SDI is dead. Long live AMPP

 CSI

“In ten years’ there will be no SDI interfaces - it will all be AMPP,” declared Andrew Cross, CEO, Grass Valley at the company’s IBC press event. “We truly believe we are creating the future of media production and making it open to everybody.”

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Grass Valley has already partnered with 40 companies to integrate product onto its AMPP production platform. Now the company is officially opening its infrastructure up to the whole market.

“Even our competitors are welcome onto our platform,” Cross said. “AMPP will connect everything.”

While Grass Valley has hitherto been keen to promote AMPP as the industry’s onramp to the cloud for live, its executives were at pains to stress that AMPP doesn’t just mean cloud-native – or live.

“What makes us special is we are leaders in hardware-based product and the leaders in software,” Cross said. “We bring those pieces together and no one else can match it.”

The veteran brand is 60 this year and claims that its product from cameras to switchers goes into making any and every major TV programme from an Olympics on down.

“It means one of the world’s most important mediums is dominated by what we have created as a company,” Cross said. “Now, our mission is to create the future of video production.

“We want to build where we go from here. We are a huge player in the market and we’re creating where it goes next.”

That future looks a lot like as it did in the past from GV’s point of view, in the sense that it imagines every programme being made using AMPP and the applications that hang off it.

“We are the only company that has worked out how to work with software in the cloud and how you can have all the same pieces in your truck, and as hardware, and to wire them up either remote or local – and you can take it into the cloud.”

Outside broadcast group NEP is a heavy user of GV gear and several of its executives testified to the way that they can essentially plug cameras into an IP network.

“It’s an exciting time to be creative with technology, to mix and match and use applications in a way we’ve never been able to before,” commented one.

IP was the driver for the venture capital-backed company’s “super high” investment in the AMPP environment starting five years ago, Grass Valley says the platform is designed to be interoperable with kit and workflows whether in trucks, on premise, remote, hybrid or fully cloud.

“It is up to the customer to decide which direction they want to go and we have the migration path for you,” said Daniel Url, Chief Product Officer.

In July alone, there were 11,108 applications running simultaneously on AMPP producing 3 million hours of programming. Its fastest growing app is Playout X which has helped onboard 1000 playout channels in the last six months.

“That proves we are doing quite well,” Url said.

At IBC the company announced 11 new hardware upgrades including a base station for customers staying in the SDI realm. It introduced 20 major software upgrades, 24 AMPP apps and 80 features for the platform.


A thought though is that Grass Valley’s play for domination by generously offering its ‘glue’ to the whole market sounds a lot like the proprietary plays of old.

You only have to turn the clock back to IBC 2015 / 2016 and find competing IP roadmaps each espoused as ‘open’ from Sony (IP Live Production System), Evertz (ASPEN), Grass Valley (AIMS) and Newtek (NDI).

The industry eventually decided it was best to have an actual standards body to front the move to IP – hence SMPTE ST 2110.

But not all the industry. Newtek’s chief architect and president was Andrew Cross whose talent for marketing as much as for tech innovation has seen NDI not only survive but thrive.

It’s no surprise that AMPP now supports NDI v5.0.

A new NDI Discovery Service allows operators to automatically find and list all NDI sources running on the network, including sources not loaded on any AMPP fabric. Sources can be quickly added to an AMPP dashboard and treated like any other source.

“We didn’t bring these technologies together just because we could,” said Chris Merrill, the firm’s director of product marketing. “We did it because of what the integration offers its customers. NDI is more than a bidirectional, low latency transport for high-quality compressed video. Native NDI within AMPP provides several unique benefits.”