SVG Sit-Down: Grass Valley’s Tim Banks on the Next Phase in the Company’s History

The chief revenue officer sees ‘a virtuous cycle of growth and investment’

Grass Valley’s presence at IBC this year signaled a new chapter in the company’s history: it has completed a multi-year transition that finds it focused on a new stage of corporate growth. Its AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform) has been a major focus in recent years, but, as Grass Valley Chief Revenue Officer Tim Banks explained to SVG during IBC, the company is still more than happy serving up quality hardware products as well.

Grass Valley’s Tim Banks: “We’ve recently made lots of smart organizational changes to deliver great operational efficiencies.”

It has been an interesting time for Grass Valley. What was the mood of customers compared with NAB 2023?
The big difference is, at NAB, we were having to explain the context for the business transformation. There’ve been lots of changes not only in our industry but in any industry and businesses that have been transforming themselves. And the parallels are there when you look at some of the major media and entertainment companies in terms of protecting their core business while capitalizing on the opportunity of new business and new services. Most of the revenue and the margins come from the core business, but most of the growth is coming from the new business. That’s where they’re looking to invest, but it’s not yet profitable.

So, there are still customers here at IBC who are looking for hardware.
Candidly, I think we may have overemphasized the software aspect at NAB. From an engineering perspective, most of our hardware products are made up of ever increasing proportions of software. The switchers have a lot of software. The cameras have a lot of software. The infrastructure products have a lot of software. When we messaged earlier in the year that we were doubling our investment in software, people [questioned whether it was] at the expense of hardware. But that isn’t what we said: it was that the hardware that we’re delivering is composed more and more of software. That required a change in skillset, resources, processes, and NAB was about explaining that context.

The cool thing about coming to IBC is, we can now say that transformation is complete. The end of June marked the end of Phase 3 of the business transformation since Black Dragon acquired Grass Valley, and all the reorganization, all the operational efficiencies that were needed to be made, are complete.

The history of Grass Valley saw several businesses amassed together, but they were not integrated. We had six business units each with their own P&L and their own management structure. We’ve recently made lots of smart organizational changes to deliver great operational efficiencies, and, by the end of this year, we’ll have hired 400 new hires in the past 24 months into R&D and engineering positions. Those hires will allow us to accelerate our R&D roadmaps and deliver a best-in-class customer experience. For live production, we continue to innovate with our industry-leading solutions, such as the LDX150 and LDX135 camera platforms and the latest generations of K-Frame switcher and Kayenne panel. And we’ve also been investing heavily in the infrastructure products, like the IP gateways and the multiviewer range. There are lots of clients who want to keep buying their infrastructure from GV. It’s what they’re used to and what they’re confident in and have a huge amount of trust in. Our credibility is based on core principles to lead through innovation and deliver the highest levels of quality and reliability.

One of the things COVID and the supply-chain disruption taught us is that we should take more control of our own destiny. For instance, we’ve recently made the move to in-source camera manufacturing; previously, the assembly of the PCBs was contracted to a manufacturer in Europe. All the cameras are now manufactured in-house in GV’s main manufacturing facility in Montreal. Final assembly and testing will still be in the Breda[, Netherlands] facility, which is where all the R&D is located.

We’re now transitioning into GV’s next phase of growth and investment, and with that comes the appointment of some new key positions, like Ian Fletcher as CTO. Ian has been in the business for a long time, and I can’t think of anyone better to lead the next phase of evangelizing about our vision, our technology strategy, and how we leverage the best agile software-defined architectures to create the future of media.

Also, Adam Marshall has been appointed chief product officer. He comes from a broadcast-operations background as well as solution architecture. He is responsible for the product portfolio in terms of product management and also the marketing function.

Most recently, we’ve made the appointment of Jon Wilson, who, as of Oct. 1, will be president and COO. He will be a great addition to the leadership team, as will Stephanie Sanchez, who has joined as chief strategy officer. She’ll be working closely with Executive Chairman Louis Hernandez and Jon on the planning process for 2024 and our key strategic initiatives.

