Switzerland's Canal9 Migrates to HD with Grass Valley

SAN FRANCSISCO— Swiss TV station Canal9 has chosen Grass Valley to enable its transition from SD to HD services as part of a five-year agreement. Grass Valley has supplied a K2 Summit production client with a K2 SAN server configuration, the GV Stratus application framework for nonlinear production including Edius editing capabilities, and GV Edge integrated playout system.

“The move from SD to HD is of huge importance to Canal9 because we are absolutely committed to giving our viewers the best quality of service possible,” said Stéphane Sassano, chief technology officer of the Canal9 Association. “Grass Valley’s solutions have made the transition simple. Their intuitiveness and ease-of-use has given us the time and freedom to be creative.”

The Grass Valley system features a seamless integration from ingest through playout, and its open nature means that Canal9 has a large choice of formats to work with.

The K2 Summit production client supports end-to-end SD/HD workflows in DVCPRO, MPEG-2, AVC-Intra, H.264/AVCHD and DNxHD formats. It integrates with GV Stratus to offer a solution for live events, production and news. GV Stratus offers a range of software-centric tools for the full nonlinear production workflow, including support for ingest, editing, content aggregation, logging, transfer and playout. It combines with Edius to offer editing functionality. GV Edge integrated playout is a software-based playout system with a purpose-built, high-availability architecture for 24/7 playout applications.