Grass Valley wishing to stress that a new era is upon us places emphasis on disruptive change and new business models.
Willy Shih |
Willy Shih - Executive Vice President/CTO Thomson & Co-Head Thomson Technology Division presented the background to the current market environment with multiple delivery channels.
He identified four factors related to the change being experienced:
Cheap processing power
The storage revolution
Equalising the experience
Democratising content creation
As result content security was identified as a key factor and an "area of intense research".
Throughout the event an open approach was stressed "We see the use of standard IT technology and advanced IP technology, together with data to overcome dictated formats"
Willy Shih contrasted the challenges of two years ago, namely making Digital Television happen, making HD a reality and the problems of limited Internet bandwidth with the new issues of today; Mobile Services and IP/IT everywhere.
"Today with mobility any time/any place is very quickly becoming a reality for entertainment and images".
Much of this it seems was intended to position Grass Valley as a different company when compared to the more traditional suppliers.
Marc Valentin |
Marc Valentin - President Grass Valley majored on the theme of Mobility. In order to emphasise the importance growth predictions of 100% per annum for the next several years were presented and it was claimed that Grass Valley, Thomson was "uniquely position" together with partners to achieve significant business volumes. Key technologies and services from Thomson are said to be available.
"For Thomson, Mobile Television is a very special segment. it happens that this opportunity is very neatly suited to the way Thomson has built itself." This includes a full suite of product and services for DVB-H content creation and delivery including SmartCast & SmartVision." Deployments are said to be both in place and in some cases underway with Qualcomm, MultiChoiice, Modeo and others generating an estimated 30 million Euros in 2006.
"This is already a big business and we believe by the way that we are far ahead of any competition in actually getting revenues from this".
Turning to IPTV Marc Valentin referenced Telefonica and a "Multi-million euro order for Grass Valley MPEG-4 ViBE enxcoding platforms"
Thomson have developed a "next generation" video signal processing chip design which it is claimed to achieve HD encoding at MPEG-4 bit rates as low as 4Mb/s. This chip will first appear in the Grass Valley ViBE HD MPEG-4 encoder but will appear across multiple products.
Jeff Rosica |
Finally Jeff Rossica - Vice President - Strategic Marketing & Business Development provided an update on the "Infinity" series of acquisition and playback devices. Ten "digital media" camcorders roamed the room apparently working although we were not shown any playback of the recorded video.
Openness with format and media choice were emphasised together with IT connectivity including camcorder direct PC filed based connection. "No other Camcorder we believe can do this no other camcorder comes close to this kind of IT version as does Infinity".
Recording Media include Compact Flash, USB and REVpro storage devices. Great emphasis was placed on the durability of the REVpro disks including a video depicting so called "torture tests" of extreme environments. New recording media drives can be added to enable the products to evolve with new tecgnologies.
Once again to emphasise the opennesness Jeff Rosica stated "We believe the Infinity concept will revolutionise our industry, we can't do that alone, in support of that, today we are announcing the open alliance partner program to move away from the dictated approach..."
A partnership with Avid was announced to integrate the Infinity series no details of what this means in detail were given. HP also will certify REVpro drives as workstation options with integrated REVpro drives for 3rd party developers.
No specific delivery dates or customers were announced but discussions after the event indicated first delieveries around June 2006.
In summary Grass Valley presented a compelling vision however details about how, when and to which companies this will be delivered remain scarce.
John Ive - 23/04/06
