Grass Valley servers power Eredivisie Live
Netherlands: Football specialist, Eredivisie Live, migrated to high definition for the beginning of the 2010/11 season with a playout centre based around Grass Valley K2 Summit media servers.
The channel – which started after winning the rights to the Eredivisie, the Dutch Premier League, in 2008 – is hosted by Technicolor at its Media Park in Hilversum.
The decision to move to HD was made in 2010 and Technicolor built a new multichannel playout suite, based around the Grass Valley K2 media server using K2 Summit production clients. The backbone has three K2 Summit production clients and provides 12 channels total configured as five ingest and seven playout channels all connected into a redundant K2 SAN, with a dedicated FTP server with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet interface.
“We chose K2 Summit servers because of their extraordinary multiformat capabilities,” said Alex Vermeulen, senior systems engineer for systems integrator and Grass Valley reseller D&MS. “Whether the need is for live HD ingested on game day, library archives of games played five years ago or for games yet to be played, the format of the footage is of no concern for us. A single K2 Summit can handle clips in any format including 3D, recognising its native format and making the necessary changes, including aspect ratio conversion.”
“We like the K2 Summit because it is a very reliable piece of machinery representing excellent value for money,” said Jurriaan Wittenberg, systems architect at Technicolor, Netherlands. “We already use the K2 Summit in the multi-channel playout suite we run on behalf of Dutch public broadcaster NPO. It has proved itself in scalability, flexibility, and file handling.”