NAB 2009: Grass Valley: Business As Usual
Sale pending, Thomson subsidiary continues to launch products, net contracts
By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 4/19/2009 11:31:06 AM
Click here for complete coverage of the 2009 NAB Show
VIDEO: Watch a Q&A With Grass Valley's Jeff Rosica
Las Vegas -- Grass Valley celebrated its 50th anniversary at the 2009 NAB Show in Las Vegas by launching a high-end production switcher, Kayenne, announcing a number of major international orders, and proclaiming that it was confident of its future prospects despite parent company Thomson's decision to sell the business.
Since Thomson announced in late January that it would divest Grass Valley, speculation has run rampant over who might acquire the company, which makes switchers, cameras, routers, servers and editing equipment used by some of the world's biggest broadcasters. Broadcast conglomerate Harris has been named as the most likely suspect by industry prognosticators simply because they could likely afford it, though much of Harris' product line overlaps with Grass Valley's.
Grass Valley SVP Jeff Rosica, speaking at the company's annual press event, said that the Thomson "was right in the middle of the process today" and had received several "serious inquiries". He stressed that Grass Valley's product development plans were unaffected by the sale process and that customers were still continuing to place large orders, such as recent sales of K2 video servers to NBC and Fox. He described that as a vote of confidence in the business' future, and noted that in its 50-year run Grass Valley has experienced multiple changes in ownership.
"We will still be the same Grass Valley," said Rosica. "That continuity is very important to our customers."
Grass Valley's biggest product introduction for NAB 2009 is the Kayenne switcher, which the company has dubbed a "video production center" because of its range of features. Rosica described it as the "world's most powerful production switcher".
Designed for use in mobile production trucks and other high-pressure live environments, Kayenne provides six keyers per M/E (mix/effect), and with frames available from 1.5 M/E to 4.5 M/E, can provide up to a whopping 30 keyers, and 20 channels of digital video effects (DVE). The switcher supports 96 inputs and 48 outputs in a single frame, provides internal up- and down-conversion, features a modular control panel with customizable RGB buttons, and its processing units fit in an 8 rack unit (RU) frame to take up less space in a production truck.
On the news production front, Grass Valley introduced a new version of its Edius nonlinear editing product and a conform/render server, the Edius XRE, designed to speed the editing workflow. Perhaps more important, the company also announced a new level of integration with Apple's Final Cut Studio editing software that will let Final Cut Pro editing customers use Grass Valley K2 servers as a storage area network (SAN) and edit clips directly from a K2 server, with no transfer or transcode needed.
"You can be editing seconds after ingest begins, which is vital for news and sports," said Rosica.
After announcing a sale of its Infinity tapeless camcorder to local Las Vegas station and NBC affiliate KVBC last year, Grass Valley hasn't netted any more deals for the camcorder with U.S. news customers, though Indiana PBS station WFYI is using it for documentary production. Rosica said that the overall economic slowdown impacting U.S. broadcasters has slowed adoption of the Infinity camcorder here, though he noted that Grass Valley has netted sales internationally for the product, including news operations like TV Morena and TV Liberal in Brazil.
On the transmission front, Grass Valley introduced a new MPEG-4 AVC 4:2:2, low-latency version of its Vibe encoder, the EM3100, designed to provide high-quality sports and news backhauls at bitrates of 30 megabits per second (Mbps) or less. It is also demonstrating here at NAB a prototype mobile DTV transmission system based on the ATSC-Mobile/Handheld candidate standard comprised of a new software module for its digital transmitter exciters, Vibe low-bit rate encoding, the NetProcessor 9030 multiplexer, and the Grass Valley Jade electronic service guide generator.
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