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| Thomson Unveils Services and Products Spanning Digital Film Making, Cinema, & In--Home Entertainment Las Vegas, Nevada (National Association of Broadcasters Convention-Booth #SU7823) April 16, 2005 — Leveraging its ability to touch more points of today's media and entertainment digital workflows than any other company, Thomson (Euronext Paris: 18453; NYSE: TMS) today made a series of announcements related to its ongoing market-expansion efforts. These efforts include new Grass Valley™ brand products for digital film making, a digital-cinema server initiative and services to support digital cinema distribution, and IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) products to support digital in-home entertainment. Today's Grass Valley announcements are part of its dMAX™ (digital Media Asset Maximization) initiative announced earlier this year. Grass Valley will highlight its support of critical digital workflows, applications, and technologies at its booth in the Las Vegas Convention Center — SU-7823. A virtual tour of the booth is available at www.thomsongrassvalley.com/tour/. "From Hollywood sound stages, network newsrooms, and mobile production trucks to major satellite, terrestrial and cable distribution, no company touches more of the digital workflow than Thomson," said Marc Valentin, president of the Grass Valley business within Thomson. "The announcements we're making today in support of our customers' workflow requirements through our Grass Valley and Technicolor businesses will enable us to secure greater market share and growth going forward." Recent Major Orders Validate Workflow Strategy Today's media and entertainment leaders are demanding greater operational efficiencies, creative control, and cost effectiveness from their digital workflows. The announcements made today-which span digital creativity, asset management, and delivery-reflect the end-to-end approach that Thomson is taking to address these challenges. This approach, which involves providing a full set of digital workflow products and services, is fully in line with the company's previously announced two-year strategic growth initiative. Thomson is already seeing strong results from this approach, as evidenced in several recent workflow-related orders for Grass Valley equipment and services globally. In digital news production, U.S. TV station group Media General is standardizing nine of its stations to Grass Valley digital news production equipment. In high-definition (HD) and mobile and outside broadcast (OB) production, the U.S.-based Lyon Video is outfitting its new $7 million all-HD truck fleet with Grass Valley equipment and will display a new HD truck parked among the Gerling & Associates mobile exhibits (MM100) at NAB 2005; Moscow-based Eurasia Entertainment has commissioned the Grass Valley Systems Group to build an HD OB van equipped with Grass Valley equipment in a multi-million-dollar deal; and Eumovil, a European OB company based in Madrid, and its sister company Media Movil, have placed an order valued at nearly $2.4 million for Grass Valley multi-format cameras and switchers to cover major sports and entertainment events. In broadcast playout facilities workflows, the Korean broadcast network MBC has placed a $1 million order for Grass Valley Profile® 6G video servers; and three major Italian broadcasters, 3Zero2 TV, La7 Televisioni Spa and Videotime-Mediaset Group, have placed orders valued at a total of $18.5 million for Grass Valley switchers, video servers, cameras, and video compression and networking equipment. And in transmission/distribution, four out of five digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcasters in France have committed their digital facilities to Grass Valley ViBE MPEG-4-ready encoding systems in deals worth a total of $1.5 million. Digital Filmmaking: Grass Valley Digital Cinematography, Post-Production Lines Expand The Grass Valley Viper FilmStream™ Digital Cinematography Camera remains the only choice for uncompromised digital capture with the quality that top-flight Hollywood directors demand. NAB 2005 sees the first demonstrations of a vital companion product for this camera, the Venom™ FlashPak solid-state recorder. The Venom recorder mounts directly to the Viper camera, is powered by it, and offers a full-resolution recording capacity of 10 minutes, which compares favorably with the capture time of a 35mm film magazine. Grass Valley is also introducing at NAB 2005 the Spirit 2K DataCine® which enables movie makers to scan their films to create a single digital file for multiple post-production processes. The Spirit 2K DataCine leverages the design of the high-end Spirit 4K system to provide a 2K image-capture capability that is in line with many sectors of the post-production industry. As demand for higher resolutions grows, users can upgrade a Spirit 2K DataCine to a Spirit 4K system. Digital Cinema: Grass Valley Server Development; Technicolor Digital Distribution Capitalizing on its ability to support the entire digital film acquisition/post-production/playout workflow, Grass Valley today announced that it has started developing a range of servers tailored to the digital-cinema market that will meet the technical specifications laid down by Hollywood's Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) and those of the SMPTE working group. Meanwhile, Thomson's Technicolor business detailed the technology, network operations, and content management it is providing through its SkyArcTM system, a major new initiative in digital cinema advertising distribution. The SkyArc system provides digital satellite distribution services in the United States to Screenvision, a joint venture of Thomson and ITV plc, which provides advertising to more than 15,000 screens in the US. Under the first phase of the SkyArc project, Technicolor will digitize approximately 5,000 of these screens over the next 18 months. A Screenvision investment of more than $50 million will enable the secure delivery of HD images and Dolby 5.1 digital audio to the theatres equipped with high brightness digital projection. The SkyArc system is upgradeable to support true digital cinema distribution. Digital In-Home Entertainment: Grass Valley Targets IPTV With telecommunications companies worldwide wanting to deliver IPTV in support of their broadband distribution strategies, Grass Valley today announced the IPS 1200, a compact, powerful, and highly practical multi-channel video streamer. Providing all the functionality that an IP broadcaster needs to deliver rich media video content in a single compact chassis at a highly affordable price, the IPS 1200 joins a long line of digital delivery products, including the award-winning ViBE digital content delivery platform, that offer real operational and commercial benefits. dMAX Initiative Supports Workflow Requirements of Media Leaders Under one umbrella, the Grass Valley dMAX initiative will deliver to media leaders worldwide a combination of software frameworks, critical applications-such as asset management, facility management, and monitoring-expert system integration, and support services to create complete, optimized, end-to-end workflows. The dMAX initiative brings together several key elements that further expand the system integration capabilities of and opportunities for, including: · An expansion of the Grass Valley centralized facility monitoring and management solutions; · A new effort which leverages the widespread expertise and experience of Grass Valley in deploying media asset management technology, news, and larger-scale systems to make media asset management more affordable and comprehensive going forward; and, · A new Grass Valley OnCall™ service level agreement (SLA) that gives media leaders the flexibility they need to implement multi-distribution workflows. Digital Workflows: Grass Valley at NAB 2005 Grass Valley will be showcasing its support for digital workflows of all kinds at NAB 2005, including those for digital cinematography and digital post production; HD acquisition and production; broadcast playout; news, sports, and feature production; cable and satellite transmission; IPTV transmission; contribution and transmission; and digital mobility. |
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