IBC 2003 Streaming Products Wrap-Up
Capture Cards
The price of high-end capture cards is dropping dramatically, thanks mainly to two companies:
Blackmagic Design introduced a 64-bit High Definition Serial Digital Interface (HD-SDI) card, called DeckLink HD that works in 64-bit HD mode in the PowerMac G5 or in Standard Definition (SD) on G4 or WindowsXP 32-bit systems. On the Macs, capture of uncompressed 10-bit HD or SD is achieved via QuickTime, while Windows-based capture uses DirectShow. Card price is $1995, more than 66% cheaper than its nearest competitor.
DeltaCast, a Belgium-based spinoff of hardware consultancy Deltatec, offers a dual-input, dual-output 64-bit SD SDI card, with an additional connector for genlocking – important for use of SDI in broadcast or control-room environments. The card has a price point of approximately $3000 and also has a daughter card capable of encoding / decoding 8 channels of AES/EBU digital audio.
Compression and Transfer Tools
Speed seemed to be the mantra of the compression tools shown on the exhibit floor, which makes sense given the broadcast focus of the show. Compression and content transfer speed increases are two areas that often indicate upcoming business adoption and IBC’s product launches did not disappoint.
On the compression front, Popwire, a Swedish-based creator of MPEG codecs who is most well known for their work on the Ericsson mobile phone video codecs, demonstrated CompressionMaster. Based on a core technology called CompressionEngine, this software-based solution can be used as a stand-alone encoding station or in conjunction with "back room" Xserve or Solaris units also running CompressionMaster. The software provides impressive encoding speeds and stability not often found in a 1.0 product release.
What a delightful surprise to find a company like Orbital Data demonstrating their pre-launch product in the Telestream booth. Orbital Data’s appliances work to accelerate content transfer across the WAN and would be used, primarily, in point-to-point situations where compressed content must be FTPed rapidly to another location. The demonstration showed both a standard and Orbital Data-enchanced FTP transfer of pre-encoded content; as the demonstrator added latency at 50 millisecond (ms) increments up to 500ms and 5-10% packet loss, the Orbital Data box maintained acceptable throughput while the standard FTP transfer decreased dramatically. In the world of broadcast where "time to air" deadlines are an everyday event, Orbital Data’s ability to speed up FTP transfers by as much as 500% may earn it a place in the broadcaster’s toolkit.