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IBC 2018 opens in Amsterdam in a few days, and IP video transport and networking are sure to be on the minds of many attendees.

NewTek will be at IBC 2018 showing its latest NDI developments. Before the show opens, I had the chance to speak with NewTek President and CTO Dr. Andrew Cross about what the company has in store for the RAI.

Besides discussing the important additions NewTek is making to its NDI SDK, Cross offered thoughts on how the market has accepted NDI and the direction in which the video industry is headed.

(An edited transcript.)

Phil Kurz: What’s new with NDI for IBC 2018?

Andrew Cross: We are going to be announcing NDI 3.7 at IBC, and I kind of trapped myself by releasing 3.5 at NAB. I don’t want to call it 4.0, but it’s the biggest reasonable step I could think of. That’s why it got to 3.7.

It’s a big step forward. There’s a whole load of improvements. The first, which is probably going to have the biggest market impact, is we are announcing what we are calling the NDI Embedded SDK. It’s a version of the software development kit for people who wish to use NDI in hardware devices.

All along NDI has been great for software, and our focus –and this goes back to what our company does—has always been on making it accessible to software users. But that’s only half of the world. So, making NDI something that truly can be used in hardware products has been missing for some time and something we have been working to fix with this embedded SDK that allows people to build actual, real NDI hardware. With that we include the tools to run it on your own device, but we are also making available our own FPGA for NDI compression.

We are actually releasing what we use for our own NDI Spot Connect Pro, which is our own 4K-HDMI-to-NDI converter. We are making this so people can build their own hardware products around NDI. That fills a big gap.

What other NDI releases will NewTek make at IBC?

AC: We are also releasing something we have been asked for a lot, which is a utility called NDI Stream Analyzer, which allows people to get a lot of information about an NDI stream. Obviously, our goal with NDI has been to make it just work for everybody. But at the same time, there are a lot of people and a lot of setups that want more information about how well a stream is working, if there is something wrong with it, the bitrate and the timing information on the stream. So, we are releasing tools that do this for free. We are giving those away.

At the SDK level we are also making big improvements. Honestly, the biggest one –although it might not sound that glitzy, it is really important—is we have put a frame synchronizer into the SDK. You know, when people are building computer software, nobody even thinks about the concept of genlock. So, your computer is running at 60Hz on its monitor, but that almost certainly doesn’t match the 60Hz the camera is running at.

It is nontrivial to take the 60Hz the camera is running at and display it correctly on a computer screen. A lot of people think you just get tearing. But you get a lot of other problems that are related to the clocks not matching. And the same is true of audio, of course.

Our frame synchronizer takes all of the complicated work in analyzing the timing and taking the corrective steps for the timing differences between your local computer clock and the remote clock, and it does all of that for free for people.

This makes it possible to build computer applications displaying and using video and audio without having to worry about timing issues so much easier. This saves so much time for people, and putting it in the SDK makes the SDK much more usable for people.

Beyond that there are a lot of other improvements, such as significant improvements in the way we send data over the network, and personally, that’s been the bane of my existence for the last three months. That is finding better ways to do this because it turns out that a real-world network –like getting UDP with forward error correction working well—is really quite difficult.

There are all sorts of weird wrinkles in the real-world that books don’t tell you about. So, we have significantly improved all of that.

Tell me more about FPGA support and the SDK?

AC: You don’t even have to buy the FPGA from us. We will allow you to buy a Xilinx test board, where anyone working on an FPGA project probably would start –so they would buy a Xilinx or Altera development kits.

We are producing in the SDK an SD card image that you can put onto one of these dev kits, and it will include our FPGA SDK, so it will serve as a testbed for people to build NDI encoders. So, if you bought one of these FPGA dev kits and put the SDK on it, you would have the basics of a working piece of NDI hardware. Now obviously people will adapt that for whatever their actual project is, but you get a great starting point.

And we allow people to get the SDK and build NDI encoders pretty much for free. To take them into a commercial application, we need to work out a licensing agreement with them. But our goal is to allow people to build something, play with it and worry about the details when they want to go to market.

