MONTREAL—Grass Valley has announced that NVP, one of Italy’s largest broadcast service suppliers, has fully tested and brought online its NVP Innovation Hub based on open standard SMPTE ST 2110 with a variety of Grass Valley technologies. 

The NVP Innovation Hub is located in the media city of Cologno, Milano.

The NVP Innovation Hub consists of two production studios, six dubbing rooms, and an OB VAN gateway. The gateway area allows for quick integration of any OB Van from the NVP fleet into the Hub’s production studios. Productions can be done in formats ranging from SD SDR to UHD HDR WCG.

The Grass Valley solutions used in the Hub include GV Orbit orchestration, Grass Valley’s AMPP SaaS platform, redundant GV Fabric IP switching, a Kahuna 9600 production switcher with a 3 M/E Maverik control panel, a Kaleido-IP multiviewer, and Audio Live for up to 2048x2048 audio routing of AES67 IP streams. 

Grass Valley distributor and systems integrator Video Progetti handled the integration of all Grass Valley equipment. 

NVP has been a Grass Valley customer for more than 10 years, with over 100 LDX cameras and six Kahuna production switchers and wanted to use AMPP to produce tier 1 and tier 2 events for their customers. 

NVP is planning to replicate its Cologno model in its Rome, Naples, and Messina centers as well. Currently, at least one match per day is being managed remotely, with the goal of managing between three and five matches per day by the end of the Serie B 2022-23 championship. NVP plans on increasing even further for the 2023-24 season.  

“The NVP Innovation Hub satisfies all our customers’ production needs from minor sporting events up to tier 1 sports productions and much more,” said Ivan Pintabona, CTO for NVP. “Based on ST 2110, we can cover all conventional and event-based production requirements, especially with redundant IP links to all major national and international venues.” 

Using GV Orbit orchestration, NVP routes sources coming from any venue to their production control room or to a number of other production control rooms based on AMPP on-premises and cloud technology. 

AMPP provides increased scalability and flexibility in production, which NVP has capitalized on to provide an extremely cost-effective remote production solution for smaller sporting events and has proven crucial to allow NVP to augment their on-premises productions tools with cloud resources. 

“NVP, as with other AMPP platform users, has discovered the flexibility and scalability that our unique SaaS and on-prem live production solution provides," said Tim Banks, CRO for Grass Valley. "NVP can now easily handle existing and new clients' production requests, with just a few clicks of a mouse." 

The Hub also includes HiWay Media, part of the NVP group of companies, which owns and operates a specialized OTT platform for sports. HiWay Media allows NVP to help their customers to produce and immediately publish the content to increase monetization. 

“AMPP lets us fully remote our sports production coverage, while maintaining a core 2110 IP-based infrastructure in the Hub,” said Pintabona. “It’s this combination of high-quality production and cost saving through remote production of sports events on an open standards IP platform that our customers truly appreciate.” 

AMPP’s scalability provides for NVP to increase its scope for coverage of sports and other events with the ability to “spin up” AMPP resources on-demand. 

MONTREAL—NVP, an Italian video production company, has upgraded two of its outside broadcast vehicles with a wide range of live production equipment from Grass Valley to support demand for 4K UHD and HDR content, Grass Valley said today.

"Viewers have long judged video content by the quality of images on their screens, which is why we’re always pursuing the next breakthrough in technology, setting a benchmark for the highest quality live productions. Our customers know they can rely on us to meet shifting demands, like the rise of 4K UHD and HDR, and enable them to efficiently deliver the content their viewers want,” said NVP CEO Natalino Pintabona.

NVP’s OB4 and newly launched OB6 are equipped with Grass Valley 4K UHD and HDR-capable Kahuna 9600 production switchers, Kaleido multiviewers, Densite modular infrastructure, Sirius 640 routers and KudosPro converters. Each truck’s Kahuna production switcher and Sirius routing switcher are seamlessly integrated, providing NVP with a scalable path to all functions and formats.

With the upgrade, NVP has the ability to “meet the increasingly complex production needs for live sports and entertainment broadcasts,” said Pintabona.

NVP plans to roll out a third 4K UHD and HDR-enabled OB vehicle next year as it expands its operations.

Video Progetti was responsible for the project’s design, system integration and build.

More information is available on the Grass Valley website.

NEWBURY, ENGLAND—SAM gear will be hitting the road in Italy as a number of its products have been selected to help build out NVP’s new 4K OB truck.

On board the truck will be SAM’s Kahuna 9600 switcher, which can manage multiformat productions and eliminates the need for external conversion. SAM’s Sirius 840 router has also been installed to support multiformat switching, allowing any combination of signal formats and processing.

The truck was designed by SAM in partnership with Video Progetti. With the truck, NVP is capable of producing SD, HD, UHD, SDR and HDR video, as well as utilize IP technology.