NTV-PLUS Prepares for a Summer of Sports in London

As the Russian broadcast rights holder for both the Wimbledon tennis tournament and for the upcoming international games in London, NTV-PLUS had two goals for this project: First, the system needed to be fast, flexible, completely reliable, and capable of being repurposed after the summer for maximum ROI. Second, the system had to fully integrate with its existing Grass Valley EDIUS® nonlinear editing workstations and its Arendo MAM.

“We looked at a number of solutions, and the Grass Valley STRATUS service oriented architecture stood out as the best option to provide the workflow we needed, both in London and at home,” said Oleg Kolesnikov, CTO at NTV-PLUS. “By leveraging our current EDIUS NLEs with a new K2 SAN for recording and playout, all under GV STRATUS, we knew that we could achieve the right performance and resilience within a tight timescale for this high pressure, mission critical system.”

For maximum productivity the system supports 13 GV STRATUS workstations for viewing and simple editing by the large number of editorial staff, along with five Grass Valley EDIUS craft editors attached to the SAN. This ensures NTV-PLUS can produce a high volume of content with great HD production values for its audience. The tightly integrated solution, using all Grass Valley components and workflows, is cost-effective without the usual integration risks because there are no interface points of failure.

“The audience expectations from major sporting events are set very high,” said Alan Wright, Senior Vice President, Europe, Middle East, and Africa for Grass Valley. “They expect detailed coverage of every game and every event. There is no time to wrestle with complex technology and no chance of going back to reshoot something: the workflow has to be as efficient as possible, the user interface has to be completely intuitive, and the underlying hardware must be perfectly reliable. Only Grass Valley can deliver on all three, and we are excited to be working with NTV-PLUS on these great sporting events.”

Grass Valley operations in Russia and other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) locations teamed up with a local systems integrator to design this fully Grass Valley system for NTV-PLUS.

About NTV-PLUS satellite broadcasting company
NTV-PLUS is the first Russian satellite broadcasting company. It stands a leading position in Russian pay-television for more than 15 years. NTV-PLUS company broadcasts for most territory of Russia and Ukraine. The company aims at producing high quality television for the whole family.
More than two million people are the viewers of NTV-PLUS channels ­ – retransmit Russian and foreign channels as well as own produced channels. More than 180 channels are available for NTV-PLUS subscribers, including high definition channels (HDTV) and Three-dimensional channel (3D).
NTV-PLUS sets the standards of modern digital TV.  NTV-PLUS television content is a unique one in Russia. To date NTV-PLUS satellite broadcasting company produces 12 sport channels, 10 movie channels, “NTV-PLUS 3D by Panasonic” channel and “Zakon TV” channel.

About Grass Valley
For more than 50 years, the Grass Valley name has been synonymous with innovation, leadership, and performance. Our full range of solutions and services is unmatched in the industry, leveraging the economies of scale of the IT industry with our proprietary core knowledge of media processing and storage. Grass Valley customers include most of the world's leading broadcasters, teleproduction facilities, and service providers, as well as independent video professionals who rely on our products to cover the world's most high-profile live events, as well as to benefit from efficiencies in day-to-day operations. When you’re watching news, sports, or entertainment programming—whether on a TV, the web, or a mobile device—you’re watching Grass Valley at work in today's connected world.