Arena Television Launches New 4K UHD Trucks with All-IP Infrastructure from Grass Valley

Arena Television, is making the move to 4K UHD and embracing developments in IP-based video production with its three new trucks that will be rolling out over the next year. To realize this vision, Arena turned to Grass Valley.

Arena is one of the first OB companies in Europe to embrace 4K UHD production based on a groundbreaking IP infrastructure, in a broadcast truck. Grass Valley will supply the key product solutions in the three planned trucks, OBX, OBY and OBZ. OBX is the first truck to be equipped with this new technology. The second truck, OBY, is due later in 2016 and OBZ will follow in 2017. Arena is working closely with systems integrator Videlio to design and outfit the trucks.

The first of the new fleet, OBX, is designed to support 32 camera productions and utilize end-to-end IP connectivity. The design is based around a Cisco IP switch, of which the core infrastructure is fiber, running 10GigE and where enabled, 40GigE. The architecture provides the ultimate production flexibility where existing baseband systems can seamlessly integrate with the new IP-enabled workflows. In addition, OBX is fully future-ready, allowing the adoption of greater network speeds as they become available.

Latency and timing are critical in live productions and Grass Valley’s awareness of the end-to-end production requirements, careful system design, adoption of technologies, and targeted research and development in products such as GV node for low latency and vertically accurate switching, contribute to this fleet of cutting-edge OB trucks and give Arena clients the production facilities they demand today, with flexibility to develop their productions in the future.