could use. So there was a balance of power between the rights owners and the broadcasters. TV was a solid, profitable business.” But with the advent of streaming, that stable ecosystem was disrupted. Now, traditional broadcasters aren’t just competing with a handful of other national

players, they are also competing with online video platforms, like Netflix and Amazon, as well as all the other digital content options available – everything from social media to gaming is fighting to hang on to eyeballs. “The scarce commodity is no longer the channel to the consumer – anyone can do that using YouTube. Today, the scarce commodity is live content,” says Lovely. Rights holders who own this valuable content now have multiple avenues for reaching the consumer, and so the advertising spend is no longer concentrated in a few regular outlets. To keep pace, broadcasters have to support multiple digital platforms and be ever more agile in how they operate – and often without a lot of extra budget to do so. Grass Valley’s AMPP is built to help content operate flexibly and lightly, while being able to deploy at scale if need be. AMPP is already being widely deployed. Earlier this year, Blizzard Entertainment used AMPP and its open API to automate playback and other capabilities for the launch of Blizzard’s Overwatch League. Activision Blizzard Esports’ production teams were able to create configurable virtual master control rooms accessible from multiple locations, eliminating the need for a conventional centralised equipment room. Multiple distribution streams with separate graphics and languages for each audience region could be produced by a single operator, using one web-based interface. The flexibility of AMPP’s architecture is a game changer for content owners who want to diversify their audience. One Grass Valley customer who currently operates 50 base channels can use AMPP to burst up to 500 additional channels during special

computing. The new platform and media toolkit is at the heart of the GV Media Universe – a road map for a software- and cloud-based future for media companies. The new ecosystem of cloud-based tools and services is aimed at making content production and distribution flexible, accessible and scaleable for companies of all sizes. One of the first beneficiaries of GV Media Universe will be traditional broadcasters that are looking to expand their reach and take new ideas to market quickly and at scale.

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