How would you characterize the demand from hardware developers for an NDI SDK solution?

AC: This is a common request and answers a good number of requests from people with interest in doing a hardware-based NDI product. But with so many people and so many requests we will be talking about an embedded SDK 2.0 and 3.0 here soon with all of the additional capabilities people will want.

We are basically a software-focused company, so I am really happy that we are taking the need to make NDI available to hardware vendors seriously here. That’s a good position to be in.

How would you assess where NDI is today among developers?

AC: I have lost track is the answer. What I mean by that is there are so many people using it for so many things that it’s hard to keep track.

Something I have seen is we are about three years in. In the first two years, all of the big software vendors were using it. But if I look at the people signing up for the SDK now, we are seeing more and more startup companies needing to interact with IP video and individuals who have cool projects.

So, it has gone from being something the big vendors use to something that’s the de facto way people quickly use IP video in their startups. It’s gone one tier further from this is what the industry uses to this is the way people experiment with IP video and build products –even at the lower level of the market—and I find that to be very cool.

Has NDI become a de facto standard for IP video?

AC: Obviously, it is self-serving to say yes. But I don’t just for the sake of marketing spin say yes. My sense is certainly that it has become very widely adopted, and I believe the answer at this point is yes.

If you walk around at IBC and in the media and product tools halls and you tick off the companies that support and don’t support NDI, you end up with more than 50 percent of the exhibitors supporting NDI, which is quite remarkable.

I am not saying –nor have I ever said—that it solves all problems for all people, but I certainly think it has become commonly seen as solving a good number of problems for a good number of people in the real world.

Are you or NewTek presenting any technical paper or speaking at IBC?

AC: Personally, I am giving a talk at the IABM meeting about IP video –more about IP video and the place of computers in that than NDI, although NDI is intertwined.

Can you offer a few details?

AC: I get asked a lot of smart questions by people, and that’s helped me to realize over the past few years that the real revolution going on in our industry is one not just about networked video. It is about a broader trend in the market and how computing technology –the combination of computer software and networking—have put together the pieces needed to produce video.

We have gone from a place where computers and the associated pieces of technology weren’t sufficient to produce broadcast quality video to one in which they are.

So, the real revolution going on in our industry, and NDI is part of it, is one in which we are able to use general purpose computing products to produce real-time video.

Our industry tends to look at that as –and I hope I’ve excluded NewTek from this—but or industry as a whole tends to say, “Look these computer things are getting fast, and you can do video with that. So, let’s steal the core things computers do and put them into our products.”

That’s the way many people think, but what I am encouraging is that people think the other way around. Instead of thinking “we’re from the video industry, how do we steal from the computer” think the other way around. The world is computing. We are computing people. How do we take all of this incredible technology and bring it into the video world?

The best analogy I can give is what happened in the phone market. When the iPhone came out, this was a computing company, Apple, which decided they could take a computer and turn it into a phone. At that time, the traditional phone vendors probably thought these guys have no idea what they are doing. This isn’t a phone. It can’t even dial 911 reliably. Nobody is ever going to use this.

But the computer industry said, “Let’s put cool screens on our traditional phones.” And a few years later the phone industry is dominated by computer manufacturers. It’s Google with Android, Apple with iOS and Samsung. Three computer companies own the phone industry now.

That is the exact same shift our video industry is going to go through. And the reason for it is technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper; computers have gotten smaller and smaller; and chip sizes have shrunk and shrunk. We can do more and more for less money, and it’s all connected together via Ethernet and the internet. We need to look as how instead of stealing the pieces of that that we want, we can take all of that and embrace it and build something that is newer and bigger than what the video industry can do on its own.

This is why we created NDI –to allow people to use software and their existing networks on computers they have today. That is where the future of the industry is going to be.

