With the transition to IP video promising to be the hottest topic at this year’s IBC2015, NewTek has announced a new open standard that it believes will dramatically speed the transmission from traditional SDI video to IP video.
“The move to IP for professional video production will unquestionably be among the most revolutionary and transformative changes of the decade,” said Dr. Andrew Cross, NewTek’s president and CTO in a statement. “At launch, NDI will work with applications from almost every major vendor and virtually every I/O card on the market, meaning that it will be broadly available for real-world production use starting in Q4 this year.”
To speed adoption, NewTek is making NDI available in the fourth quarter as a royalty free software developer kit (SDK).
The launch of NDI comes at a time when many broadcasters are interested in IP video and IBC2015 will see a number of demonstration of systems relying on it.
But there has also been a great deal of concern and confusion over existing standards, which some vendors believe aren’t well suited to the needs of live broadcast production.
NewTek is billing NDI as a solution to those concerns by providing high performance over standard GigE networks and allowing users to transition facilities to IP video production systems without having to toss out their existing SDI cameras and infrastructure.
In a pre-IBC briefing, the company stressed that it had worked closely with a large number of top manufacturers and developers to allow IP connectivity between devices.
As a result, NDI will works with products and systems from Brainstorm, CasparCG, CharacterWorks, ChyronHego, ClassX, Compix, EasyWorship, Gnural Net, Graphics Outfitters, LiveXpert, Media 5, PlayBox Technology, Teradek, Vizrt, Wasp3D and others.
NewTek has also collaborated with AJA, Deltacast and Matrox so that their capture cards to act as NDI senders or receivers and that it will provide support for Blackmagic Design cards.
In addition, Boland, JVC, LiveU, Microsoft Skype TX, NewsMaker, Panasonic, PESA, Sienna and Wowza are also working on providing NDI-based solutions.
Overall, the company said that NDI will support “well over 100,000 compatible systems already deployed worldwide, making it by far the most prolific IP video transfer method in the production market” at launch.
"IP-based workflows are without a doubt the future of video production, and we are excited to work with NewTek on opening the standards to allow any company or customer to change their workflow,” said Petter Ole Jakobsen, chief technology officer of Vizrt in a statement.
