No New CEO Imminent For Grass Valley

With the IBC show originally scheduled to start tomorrow in Amsterdam canceled due to a surge of COVID-19 infections in the Netherlands, Grass Valley held a virtual press briefing Wednesday (Dec 1) to give an update on the state of its business. While light on product and customer news, the event was notable as the first public forum for the company since the exit last month of president and CEO Tim Shoulders and GM, Live Production Marco Lopez.

Since Shoulders’ departure, day-to-day oversight of Grass Valley’s operations has been assumed by Louis Hernandez Jr., a former Avid CEO and the founder, managing director and CEO of Black Dragon Capital, the private equity firm that acquired Grass Valley from Belden Inc. last year.

Louis Hernandez Jr.

Hernandez led off yesterday’s briefing by describing his plans for Grass Valley, which include continued investment in public cloud technology, an expansion in new business models such as SaaS services, and an increased emphasis on pursuing partnerships with other vendors.

“We own 100% of Grass Valley, and what that means is we have tremendous flexibility and a long-term horizon to invest,” Hernandez said.

When asked whether Grass Valley would hire a new CEO, Hernandez  mostly sidestepped the question, speaking of a broader reorganization of the company around AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform), the cloud “operating system” that will serve as the linchpin of its future offerings. While he did say that Grass Valley planned to bring on some executives with cloud migration experience, he also indicated that he’s in no rush to hand over the reins.

“We’re all operators on the Black Dragon side, so we have four of us who’ve been working on this full time,” Hernandez said. “We interact with the team every day since we bought the company, we’re deeply engaged in every aspect of the business. So, from a continuity perspective there’s virtually no disruption. We’re meeting with the team every day, and I’ve run companies for 25 years, so it’s not hard for us to assist.”

Hernandez said one of the surprises for him when he began considering an acquisition of Grass Valley back in 2019 was that the company hadn’t mentioned AMPP, even though it had spent four years and more than $100 million developing the technology. Now the cloud platform has over 25 live customers along with 50 POCs around the world.

“I actually discovered it at IBC talking to some of their customers who are friends of mine, telling me, Hey, this AMPP thing is pretty cool, I think it’s going to be a big hit, it’s going to change the industry,” he recalled.

Now Grass Valley wants to use AMPP to expand the Grass Valley Media Universe (GVMU), its concept of a “shared ecosystem” that combines connected hardware devices, software-only solutions and third-party products from partners. The GVMU will help legacy customers satisfy an exploding demand for content for new digital platforms while individual program revenue and viewership, or “yield-per-asset,” continues to decline, Hernandez said.

Sydney Lovely

According to Grass Valley CTO Sydney Lovely, AMPP comprises agile management tools, elastic platform services and patented “intelligent media technologies” that address technical barriers like latency and cloud ingress.

Lovely said that around 25% of media companies’ total tech spend is on integrating solutions, and Grass Valley wanted to provide a single platform to unite workflows from different parts of the broadcast plant. The new platform also had to be able to handle the rigors of live production, where Grass Valley built its reputation.

“Our thesis was if we built it for live everything else would be downhill from there, and that’s truly been the case,” Lovely said.

Neil Maycock

Grass Valley CMO Neil Maycock said the “next phase” of the company will focus squarely on growing the GVMU and using AMPP to not only drive new cloud revenues but also bring in “connected devices” from the broader Grass Valley portfolio such as cameras, switchers and IP infrastructure systems. He gave the example of gaming company Electronic Arts, which is using AMPP in a live production workflow where a director at home with a physical Grass Valley switcher desk is connecting to a software switcher in the cloud.

“We’re able to combine traditional products with our cloud platform to enable whole new ways of working,” he said.

Maycock said Grass Valley will offer more opex-based models that allow customers to better scale their costs against their revenues. He also referenced several long-term enterprise agreements with large customers that are worth a combined $67 million and said more enterprise deals were imminent.

“We want to innovate not just with technology but innovate with our commercial models and how we engage with customers,” Maycock said. “We’ve introduced radically new commercial agreements and models.”