SVG Sit-Down: Grass Valley CTO Ian Fletcher on the Strengths of Avora and Why DMF, MXL, and Third-Party Relationships are Important

Grass Valley s AMPP platform continues to grow in popularity, especially with the growing interest in virtualized production. But the company also has introduced new products like Avora which it unvelied at IBC which offer a new way to built out production capabilities. SVG Co-Executive Director Ken Kerschbaumer recently spent some time diving deep into Grass Valley, AMPP, AVORA, and much more with GV CTO Ian Fletcher.

Let's talk about AVORA which is the big new launch from Grass Valley here at IBC.

AVORA is basically built on recognizing that not everybody needs big AMPP, not everybody wants cloud orchestration, and not everybody needs all the clever stuff. We know there's a market for all-in-one products - there are a lot of them out there - but they're all fairly constrained. They do what it says on the tin, and that's all they do. And to be honest, some of them aren't that broadcast hardened.

So, what AVORA does is take the hundreds of man-years of work that have gone into the low-level video-processing parts of AMPP - the I/O, the clip players, the mixers - and put them into a single Linux-based server that we ship as an appliance. It doesn't connect to the cloud at all. It's very simple to use, but it's got all the production tools you need - from inputs to graphics to replay to playout to multiviewers - right there on your screen. Unlike a lot of the other all-in-one products, though, it's multi-user, because it's HTML5-based: you could be doing audio while I'm doing vision, in different rooms, or one of us working from home. So, you still get that aspect of AMPP's benefits, but you're connecting to a server on-prem.

And finally, it takes on the dynamic piece of DMF too, in the sense that it's not fixed I/O, fixed mixers, fixed anything. You just say, For this show, I need four clip players, six recorders, a 2 M/E mixer, two multiviewers, six SDI I/O, four NDI outs, and you configure all of that dynamically - it just spins up the microservices to do it.

Ian Fletcher, Grass Valley, CTO, with the new Avora, a multi-user all-in-one production system that is packed into a Linux-based server and does not require cloud-based connectivity.Is there a limit to how big of an operation AVORA can handle?

It comes down to the number of SDI spigots. This unit is SDI-only, though you can bring in some NDI sources too. You get 24 bidirectional SDI ports, so they can be inputs or outputs, and then you can add NDI or SRT - the switcher itself is software, so it doesn't really care. There's a fuel gauge on top that shows you how much CPU and GPU capacity you've got left. We've tried to max it out, run out of things to throw at it, and we're still nowhere near even 50%. So, it's actually quite hard to fully max out - and that's on a relatively low-cost 2U server, shipped as a complete setup.

What has the response been to AVORA?

We've been really struck by the level of interest in this. Initially we thought it would be aimed at the corporate market, or high-end content creators, but actually a lot of broadcasters have jumped on it too - even ones that are big AMPP users - because they have use cases where a social media team is using something like StreamYard or vMix, and they don't love having yet another separate thing to support. They want something on the same core technology they already use, just in a much smaller form factor. It's playing really well across a huge range of customers, so we're really pleased with that.

It's also got a genuinely fun feature and the moment that got the biggest reaction during our live demo and IBC was for a built-in scripting tool. You can put technical instructions right into the script, like cut to camera one, add this graphic. You build up your script, then switch into teleprompter mode, and using your microphone, it listens to what you're saying as the presenter, scrolls the autocue, and triggers the technical instructions as you go. You can literally run a no-operator show where the presenter just reads their script which is great for social content, or anywhere you want to go into a small room, record 15 minutes to camera, and have all your cues and clips play automatically.

What are some of the other key developments at Grass Valley's stand at IBC?

At IBC we had a whole area with about 14 vendors all running on the same common compute, all using MXL to exchange flows. Many of them have gone a step further and integrated into our platform so you can open their UIs from our front end - and they also get the benefit of us handling all the billing and subscription management, so they just get a payment from us.

And for me, the more exciting stuff isn't so much about what we've done ourselves - it's what other vendors have done on our platform. Seeing companies like Bridge Technologies bring their video-quality monitoring tools into AMPP is great: people can just buy it from the app store, download it, spin it up, and open all the Bridge Technologies monitoring tools - without pulling a signal from one server to another just to do management and monitoring.

LayerCake is another vendor who was on the booth, and they have been on your stand at previous trade shows.

Yes, and in their case they're the orchestrator, and actually controlling us, and then we in turn control other devices.

Are there other interesting third-party relationships?

I think the Lawo piece is really interesting because we have AMPP and they have Lawo Home which solves a different problem. Lawo Home is very much on-prem and it's focused on controlling Lawo devices as they've got a lot of infrastructure and audio processing that we don't do.

I like to use the analogy of AMPP as a house. The industry isn't going to agree on one house,

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