The new IP-based system was initially deployed at the UEFA Europa League final in Baku, Azerbaijan on 29^th May, 2019 and the live production environment at the UEFA Champions League final in Madrid on 1^st June, 2019. It was also recently used for the Australian Open tennis tournament in January. The packet-based, IP-centric production system they are now regularly deploying includes Grass Valley UCP-25/50 Gateway cards and MV-821-IP multiviewers and Cisco Nexus 9000 IP switches.

To evolve its live production capability, Gravity Media began migrating towards a live IP-based production environment at the Australian Open, making use of Grass Valley IP multiviewers to handle its monitoring requirements. The new Grass Valley IP core enables Gravity Media to leverage a future-proofed production environment that is agnostic to evolving production needs and can adapt rapidly, even during an event.

Ed Tischler, acting managing director for the UK at Gravity Media, said that by taking an IP-based approach, his company has vastly simplified the system.

“Now we can get the whole IP core up and running within a day – that is unheard of for a major sporting event,” he said.

Leveraging the flexible nature of IP allows Gravity Media to easily scale the system up or down to meet the requirements of a wide range of live events. The open standards-based approach allows it to add IP elements to the live production environment, selecting best-of-breed systems as more vendors roll out solutions based on the SMPTE ST2110 standard.