Telairity Upgrades BE8600 Contribution Encoder for 2017 NAB Show

SANTA CLARA, CALIF.—Telairity has upgraded its flagship BE8600 H.264/AVC contribution video encoder with a new 10-bit 4:2:2 mode. The encoder is designed for backhaul, broadcasting, cable casting and IPTV.

4:2:2 encoding preserves high-color fidelity in source video by keeping twice as many color bits as are retained in 4:2:0 compression. Holding other factors constant, the extra "chroma" bits boost bitrates by one-third. Raising RGB (Red-Green-Blue) primary color channels from 8-bits to 10-bits multiplies the available color palette by a factor of 64, from about 16M "mixed" colors to over a billion. This improvement requires a further 25 percent increase in bitrates.

For example, a 15Mbps 4:2:0 stream needs to be raised to 20Mbps to accommodate the additional chroma bits retained in 4:2:2 encoding, then further increased to 25Mbps to enable "giga-color" 10-bit mode.

Other new NexGen features now under development include passing RP188 time code triggers and KLV metadata, and an upgrade from 8 to 16 channels of audio per video channel.

Telairity partner Primecom Technologies LLC will demo both the half-width BE8600 contribution encoder and full-width BE8650 paired encoder/modulator system at its booth, N3233SUL. Video Clarity will also demo Telairity's BE8740 4-channel distribution encoder at its booth, SU12413.

Tom Butts

Tom has covered the broadcast technology market for the past 25 years, including three years handling member communications for the National Association of Broadcasters followed by a year as editor of Video Technology News and DTV Business executive newsletters for Phillips Publishing. In 1999 he launched digitalbroadcasting.com for internet B2B portal Verticalnet. He is also a charter member of the CTA's Academy of Digital TV Pioneers. Since 2001, he has been editor-in-chief of TV Tech (www.tvtech.com), the leading source of news and information on broadcast and related media technology and is a frequent contributor and moderator to the brand’s Tech Leadership events.