The new Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, and the latest addition to the Belden Inc. portfolio of best-in-class communications technology brands, is featuring GV STRATUS Playout at Broadcast Asia 2014.
GV STRATUS Playout is a truly groundbreaking playout technology that combines the efficiency and flexibility of cloud computing with the performance and reliability of an on-site solid-state playout server—all on a single card. This cloud-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) technology enables facilities to regionalize channel content and begin playout in minutes.
“This ingenious approach to playout is unprecedented, and we believe it is the future of rapid deployment playout in our industry,” said Stephen Wong, senior vice president, Asia Pacific, Grass Valley. “GV STRATUS Playout simplifies playout control enabling new revenue generating business models while lowering operational costs.”
GV STRATUS Playout works with Grass Valley’s Densité SSP-3801 solid-state playout card, which enables broadcasters to leverage the immense flexibility of the cloud-enabled playout control system with the security of housing all media content on-site. Using high-grade media storage, the module is easily configured and installed. The card sits at the edge of any network where it provides frame-accurate playback and displays still and animated logos and high-quality pre-rendered graphics.
Wong added that “because GV STRATUS Playout is a solid-state, stand-alone card, there are no moving parts to wear out. This not only makes it very attractive in terms of long-term performance, it is also highly resilient to network outages. The card stores 24 hours of playlists and will continue with uninterrupted playout, automatically update itself once network connectivity is restored.”
In vastly diverse cultural regions such as Asia-Pacific, regionalization, localization and even hyper-localization is seen by many as the holy grail of playout. All of these are easily achieved with GV STRATUS Playout, not just for commercials, but for specialized promotions and long-form programming to cover blackouts. With GV STRATUS Playout, cost-prohibitive dependence on satellite bandwidth and audience specific complex playout systems are no longer concerns.
GV STRATUS Playout makes use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud “platform-as-a-service,” which is hosted in Microsoft Data Centres, and is vastly superior in terms of performance, resilience and scalability to anything that could be economically viable within a broadcast facility.
All GV STRATUS Playout metadata is stored within the local Microsoft Data Centre and automatically synchronized to a geo-redundant data center—making data supremely redundant and unassailable.
“There is simply no more compelling playout solution on the market today," said Wong.
