ADVERTORIAL
AMPING UP CLOUD-BASED PRODUCTION WITH GV AMPP
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he way consumers engage with content is shifting faster than ever before, leaving the television industry playing catch up. Broadcasters, production companies and content producers are also seeing the complexities in production and distribution soaring. The industry now needs bolder innovations to keep up with the growing number of platforms, devices, markets, audiences and versions of content. We live in the age of media choice and that makes producing programmes of all types – especially live TV – more challenging than ever. The need for flexibility and scalability has been further highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic, accelerating the trend towards cloud-based infrastructures that support the creation of dynamic content across multiple platforms. Grass Valley had already been anticipating this shift to distributed cloud production before the pandemic hit, while customers across the board were increasingly looking for greater efficiency and flexibility through remote broadcast setups and customisable workflows. Grass Valley released GV AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform) in 2020, a cloud-native, cloudagnostic solution which can be operated on-premise, private cloud, or in the public cloud, ensuring a smooth transition from hardware to software. The platform’s foundation is based on five core technologies – fabric, timing, connectivity, identity, and streaming – the key to elastic media services. GV AMPP is a game-changing platform, giving customers the flexibility to spin up or spin down applications as needed – only paying for the services they use – even in live production environments. This solution unlocks the power of elastic compute for live sports, news, and playout workflows, helping customers easily transition to public, data centre or hybrid infrastructures that are future-ready with nothing more than a web-based interface. Built on an unique microservices architecture, GV AMPP also solves many of the issues that can complicate IP and cloud deployments; such as network connectivity, timing, and ultra-low latency. Discovery’s leading multi-sports brand, Eurosport, recently chose GV AMPP Playout, Grass Valley’s newly launched
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application suite for its Agile Media Processing Platform, as part of a major technology transformation to provide ‘true cloud’ architecture supporting playout across the network’s sports broadcasts. The project is part of a wider technology transformation Eurosport has been undertaking, including utilising cloud and remote technology within a unified production ecosystem to allow it to create and distribute world-class content onto any platform, from anywhere in the world. The cloud allows services providers to keep pace with their core audience demands and spin services down as fast as they are spun-up. Los Angeles-based live entertainment and media company De Tune also deployed GV AMPP Master Control to support completely virtual live event broadcasts. The De Tune team used GV AMPP Master Control to create a master control room (MCR) in the cloud with full redundancy, accessible anywhere globally to support a series of online events for the creative agency Public School. Production staff, located in their homes, with no on-site tech support, handled three-hour-long events, featuring 40 presenters worldwide and delivered to six countries across EMEA, the Americas, and Asia. Other broadcasters are using the flexibility of AMPP’s microservices to solve a variety of use cases around remote production. For example, using AMPP’s low latency monitoring technology to bring all of the multiviewer heads from outside broadcast trucks back to production staff working from home. GV AMPP is central to the GV Media Universe, Grass Valley’s vision for an entirely software and cloud-based media future. GV Media Universe is a comprehensive ecosystem of cloud-based tools and services interconnected with a range of existing Grass Valley solutions from all areas of the portfolio, including playout, editing, and replay. The cloud brings significant benefits to the media industry, such as cost savings, agility, and scalability. It enables businesses to experiment creatively while providing efficient and scalable workflows for now and the future. We’re excited that GV AMPP is leading the way in unlocking these flexible production workflows and allows customers to be prepared for change as the media industry continues to evolve. n