Grass Valley expands the K2 range with new clients and servers

At NAB 2011, Grass Valley will highlight a new series of highly affordable models that target a variety of play-to-air applications and other content distributions.

Grass Valley continues to expand its line of K2 Summit servers in order to expand its applications to new areas of business, technologies and file-based broadcasting.

At NAB 2011, Grass Valley will highlight a new series of highly affordable models that target a variety of play-to-air applications and other content distributions.

The new Grass Valley K2 Summit broadcast clients comprise five new models: two sharing storage clients that connect to a K2 storage area network (SAN) via iSCSI and three integrated storage servers.

These broadcast clients and servers are based on the K2 Summit platform, having been optimized to meet the specific needs in broadcast/play-to-air environments.

Features of the new K2 Summit clients include up to four configurable SD/HD channels (MPEG-2 encoding up to 50 Mb/s), up to 16 TB of internal storage, agile playback of DV and MPEG-2 formats; up/down/cross conversion, file sharing using GXF, MXF, QuickTime and AVI formats, and up to 16 audio I/O tracks per video channel. Since they are an extension of the K2 family, they support a wide range of Grass Valley applications as well as other automation and asset management systems from third-party manufacturers.

Charlie Dunn, senior vice president of publishing, servers and storage at Grass Valley, said: "The K2 Summit architecture has been designed from the ground up to be flexible and support a variety of applications that help streamline production, file sharing, and program execution processes. These new streaming models carry all the features and reliability of the K2 Summit and K2 Media Server."