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VOICE BOX
End-User Advantages, Technical Hurdles
Overall, AVoIP enables more flexible use of network infrastructures and permits easy scalability. Because the IP network is effectively video and audio format agnostic, scaling from 4K to 8K becomes more a matter of sending more data packets, whereas upgrading traditional connections, say from HDMI 2.0 (using TMDS) to HDMI 2.1 (FRL) means a fundamental signalling and cabling change to achieve faster data transfer rates. Depending on the application, the network may be any IP infrastructure, such as a private LAN, dedicated Ethernet cable, WAN or even 5G wireless. IT-style management becomes possible too, including remote monitoring, firewall security, troubleshooting and control from a central office. There are some challenges, however. On the flipside of IT-style management benefits, setting up and managing connections can demand IT knowledge and expertise that traditional plug-and-play point-to-point connections have not required. In addition, AVoIP standards need to become more mature, and this is perhaps even more challenging. In the past, AVoIP development in the
© Systems Integration Asia | VOL. 19 ISSUE - 2 ~ Dec 2019 ~ Jan 2020
broadcast sector more or less completely stopped while the market waited to see which standards would become dominant. The industry is now adopting ST 2110 as an open and interoperable protocol for transport and timing and equipment sales are moving again. Even so, AVoIP still cannot yet offer an easy plug-and-go solution for simply and quickly connecting cables to send content where it’s needed. As an example, for an outside-broadcast team covering an emerging news story, a conventional point-to-point protocol and connection such as SDI is still the fastest, easiest, and most dependable solution and doesn’t involve any delay while IP networks are being set up. This is likely to change as real-world lessons are learned, software improves and IP adoption increases. In the professional media world, where network planners can think in terms of closed systems, various standards and proprietary formats have been able to coexist without market pressure to ensure interoperability. However, without a single, dominant open standard to specify aspects such as QoS metrics and bandwidth management, users cannot simply put professional video onto an Ethernet IP network, connect any chosen receiver, and expect that equipment to detect the AVoIP traffic and display the content.
Chip-Level Challenges The infrastructure products needed to make AVoIP networks real for pro AV or broadcast applications are dependent on silicon integration to convert between various AV-industry formats and the Ethernet/IP domain. Much of the current AVoIP development on the professional media side is based on competing formats such as AVB/TSN, SDVoE and Dante AV. There are no interface chips available off the shelf that can handle all the different proprietary protocols and bridge to existing standards such as SDI, HDMI and DisplayPort.