LNK Group Moves Five National Networks to Grass Valley AM...

Lithuanian broadcaster deploys Playout X and Framelight X across five networks, combining on-premises software-defined playout with cloud-based disaster recovery as part of its SMPTE ST 2110 transition.

LNK Group one of Lithuania's leading commercial television groups has moved playout and media management for its five national television networks to Grass Valley's AMPP Media Operating System, completing a project to introduce software-defined operations alongside its transition to SMPTE ST 2110.

The deployment covers LNK, BTV, TV1, InfoTV and 2TV, replacing LNK's legacy playout environment with Playout X and Framelight X running on AMPP Local at its Vilnius facility.

Delivered by Hannu Pro, Grass Valley's partner in the Baltic region and a certified AMPP Managed Service Partner, the project combines an on-premises primary system with cloud-based disaster recovery.

LNK selected the Grass Valley solution following a competitive tender as part of a wider upgrade of its broadcast infrastructure. The broadcaster required the reliability and operational resilience of national television playout, with greater flexibility to develop services and workflows.

This project represents an important step in the modernization of LNK Group's broadcast infrastructure, said Ri ardas Kazlauskas, CTO at LNK Group. Our objective was to maintain the reliability required for national television broadcasting while giving us more flexibility in how we deploy and develop our services. Moving our five networks to AMPP and Playout X alongside our transition to SMPTE ST 2110 provides that foundation.

Five Networks on AMPP

LNK's five networks combine scheduled programming, advertising, live content, news and graphics. Redundant Playout X chains provide continuity across all five, with support for live inputs, secondary recordings, HTML5 graphics, advanced audio and SCTE insertion for downstream advertising on LNK's digital platform. LNK and BTV also support SRT contribution feeds.

AMPP allows applications to run on shared compute rather than dedicated broadcast hardware, giving LNK greater flexibility to introduce or modify workflows. The deployment operates alongside the broadcaster's SMPTE ST 2110 infrastructure, connecting software-defined applications with its wider IP environment.

One of the most important aspects of this transformation is that broadcast applications are no longer tightly coupled to dedicated hardware, said Justinas Kunickas, CIO at LNK Group. With AMPP we can run applications on shared compute infrastructure, integrate them with our existing systems and introduce or change workflows without rebuilding the underlying signal chain. For us, that architectural flexibility is one of the key benefits of moving toward a Dynamic Media Facility environment.

Connecting Playout and Media Management

Framelight X provides media management, logging, editing, record scheduling and content review, with high-resolution and proxy media held on central NAS storage. It also supports QC and preview of high-resolution content and connects LNK's active workflows with an archive of approximately 150,000 assets.

Framelight X replaces the archive browsing and selection functionality previously used by traffic, scheduling and promo teams, providing access to content held within the existing Telestream DIVA archive. Hannu Pro integrated DIVA and Vantage with the new environment to meet LNK's workflow requirements.

For LNK and BTV, disaster recovery is provided through a separate AMPP deployment on AWS, with Wasabi storage for high-resolution and proxy media.

Building on Existing Operations

The project continues a technology relationship between LNK and Hannu Pro dating back to 1993. LNK's wider production environment includes Grass Valley LDX cameras, K-Frame vision mixers and GV STRATUS, alongside Octopus NRCS for news production.

LNK Group demonstrates how software-defined applications can be introduced into established broadcast operations while maintaining the resilience required for national television, said Carlos Ferreira, VP of Sales, Southers Europe at Grass Valley. AMPP gives LNK a common platform for playout and media management across five networks, with the flexibility to run applications on premises and extend critical services into the cloud. Combined with SMPTE ST 2110, it provides a practical route towards the Dynamic Media Facility.

Kalvis Baumanis, CEO of Hannu Pro, added: We would like to thank LNK's management for the trust they have placed in Grass Valley and Hannu Pro while making the bold move into the AMPP Dynamic Media Facility world among the first broadcasters in the Baltics. With AMPP, LNK's technical team has hundreds of broadcast tools immediately at hand, covering practically any television production need. Where adding a new capability once meant months of ordering, installing and configuring dedicated equipment, it can now be deployed in minutes.

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