You mention the next phase. Can you walk me through some rough details of that phase?
There’s not an end date on it because it’s likely that it’ll be a virtuous cycle of growth and investment. The key aspect of that is, the business is surging across the portfolio. For example, we’ve seen 200% revenue growth for AMPP year over year. We’re also going to deliver our strongest revenue since the pandemic for cameras, switchers, and infrastructure as the supply-chain issues are easing. By the end of the quarter, we will have eliminated our overdue backlog and will be pretty much back to normal lead-times, which is fantastic.

What we are seeing in the market now is people being told they must choose to go hardware or go software, go cloud or on-prem, go IP or SDI. Our view is why choose? If you’ve architected your solution correctly, which we have with the AMPP platform, the answer to all those options is yes; we offer great hybrid solutions for all those needs.

Many of those old-school false dilemmas are led by the vendor community and particular stakeholders’ interests based on proprietary solutions that lock you in to protect their existing business. But, from our perspective, our core ethos and principles are centered on openness and integrated GV and third-party solutions based on open standards. We’re proud of the hundreds of millions of dollars in investment that we’ve made in creating the platform and the ecosystem; we think of AMPP as the operating system (like iOS or Android) for media. We want to make it freely available to the industry, and there are 20 partners on the GV booth here at IBC who are technology partners who’ve signed up to our alliances initiative; there are over 80 in total.

Our industry has always wanted best-of-breed (i.e., the ability to choose their preferred graphics, intercom, encoding solutions, etc.), and by adopting an open ecosystem approach, we can deliver this for the new age. Why have other vendors tried to reinvent the core platform (which will take deep pockets and time) when they can simply adopt our open SDKs and APIs and focus their development efforts on integrated applications designed to meet client needs — all delivered within AMPP’s unified UIs, logins, billing, and security.

Earlier, you said your customers are transforming their businesses and that obviously impacts every manufacturer. Is this constant pace of change the new reality?
I think there’s going to be continuous change. You have different markets, different regions, and different segments addressing that change at different rates. That’s going to be the reality.

From our perspective, we’ve seen, for instance, adoption of AMPP surge. I remember at NAB standing on the stage and we were puffing out our chest saying that, in March, the monthly usage of AMPP eclipsed a million hours per month. It’s now over 3 million hours per month. That’s the growth trajectory, and it’s actually live and sports driving that. Clients are adopting AMPP to solve the dual challenges of 1) how do you increase your revenues (maximizing the monetization of your rights and your assets) and 2) how do you drive operational efficiencies (by adopting remote production or new ways of working) to make dramatic cost savings and also increase your sustainability.

It seems we are on the cusp of a live-sports explosion, especially because the cloud can enable smaller entities to offer a better-looking production without huge capital investments. And the bigger events are getting bigger with things like ENG crews capturing content around the live game.
Everyone wants more content. It’s the sports market that’s driving much of that innovation, like Sky‘s coverage of Formula One with the in-car camera feeds so you can follow your favorite driver for the race. That leverages the power of AMPP because Sky can spin up the feeds 30 minutes before the race and spin them down 30 minutes afterwards. They could not achieve that elasticity and utilization with a pure hardware implementation.

Same with the coverage of an event like US Open tennis, where clients want to maximize the monetization of rights and can now offer access to all the courts so fans can follow their favorite player as if it were a dedicated channel. You can create those more personalized, targeted services and appeal to a broader and broader audience.

Interestingly, the real uptick in AMPP usage isn’t growth in Tier 2 or Tier 3 sports but in Tier 1 content. It’s NFL Sunday Ticket, Formula One, US Open tennis, the Champions League, English Premier League, and the Saudi Pro League. All those sports, all the broadcasters, and the sports federations themselves are looking for ways to increase their revenue, maximize the monetization of their assets, and do so in a cost-effective, agile, flexible way.