Grass Valley – Elastic Compute for a Sustainable Media Industry
Ronny Van Geel, Director of Product Marketing, Grass Valley
The media industry has a paradox at its core. It’s an industry built on light, color and imagination, yet behind the scenes, it’s powered by one of the heaviest infrastructures in technology. Every second of live production consumes compute cycles, cooling, transport and power. The creative output is ephemeral; the energy cost is constant.
That contradiction has become impossible to ignore. As audiences demand richer experiences and round-the-clock content, the carbon footprint of production quietly grows. The challenge is no longer only how to make great content, but how to make it responsibly. Without losing the immediacy, emotion and precision that define live storytelling.
When Elasticity Meets Efficiency
True sustainability doesn’t come from doing less; it comes from doing smarter. The biggest environmental gains aren’t found in recycling or offsetting, they’re found in optimization. This is where elastic compute changes the equation.
Instead of maintaining racks of always-on hardware, elastic compute lets production teams activate only what they need, when they need it. The moment a function isn’t required, it powers down. When it’s time to scale, capacity expands instantly. Energy use becomes proportional to creativity, not to idle time.
Grass Valley’s AMPP OS was designed precisely for this: to virtualize production functions so they can be dynamically orchestrated across available compute resources. The result is efficiency by design. An architecture where flexibility and sustainability are inseparable.
For decades, the industry accepted a silent inefficiency. Hardware was dimensioned for the “worst day”, the biggest show, the busiest feed, the peak load. Those systems then ran all year, consuming power even when pushing black video through the chain. That model once made sense; reliability required redundancy.
But the economics of overcapacity and the ethics of energy waste no longer align. The media industry, which shapes public perception on global issues, can’t afford to lag behind on the one topic that defines our shared future: sustainability.
A Smarter Architecture for Creative Freedom
Elastic compute doesn’t just reduce waste; it amplifies possibility. When production tools become virtual, every node of compute can take any form. A production switcher today, a multiviewer tomorrow, a replay system next week. This shape-shifting flexibility allows creative teams to experiment, to reconfigure workflows on the fly and to scale for special events without overbuilding.
And the transition doesn’t require abandoning what already works. AMPP OS applications integrate seamlessly into existing Grass Valley infrastructures, extending their life and reducing the need for new hardware investment. Organizations can evolve step by step, guided by operational logic rather than by capital cycles.
Of course, not every team has in-house cloud or DevOps expertise. That’s why Grass Valley introduced GV Hosted. It’s a media-grade compute environment operated by Grass Valley engineers and powered by AWS. It removes the technical burden of infrastructure management, allowing production teams to adopt elastic compute immediately.
The idea is simple: you control your productions; we manage the environment beneath them. It’s a bridge into software-defined production that combines reliability, security and performance with a dramatically smaller environmental footprint.
From Efficiency to Integrity
The sustainability conversation in media often drifts toward image: badges, pledges and metrics. But real change happens in architecture. Elastic compute doesn’t just tick the ESG box; it redefines the physics of production itself. By linking energy use directly to creative activity, it aligns ecological responsibility with operational sense.
That alignment is the real breakthrough: a system where doing the right thing is also the efficient thing.
The creative spark will always consume energy. But how we manage that energy is a choice. With AMPP OS and the hybrid pathways that include GV Hosted, Grass Valley offers a way to keep the lights of storytelling bright while dimming the waste behind them.
Sustainability is not a constraint on creativity; it’s its next frontier. The lighter our infrastructure becomes, the freer our stories can travel.
