Targets low-cost 24/7 broadcast stations and playout facilities

With its most advanced, multichannel K2 media servers used by virtually all of the major content distributors in the US and around the world, at NAB 2010 Grass Valley introduced the new high capacity cost-effective K2 Summit Transmission Server Package in a 2 RU chassis that is targeted to smaller broadcast stations and playout facilities with smaller budgets. With up to 8 TB of internal storage it can store well over a week’s worth of programming making it an ideal standalone transmission server for distribution playout architectures at remote locations or even in a disaster recovery site.
Designed to meet the majority of the world’s need for high-quality program playout, the new K2 Summit Transmission Server contains 8 TBs of total storage that can be RAID protected supporting DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO 25, DVCPRO 50 and SD/HD MPEG bit rates up to 50 Mb/s including D10, all versions of XDCAM HD, XDCAM EX and MEPG I-frame and long GOP formats.

With a flexible architecture, users can configure it as a 4-channel playout system or as a 3-channel playout system with one bi-directional channel that can be used for record or as a fourth playout channel. It also supports all the key features of the current K2 Summit with the ability to play multiple compression formats back to back and can up/down/cross convert files on playout letting it transmit both SD and HD channels with the same files. The high quality up/down converter preserves captioning information and performs the correct aspect ratio conversion as well as outputting a high quality converted signal.

“The K2 Summit is a high performance, multi-format platform that can be configured to address a wide variety of markets and applications,” said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Grass Valley. “The flexibility of the platform enables special purpose configurations to be offered with specific capabilities at a lower price. We think there’s huge potential for a compact distribution product like the new K2 Summit Transmission Server.”

The K2 Summit includes redundant hot-swappable power supplies and redundant Ethernet ports. It also features an embedded OS that runs off of a CompactFlash drive for fast and reliable operation. Leveraging Grass Valley’s Emmy Award-winning core video technology, each server channel is built around a high-performance RISC processor and an embedded real-time operating system, and performs video/audio processing in the robust and secure manner needed for a 24/7, frame-accurate environment.

Transmission applications generally run at the most efficient bit rate possible to minimize storage and transmission costs. The common rate for SD MPEG is 10-15 Mb/s and HD is 25-50 Mb/s. K2 Summit uses the latest in SAS drive technology including new 1TB drives. These state of the art drives offer higher capacity with minimal tradeoffs in performance. This configuration offers mirrored storage of up to 23 days at 12 Mb/s and 6.5 days at 50 Mb/s. If mirroring is not used, the storage is effectively doubled by using the entire 8 TB for video storage. This allows six weeks of SD storage or approximately two weeks of HD storage.

Pricing and Availability

The new Grass Valley K2 Summit Transmission Server Package began shipping in March with a cost of $54,900 (USD).