Daktronics, Grass Valley Announce Industry-First Show Control API Integration

Daktronics of Brookings, South Dakota, and Grass Valley, a provider of live production solutions, announce a new milestone in their ongoing strategic partnership.

Together, the companies are developing a next-generation, deeply integrated workflow that allows Grass Valley production switchers and control systems to natively access and interact with the Daktronics Show Control API, setting a new industry benchmark for unified venue production.

This advancement builds on the strategic alliance announced earlier this year, extending the collaboration into a powerful technical integration that goes far beyond the simple, industry-standard triggers commonly used in the market today.

Grass Valley and Daktronics are co-engineering an advanced communication layer designed to create a two-way exchange between Grass Valley switchers and the Daktronics Display Studio environment. The result will be a seamless connection that improves coordination between control room and display operations while giving production teams the ability to tailor workflows to the specific needs of each event.

As part of this integration, Grass Valley switchers will be able to understand and interact with the full structure of the Daktronics Show Control and Display Studio workspace. This includes reading all available workspaces, pages, containers, tabs, and button hierarchies, along with retrieving detailed button definitions and associated metadata. Operators will also have the ability to remotely control or trigger playback elements in the Daktronics system directly from Grass Valley interfaces.

The integration will support a wide range of Display Studio attributes, including button IDs and names, audio indicators that identify content containing sound, foreground and background colors, and the X/Y coordinates of elements within the Display Studio user interface. By making this information available natively, Grass Valley systems can automatically populate macros, configuration menus and operator displays with clear, contextual data, greatly reducing setup time, minimizing operator error and providing unprecedented visibility into display system operations.

“This collaboration represents an industry milestone,” says Greg Huttie, VP of Switchers at Grass Valley. “By tightly integrating our switchers with Daktronics Show Control, we’re giving venues a unified and intelligent workflow that elevates timing, precision and creative control in ways the industry has never seen before.”

“This integration gives our customers a dramatically more efficient and connected workflow,” says Greg Fleischbein, Product Manager at Daktronics. “Grass Valley switchers will interact directly with the full structure of Display Studio, giving production teams clearer insight, faster setup and more confidence during every moment of a live event.”

Grass Valley and Daktronics share a long-term commitment to enhancing the in-venue production experience. This new API-level integration marks a major step forward in providing customers with more engaging presentations, more reliable operations, and more efficient end-to-end production workflows, further solidifying the innovative foundation established under the companies’ strategic partnership.