Grass Valley (electronics company)

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Grass Valley

logo
legal form LLC
founding 1958 in Grass Valley, California
Seat CanadaCanada Montreal
management Timothy Shoulders II (President)
Website grassvalley.com

Grass Valley , formerly also known as the Grass Valley Group , develops and produces technologies for the film and television sector as well as transmission technology and digital cinema .

history

Analog video mixer (around 1985)

Grass Valley was founded in 1958 by Donald Hare as a small development company. The company was based in Grass Valley in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California . In 1964, Grass Valley demonstrated the first video distribution amplifier on the occasion of the NAB show. The first vision mixer was introduced in 1968 and quickly became the company's flagship and workhorse.

Through the merger with the precision measuring device manufacturer Tektronix in 1974, the company became internationally known. Grass Valley and Tektronix developed one of the first hard disk recorders when a video signal source with constant signal quality was required in order to be able to carry out calibrations and calibration procedures on the measuring devices produced. In the mid-1990s, it was decided to market the device externally. The ProFile from the PDR (Professional Disk Recorder) series was successful because it combined four video recording and playback channels, which could be controlled in the same way, in the same size as a Betacam tape machine. The product was characterized by intuitive operation, consistent signal quality and short access times. In 1999, however, Tektronix decided to concentrate only on high-end measuring devices and therefore sold the "Broadcast" division to a private investor. He continued the restructured company under the name Grass Valley Group Inc.

In 2002 the French electronics group Thomson took over the financially troubled company and incorporated it into its broadcast subsidiary Thomson Broadcast & Media Solutions, which had already become the most extensive European all-round provider of broadcast equipment in the video sector through the acquisition of the largest competitor Philips BTS . After the acquisition of the Grass Valley Group, the world market was largely dominated; Only in some product areas were there still competitors with Sony , Snell & Wilcox (Quantel) and various smaller providers.

In September 2005 the company was renamed Grass Valley again for marketing reasons. In 2006, Canopus , a manufacturer of non-linear editing systems, was acquired.

Due to ongoing financial difficulties in connection with the global financial crisis , the Thomson Group was forced to part with several holdings in 2009.

The sale of the core of Grass Valley's activities (consisting of the “Professional Broadcasting” division) to the financial investor Francisco Partners was finally announced in July 2010 and completed in January 2011. As a result of the takeover, the company's headquarters were relocated from Cergy near Paris to San Francisco .

The “Systems Integration” division went separately to the German financial investor Parter Capital Group in July 2012 and went into bankruptcy at the end of 2013, while the “Head End” division went to the French Fonds de Consolidation et de Développement des Entreprises (FCDE ) was sold.

In 2014, Grass Valley was sold to the Belden Group for $ 220 million . In February 2020 Belden sold the group, whose sales had been halved to 350 million dollars, to the personnel with the editing software manufacturer Avid affiliated private equity -Unternehmen Black Dragon Capital.

Products

Today Grass Valley offers various server systems - from the single device T2 4K Series for ProAV users to server networks in SDTV / HDTV / UHDTV . In addition, the company carries all key products in a studio environment:

In addition, older devices that are no longer sold are also supported by the Grass Valley Service.

Locations

Grass Valley has sales and service offices in all major countries around the world. There are also some product-specific development centers. The German branch, Grass Valley Germany GmbH, is located in Weiterstadt .

Customers

Since Grass Valley also carries out system integration, i.e. construction and commissioning of television studios, in addition to development and sales, customers include almost all well-known national and international television companies as well as many production facilities and OB van manufacturers. Two of the largest projects implemented by Grass Valley Systems are the technical construction of the Al-Jazeera International channel with news studios all over the world and the rebuilding of the entire signal distribution system for the British BBC .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. mebucom.de: Systems Integration Group sold by Grass Valley
  2. BTS bankruptcies
  3. Digital Production: Grass Valley is sold
  4. Black Dragon Capital takes over Grass Valley