Grass Valley Digital News Production Powers Leading Independent Indian Broadcaster

The 24-hour news channel serving the Andhra Pradesh province of India, TV9, has recently upgraded its production facilities to supercharge its file-based workflow.
The station, based in Hyderabad, had used Grass Valley Profile servers from its launch in 2004. Now it uses Grass Valley K2 media servers to support its editing and playout functions.
The station owned by India's Associated Broadcasting Company (ABC) has used Grass Valley Aurora Edit workstations from the start. Ten seats are provided for journalists and editors, with comprehensive functionality including titling capabilities. Another two Aurora Edit seats are included in a dedicated editing room to enable craft editing facilities such as 3D DVE and colour correction.
All the edit workstations share content through a common K2 media server with RAID storage. This also acts as the ingest store as news reports come in from journalists.
Once stories are completed, they are handed on to primary and backup K2 servers for playout. All media management and system configuration is controlled through workflows established by the Grass Valley App Centre, with simple Windows-based software running on a PC on the same network.
The main news studio includes a Grass Valley Indigo AV Mixer, which combines an audio-follow-video-mixer with production switching.
Badari Prasad, Technical Head of ABC TV, said: "We are an aggressive newsgathering organisation - our goal is to get the latest breaking news on air no later than half an hour after it happens so we can be the first choice for news.
"Our technology has to support our journalists with speed and accuracy. From the very start the Grass Valley equipment has done that. This latest upgrade gives us more flexibility, even more speed and, thanks to its use of industry standard technologies like gigabit Ethernet, it meets our budget as well as our operational requirements."
Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley, said: "TV9 in Hyderabad is a great example of what is important in television news today.
"Their overwhelming drive is to get the story to air fast and to meet the expectations of their audience. We were pleased to supply them with their original technology platform. and it is great that they returned to us for a technology upgrade, bringing in new servers and connectivity.
"We very much look forward to continuing to work with ABC and its family of stations in the future."
Associated Broadcasting Company was established in 2004 with TV9 in Hyderabad and since then has launched seven more regional stations, with services based in New Delhi and Chennai due to open in 2009. Additionally, the services and support provided by the local engineering team has reinforced ABC's trust of Grass Valley. This gives ABC national coverage of its brand of bold and fearless journalism.
Further information is available at: www.grassvalley.com.
(KMcA/BMcC)