Grass Valley IP Solutions Give Gravity Media a Smart, Flexible Live Production Infrastructure for Major Sporting Events

Grass Valley’s IP solutions have been selected by Gravity Media to form an open standards-based IP core built – together with Cisco Nexus 9000 IP switches – as part of an upgrade to its live production capability. The deployment includes Grass Valley UCP-25/50 Gateway cards and MV-821-IP multiviewers as part of a wider roadmap to full IP migration by the global provider of complex live broadcast facilities and production services to content owners, creators and distributors. The system was deployed at the UEFA Europa League final in Baku, Azerbaijan on 29^th May, 2019 and also formed the heart of the live production environment at the UEFA Champions League final in Madrid on 1^stJune, 2019.  It was more recently used for the core of a Grand Slam tennis tournament.

As consumer demands for captivating viewing experiences place pressure on existing baseband environments, Grass Valley’s advanced IP solutions help customers transition to flexible, scalable infrastructures and smart, agile workflows. To evolve its live production capability, Gravity Media began migrating towards a live IP-based production environment at a major sporting event in Australia in January 2019, making use of Grass Valley IP multiviewers to handle its monitoring requirements. The new Grass Valley IP core enables Gravity Media to leverage a powerful, future-proofed production environment that is agnostic to evolving production needs and can adapt rapidly – even during an event.

“By taking an IP-based approach we have been able to vastly simplify 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,” explained Ed Tischler, acting managing director for the UK at Gravity Media. “As the frontrunner in the industry transition to IP, Grass Valley has the best pedigree, delivering the most accomplished solutions on the market. Their monitoring system is second to none and unlike solutions from other vendors – which require a lot of time spent in set up – with Grass Valley everything just works out of the box.”

The inherently flexible nature of IP means Gravity Media can easily scale the system up or down to meet the requirements of a wide range of live events. The open standards-based approach allows the broadcast services provider to seamlessly add IP elements to the live production environment, selecting best-of-breed systems as more vendors roll out solutions based on SPMTE ST2110.

“As consumers demand stunning images and captivating viewing experiences across a wide range of platforms, agility and adaptability are central to helping our customers take on the challenges of a rapidly evolving market,” said Mark Hilton, vice president, live production at Grass Valley. “As the vendor with the most deployments for open standards-based IP solutions, we deliver reliable, field-proven solutions that draw on our unmatched experience and expertise in live production. We have been working closely with Gravity Media for many years and are very proud that the company has turned to us again for this crucial migration to an IP-centric production model.”