Jeff Rosica
Q. What kind of products or services does your company offer for broadcasters?
Grass Valley manufactures and supports a wide variety of key products for broadcasters and high-end content producers. These include standard-speed and Super Slo-Mo cameras; production switchers; automated production tools; automated content repurposing tools; editing systems for craft and news, servers for ingest, playback, replay and transmission; routing, infrastructure and modular products; converters; and IP distribution systems. Recent product introductions include the Kayenne Video Production Center, K2 Dyno Replay System, LDK 8000 Elite cameras, and MediaFUSE to help broadcasters automatically repurpose their content for Web, mobile, and other non-broadcast delivery opportunities. As well, Grass Valley offers a comprehensive services portfolio which offers a complete range of cost-effective support solutions including commissioning, training, technical support, service agreements and remote monitoring. Standard packages are available as well as customized programs for large and/or complex service level agreement programs. With skilled broadcast engineers in more than 20 countries and local infrastructure in every major region, Grass Valley delivers the industry’s leading customer support and professional services offering.
Q. What’s new that you will you show at the NAB Show and that TV broadcasters should look for there?
While I don’t want to give away all of the new products and solutions that Grass Valley will be showing at NAB, I will say that we are planning to have a number of products with major enhancements introduced in Las Vegas. Specifically, for broadcasters, we will have a new version release for the Ignite Automated Production System with features requested by users, especially for those producing news. New at NAB will also be key feature enhancements to our MediaFUSE content repurposing system to further assist broadcasters in repurposing their content for Web, mobile and other alternative delivery methods. We will be showing our Kayenne Video Production Center working tightly with our LDK 8000 cameras and demonstrating the switcher controlling key functions on the cameras to allow for creative changes (such as star or soft filters moving in or out) to be linked directly to the switcher time line as well as to make simple level changes as needed. Look for some big news around our very successful K2 Dyno replay product,as well as our K2 Summit server, and the Trinix NXT video routing system. The NAB introduction of EDIUS 6 for craft editing and key updates to MEDIAEDGE that make it the perfect product for in-house distribution and off-air monitoring and recording. If you’re a broadcaster or content producer I invite you to come by the Grass Valley booth and see how we can really help to make your business more efficient, as well as providing a better and more consistent product to your viewers.
Q. How is your new product offering different from what’s available on the market?
In addition to working on making all of our user interfaces faster and more intuitive for the operators, one of our mandates at Grass Valley is to continue bringing all of our products together to enhance each product's functionality when paired with other Grass Valley products. An example pointed out earlier is the Kayenne switcher controlling our cameras. In addition, Kayenne is capable of a tighter integration with our K2 Summit and K2 Solo servers, as well as with our Trinix NXT and GeckoFlex systems. We like to think of this as 1+1 = 3. It’s an unfair advantage when placed in the broadcasters hands. Specifically, we can talk about new enhancements to Ignite, our automated production system. Once installed into a broadcast facility, Ignite allows an almost unheard of level of production automation and control providing the opportunity for broadcasters to easily add new news shows to provide new revenue streams for better bottom line performance. Many of our new products and product enhancements are also allowing content producers that are on a limited budget to get an unheard of level of production quality not previously available at this price point.
Q. How has your company been affected by the current economic situation and what are you doing to get through it?
Grass Valley, like most companies, definitely had some economic and business challenges due to the recent economic situation. In addition to these external forces, Grass Valley was also put up for sale by our former parent company and had to work through 18 months of a few customers feeling uncertain about our future. As of January 1, 2011 the Grass Valley purchase by technology group Francisco Partners is complete and we are once again an independent company and doing very well. Our H2 in 2010 was much better than our projections and expectations and we have returned to being a profitable company and expect that to continue into the foreseeable future.
Q. Where are you based, and how many employees do you have? Anything else we should know about your company?
Our corporate headquarters is now in San Francisco, while our factories and design centers are still located in Nevada City, California; Beaverton, Oregon; Woburn, Massachusetts; Salt Lake City, Utah; Kobe, Japan; and Breda, The Netherlands. Our sales offices are located throughout the world in most of the top business centers in each country. Today we are over 1,000 employees strong, and our focus is on designing and manufacturing products that help our customers to become more efficient in their current processes, as well as working together with them to bring products to market that will help them to grow and enhance their revenues as well.
