Grass Valley Partners with EBU, VRT, and other suppliers on Live IP Production Studio

Grass Valley (Belden) is collaborating with the EBU (European Broadcasting Union), VRT (national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish community), and other industry partners to implement a live TV production studio at VRT’s premises in Brussels. It uses state-of-the-art IT-centric hardware and software to enable broadcasters to produce programs quickly, efficiently and cost effectively.

The multi-phase LiveIP Project is part of Sandbox+, an international joint platform for collaborative innovation put together by VRT, EBU and iMinds. Industry technology partners participating in the project include Axon, Dwesam, EVS, Genelec, Grass Valley, Lawo, LSB, Nevion, Tektronix and Trilogy, which provide all the elements of a live production chain driven by IP.

A scaled down version of the studio will be shown as a proof-of-concept demonstration on the EBU stand (10.F20) at this year’s IBC Show in Amsterdam, September 11–15, 2015. On Friday, September 11 at 16:00 (CET), visitors can see a demonstration of the multi-vendor system, which uses open standards—in this case SMPTE 2022/6, AES67, and PTP—to transport broadcast feeds via SDN. The project shows a high level of interoperability between multiple vendors, enabling seamless switching and limited redundancy of uncompressed video and audio feeds as they’re transported over an IP network.

Grass Valley is providing an LDX 86 camera with XCU IP base station, OCP 400 camera control panel, K2 video server, K2 Dyno S replay system, and Karrera S-series K-Frame switcher with new IP I/O module. The solutions will play a critical role in showing that IP-based live production is achievable today. Grass Valley also will be showing a number of its own IP solutions in the Grass Valley booth (1.D11) at IBC.