The world of IP-based video is defined at present by a couple of major technologies. David Davies examines their primary points of difference and wonders ‘what’s next’ for media connectivity and transportation.
If you wanted to put a date-stamp on the birth of modern media networking technology, then you would need to be looking closely at the last four months of 2015. In September that year, the Network Device Interface (NDI) software specification developed by NewTek was publicly revealed and demonstrated at the IBC Show. A few months later, the TR-03 and TR-04 technical recommendations were published by the Video Services Forum; these would go on to provide important foundations to the SMPTE ST 2110 standards suite, the first four parts of which were published to no little fanfare in November 2017.
The concentration of ST 2110 on uncompressed video arguably does much to explain its initial rise to prominence. Large broadcasters and service providers were always going to be in the vanguard of companies with the resources to adopt IP media at an earlier stage and were inevitably going to require the highest possible (uncompressed) video quality...
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