What's interesting to me is that GV is one of Thomson's most successful and recognizable brands. Anyone with a corporate business background will tell you that, in times like these, it is actually ADVISABLE for some companies to sell their most successful brands ... especially if there are some extremely interested buyers ...

[quote="Bob Ennis"]In my opinion, GV is little more than shadow of its former self, but it still has some very talented people who really appreciate what the TD's need to make their job easier. It would take someone with big huevos (or a company who needs to fill out their own product line [someone like Harris, perhaps]) to pick up what's left of GV & turn it around to make it even close to what it once was, but those people still exist. I would wait for a bit & see what happens before putting my Kalypso on E-Bay.[/quote] Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!! My money says that there's alot of phone calls being made across the Atlantic (no one wants to use the corporate jet with shareholders watching). If Harris picked up GV, they'd have a product line that could finally compete with Sony. -Jeff

[quote="Rick Edwards"]If they can find a buyer.... in this bad economic climate, with a large portion of broadcasters, studios and the like not buying anythnig, there's a good chance it will just die.[/quote] I wouldn't be too quick to count them out. In the 15 years that I was associated with GV, we went through 3 different owners (we used to refer to it as "different circus, same clowns"). Tektronix sold GV to a Venture Capitalist who wanted nothing more than to turn the sale around & make a profit (which he did). Thomson's business model has been to buy up "promising" companies, milk them dry, and then sell them. Thomson really bought GV for one reason...the name: they felt that by putting the GV name on the BTS (Philips) cameras that they would have a better chance of selling them in the U.S., and that worked to a point. Thomson had the DD series switcher which was a hit in Europe but a flop in the U.S., while the Kalypso was the other-way-around. The Kayak (and now the Kayenne) was the attempt to meld the 2 competing switchers into one - and it has been a very successful product. On the other hand, the switcher market is not a big one, and it takes a company that either has a lot of dedication or one that can have other parts of the company subsidize the switcher division to maintain a presence in such a small market. Local stations used to be the bread-and-butter of switcher companies - that's going away as local stations convert to automation, where you really don't need a User Interface; you just need the switching electronics, and you don't necessarily need a switcher manufacturer to do the electronics anymore - the same hold true with concert video production which can be driven by a schyronized track. Thus, the same switcher companies that are touting automation systems are slowly and inadvertantly putting themselves out of business, both here in the U.S. and overseas. In the Entertainment / Fixed Studio arena, and for a number of reasons, SONY has the lion's share of the switcher sales (at least in the U.S.). However, GV still owns the truck market (again, at least here in the U.S.), and has a religiously loyal following. Fewer & fewer entertainment shows, unless they're done live, are relying on a TD. But sports is growing - there is still a need for larger, more flexible switchers based around a good User Interface in this market. The SONY has a few fatal flaws that many sports TD's find unacceptable for what they do, and unless SONY revamps some panel & operating paradigms, I think that they'll still have a hard time breaking into the truck market in the U.S. In my opinion, GV is little more than shadow of its former self, but it still has some very talented people who really appreciate what the TD's need to make their job easier. It would take someone with big huevos (or a company who needs to fill out their own product line [someone like Harris, perhaps]) to pick up what's left of GV & turn it around to make it even close to what it once was, but those people still exist. I would wait for a bit & see what happens before putting my Kalypso on E-Bay.

Now that everybody has just spent a load of bucks upgrading gear to HD, or at least preparing for the switchover, they're probably set for at least a while, I would have thought that recession or not their sales would have gone down anyway. Of course not having to keep the analog towers alive for another 4 months would have helped.

If they can find a buyer.... in this bad economic climate, with a large portion of broadcasters, studios and the like not buying anythnig, there's a good chance it will just die.

Hopefully the buyer will do the right thing and continue to develop the Kalypso and not try to combine two switchers that operate completely different.