A Reflection on 20 years of NAB booth builds and the Evolution of Grass Valley AMPP

At NAB, I had a moment to reflect on just how dramatically our approach to preparing the Grass Valley booth has evolved. After nearly two decades of being directly involved in the planning and execution of Miranda and Grass Valley tradeshow booths, I’ve seen the transition from traditional hardware-based demos to fully virtualized environments firsthand. And the shift is nothing short of transformative.

Although GV continues to offer and invest heavily in our Industry leading Camera, Switcher and Infrastructure solutions, our customers now have many compelling AMPP alternatives to choose from. Many of our connected devices such as Switcher and Replay panels are fully compatible with AMPP.

Roughly nine years ago, Grass Valley began building what would become GV AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform). In just the past 4–5 years, as AMPP has matured and evolved into an end to end solution, how we plan, build, and execute tradeshows and demos, changed dramatically.

A Look Back:

Preparing for NAB used to be a major logistical feat. Here’s what that looked like just a few years ago:

  • Planning began as early as November for an April show.
  • BOMs were finalized by January, and we began pulling equipment from the factory and field.
  • Custom demo kits were assembled over 6–8 weeks.
  • We deployed large Core distribution routers, downstream DAs, and often multiple utility routers for capacity, along with tons of frame synchronizers.
  • Massive coax bundles ran under floors or overhead.
  • Electrical load? Roughly 200KW over three distribution boards.
  • One and a half 50-ft trucks were loaded with gear—some of which sat unused for most of the year.
  • Setup would sometimes consist of 20-hour workdays, with constant troubleshooting: damaged cables, sync loops, crosspoint errors.
  • We needed dozens of converters and gateways to unify formats.
  • Each system was purpose-built, requiring spares for every unique piece of hardware.

The AMPP Difference

With GV AMPP now at the core of 70% of our demos, there is now a very measurable impact on several aspects of the project and drastically reduced overhead costs:

  • 55% reduction in physical equipment
  • 66% less power consumption, including air conditioning
  • Planning time cut in half
  • 80% reduction in distribution infrastructure
  • 75% of demos run on just 5 AMPP Edge servers
  • Far fewer man-hours for setup
  • Spares = extra compute (just add a server)
  • Internal routing of signals within AMPP = zero need for DAs or external routers
  • Configs can be saved, reloaded, and modified for future events
  • Far less cabling, fewer sync issues, and drastically simplified signal management
  • Direct support for 2110, SDI, NDI, SRT, RTMP – no conversion needed

What Customers Love

It’s not just us seeing the benefits. Customers deploying AMPP are realizing massive gains in flexibility and efficiency:

  • Remote Operations – Operators access tools via browser with high-quality, low-latency WebRTC –Save on travel costs and personnel down time.
  • Cloud, On-Prem, or Hybrid – Choose the deployment that fits your workflow
  • Zero re-cabling or hardware swap-outs to change your use case
  • Centralized or Cloud Compute allow for more efficient/ frequent

The Future Is Flexible Compute

With more than 300 native apps and 60+ partner integrations, AMPP can now support complete workflows for live production, asset management, and playout – all from the same environment. No need for external routing, sync, or conversion. It’s all virtualized, all scalable, and always evolving.

Other vendors are now following this model, many building AMPP-compatible solutions. And the reason is clear: the advantages in cost, efficiency, flexibility, and scalability speak for themselves.

Interested in learning more about AMPP or evolving your own workflows? Feel free to connect or message me directly. I’d be happy to share insights!