At the press event of the “new: Grass Valley yesterday, they did formally announced that the new merged unit of Belden combining Miranda and Grass Valley will be called Grass Valley. They will however keep the Miranda purple and elliptical logo. The new Grass Valley president Marco Lopez (coming from the Miranda unit) did clarify that they kept the name because it was the better known brand internationally but they still wanted to keep an element of Miranda as it is known to be more innovative. This did confirmed my speculation of my blog post from April 4th.

Aside from that, their focus was largely on the opportunity for television entity to earn revenue with localized content. They had a series of product announcement to support that model including a card for the Densite frame that can insert localized content and is controlled by their new cloud-based software “GV Stratus Playout”.

Their strategy is another take on the localized playout concept but similar to what Harmonic did announced Saturday in it’s VOS initiative.

The localized content approach is certainly an attractive one for broadcaster and it is something that I was already discussing with them while I was at Miranda over a decade ago. However, one of the problematic point in implementing such a strategy is with the sales and traffic systems. The US market is divided into two major vendors for those, Wide Orbit and Imagine (former Harris Broadcast) and their systems does not allow for a very efficient implementation of the management part of the equation. I don’t know how much of that the management of the new Grass Valley is aware but they may find that it is quite a difficult issue to tackle for their clients to implement their vision.