Glass-to-glass from Grass Valley and Irdeto
April 14, 2011
By Colin Mann
Broadcast and professional video specialist Grass Valley has partnered with global software security and media technology company Irdeto to enable broadcasters and other owners of live and pre-recorded content to more easily and efficiently manage and distribute that content to any Internet-connected device.
By combining the power of Grass Valley’s MediaFUSE automated content repurposing and multi-distribution system with the flexibility of Irdeto’s Broadband solution, broadcasters and other content providers can save significant time and money throughout the entire process of ingesting, enhancing, organising, and publishing live content to a multitude of stationary and portable devices, while ensuring a consistently high-quality viewer experience.
The solution also provides immediate access to highlights, replays, and other pre-recorded content, which can be packaged into new media offerings to attract new audiences and revenues.
“By partnering with Grass Valley, we are able to arm broadcasters with a solution that can quickly and easily monetise their media assets and extend their brand proposition across an increasingly fragmented and demanding audience,” said David Canellos, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Irdeto. “We look forward to working with Grass Valley to replace inefficient and outdated distribution processes with a solution that not only generates five times more content but also streamlines processes, plugging easily into a broadcaster’s existing infrastructure.”
The pair say that with content delivery beyond the TV screen becoming an increasing necessity for broadcasters, the combined solution helps to enable the transition from broadcasters being “just a TV station” to becoming a powerful media outlet for the 21st century. File delivery to content delivery networks, integration with traffic and archive systems, digital rights management (DRM), and encrypted content delivery are simplified with this joint offering.
“Users of our Ignite scalable automated production system are already familiar with MediaFUSE’s ability for live streaming, metadata entry, on-demand encoding, and automated content replacement,” said Scott Murray, Senior Vice President of Live Production Solutions at Grass Valley. “What this combined solution brings to a media operation is a complete, multi-distribution content management system to help broadcasters and other content providers better compete on all screen types, not just the TV sitting in the living room.”
The combined solution is turnkey, allowing integrated distribution of live content from a content provider’s existing production infrastructure. There is no additional integration required and the solution scales as users build out their broadband offerings in order to fully monetise their assets.
Current Grass Valley MediaFUSE users can easily upgrade to the combined Grass Valley/Irdeto solution to create a one-stop solution to feed any multiscreen service with a rich set of plug-ins to support a wide range of file transfer protocols.
The combined solution, announced at NAB in Las Vegas, is competitively priced for broadcasters and other content providers to implement, based upon their own special requirements. The combined solution will first be made available in North America, rolling out worldwide throughout 2011.