News

Grass Valley Announces New Open Alliance Partner Initiative (11/5/2006)

Key Industry Supporters, Including HP to Participate in Initiative

Thomson (Euronext Paris: 18453; NYSE: TMS) today announced a new marketing program highlighting new, more open and more flexible approaches to newsgathering and field production - the Grass Valley Open Alliance Partner (OAP) initiative. Grass Valley's Infinity OAP program represents a growing group of industry-leading companies such as HP who are supporting the Infinity Series and its open, flexible approach to electronic newsgathering and field production.

The OAP program is a move away from the dictated approaches and proprietary recording, storage and playback formats that have caused frustrations and workflow inefficiencies for broadcasters and video professionals - and signals these leaders' support for true openness and format flexibility to support the demands of their customers for more collaborative, efficient workflows.

Integrating full IT connectivity, compression choices, true contribution-quality high-definition format support, and the unique ability to freely use off-the-shelf removable recording media such as REV PRO(tm) cartridges or standard, professional grade CompactFlash memory, the Infinity Series of digital media camcorders and digital media recorders is at the core of the OAP program.

As part of the initiative, HP will certify Grass Valley's off-the-shelf, removable REV PRO drives as an option to their workstations and reference the REV PRO drives for its OEM partners. The REV PRO devices can be built into workstation products or made available as external drive accessories. This will allow customers, such as HP OEM partners, to purchase HP workstations designed for desktop video applications with REV PRO built in - allowing them to benefit from the power and versatility of REV PRO for desktop applications. It will also ready the workstation for supporting workflows featuring the Infinity Series.

"Support of Infinity Series products, through inclusion of the removable REV PRO devices, as an open recording option for video professionals sends an important message to the industry that the format is being supported to address a variety of production processes," said Marc Valentin, president of the Grass Valley business within Thomson. "Equally important is the availability of our leading craft and quick-turn NLEs on the powerful xw9300 platform, a combination that will lead to even more efficiencies and creative control for our customers."

"With its open, IT-centric architecture, the Grass Valley REV PRO devices fit in nicely with HP's new generation of workstations and storage systems," said Jeff Wood, director of Personal Workstations at HP. "Being part of the Grass Valley Open Alliance Partner program will benefit creative professionals by providing instant access to data with multiple resolutions and file types."

Compatibility between the REV PRO drive/ media and the HP personal workstations will be demonstrated at NAB, both in the HP booth (#SL3744) and the Grass Valley booth (SU2906). This announcement supports Thomson's overall strategy to help its global media and entertainment customer base acquire, create, edit and manipulate, aggregate re-purpose and package their high-value content. Grass Valley is a leading innovator and supplier of post production and digital intermediate platforms which are relied upon by leading facilities around the world.

Edius and NewsEdit XT Bundled With HP Workstations

The NewsEdit system, one of the industry's fastest NLE for quick-turn production, will be available on the HP xw9300 Workstation, which offers customers dramatically increased speed and computing performance.

The Edius turnkey workstations from Grass Valley will be offered with configurations incorporating the HP xw4300 and xw8200 workstations. Four versions of turnkey systems will be offered that exclusively leverage HP workstations, Edius software, Edius hardware and REV PRO devices. These four system configurations range from low-cost HDV editing systems up to fully featured HD-SDI edit systems.

www.thomsongrassvalley.com

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