Grass Valley turns up the power of cloud production with GV AMPP

At its GV LIVE Presents — Innovate 2020 event on April 23, Grass Valley launched its new cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) Agile Media Processing Platform (GV AMPP). This game-changing solution unlocks the power of elastic compute for live sports, news, and playout workflows, helping customers easily transition to the future-ready public, data center or hybrid infrastructures.

The first application available for the platform, AMPP Master Control, has been on air with Blizzard since the opening of the Overwatch League 2020 season in early February. In response to the COVID-19 crisis and building off this solution set, AMPP has been an essential system enabling the esports leader to keep its Overwatch LeagueTM and Call of Duty® LeagueTM matches live since March 28, enabling truly distributed remote production with all operators and talent working from their homes.

“Our leagues rely on cloud infrastructure to produce live, multi-language broadcasts for global audiences,” said Pete Emminger, vice president of global broadcast at Blizzard Entertainment. “As a launch customer for Grass Valley, the Overwatch League has been using AMPP since the start of the 2020 season. AMPP provides an incredible value as it furthers our cloud capability and empowers our remote broadcast setup, allowing us to remain flexible even in the face of a global health pandemic.”

With AMPP Master Control, Activision Blizzard Esports’ production teams can create highly configurable “virtual” master control rooms accessible from anywhere in the world and eliminate the need for a conventional equipment room. Multiple distribution streams with separate graphics and languages for each audience region can be produced by a single operator — all from one web-based interface and equipped with only PCs, screens, and a connection to the cloud. All monitoring and local program distribution processes take place entirely in the cloud.

GV AMPP allows production teams to flexibly create customizable workflows, with a variety of apps such as multiviewers, router panels, test signal generators, switchers, graphics renderers, clip players and recorders — all of which can quickly be deployed to support a wide range of workflows. Built on a unique microservices architecture based on five core technologies — fabric, timing, connectivity, identity, and streaming, GV AMPP truly enables elastic media services and directly addresses many of the issues that complicate common IP and cloud deployments, delivering seamless network connectivity, timing and ultra-low latency.

GV AMPP is the core technology powering the newly announced GV Media Universe, a comprehensive ecosystem of cloud-based tools and services that revolutionizes the way live media is produced. The GV AMPP platform is cloud native and cloud-agnostic, while supporting the processing of video/audio both in the public cloud, in a private, on-premise data center, or in hybrid topologies. This flexibility and power will bring about a significant paradigm shift in live content production, allowing shows to be produced from any location.

Tim Shoulders, Grass Valley’s president, commented: “”The ability to adapt their content and delivery models to changing consumer habits is critical to the success of our customers’ businesses. With GV AMPP, we’re delivering a simple way to unlock flexible production workflows where cost and features scale up or down as needed. Our work with Activision Blizzard Esports is a perfect example of how this technology allows live content producers to leverage a new level of agility and flexibility; we’re delighted they have chosen GV AMPP to produce their tournaments. We’re also thrilled that they are leaning on Grass Valley as they expand their production capability across their legendary portfolio of properties during these challenging times.” BCS Bureau