Indian regional news channel, Lokshahi News, has deployed a range of Grass Valley solutions for its new playout operation. The Marathi language broadcaster has built its system around Grass Valley’s iTX integrated playout platform, leveraging its flexibility and scalability to create a future-proof set-up that supports content delivery to linear and social media outlets. The Grass Valley workflow will also ensure greater efficiency across Lokshahi News’ 24/7 production process.

Owned by Lokshahi Media Group and launched in January 2020, Lokshahi News selected Grass Valley solutions for their proven future-ready capability, allowing the broadcaster to seamlessly manage multiple playout channels, across a range of platforms, as its service grows and evolves. The iTX platform delivers multi-resolution support, easily handling 4K, HD and SD, as well as the capability to simultaneously play out both IP and SDI. The Indian news channel has also deployed GV STRATUS for news production and content management, EDIUS for editing, Kula 2ME and Kula AV production switchers, the Masterpiece master control switcher, Kaleido Multiviewers and Densité 3+ FR4 Frame processing solutions.

Mr. Vijay Shekar, Editor-in-Chief and CEO at Lokshahi News commented: "With its end-to-end offering, Grass Valley meets expectations for an efficient, scalable and easy to manage workflow. The team truly understands our requirements for a future-ready news platform that supports both traditional and modern social media broadcasting. The GV STRATUS solution not only allows us to directly publish content and metadata to popular social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, it also keeps a track of those assets and their popularity on these platforms.”

GV STRATUS gives Lokshahi News fast turnaround from ingest to on-air, efficient asset management and the ability to live stream all ingest ports. The built-in Rules Engine allows the production team to easily manage content based on analytics, handling everything from deletion after a set period to social media delivery and archiving via one unified interface. Combined with iTX’s ease of use and scalability to spin up a channel in a matter of hours, the news broadcaster has a system in place that can support the needs of its continuously evolving business.

“Consumers no longer engage with news content in a purely linear way; with nearly half of the world’s population now using social media according to Statistica, these platforms are an increasingly important source of news. As a result, news broadcasters must ensure that their content is first to air as well as first to social platforms,” added Greg de Bressac, Grass Valley’s vice president sales, APAC. “Today’s newsroom has to be highly flexible and efficient to respond to the shifting consumer landscape. Our news customers need tools and technology that allow smart and agile ways of working and can support a wide and varied range of services. We are very proud that Lokshahi News has chosen to work with Grass Valley to build a news operation that can take them into the future.”