In this sixth of six installments related to the 2018 NAB Show, colleagues Roger Sherwood, Global Industry Director of Cisco’s Media & Entertainment group, and technology communications specialist Leslie Ellis –who’ve covered umpteen millions of square feet of trade shows—talk shop. The question they’d been posed was this: “Talk about things you’d only know or see because you’d been there; stuff you won’t find online.”

Leslie Ellis: I think I’d start with the “numbers behind the numbers” that Josh (Stinehour) revealed at the Devoncroft conference, about NAB exhibitors over time.

Roger Sherwood: You mean the bit about how one major exhibitor purchased 41,950 square feet of space at the 2005 NAB --and 9,900 square feet this year?

LE: Yes. Hello, industry consolidation! And what puts those numbers in perhaps even sharper contrast is that NAB is one of the remaining gathering places for “video people” in general. So many other trade shows have shut down. As a result, it seems like a lot of adjacent communities are seeking and finding ways to “bundle in” with NAB.

RS: There was a lot of “show within a show,” too –all of those mini stages sprinkled around the various show floors.

LE: Three that I counted, probably more.

RS: This isn’t news by any stretch, but I loved when John Stroup (CEO of Belden) said how they’ve seen so many other industries “go digital” –manufacturing, retail, and so on— but that media and entertainment is the one of the last to go fully digital. I loved it because it reiterates something we’ve been seeing for several years now.

LE: As you know, I live mostly in the industry we used to call “cable,” and from that prism, sometimes it seems like déjà vu, when listening to broadcasters talk about where they are along the continuum of “IP transition.” It feels like about a three-year gap.

RS: The other one that really stood out to me, and again from the Devoncroft conference, was the whole thing about how “remote production” had risen to No. 4, from somewhere far lower than that, in their list of most important tech trends, [which was] defined as “not where you spend money, but what will have impact.”

LE: Right! That was on my list, too. And then that supporting quote from Michael Harabin (President, Gearhouse Broadcast) –“I saw all those trucks pulling out there for production … it’s like looking at dinosaurs moving around.” I’d read about trends in remote production, but I didn’t realize it was moving that quickly.

RS: Yes, that’s a biggie. And I think we both agree that the quote of the show goes to my colleague and friend, Dave Ward (Cisco CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect), with his “1-800 Save My Ass” quipo. You have the killer notes, what was the context, exactly?

LE: He had been asked “Who puts all of this together?” as it relates to the virtualization of everything. Dave said, “It goes back to who’s going to be the 1-800-SAVE-MY-ASS when something is broken… which will depend on who the end customer trusts. Who they think is actually going to answer the phone when something is broken.”

RS: And then something about how that’s us, that we’ll be the 1-800.

LE: Right. The quote was, “We’ll take the lead, the solution partners.”

RS: Speaking of field notes… did you tell me you spent some time just writing down things you heard people say in passing? Kind of like “scenes from a mall,” except in this case from LVCC?

LE: I did! I always do. I only write them down if I hear them a few times, or if they’re particularly funny or illuminating. You know –what you hear when you’re walking from one place to another. This year, the one that came up enough that I wrote it down and ended up putting six check marks behind it –so at least 7x overheard— was “I didn’t say I want it, I just want to see it.”

RS: Could apply to almost anything.

LE: Could, but, among the “bright sparkly things” this year was HDR, AR/VR, and let’s not forget the most frequently used acronym of the 2018 NAB, “AI/ML.”

RS: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning.

LE: In one of the Show dailies, I counted 25 incidences of it on a single page.

RS: You’re a weirdo. I mean that in the nicest way.

LE: Thank you. What’s next?

RS: IBC.

LE: See you there!

The 2018 NAB Show, along with a few lingering snowstorms, income taxes, and the alleged arrival of spring, are all theoretically behind us now -- but not without leaving a chunky trail of acronyms, at least in the case of NAB. Acronyms are a necessary evil in any industrial life, not because engineers are trying to drive us bananas with the grand geekery of it all, but because it’s just easier to say (as one of hundreds of examples) “SMPTE” (pronounced “simm-tea”) than it is to say “The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.”

