INTERVIEW
Justin Kennington – AptoVision
Coping with convergence
AptoVision Weighs in on AV / IT Convergence , Software Defined Video and Other Hot Topics
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spate of announcements and articles have come out of AptoVision in recent weeks all revolving around AV / IT convergence on 10 gigabit Ethernet networks and the growing importance of softwaredefined video architectures in Pro AV .
NCN speaks with Justin Kennington , strategic and technical marketing director at AptoVision , to provide some perspective .
Our industry has known for years that AV and IT convergence is coming . What ’ s your take on that ? Today ’ s 1 gigabit per second networks are insufficient to enable ‘ convergence ’. In the past , we were held back by the fact that IT systems could not meet the performance requirements of AV users . Then control systems moved to the cloud , network audio slowly started gaining traction and finally a few approaches have been used to carry video through Ethernet hardware .
The holdup is no longer bandwidth . It is shared bandwidth . The promise of convergence is AV and IT systems coexisting together on one infrastructure . But find an IT guy with a working 1 Gbps data network and ask him it ’ s ok for you to add dozens of video transmitters consuming hundreds of megabits each to his system . The answer will be a resounding ‘ no ’ because he knows that can ’ t work . The users of the data network expect that nearly all of the 1 Gbps bandwidth is available to them for file downloads , collaboration and even PC and mobile video streaming .
If the AV system starts consuming the majority of that bandwidth , the data user ’ s experience is significantly compromised . Integrators , IT system administrators and even 1 Gbps video product manufacturers have already realised this and so standard practice is to create two parallel networks , a 1 Gbps data network ( likely preexisting ) and alongside it a physically independent 1 Gbps Ethernet network dedicated solely to the AV system . What ’ s the point of that ? If you want to build two infrastructures , just use HDBaseT and don ’ t pay any video quality or latency penalty .
To truly converge these networks , we need to upgrade the capacity of the data network . 10 Gbps infrastructure is here and it ’ s cheap . Using this class of network , HDMI video can be transmitted with little to no compression and a full 1 Gbps ( or more ) can be set aside for the data network users . Their experience is completely unaffected by the behavior of the AV equipment . On top of that , no compression means no latency and no compromise of image quality . And the 10 Gbps equipment is an easy expansion of the 1 Gbps network , they can be interconnected , so that your existing 1 Gbps infrastructure can function as it always has , while the 10 Gbps upgrade is only needed where you want to add video capacity .
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