Maximum Options with Minimal Effort

Grass Valley’s sales strategy for NAB 2011 is simple: offer more power and flexibility for less money. Product enhancements plus new tools like the STRATUS platform can streamline the entire production process. That includes everything from writing and recording right through multiplatform delivery and even client billing. Grass Valley’s STRATUS and MediaFUSE even integrate with third party hardware and content management tools. In this interview, Ed Casaccia director of product marketing and Scott Matics, MediaFUSE product manager, talk about the challenges and benefits of making production tools far more flexible — and cost-effective.

Despite the economy, stations continue to upgrade their production, especially news, to HD. How many stations have converted and where have you been most successful?

Casaccia: Of the eight hundred-some local television stations and networks that do news programming in the US, I would say that about thirty-five percent have converted. We've been very successful with both ends of the spectrum — with both large-market broadcasters like the ABC and CBS-owned stations and with smaller groups. Media General uses our technology in a large number of small stations mostly across the Southeast. So the scalability of our systems from large to small is really quite striking.

“Broadcasters now realize that just sending something to the transmitter is becoming less important every day.”
— Scott Matics

Originally, HD conversion was driven by picture quality. But Grass Valley’s focus has shifted towards automating and streamlining workflow.

Casaccia: Actually, the two things go hand in hand. The technology in networking and servers emerged at the same time. What Grass Valley provides is the piece in the middle that takes all those different sources of content and directs them to all those different destinations.

Matics: There's a lot of video production tools out there, but the question is, do they work well together? Do they provide an efficient means of getting content from ingest, through production, and out to delivery? Broadcasters now realize that just sending something to the transmitter is becoming less important every day. It's becoming much more important to support different destinations for the content. The challenge for a company like Grass Valley is to provide quality tools that can do all of these different things, and support all of these different content destinations.

Let’s talk about the front end of that process. What has Grass Valley done to enhance its production tools?

Matics: With Ignite and Media Fuse, we've added more flexibility and reliability. Instead of trying to add features that maybe didn't improve the workflow, we added more intelligent functionality to make the product work better in a very demanding environment. Ignite operators can make as many changes as they want with no worries about changing the (newscast) rundown. The Ignite operators and producers and recorders are continuously notified if a change might occur, but then they decide whether to accept those changes or not.

Is Ignite mainly designed to automate production in concert with Grass Valley’s switchers?

Matics: Yes, at NAB we’ll show Ignite running with Grass Valley's new Kayenne and Kayak switchers. But Ignite also works on existing Kayenne, Kayak, or Kalypso switchers. It's designed for one operator, or in some cases, two people.

And then MediaFUSE lets anyone on the production team deliver that video content where it needs to go.

Matics: We’re not just talking about video. It also delivers true multimedia content where you have textual stories, descriptive content, still images, in addition to video content that can be in many different formats. MediaFUSE offers two different interfaces. One is FusePRODUCE and it’s a control that comes up in the rundown. It supports both Avid I-News and ENPS. The other is FuseAPPROVE and that’s a Windows-based application that can manage multimedia from any workstation on your network.

So if I’m a producer, how does this make my job easier?

Matics: We're putting journalistic power back into the hands of the journalists and producers who probably know more about the content. But at the same time, we're providing a way for the web staff to maintain control over everything. For example, I can prep a weather segment so it’s packaged and on the web just as soon as it’s off the air. I just pre-select a photo of my weather person, add the key words, and mark it “pre-approve.” MediaFUSE reads that data from Ignite and transcodes that story into eight different formats and sends them out to my content management systems. Automatically!

What about content that shouldn’t or can’t go out automatically, such as licensed clips from the NFL or Major League Baseball?

Matics: Right. It’s important to embargo certain content. But many local broadcasters are so afraid of misusing licensed sports that they choose to just not do a live stream. But today, viewers expect that content online. MediaFUSE makes sure you send out only what you want to. MediaFUSE also lets you pre-select the right ads and promos for your commercial breaks and pre-rolls. Some broadcasters simply go to black or cut to a traffic cam during commercial breaks. That not only lets viewers wander off, but wastes potential revenue.

