Danny Barr is from ZeeVee and he talked about extending and switching UltraHD video in mission-critical applications. His talk was entitled “The 3 Cs of Video Distribution:Complexity, Compression and Cost”. ZeeVee’s history is in video distribution and it started by delivering video over coax, while it has added IP distribution now.
He started by talking about Top Golf which runs golf driving ranges. It decided that video everywhere should be seen as a strategic asset. Barr showed an installation that used 27 miles of existing coax and supported 280 displays.
Fenway Park is the US’s oldest baseball stadium and ZeeVee was able to deliver a lot of video at low cost by exploiting distribution over existing coax.
Now that UTP cable is becoming more widely available and installed as standard, IPTV is getting more popular. Ethernet is changing things and many customers want to mix coax and UTP. Barr pointed out that YouTube is the second largest search engine! YouTube is bigger than Bing or Yahoo.
The world is still switching from SD to HD and Barr said that most broadcasters in the US are still only sending 720P video. There are many proprietary video distribution solutions using twisted pair wiring, for example from Crestron, AMX and Extron. There is a big question of how you distribute 4k video over TCP/IP and 10Gbit switches.
Pro AV systems not based on IP typically need custom programming and you usually need fixed chassis sizes with 16/32/64/128 channels. Barr said that the cost of networking has been dropping and you can now send 6Gbps on a 10GB ethernet switch. That will support 3840 x 2160/30fps with 4:4:4 video or 3840 x 2160/60fps with 4:2:0. (you can also squeeze 3840 x 2160/6P with 4:4:4 if you “minimally compress”, he added).
ZeeVee has a new ZyPer4K transducer that can connect HDMI/audio and RS-232 into ethernet. The company’s system can send audio, video and control signals over ethernet (although unlike HDBaseT, no power can be sent).
ZeeVee said that the backplane of the big network switches being sold by HP and Dell are able to support 1.28Tbps, so there is plenty of headroom for video over IP in 10G switches. Latency of the ZeeVee system is also said to be under 5μS.
Systems have to be configured – inputs can be auto detected, but they are flexible network switches which can be re-configured flexibly and dynamically. A 24 port switch could be configured for any combination of inputs and outputs with 22/2 inputs and outputs or 12/12 possible.
The company can also support simple video wall scaling up to 5 x 5 video walls.
After the talks there was a panel session when the question of whether 8K will really be needed was discussed. Panelists thought 8K would definitely happen. The panel also thought that 3D is not dead – it is still alive in the cinema, but you have to deliver a high quality image.
