360 seconds. News & Commentary — Weekly program. The main news for broadcasters.

Hosts

Philip Grossman, Film and Television Industry Veteran and Technology Consultant, Mary Ann Seidler, First Light Broadcast.

Presenter

Maria Kholodova, TKT1957.

Program Topic

• Grass Valley: The free playout

Maria Kholodova: We are glad to have you here Philip. I believe you won a couple of awards at the recent NAB. Can you tell us more about that?

Philip Grossman: I’m very excited to announce that I was involved with the winning of two awards. One was with Production Hub product of the year which is for our B4 to RF mount which allows for broadcast cameras to be utilized on a RED camera while displacing the need for new lenses. This opens up a large window of the capability to live broadcasters, sports, and networks that use cinema cameras. The other award was for my work with a company called DigitalGlue and their creative.spaceon-premise managed storage which won NAB’s storage product of the year. I am very excited about that and I look forward to continuing working with them.

Maria Kholodova: Thank you for being here Mary. What can you tell us about your experience at the NAB?

Mary Ann Seidler: It was surprisingly good. I talked to the NAB officials and they told me something that we all kind of knew inherently: which was that people decided to go to the show in the last week. For example, I had dinner with a client, and originally, it was supposed to be the client but he eventually brought five engineers. I think that was very indicative. I was surprised, happily, to see that there were a fair number of international visitors, most of them coming from Latin America and we also had some coming from Europe, which was unanticipated for a pandemic year. It was a good show and there was so much excitement going on. I must say that I’ve missed the NAB show. Philip, I assume you probably saw the same thing?

Philip Grossman: Yes. I was excited to see the turn-out. I’d say we were probably 40-50% of the capacity that we normally have, but I must say it was very targeted. The people that came, came for information. I know this from the several booths that I visited and the ones I was participating with, the customers were very interested in the products so there wasn’t a lot of window shopping which was great. I was glad to see that those who wanted to wear masks did so and others who didn’t were allowed to do so too, everybody got along, there was handshaking and hugging and it was great to see everybody again. Also, the available new products were pretty amazing.

Mary Ann Seidler: I spent a lot of my time in West Hall and that was an interesting conglomeration of different types of companies. Did you notice that there were so many new companies present, that were not in the last NAB?

Philip Grossman: Yes. There were a lot of new companies. I spent most of my time in Central and North, a little bit in West, I think the new layout is more interesting. Some companies like Canon had the same giant booths while other smaller companies like you mentioned had smaller booths which I think made it a better show because there were newer companies I had never seen before with new interesting products. I imagine that the theme had to have been “Virtual Production” because it seemed that every single booth had a virtual production wall.

Mary Ann Seidler: Absolutely. And of course, storage. If you wanted to get people to your booth, all you needed to do was say “cloud storage” “virtualization” or “virtual cloud storage.”

Maria Kholodova: I also wanted to ask you about Grass Valley, their free playout, the core AMPP playout functionality is going to be available for free to customers from June 1st. The move builds on the GV media using an ecosystem that allows media companies to use on-premise cloud or hybrid to build live production environments. Philip, how do you think the broadcasters are going to benefit from this?

Philip Grossman: It’s interesting. I’ve been working a little bit with Grass valley over the last three weeks around their product set and getting an understanding with some of my customers. Interestingly, they are offering this component as free, now we have to understand that the free component cannot operate by itself but it’s nice to see that they are reducing the cost as you move to the cloud. In general, the cloud, though convenient, it’s never cheap so you just have to look at what your price of convenience is and this, to some extent will lower that price to your convenience. It’s fascinating to see that more companies are moving to the cloud because they do have the hybrid solution (though I believe «fully integrated» is a better term) which works both on-premise as well as in the cloud which I think is a good strategy.

Maria Kholodova: Have you noticed that many companies are making this kind of solutions more accessible, cheaper, or free?

Philip Grossman: Yes. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of push to go to the cloud and obviously by making certain components free or cheaper, they’ve undoubtedly maximized their investment in that piece. Similar to the joke “the first hit is free.” I think that’s what they are doing here by getting people involved. I think a lot of these cloud-based solutions are all-encompassing, it quite different from the old paradigm of separate playouts, separate automation, and separate elements, they now have it all-in-one.

Maria Kholodova: Many thanks to our experts Mary and Philip. We hope to see you on our next segment.

The live broadcast took place on May 2, 2022. Production — TKT Media Group.