Can MediaFUSE also do some creative matchmaking between ad content and the audience?

Matics: Yes, the metadata you can add to the stories also enables the ad delivery systems to target the demographic most likely to be viewing that type of content.

This year at NAB, you’re also introducing a brand new platform called STRATUS. Why do we need a new platform?

“The big lesson that we have learned is that it is not our role to define the workflow. Our role is to enable the customers' workflow concepts.”
— Ed Casaccia

Casaccia: One big lesson we learned from our customers is that it’s not our role to define the workflow. The STRATUS platform has a flexible service-oriented architecture that supports any workflow strategy. It eliminates the need to buy one application to edit, another to search for files, one more to control servers and so on. Instead, you get one integrated set of tools that performs a huge range of tasks — all with a consistent user interface.

How big a range is that?

Casaccia: Because STRATUS tools can be configured to control almost any operation, there’s no longer any need for users to learn to operate each application from scratch. That's what we overcome with STRATUS. Because each configuration uses the same STRATUS interface, users are basically familiar with all of them. For years, everybody’s been trying to consolidate workflow from production through playback. STRATUS is the first product that promises to truly bring them together.

Why is it so important that the same platform used to create content also be able to deliver it to end users?

“Today broadcasts can be customized for the Internet, mobile TV, for use in taxi systems and maybe different types of digital signage.”
— Scott Matics

Casaccia: Because every day, it becomes more important for broadcasters to support different destinations for their content. Just sending something out to the transmitter is not enough. The challenge is how can you do that and still maintain a cost-efficient operation. There are entire news organizations that exist solely because file-based workflows control their operating costs. STRATUS is a step farther than anyone has gone before.

Matics: Our customers are also beginning to use different content management systems. We'll be releasing our Brightcove interface at NAB. Brightcove is really going after the broadcast industry for content management. Today a broadcaster’s staff is only able to get ten or fifteen stories a day on the website. Tools like STRATUS and MediaFUSE can increase that to fifty or sixty stories, with better formatting and metadata. The ability to constantly broaden and update your content not only drives traffic to your website, but you can automatically reformat it to all kinds of devices for a whole new audience.

When stations have these tools and can deliver all these extra stories, how much does it grow their web and mobile traffic?

Matics: Our customers don't like to make that data public, but if you look on a comparison search engine like compete.com, you’ll find that in many cases the stations using MediaFUSE have much more traffic on their sites than competing local stations. People get in the habit of visiting them more, because they're rewarded more often with new content.

TV news production is becoming increasingly field-centric with reporters shooting and editing live from the story. How has this trend influenced Grass Valley’s product line?

Casaccia: I worked for a legendary news director who walked into the newsroom one morning and said, “What are all these people doing here? There is no news going on in this newsroom!” You're going to see a continuing trend for solo journalists who are out where people are. Not just acquisition, but the production itself has been remoted. They're electronically connected and coordinated by the newsroom. That makes economic sense, and it also improves the product.

“We can now sell the equipment to create HD content for less than the cost of equivalent SD products three or four years ago.”
— Ed Casaccia

Most stations are still looking to cut costs, so why does Grass Valley see this as a smart time to upgrade facilities?

Casaccia: Because HD is rapidly becoming the standard in American households. The more time viewers spend watching HD, the more unacceptable the SD signal becomes. Plus, our business finally enjoys the benefits of Moore's Law and that’s really lowered the cost barrier to entry for HD production. We can now sell the equipment to create HD content for less than than the cost of equivalent SD products three or four years ago.

Matics: And by making those tools much easier to operate, we make it possible for people who aren’t the most technical to just create content. We get the equipment out of their way and allow them to just do their job. That’s an important part of what we do.