In Australia, two rival television broadcasters have come together to pool their resources and develop one of the world's most advanced playout centers: MediaHub Australia. ABC and WIN developed the requirements specification of the center, and then turned to the Grass Valley™ Systems Group to turn it into a reality.

Located in a western suburb of Sydney, it is a single, very large-scale digital playout facility. It was designed and built from scratch to deliver cost-effective, enhanced delivery services that will meet the challenges of the future by increasing the programming capability and capacity of these two Australian broadcasters.

Although it began broadcasting HD programming in 2008, Thirteen/WNET, America's most-watched public television station, completed the migration of all of its production operations to HD in January of 2011.

To do this correctly, they had to carefully expand the existing signal distribution infrastructure to accommodate more HD content and a significant but decreasing amount of SD shows as well.

Boxing fans watching The Legend Returns pay-per-view (PPV) fight between Evander "The Real Deal" Holyfield and Francois "The White Buffalo" Botha—along with several undercard fights—on Saturday, April 10, 2010 were treated to a captivating high-quality, multicamera production that captured the action of Holyfield's 8th round decision from virtually every angle. Little did they know that the production team that night on site at the Thomas & Mack Center, in Las Vegas, included a small crew, six standard-definition (SD) cameras, and a single, compact Grass Valley™ Indigo™ AV Mixer.

Creative Technology is an internationally recognized professional audio visual staging services provider with locations in the US, UK, Germany, Dubai, China, and Singapore. They have worked with many of the major automobile manufacturers around the world to help announce new products in the most imaginative way. Along with all of the exotic cars and prototype vehicles on display at the annual North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) convention, held in Detroit, the event is also renown for its sophisticated live multimedia presentations that vie for attendees' attention.

To automatically play back pre-recorded video on large screen displays at the 2010 NAIAS convention at Detroit's Cobo Hall in January, Creative Technology used a unique, file-based digital disk recorder—the T2™ intelligent digital disk recorder (iDDR) from Grass Valley™ to drive numerous high-definition video screens in support of the recurring live presentations.

Takenaka offers a unique brand of event staging—called LiveTechnical—which uses state-of-the-art technology to create mind-blowing visual extravaganzas. The Star Festival 2009, an event co-produced by Takenaka in Osaka, was one of their most spectacular events of the year, perfectly demonstrating their technical and creative prowess in this field. When planning this prestigious event, the LiveTechnical team wanted an exciting stage show enriched by more high-definition imagery than they'd ever used before. They wanted to use video in new and exciting ways.

In addition to providing crystal-clear HD video and rock-solid performance, the solution also had to be easy to use and compatible with the other equipment they were using. Grass Valley™ T2™ fitted the bill perfectly. One of the key features of the T2 iDDR is its intuitive user interface. This meant that VJs at the event had live control over two independent HD playback channels. Compatibility with switchers, professional projectors, and other staging equipment is also no problem, thanks to HD-SDI connectivity.