In Broadcast - CABSAT 2016 - 28


28

www.inbroadcast.com | CABSAT InShow Guide | 8 - 10 March 2016

Grass Valley Eases the
Transition to IP with
Advanced Solutions
Change is the nature of the broadcast industry, and Grass Valley can help you navigate the change...

B

roadcasters are undergoing a
significant workflow transition,
from the more traditional SDI (serial
digital interface) environment to one
that leverages the power of IP (internet
protocol), to increase speed, agility,
and flexibility. A number of other
industries have already undergone the
transition to IP, and Belden has played
a key role in many of those transitions.
Now, through solutions from Grass
Valley, a Belden Brand, broadcasters
are leveraging that expertise along
with a commitment to open standards,
to realise the many advantages of IP
technology.
Grass Valley's "Glass-to-Glass" IP
strategy delivers IP connectivity across
its entire product portfolio, making it
easier for customers to transition at
their own pace, and minimise costly
and unnecessary SDI-to-IP conversion
gear. By integrating standardised
SMPTE ST 2022-6 IP support into every
major product category, the company
enables customers to migrate to IP,
when it makes the most business
sense. Cameras, switchers, routers,
servers, replay, and multiviewers all
provide the ability to work in either
SMPTE ST 2022-6 IP-based or SDIbased environments. IP makes the
movement of content much more
efficient, provides broadcasters with
the agility they need to adapt quickly
as technologies improve, and the
flexibility to add new services to help
them win and retain viewers.

Grass Valley's GV Node
is key in Grass Valley's
Broadcast Data
Center model

IP technology is well established
and delivering benefits in a number
of other vertical industry applications,
including IT data centres. The
broadcast industry can benefit from
a model like this, one that relies on
the same scalability, load balancing,
use of commodity hardware, and
redundancy that make IT data centres
so ubiquitous, but adds vertically
accurate switching, low latency, and
the familiar workflows of broadcast.
Grass Valley's Broadcast Data Centre
is the solution to this requirement, and
it's a critical component of the Glassto-Glass IP Solution.
At the centre of Grass Valley's
Broadcast Data Center model are two
key products:
* The GV Convergent IP router
control and configuration system
transparently manages facility routing
as the industry migrates from SDI
to IP infrastructures, maintaining
familiar control interfaces, as well
as introducing intuitive new GUIs
for configuration, management, and
control through software defined
networking (SDN). GV
Convergent is both

GV Convergent is both infrastructure and signal format agnostic for easy system scalability

infrastructure and signal format
agnostic for easy system scalability,
and provides easy integration and
control of IP edge devices and thirdparty IP devices.
* GV Node allows broadcasters to
combine many of the advantages of
a data centre model with the specific
requirements of a live broadcast
production environment. It is a true
real-time IP processing and routing
platform,
offering
multipurpose
IP processing, IP aggregation, and
vertically accurate switching capability
for live applications. When GV Node
is combined with common off-theshelf (COTS) IP switches, extremely
large capacity routing systems can
be created with thousands of input
and output channels. GV Node is
designed to handle deterministic
vertically accurate switching within IP,
supporting open industry standards.
Grass Valley - Leading the Way
To ensure that broadcasters
have the flexibility to build an
infrastructure solution that is best
suited for their individual needs, Grass
Valley is leading the charge towards
interoperability and open standards in
the industry's IP transition.
An
open
standards
approach, with products
and solutions developed
to support these standards
and tested in real-world
environments, is critical
in
protecting
current
investments and ensuring
long-term interoperability.
For this reason, Grass Valley
joined other manufacturers
in the industry to form

the Alliance for IP Media Solutions
(AIMS), a non-profit trade organisation
dedicated to fostering the adoption of
industry standards for the broadcast
and media industry as it transitions
from SDI to IP.
Moving to IP will ultimately allow
a shift from dedicated broadcast
hardware to virtualised and cloudbased
infrastructures,
which
offer even greater infrastructure
flexibility and easier upgradability,
in turn creating a future-ready,
format-agnostic broadcast facility.
Traditionally, as video formats have
advanced to offer higher resolution or
more sophisticated audio, they have
required broadcasters to undertake
significant infrastructure rebuilds,
with associated costs and potential
disruption.
However,
because
Ethernet (IP) is format agnostic, it
allows a transition to next generation
formats - like 4K - without a major
infrastructure change.
With the agility of IP, broadcasters
will be set up to handle the growing
needs of their broadcast plant today
and, perhaps even more importantly,
their ability to continue expanding
easily in the future. It's this agility
through technology that makes IP
so appealing: high data rates, wide
bandwidth, and a system that's both
format agnostic and scalable for
whatever the future brings. Grass
Valley brings solutions to market that
help customers work more efficiently
while capitalising on the many
exciting growth opportunities on the
horizon. Change is the nature of the
broadcast industry, and Grass Valley
is the partner to help you navigate the
change.
http://www.inbroadcast.com
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