McGraw-Hill Broadcasting Co. will purchase Grass Valley digital production gear to centralize the news operations of four of its ABC affiliates in a deal worth $3.2 million.
The move is part of McGraw-Hill's plan to streamline its news program production via a tapeless and shared digital environment.
McGraw-Hill's Indianapolis station, WRTV-TV, will be the first to install Grass Valley's DNPS system, comprising 10 NewsEdit nonlinear editing systems, three PVS 1100 Profile XP servers, a FeedClip interactive feed capture system, a NewsBrowse Web-based browser/editor and a complete gigabit Ethernet-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) system.
Ron Jennings, McGraw-Hill Broadcast Group's director of engineering said he hopes the stations will quickly realize efficiency gains from the new DNPS equipment. He cited as an example the graphical interface of the NewsEdit systems, which closely replicates the machine-to-machine editing functions already familiar to the McGraw-Hill newsroom staff. He also noted that integration of the new servers should be relatively easy since its newsrooms have a large number of Profiles already installed.
