AV AND THE ENTERPRISE

By Fernando Mora, Director of AV and Multimedia Design and Operations, The National September 11 Memorial & Museum

When I began my career in the audiovisual industry around the time when AV teams were transitioning from residing within a company’s facilities dept alongside the janitorial staff to the IT dept, the idea of controlling a device on the phone from around the world was the stuff of science fiction. We understood that the looming integration between AV and IT would bring about significant changes, but no one could envision the revolution it would spawn.  

Nowhere has the impact of that integration been realized than in large scale AV deployments. These are venues such as stadiums, arenas, convention centers, theme parks and museums. Systems are too large or spread out for a small team to manage efficiently. At this scale, your team can’t be everywhere all the time, and nothing takes someone out of the experience you’re trying to provide, like a big blue “No Signal” message on the screen. For this reason, we need a way to manage these systems efficiently.  

In a post-pandemic work-from-home era, these features and capabilities are critical to high up times for these large systems.

First in line are control systems. Not the legacy hardware-based processors of years past but software-based approaches that can be virtualized, installed on the bare metal server on premises, reside in the cloud, or combine these. An organization can opt to run the primary system on premises with a private cloud backup.  Some of the offerings I’ve come across are familiar names to the AV industry, such as Crestron, Extron, Medialon, QSC and Utelogy , among others. They allow for remote management of any device on your network, single-pane-of -glass dashboards, email notifications of predetermined issues, system automation, user rights management and LDAP integration for a more secure environment. Gone are the days of hard-coded passwords. 

In a post-pandemic work-from-home era, these features and capabilities are critical to high up times for these large systems. Imagine resolving an issue on your phone while standing in line for a  hotdog at a ballpark. With clever programming, the system can be capable of self-healing. What this means is that the control system actively records the status of a given device , i.e., Media Player status: Playing/ Stopped, Projector status On/ Off AND records the time of day. With a simple IF statement, the system can decipher IF is 2PM on a Monday, for example, AND the media Player is Stopped, send a Restart command, wait for the Restart and if it doesn’t restart, send an email to the AV team.  

Next are media transport solutions such as AV-over-IP, which is a bit of a wild west in 2022, it’s the VHS vs. Beta wars of the 80’s on steroids. Second to the UC space in AV is the most crowded. Unfortunately, the Pro AV industry doesn’t have a standards body that can help sort this out. “Standards” in the AV word is a synonym for Confusion.  

Different manufacturers use different codecs (for some, no codec at all) on different products with very little interoperability and varying infrastructure requirements. As an End-user, it is critical to do your research, but even then, it’s still a gamble; there is no guarantee that the manufacturer you chose will be in business or actively developing your product in the future, leaving you will a dead end product. Your specific needs will ultimately dictate which solution is right for your venue. Factors such as the quality and speed of your infrastructure maybe the most important but other factors such as encryption, security, latency, image quality, video wall support, control of field devices (RS232, IP, USB, IR, PTZ, CEC control, ), support for software encoding/ decoding, Unified Communication integration (Zoom/ Teams), KVM and last but certainly not least, is the product available due to supply chain issues.  

At play here, we have SMPTE ST 2110, NDI, SDVoE, IPMX and Dante AV. 

NDI (Network Device Interface)  

It is a free to use, proprietary (or open, depending on whom you ask) protocol created by NewTek and released in 2015. It’s very popular with the creator community because of its ease of use. It’s auto discovery feature works flawlessly, and the barrier for entry regarding cost and equipment is the lowest option in this group. For these reasons, NDI is the leader In this space currently. The NDI Tools pack , a suite of software on version 5.5 and packaged into an NDI Launcher application, makes using NDI very easy and intuitive. The launcher serves as a shortcut to 12 different …. Below is the one I frequently use 

NDI Webcam Makes any NDI source in your network available to a soft codec like Teams, Zoom WebEx, etc. This is great for using an NDI enabled camera as your webcam or the program output of a TriCaster as the camera source of a Teams/ Zoom call.  

NDI Screen Capture Presents your computer display, local webcam or region of interest of your screen as an NDI source avail.  

NDI Studio Monitor: More than just a software monitor to pull various NDI streams onto your computer monitor. It has an embedded control component to control the PTZ camera and enable KVM for a computer source or a TriCaster. 

SDVoE (Software Defined Video over Ethernet)  

This platform is supported by an alliance of manufacturers founded in 2016 and designed to run strictly on a 10G network. The founders envision this technology replacing the matrix switcher with an IT Switch, but it’s better suited for a new build because of the bandwidth requirements. Personally, I think unless you specifically require little or no compression or for a critical viewing application (Medical), I would opt for a 1G solution.  

SMPTE ST2110 (Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers) 

It is a broadcast centric suite of protocols that are bringing big changes to the broadcast market. The one of the major features is a paradigm shift in how we all have been working over the past few years, which is remote. Imagine a world in which broadcast teams are spread out worldwide, all connected securely to a broadcast center or to the venue directly. All a TD would need is the multiviewer stream, switching hardware and a few audio channels for program audio and comms. He/She would be free to work several events in a single day without leaving the garage. 

IPMX (Internet Protocol Media X-perience)  

The new kid on the block and the platform closest to the AV industry have come to a standards-based , interoperable 1G solution. Built upon SMTE ST2110 but designed with the Pro AV market in mind. With features such as EDID management, Hot Plug Detect, CEC, and HDCP support, and EDID are critical components of a functional AV system. There is no need for PTP (Precision Time Protocol) to be constantly present on the network as required by ST2110 for device synchronization since it doesn’t make sense in an AV Installation. As of this writing, there are no products on the market.  

Dante AV 

It is the reigning King of the audio over IP market, they are now branching out to video. With 3200 Dante-enabled audio products on the market, they seem to have a leg up on the competition due to their premier brand name in the industry. This looms large in the mind of decision makers when it’s time to specify a product. What separates this product from the others in terms of ease of use is the integration with their DDM (Dante Domaine Manager) enterprise management platform. The success of Dante AV will hinge largely on how well they leverage their huge installed base and how frictionless adding video to an already deployed system is, in my estimation. They are deploying a similar approach to NDI using software-based encoder/decoder solutions, but they will be licensed products.  

In 2022 the AV professional needs to be versed in the skillsets of network engineers and server administrators, at least on a basic level. We will need to embrace this new paradigm or be left behind.