Bridge Technologies' video and audio monitoring scopes can now be called up inside Grass Valley's AMPP platform as software, without dedicated hardware. The change comes as Bridge joins the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) initiative.
MXL is an open-source, vendor-neutral layer for IP-native, software-defined media production. It was developed with the EBU, the Linux Foundation, NABA and other partners. Grass Valley's AMPP is a cloud-native operating system and virtualized production platform, and it now uses MXL as its transport layer so tools from different vendors can exchange media with low latency.
To make the fit, Bridge containerized several components of its production toolset and repackaged them as monitoring scopes. Containerized software is packaged with everything it needs to run, so it can be started on shared computing resources rather than on purpose-built boxes. Bridge said pairing the scopes with MXL reduces constant network read/write cycles, which lowers latency, network overhead and infrastructure costs. Users can switch scope features on as needed, for example to handle spikes in demand during large sporting events.
Matt Yates, Grass Valley's director of strategic alliances, said that "With AMPP OS now MXL-native, Bridge's containerized monitoring tools can be accessed within the AMPP environment, giving users greater flexibility in how and when they deploy these capabilities."
Simen Frostad, Bridge's chairman and co-founder, said MXL and containerization offer "a flexible, efficient way to run our best-in-class scopes across larger, more dynamic production environments, without the overhead of dedicated hardware deployments." Neither company gave pricing or a release date.