Sky News Australia migrates production to Grass Valley cloud platform

The successful migration of a 24/7 national newsroom to a software-defined, cloud-first architecture signals a maturing of cloud production beyond live sports and temporary events. By decoupling production from physical workstations, ANC demonstrates that high-volume broadcast operations can achieve operational resilience and remote flexibility without sacrificing output speed. This move aligns with a broader industry shift where major broadcasters utilize microservices to optimize OpEx during infrastructure overhauls. Watch for similar large-scale adoption across News Corp’s global properties as legacy hardware contracts expire.

The transition to Grass Valley’s AMPP platform coincides with a massive period of change for Sky News Australia. According to Colliers Project Leaders (April 2026), the network’s move into a purpose-built multimedia hub in Surry Hills, Sydney, was finalized on December 10, 2025, roughly one month ahead of its intended schedule. This site now serves as the centralized production core for more than 1,500 hours of weekly content, featuring 143 square meters of LED video walls and 9 kilometers of cabling. Per internal network announcements (February 2026), Sky News Australia is also set to rebrand as 'News24' later in 2026. This shift reflects the termination of a 10-year naming rights deal with UK-based Sky (owned by Comcast), which expires in December 2026.

Grass Valley’s cloud-native momentum has expanded significantly during this period. At the NAB Show 2026, CEO Jon Wilson reported that the AMPP platform now processes 20 million production hours per month, a 100% increase over the 10 million hours reported in early 2025. This growth is driven by recent tier-one deployments, including Sky Network Television in New Zealand, which implemented Playout X across 10 HD channels in August 2025 to support UHD and hybrid cloud-burst operations. Furthermore, Grass Valley recently unified its software ecosystem through collaboration with Lawo (June 2026) to integrate the HOME orchestration platform with AMPP, validating the "Dynamic Media Facility" concept for large-scale, multi-vendor environments. This strategy targets major international broadcasters seeking to move away from rigid, FPGA-based on-premise hardware toward elastic COTS and cloud-based processing models.