Grass Valley Group's Netcentral Software Surpasses $1 Million In Sales

—NetCentral 2.0 Expands Support For New Product Lines—

Amsterdam, IBC, 7 September, 2000 — The Grass Valley Group, provider of state-of-the-art software for broadcasters and video professionals, today announced that its NetCentral™ SNMP-based software for remote diagnostics and monitoring anywhere in the world has exceeded the $1 million sales mark in just nine months.

The SNMP-based option provides an efficient and affordable tool that averts system downtime and may be customised for local languages. It ships as an option to the company's Emmy^® award-winning Profile^® XP Media Platform™, which has more broadcast content stored on it and more installations world-wide than any other video server.

NetCentral is part of the Grass Valley Group's powerful set of software solutions that enable capabilities ranging from widespread media access to streamlining and simplifying getting high-value content to the Web.

The application monitors the health and status of Grass Valley's SNMP-enabled devices continuously and provides a centralised error reporting collection point for network connected systems to identify potential problems.

NetCentral warns operators and maintenance staff proactively when conditions change with their equipment — so reducing the time between the occurrence of a specific failure and its detection. In addition, one monitoring station can monitor all of the products on a facility's world-wide network — so reducing overall operations costs.

The NetCentral software application is part of the Grass Valley Group's Media Without Bounds™ technology and solutions initiative to optimise video and other content creators' digital distribution strategies. NetCentral provides facility engineers the ability to monitor the status and condition of all their servers from one central location, no matter where in the world they may be located.

"For broadcasters and other content creators, digital is all about increased efficiency and flexibility," said Tim Thorsteinson, president of the Grass Valley Group. "Both customers and application developers benefit from our initiative since we have improved not only the timeliness of reporting but also the quality of the diagnostic information presented to the operators, even advising them what to do in specific situations.

"Implementation of NetCentral on Profile XP is Grass Valley Group's first step in deploying our strategy for SNMP support on all of our new products."

NetCentral 2.0 Adds Remote Monitoring Capability for Modular Products

IBC also marks the introduction of NetCentral 2.0, a new extensible framework designed to add additional equipment types easily to the user friendly NetCentral GUI. Grass Valley™ 8900 and 2000 series modular products are the first products to be added into this framework.

Using the NetCentral interface, customers will be alerted to changes in status, such as module extraction or failure and loss or degradation of an input signal, power supply or fan failures. NetCentral 2.0 combines SNMP and HTML support to provide a multi-protocol framework that integrates the company's Web-based configuration tools to provide a comprehensive solution for control configuration and monitoring.

NetCentral includes a variety of user-programmable alerts that take specific actions, such as sending an email or ringing a pager. Depending on the severity of the problem, NetCentral responds by sounding an alarm, categorising the severity of the error and providing specific details of the problem and advice to the operator as to an appropriate course of action.

The SNMP agent in Profile XP also features warnings that can prompt a preventative maintenance action, such as alerting when a system's internal temperature is rising or detecting deteriorating performance of a disk array. This capability enables unprecedented troubleshooting capabilities by the maintenance support staff.

Even if the technician is off site when the problem occurs, the situation may be quickly diagnosed and resolved. Via a standard Web browser, a NetCentral application, known as iNetCentral, allows immediate and easy access to monitoring and configuration information presented by NetCentral as well as logs maintained by the system.

A key feature of NetCentral is its user interface, which is customised to the product, which it is monitoring. In this fashion, NetCentral makes it easy for new and less experienced or trained users to diagnose complex products.

Further extending the reach of broadcasters' and other content creators' facilities infrastructure investments, NetCentral addresses the total cost of ownership. Disk-based servers have lowered facility maintenance costs dramatically, especially when compared to VTRs.

The SNMP-based application also increases the value of Grass Valley Group's products to other software developers by allowing them to demonstrate a more comprehensive set of monitoring functionality that takes less work to integrate into their applications.

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Notes to Editors

The Grass Valley Group knows more about high-quality video than anybody else—especially as video goes digital. Interactive television. Digital cinema. Data-enhanced broadcasting. Internet. It's a world of Digicasting™—of Media Without Bounds™. Whether online or on the air, the Emmy^® award-winning Grass Valley Group, a privately held digital media leader, has the hardware, software, and new media technologies necessary to get content wherever it needs to go. For the latest Grass Valley Group product information, visit /.

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