Digicasting — The Result of Media Without Bounds

It's a simple idea: take high-quality, digital content and re-cast it for any transmission network, protocol, or output format. From TVs to PCs, set-top boxes to stadium scoreboards, the aim is to use the same crisp video and pristine audio to provide a rich experience for advertisers and viewers across a variety of distribution media.

It's called Digicasting™, and at the Grass Valley Group we're making it happen. Working with the world's leading content creators, we are creating and deploying technologies for making high-quality content available through multiple digital pipelines.

There are three trends spurring the move toward Digicasting: the government-mandated transition from analog to digital infrastructures in the United States and the adoption of digital production and transmission facilities worldwide; the emergence of new media markets for high-quality content; and the ability of digital technologies to increase production efficiencies, streamline content-creation workflows, and boost organizational profitability.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all broadcasters must eventually meet set digital transmission standards. In order to comply, these broadcasters must move from their existing analog infrastructures to those that transmit digital signals. Around the world, it's a similar story, with broadcasters facing a variety of country-specific, government-driven deadlines for digital transmission.

Meanwhile, digital technologies are helping to spur the creation of new markets for high-caliber digital content, including the Internet, digital cinema, and interactive television. Digital technologies are also expanding the reach of existing distribution pipelines such as broadband- and satellite-based systems. Thus content creators are looking at these emerging and expanding opportunities as a way to increase the return on investment in their vast storehouses of original content.

Digital technologies are also enabling companies to compete in an increasingly demanding world. Going digital reduces overall production and operating costs and improves overall system reliability—software that can monitor the health of a video server network and automatically page a technician at the first sign of trouble, for example, is just one of many new capabilities enabled by digital systems. And content creators can enjoy greater flexibility and profitability as digital systems streamline production and distribution workflows.

Thus, the benefits of Digitcasting far outweigh the initial investments.

At the Grass Valley Group, we believe that Digicasters™ must be able to work without limitations imposed by format, resolution, protocol, or geography. To enable that freedom of choice, we launched our Media Without Bounds™ initiative, focusing on five key areas that encompass content creation and distribution:

• Media Platforms, which provide video storage, production, and manipulation while supporting the multiple formats, resolutions, and open architectures necessary to meet the current and future needs of content creators and distributors.
• Media Production systems, designed to unleash customer creativity in live operation and post-production settings.
• Media Connectivity solutions, which bridge the worlds of traditional video routing and standard computer networks.
• Media Software, which enables networked media asset management, centralized device monitoring and control, and the ability to put high-value content online as easily as on the air.
• News Production Systems, which enable newsrooms worldwide to make the transition from analog to digital infrastructures.

The Media Without Bounds initiative will help content creators and distributors leverage the opportunities made possible by the exploding bandwidth of an increasingly networked world. By providing them with the greatest elasticity possible, the Grass Valley Group lets these professionals tailor their workflow processes and target their output for whatever distribution pipelines they so choose.

Which is, simply, what Digicasting is all about.