Grass Valley (company)

Grass Valley, formerly known as Grass Valley Group, develops and manufactures technology for the film and television as well as transmission technology and digital cinema technology. Since January 2011, the company is owned by investment firm Francisco Partners.

History

Grass Valley was founded in 1958 by Donald Hare as a small development company. The company's headquarters was in the town of Grass Valley in California's foothills of the Sierra Nevada. 1964 Grass Valley demonstrated at the NAB Show ( National Association of Broadcasters ) in a hotel room to a selected audience the first video distribution amplifier. It was only in 1968 the first vision mixer was presented, which quickly became the flagship and workhorse of the company.

The company became known only internationally Through the merger with Tektronix in 1974 and was about 15 years have been incredibly successful. However Tektronix 1999 decided to focus only on high-end instruments and therefore sold the area "broadcast" to a private investor. This led the combined company will continue under the name Grass Valley Group Inc..

In 2002, the French electronics company Thomson took over the financially troubled company Grass Valley Group and incorporated it into its broadcast subsidiary, Thomson Broadcast & Media Solutions. A number of past acquisitions such as the principal European competitor Philips BTS Thomson Broadcast & Media Solutions grew to become the most all-round supplier of broadcast equipment in the video area in Europe. After the acquisition of the Grass Valley Group, the global market is now largely dominated and divided only in some product areas with Sony, Snell and several smaller providers.

In September 2005, the company was officially renamed back to Grass Valley. In the wake of financial difficulties the Thomson group end of January 2009 a possible sale of several business units, including the Grass Valley Group announced. The sale of the core of Grass Valley activities (consisting of the Division Professional Broadcasting) to the financial investor Francisco Partners was finally announced in July 2010 and completed in January 2011. In the wake of the takeover of the headquarters of Cergy, near Paris, was moved to San Francisco. The range of transmissions has been separated from it to the German financial investor Parter Capital Group (July 2010) and the area of ​​the head end to the French Fonds de Consolidation et de Développement des Entreprises ( fcde ) sold (February 2011).

Products

Grass Valley / Tektronix produced one of the first video disk server at all. The company needed a video source, which always delivered the same quality of a video signal in order to perform calibrations and Einmessprozeduren to their high quality instruments can.

More random decision was made then the mid-1990s to market the device also. The ProFile from the " PDR " series ( Professional Disc Recorder) was very successful, as he, in the same size as a Betacam tape machine 4 video capture and playback channels combined, which could control himself incidentally also the same. Intuitive operation, always the same signal quality and extremely fast access times left the ProFile quickly become the standard devices that belonged to Mindestaussstattung a television studio or OB van.

Today offers Grass Valley different server systems. From a single device " Turbo iDDR " for the ProAV users to complex, global server networks in SDTV / HDTV with ProFile XP or the new K2 server family. In addition, Grass Valley offers basically all key products of a system environment such as cameras, signal processing and signal distribution to:

  • Professional Cameras and Camcorders
  • Video servers and media storage
  • Transmit flow mixer & transmit flow control
  • Video Mixer / Video Mixer
  • Modular Signal Processing / router / controller
  • Digital News Production / Editing Systems
  • Produktions-/Kontroll- & surveillance systems

In addition, another older, no longer sold, but still used and also by Grass Valley Service supported devices in use. Furthermore, Grass Valley is a world market leader with the video equipment.

Locations

In all major countries around the world entertains Grass Valley sales & service offices. In addition, there are product dependent development centers. The German branch, Grass Valley Germany GmbH, located in Weiterstadt.

Customers

Since Grass Valley next to development and sales and system integration, that is, construction and commissioning of TV studios, performing, include almost all well-known national and international broadcasters and many production and OB van companies to the clientele. Some of the largest projects that will be realized by Grass Valley system is the technical structure of the channel Al - Jazeera International ( Al -Jazeera ) with news studios around the world and the relining of the complete signal distribution of the English BBC.

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