Grass Valley brings DIY philosophy to broadcast with Playout Xpress

Playout Xpress, a low-cost, customizable, entry-level system, is Grass Valley’s latest venture.

Playout Xpress is a “simple, pre-commissioned” system that allows end users to define their specific requirements. The solution offers up to four playout channels and a “powerful and reliable feature set” that will provide customers with a “resilient” automation system at a “competitive” price.

GV Playout Xpress has been designed to be deployed by the customer in as little as one day. Thus, it seeks to adapt to changing audience trends, enabling its customers to “quickly” create more content, through more emerging sources and social media.

Solution for a dynamic market

Karl Mehring, Grass Valley’s senior business director of playout, detailed the keys to Grass Valley’s new launch: “In today’s dynamically shifting media market, customers need to engage with global audiences that can no longer be reached through one or two platforms. Playout is crucial to enabling customers to spin services up and down quickly in the most cost efficient way possible”.

“Our portfolio of playout solutions is designed to support everything from high density, enterprise-level applications to cloud-native systems that meet the needs of temporary pop up channels, and we are excited to launch Playout Xpress to further expand our offering,” he concludes.

Key features of Playout Xpress

• Up to 4 channels of playout in 4 RU with an option for full redundancy
• Built-in online storage for direct media access on playout servers, with up to 1 TB of usable storage per channel
• Automation:
  • Designed to cope with the “most demanding” applications, including reactive channels and dynamic ad break scenarios
  • Built-in playlist editor
  • Multichannel timeline view
  • “Modern and intuitive” HTML5 UI with pre-configured user roles for edit, monitoring and administration
• Rich channel branding:
  • Logos and animations
  • Built-in CG with full support for text crawls
  • Captions/subtitles
  • Supports SCC, CAP, STL and SMPTE ST 428-7 XML file formats
  • Pass-through of CC EIA 608/708
• Master control
• 4x DVE per playout server
• Transitions: V-fade, X-fade, U-fade, Take & Fade and Fade & Take support
• Audio files/outputs
  • Support for 16/24-bit PCM @ 48 kHz
  • File based VOs with 4 audio players
  • Single output audio expression from language tags
• Traffic integration:
  • Native XML format
  • As-run logs in native XML format delivered to single external location
• Media management:
  • External “pull” location: GV Playout Xpress will pull files from a single FTP/CIFS location in line with schedule requirements
  • Video Network Manager to manage pull requests and housekeeping through delete rules
  • Administration Station for metadata update
  • Automated replication of content across playout servers