With London Games on Horizon, Russia’s NTV-PLUS turns to Grass Valley

In order to support its coverage of several major sporting events in London this Summer, Russian satellite broadcaster NTV-PLUS has worked with Grass Valley to build a complete integrated production infrastructure based on the Grass Valley STRATUS Media Workflow Application Framework to control content workflows around server networks and editing facilities.

As the Russian broadcast rights holder for both the Wimbledon tennis tournament and for the upcoming international games in London, NTV-PLUS had two goals for this project. First, the system needed to be fast, flexible, completely reliable, and capable of being repurposed after the summer for maximum ROI. Second, the system had to fully integrate with its existing Grass Valley EDIUS nonlinear editing workstations and its Arendo MAM.

“We looked at a number of solutions, and the Grass Valley STRATUS service oriented architecture stood out as the best option to provide the workflow we needed, both in London and at home,” says Oleg Kolesnikov, CTO at NTV-PLUS. “By leveraging our current EDIUS NLEs with a new K2 SAN for recording and playout, all under GV STRATUS, we knew that we could achieve the right performance and resilience within a tight timescale for this high pressure, mission critical system.”

The system supports 13 GV STRATUS workstations for viewing and simple editing by the large number of editorial staff, along with five Grass Valley EDIUS craft editors attached to the SAN. The tightly integrated solution, using all Grass Valley components and workflows, is cost-effective without the usual integration risks because there are no interface points of failure.

“The audience expectations from major sporting events are set very high,” says Alan Wright, SVP, Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Grass Valley. “They expect detailed coverage of every game and every event. There is no time to wrestle with complex technology and no chance of going back to reshoot something: the workflow has to be as efficient as possible, the user interface has to be completely intuitive, and the underlying hardware must be perfectly reliable. Only Grass Valley can deliver on all three, and we are excited to be working with NTV-PLUS on these great sporting events.”

Grass Valley operations in Russia and other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) locations teamed up with a local systems integrator to design this fully Grass Valley system for NTV-PLUS.