We opened up our browsers today and saw the latest news on IP video, Ultra HD and the Aereo lawsuit.
And that’s when it hit us.
We don’t know if Aereo will prevail or what, if any, affect the resulting Supreme Court decision will have on television broadcasters and cable operators. We can’t tell you whether the UHF band will be auctioned off to wireless carriers, or if ATSC 3.0 will be used to scale up to 4K or 8K or any K beyond that.
What we can tell you is that whatever happens in the next year or two or five in television broadcast, it will surely involve more networking to help manage the new channels of audio and video that are coming.
And that we know about.
It seems many of the issues surrounding the adoption of video over IP are straight out of the Wheatstone audio over IP playbook. Just a few short years ago, we, too, wondered about bandwidth capacity, storage, and all those concerns that come with transmitting uncompressed digital media over Ethernet. Now, we’re zipping IP audio all over the place without giving it a second thought.
Even before audio over IP and the advent of our WheatNet-IP system, Wheatstone was into audio networking in a big way. We still make our audio consoles with BRIDGE TDM networking, in fact. We know how cool it is to be able to access audio from anywhere and to send audio to anywhere there’s an IP address, and to control and distribute content in powerful ways that hadn’t been done before. Today, our “network universal” consoles are so truly universal, they can fit into almost any video production environment, anywhere -- whether it’s a Wheatstone TDM routed studio, a MADI-equipped stadium, a remote truck or even the newest space in studio networking based on IP connectivity. Any channel can connect to any audio source, using any preferred audio format at any time, whether it’s analog, HD/SDI, AES-3, MADI, WheatNet-IP, or the emerging AES-67 AoIP standard.
So if there’s one thing we would like to tell our friends in the television industry at this important flashpoint in history, it’s this: technology will always give you the resources you need, and perseverance will find a way to use that technology for whatever change is coming down the pipe. And networking? As it becomes a more important factor in the future, we are here to help.