SVG Europe’s Post

Transcript

Hi, I'm Joe Riddick and I'm here with John Wilson, Polident and CEO at Grass Valley. And so John, what would you say are the key trends you're seeing across the sports broadcasting landscape right now? Yeah, So first, thanks for having me excited to have excited to catch up and have the conversation. So in terms of the the key trends across the sports broadcasting landscape, I say it's because it's a challenging place right now relative to the conversations we're having with customers and how do they balance their overall business plans right as we see. Rights fees continuing to increase, fees for talent continuing to increase. And yet for us as Grass Valley as you and the industry knows us, we're a technology provider and vendor and we we enable our customers to bring the highest quality content in the world to life for all of their end customers and all the conversations that we're having. Joe is with all of the competing demands for our customers and from a monetary and just business perspective, how do they. Reduce the cost and complexity of their operations, right, driving down the cost of that technology allows them to be more competitive such that they can secure the rights that they need to bring in the number of users, the number of eyeballs to their platforms and ultimately continue to drive their business. And so as we continue to have these conversations with customers on an ongoing basis and we've been spending a lot of time at Grass Valley, externally focused, spending time in market with our customers understanding. What those needs are and how can we continue to enable them? All of our conversations have been focused on driving down the cost of their technology such that they can again secure greater higher profile and visibility content rights, make sure they've got the right talent on air, but still have all of everything they're broadcasting be the highest quality in the world to bring those eyeballs in and sit and continue to attract users and and viewers around the world. To their content. And so you mentioned some of the challenges there, cost efficiencies and and challenges. How is Grass Valley helping customers to solve these? Yeah, absolutely. So for us it starts with the Grass Valley Media universe, which is the the combination of all the products that we've developed at Grass Valley along with partners from an alliances standpoint that we bring in to the Grass Valley Media universe that provides our customer solutions. And OK, that sounds, that sounds great, sounds interesting probably. But how is that helping our customers? Well, what we've created with our technology. And AMP, our media platform sits at the center of this as an operating system for Media Joe. But importantly we're driving down the cost of technology for our customers with a platform approach and it starts with a cloud native software centric approach. Many of our customers are deploying their next generation technology with us though on Prem. There's some that are deploying in the cloud because of the decisions that they've made at a corporate level to be cloud first and that's great. We can, we can. Support them with what we've built across our technology stack with AMP, with our hardware products. But many of those customers have realized that with our approach, they can drive down meaningfully the cost of their operations because we've extracted in many cases the traditional software that's set, that sat on bespoke hardware devices into a platform and drive down the economics for them. And so it's been really interesting to see customers beginning to embrace that more meaningfully. And for us really what's changed at Grass Valley, the last I'll say 12 months, Joe is we've been on this journey to a software centric cloud native approach across across the last seven years. We've also been developing the latest and greatest hardware products in the industry as well from our cameras, from our switchers, from our infrastructure products. But increasingly customers are seeing given all the progress we've made in the investments they're making bets again on Grass Valley. Because they're seeing the real world use cases from Tier 1 customers with some of the most premium events in the world leveraging the latest technology from Grass Valley. And so that's the only beginning to accelerate the conversations we're having with our customers around the world in how do we continue the 65 years plus in many cases of partnership that we've built in the industry and really extend that for all of our customers as they look to the next generation technology transformations. And you mentioned AMP though, and that platform continues to evolve and what produce X, one of the latest solutions released. Can you tell me more about this and what it brings to the platform? Yeah, absolutely. So sport producer X, the value in this solution is that it allows a single operator to produce an event by themselves in a, in bringing the combination of all the tools that that single operator needs to drive a live event on the app on the AMP platform. So it simplifies from a user interface. Very intuitively what a user can do because we've packaged up all the capabilities they need to to deliver a live event just with again that single user. And so that's where where we increasingly are focusing Joe is yes, continuing to lead from a technology standpoint, but also as we see opportunities to allow our customers to drive efficiencies in their operations and focusing on the user experience. And, and I say that because it's really important because. Our customers tend to be just like the rest of the technology vendors in this ecosystem. Our customers are the technology teams, but are those customers are customers at each of the major broadcasters, sports rights owners, media companies, Their customers are the operational teams. And ultimately for us where, where we continue to be focused is yes, we're going to sell the technology teams, but then also helping them bridge the gap with their operational teams of how do I create seamless. User experiences for them as the operators to ensure that they can be successful and ultimately it's about creating win wins and allowing them to be successful. And so Sports Producer X is a great example of that in terms of enabling simplicity and efficiency for our customers by with a prepackaged solution on AMP. Brilliant And we're recording this on the eve of any B. Can you share any plans for the show? Yeah, happy to I want, I won't share what we'll save some some of the the new product announcements for NB itself, but we've got, we're going to have a number of new announcements Joe across the entire portfolio from our camera line where we've had fantastic success this last year. Our our camera business grew over 70% in 2024 and that's a testament to the investments we've made in the new products that we've announced. So we'll have. More features that we're announcing across the camera line at NAB are switchers, which again had a very strong year in 2024. On the back of the investments we've made, customers are going to be able to see the new and the latest and greatest investments we've made, including a new Switcher, the VXP, which we've launched into the market. That will be targeted more at the mid tier market, but also is able to scale up to high end applications as well depending on what a customer wants to do. And then as I transition to our infrastructure products, number of new announcements there as well. We've made major investments over the last 12 to 18 months to begin to refresh our infrastructure platform to release products that will really move the needle for our customers from a processing standpoint. Some excited to talk to customers about that. And then finally, if I come back to AMP, we've made tremendous developments and progress in the last 12 months as I said earlier, relative to Tier 1. Commercial deployments across the platform. And So what we'll be sharing with customers is those real world case studies and examples of how our technology is enabling our customers to meaningfully drive down the cost of their technology, meaningfully drive down the cost of their operations with seamless operator experiences as we move forward. And that's really critical.