IBC 2015: Data centres will play a crucial role in allowing broadcasters to respond more quickly to changing market dynamics, according to Grass Valley.

Speaking at the unveiling of the company’s GV Node processing platform at IBC today, Grass Valley vice president of infrastructure products Mark Hilton (pictured) said that the shift to IP-based infrastructure was the “first critical step to getting to flexible, agile data centre-like environments that we see in many other industries”.

He said that companies such as Google, Netflix and Hulu were able to take advantage of distributed data centre architecture to get new products to market quickly.

“Data centres provide the ability to spin up new applications, channels or capability that the market requires that in today’s environment can take months or even years,” Hilton said.

The broadcast industry’s requirements of high and persistent bandwidth and its sensitivity to latency had been impediments to the industry’s use of data centres, he added.

Hilton described GV Node as “one of the first products that will provide the capability that we feel is necessary for a broadcast data centre…we gave it the name ‘node’ because it can be a component of a larger distributed fabric – it can work alone or collaborate with other products.”

GV Node, which has been designed to operate as the main source of switching in live production, offers “video and audio processing, vertically accurate switching and IP aggregation”.  

According to the manufacturer, users may choose to operate GV Node alongside commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) IP switches.

It offers multiple signal processing and monitoring functions and provides IP and SDI I/O as well as MADI I/O, audio de-embedding/embedding and monitoring and supports SMPTE 2022-6 video-over-IP and 4K 1-wire using TICO compression.

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