Like many of us in the video realm, we attempt to keep tabs on what is a steady flow of such impressively nerdy acronyms dotting the conversational landscape. Especially those that mark the transition of pretty much everything to IP, Internet Protocol. It started with the transition of SDI (Serial Digital Interface), essentially the starting line for the broadcast transition to IP.

There’s SMPTE 2022, in the works since 2007, as a “unidirectional, IP-based protocol for the transport of real-time video, audio and ancillary signals … in particular, a method for the encapsulation of the payloads of a variety of existing SMPTE serial digital video standards.”

The new one (to me, anyway) this year was SMPTE 2110, which builds on 2022 by unpacking each part of a signal (the video, the audio, and any ancillary data) into different IP streams, instead of being rolled together into one big transport stream. Each individual stream contains its own time stamp, which can be used at the receive end to line everything up so that it plays out correctly. (So, kind of like the IP version of lip sync.)

As someone much smarter than me took the time to explain in Las Vegas (thanks again, Subha!), SMPTE 2110 spans three pillars. The first: Off-the-shelf switching, as in video switching, so that broadcast and media providers can get away from buying big, all-in-one, monolithic switches. The reasoning: The inputs to any video switch tend to scale at different rates, dynamically. Therefore switches need to be able to also scale at different rates, dynamically.

Which brings up the second pillar: The ecosystem. One of the highlights at the Central Hall this year was the (always crowded) IP Showcase, where 56 suppliers representing the broadcast landscape came together, again, to demonstrate their collaborative work to interoperate -- not just as a “plug fest,” but more this year at an operational level. Background: That IP Showcase tends to move back and forth, across the Atlantic, from IBC to NAB and back again; that will be the case this September, in Amsterdam. It’s kind of assumed, by now, that one piece of gear can link to another, and they’ll both work as intended. This year, it was more about that next step -- how to make it work in real life, so that the people operating it can do so with relative ease. Meaning that their day-to-day, business-as-usual life stays reasonably the same, unfettered with the drudgery of relearning new ways to do the same things.

Last not least, SMPTE 2110 is further evidence of virtualization. Taking big, “bespoke” things, and unthreading them into their digital core. Maybe it’s an API (Application Program Interface) for a software-defined network (SDN) that gets teased out, standardized, open-sourced, and offered out to the community.

In theory and in practice (so far), SMPTE 2110 makes it easier for broadcast and media people to do more things, more quickly; to be more Internet-like. One example that came up over and over again was 4K video, already widely available on the display end (as evidenced in every consumer electronics store leading up to the Winter Olympics). Or prepping a venue to shift from, say, the Madonna concert on Saturday night, to the soccer match on Sunday afternoon. Or outfitting a control room for a multi-site production, without having to re-encode video multiple times.

So what does it take for the industry to be SMPTE 2110 ready? At the most basic level, it’s about those acronyms that are getting all broadcast applications and gear “souped-up” for IP. The next step is about how to work in that 2110 environment. What changes are necessary, in traditional broadcast operations, to accommodate the dynamic scaling of inputs and outputs?

The work of it is all shifting towards operating in IP. And scaling a network that previously would transport a few monolithic flows, but now has multiple IP-based flows -- all going to different end-points, but needing the precise timing to maintain broadcast accuracy and fidelity. If you visited the Cisco booth, for instance, it is that level of operations which were on display. You can find out more about that here. And you can be certain that in September, on the other side of the Atlantic, we’ll be talking more about operating in a 2110 environment.

Until then, be well and thrive!

About the Author: Leslie Ellis is a respected “technology translator,” known in cable and telecom circles for her award-winning, 20+ year “Translation Please” column in Multichannel News. She took on this Cisco-sponsored pre-NAB series to point out common and frustrating obstacles, for anyone on the sliding transition toward “being more Internet-like.” It is less of a comprehensive representation of available options and more a glimpse into what’s worrisome, on a day-to-day basis for engineers and IT people who work in media and entertainment.