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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.
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.
With its core business in live sports production, Grass Valley has seen its revenue contract significantly over the past eight months but with a new integrated software-defined product roadmap, it looks to bounce back while “reducing the pain” of migrating to IP. This insight, and more, was revealed during a virtual press conference presented by company management in early October.
As more and more organizations endeavor to use video as part of their business strategy, the capability to stream online at low latency has become as critical as ever for less demanding applications. That’s because viewers of all types now expect a positive experience similar to what they see on their living room TV set.
EVS’s “Ingest-to-Post” message is leading the way into IP production with new network technology, a new all-software server, and virtualized control systems.
The Makito X4 features a claimed highest available 4K UHD and HD encoding density for live broadcast contribution and remote production.