Grass Valley’s Sydney Lovely on the cloud, AI and the road ahead – NewscastStudio

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Grass Valleys 2022 NAB Show push is focused on transformation, showcasing how broadcasters can embrace the cloud and what it can enable.

With this in mind, we recentlyspoke with Sydney Lovely, Grass Valleys CTO, about cloud production the continued expansion of the AMPP ecosystem and new technologies impacting broadcasters like AI and machine learning.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

From my perspective, running R&D globally, about 70 to 80% of our engineering resources are software engineering and have been for quite some time. And even products like our iconic production switchers theyre a complex beast with five million lines of code. So were not really new to the software game.

Were still in reasonably early days in cloud adoption. And the way I would think about it is that technology falls into three main buckets. The first is the hardware-defined technology, like our production switcher is a good example of that, with complex software under the hood but people consume it through the form of hardware. The middle bucket would be products that are more software-based, and people have consumed in a traditional software way through on-prem servers or virtual machines. And those would be products like our playout systems or our MAM system, Stratus.And then the new third bucket is elastic or cloud computing capabilities. What weve seen is that over the last couple of years, those products that were traditional software solutions are moving pretty rapidly to the cloud, things like traditional playout systems.

The things that are going to the cloud sooner are some of these derivative content or streaming channels, etc.

In the past, our customers had to stand up totally different solutions for their digital and streaming channels than theyve had to do for their live production environment. As you can imagine, thats a real hassle for them. So being able to do that in a more joined-up manner is really helpful to them.

If you look at one of the biggest drivers of cloud computing economically elasticity.

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If Im doing something only two hours a day, those types of things really shine in the cloud because you can spin it up, you pay for what youre using and then you shut it down.

And the areas that are always on are less economically interesting. However, the juxtaposition here is that the technical difficulty of playout is by far the easiest and live production is by far the hardest. So thats one of the reasons that this whole industry hasnt really moved to the cloud faster than it has.

With our Grass Valley Media Universe approach, we said, we have to solve the live problem first. And if we solve the live problem first, everything else should be downhill from there.

We started with that live space and then just recently weve released an entirely new application suite around playout that lets customers deliver channels to air, brand them, subtitle them, monetize them with traffic, and so on.

Weve also released our production application suite, with a native HTML editor, a fully elastic ingest service, etc.

Weve really completed the core of the Grass Valley applications. Of course, well continue to add applications to the ecosystem and enhance those applications, but at this point, you can build an entire TV station in the cloud based on the Grass Valley AMPP solution.

If you look at our customers, theyre under a lot of pressure due to digital disruption and the democratization of video in general.

They need things to be simpler and easier. So you used to have many, many, many, many different best-of-breed steps in creating a media supply chain, and each one of those things required specialized expertise on the part of the customer and the vendor community to pull all this stuff together.

Were trying to really streamline this and make it far easier, so it really boils down to a simpler workflow for them.

At this point, its probably less about building it all ourselves or buying it. Its probably more focused on the partner side.

Weve spent five years building a true cloud-native microservices platform. And a lot of the partners weve talked to, theres just no way they can get there on their own. But our customers need those types of solutions to be available in the cloud.

I think Andrews experience with building out those ecosystems is key, absolutely key. And so thats something that has always been part of the vision for this. (Editors note: Lovely means Andrew Cross, Grass Valleys CEO.)

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Its a mixed bag. There are certainly traditionalists that are uncomfortable and if we contrast that with a lot of our more digital native customers, theyre extremely comfortable with it.

There are folks on the broadcast side that are still a little bit uncomfortable with it, but Id say thats really changed a lot in the last couple of years. Necessity is the mother of invention.

The platform weve built, it had an intention of making and giving those customers a familiar experience, so they dont have to have a Ph.D. in AWS or in Kubernetes.

I think its changing. Id say were beyond the first innings of the baseball game, so to speak. Were kind of in the middle innings. So its a mixed bag, but some of our customers that came from very traditional backgrounds have learned this stuff very, very quickly. But theres certainly a lot of demands on everybody because they need to keep their current stuff running. They need to adopt the new technologies and push forward.

I see this unfolding in three phases. So the first phase is going to be AI and machine learning making what Ill call editorial suggestions.

The next piece is going to be fully automated AI and ML with final director-level approval, well call it. So itd actually go through and create content, then you would approve it, and then eventually its lights-out, create it on your own.

Lights-out is created all by automation. So I think the lights-out stuff is a ways off.

Were already there with the suggestive AI capabilities and even some of the capabilities that were able to take advantage of around creation with editorial approval, that second stage.

For example, our automated caption creation is integrated into our AMPP platform and you can use it either way.

Then Id say on the live production side, were also starting to be able to see things like a capability around automated highlighting.

A lot of times with AI and ML, you think about it in terms of image analysis. Its actually even simpler technology than that. Its data wrangling. Weve recently evaluated a partner technology thats automated highlight generation where itll go through and take an entire soccer game, three hours long, and automatically generate a highlight reel.

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Grass Valley's Sydney Lovely on the cloud, AI and the road ahead - NewscastStudio