Grass Valley Group and Video Networks Inc. Announce Alliance for Digital Play-to-Air in Broadcast Newsrooms

Business Wire, Sept 6, 2000

Business/High Tech Editors

ATLANTA and NEVADA CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 6, 2000

Interface between VNI's NewsTracker and Grass Valley Group's

Profile XP play-to-air servers and Vibrint newsroom systems enables

tapeless news environment

In a move that will greatly increase newsroom efficiency and provide news professionals access to more digital media assets than ever before, Video Networks Inc. (VNI), a leading business-to-business provider of digitized video and e-commerce services for the media industry, today announced an agreement with Grass Valley Group, a digital media leader, to work together to develop an interface between VNI's NewsTracker(TM) news-on-demand system and the Grass Valley Group's Profile(R) XP Media Platform.

Today's agreement will enable broadcasters to take a huge step toward the goal of a tapeless news environment. VNI's NewsTracker lets news producers quickly and easily access and manage broadcast-quality digitized news content. The Emmy(R) award-winning Profile XP Media Platform has more broadcast content stored on it and is installed in more broadcast operations worldwide than any other video server. An interface between these systems will let editors avoid dubbing content to tape before editing. Instead, they can move the material from a VNI server directly into a Profile platform as well as the Grass Valley Group's Vibrint digital hard news production systems. In so doing, the interface will simplify newsroom operations, let multiple users use the same media and, most importantly, improve time to air.

The alliance builds on an agreement that VNI announced last spring to interface and integrate NewsTracker to Vibrint's Digital News Production Workgroup tools for hard news editing and news playback. Vibrint is now owned by the Grass Valley Group.

The companies said that future joint plans include an interface between Grass Valley Group's ContentShare software platform for media asset management and VNI's Media Commerce Network (MCN) through the Digital Media Gateway, VNI's latest application for broadcasters. The MCN is an interactive network that combines Internet, satellite and telephony technologies, letting customers in the broadcast, cable, media and entertainment industries manage digital content and distribute it to traditional media outlets as well as the Internet. The Digital Media Gateway is a portal for digital content of many different types, including news, syndicated content, stock footage, promos and ads from a variety of content providers.

"We are thrilled to announce this alliance with the market leader in broadcast-quality video servers," said Mike Eckert, chief executive officer of VNI. "By interfacing with Grass Valley Group equipment, we can provide seamless digital connectivity to our broadcast clients from remote content sources all the way through to the production environment at the broadcast stations."

"VNI is the first service provider to move news stories over IP networks as data files," Tim Thorsteinson, president of the Grass Valley Group. "This capability ties directly to Grass Valley Group's initiatives to enable content creators access to any media, anywhere, anytime."

According to Thorsteinson, Grass Valley Group has the major market share of iNews (formerly known as Avstar) computer newsroom systems and Profile XP Media Platform family devices at a majority of VNI-enabled sites. "By tying our two systems together, we are providing a very elegant automation and time-to-air improvement -- a huge upside benefit to our core customers," he said.

With VNI's NewsTracker news-on-demand system, newsrooms no longer have to roll tape constantly to record news feeds. NewsTracker's Java-based interface lets news producers review categorized regional, national and breaking news stories. They can browse through content and select broadcast-quality video clips and associated scripts right from their desktops.

VNI's footprint of media management servers at a growing number of broadcast stations acts as a gateway into the stations for a wide variety of media content. Combined with its content management applications, VNI's solution brings ease and efficiency to managing video. Just like sending a group email, the delivery of digitized video content to stations is managed as a file transfer over a satellite-based IP path, and a return path is established over the Internet. This connection enables the system to verify that the files were delivered correctly and to automatically initiate a resend of any specific data packets that were not received well. VNI's Network Operations Center (NOC) in Atlanta centrally monitors the management of the network traffic. Currently, VNI's NewsTracker is in all 215 NBC News affiliate stations nationwide.

With the growing demand to purpose content for television and the Web with essentially the same staff resources, Grass Valley Group newsroom hardware and software solutions are ushering in a new era of speed and flexibility to newsrooms worldwide.