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Back in the fall of 2020, several months after private equity firm Black Dragon Capital completed its acquisition of Grass Valley, it became apparent to the company’s management team that it had an unpolished jewel in the GV portfolio that needed attention. Given the virtualization changes, cost cutting and high demand for new content occurring within the industry, customers who served as beta testers told them, “this AMPP thing is going to change the industry.”
For large media companies, especially those with global exclusive sports and entertainment rights that are delivered around the world simultaneously, the new frontier is streaming millions (and sometimes billions of viewers) of live events over an IP infrastructure. Or more specifically, a series of tightly linked cloud services that process media quickly and ultimately span the world.
Although latency and resource coordination continue to challenge those considering cloud-based remote live production, the distributed architecture model is steadily gaining traction as a cost-effective alternate to hardware-based on-premise projects. To date this IT-centric architecture has not been deployed for high-profile productions like the Super Bowl or World Cup, but remote IP-video contribution, production and distribution has allowed second-tier sporting events to be televised globally whereas they might not be - due to cost and fully remote access - using traditional production methods.
New, in-cloud, pay-per-use business models offer new advantages to occasional REMI, field reporting, remote event production and similar content producers and distributors with a better business model to remain competitive and profitable without huge ongoing capital investments.
The pressure to extract more revenue from ever shrinking budgets, due to expensive content rights contracts, is causing Broadcasters to re-evaluate—and in many cases reduce—how they spend their money on production tools and infrastructure. Recognizing this, live production technology providers like Grass Valley are getting “creative” in how they sell their products and cloud-native systems.
DekTec adjusts to new dynamics, technologies, and solutions in 2021.
While many professionals have come to understand how to configure IP-based infrastructures to handle the distribution of audio and video files, managing specific devices on the network has been extremely complex, at best. Recognizing this, Lawo has developed a new software management platform called Home that makes it easy to set up, manage and benefit from the flexibility, scalable nature and signal-agnostic design that comes with IP infrastructures.
Coming off a whirlwind of three new acquisitions in the past six months, Telestream said it has carefully navigated the past year and emerged stronger than ever. The company actually increased profitability in a time of challenge for many others in the industry.