OSLO, NORWAY—Tico Alliance has a new name to its roster of companies seeking to support interoperability for broadcast IP migration with the addition of Appear.

As part of the Alliance, Appear will adopt the Tico codec, adding Tico lightweight compression to the Appear X10 and X20 product range for UHD transport over 10G IP networks or legacy 3G-SDI links with minimum latency. Appear reports that the synergies of Tico compression and the capacity of the X platform optimizes network bandwidth usage upholding video quality at a premium level.

“Joining Tico will enable us to foster a shared commitment to equipping broadcasters with a seamless, integrate and high-quality Ultra-HD ecosystem,” said Carl Walter Host, CEO of Appear in the company’s announcement.

LAS VEGAS—In recent weeks the Tico Alliance has added five companies to its ranks—Aperi, Axon, Cesnet, Icron and Pronology. These companies are now part of the coalition that are seeking to establish Tico compression in the new IP-based live ecosystem.

Tico Alliance members have made their way to NAB as well. Members will be demonstrating real-life deployment of Tico across applications including HD over 1GbE, UHD/4K over single 3G-SDI or 10GbE IP using SMPTE 2022-6 or SMPTE 2110; there will also be a showcase of 8K products using Tico. Tico Alliance members participating at the booth include Aperi, Blackmagic Design, Bluefish444, B&M Modern Media, Deltacast, Icron, IO Industries, Grass Valley, Macnica Technology, Panasonic, Pronology and Village-Island.

Tico Alliance is located at booth C8525 during the 2017 NAB Show.

CHAMPAIGN, ILL.—The Tico Alliance can now count Cobalt Digital among its members, as the company has announced it has joined the consortium of manufacturers that support Tico compression as a standard in the IP-based live ecosystem. According to its press release, Cobalt will contribute to the group’s collective knowledge and interoperability studies to help transition traditional customers to the next-generation production and broadcast standard.

As a member of the Tico Alliance, Cobalt will have access to Tico technology and be able to integrate it into its FPGA-based hardware platforms. Cobalt Tico technology will be available as openGear modular cards and as units in Cobalt’s BBG-1000 series.

Tico technology was developed by intoPix and is designed to help in the transition to IP and 4K/UHD by simplifying connectivity. It is meant for interoperability in studio infrastructures, according to Tico.

Founded in April 2015, the Tico Alliance also includes Leader Electronics, Bluefish444, Media Links, EVS and Tektronix.

Cobalt Digital is a manufacturer of 3G/HD/SD conversion, terminal, throwdown and multiviewer technology.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—SDI video card manufacturer Bluefish444 has announced that it has become a member of the Tico Alliance. With Tico’s 4:1 compression scheme, SMPTE RDD35, Bluefish444 customers can access uncompressed video at one quarter the bandwidth to be transported over existing SDI infrastructure and emerging IP technologies.

Additional features of joining the Tico Alliance include a small footprint in FPGA resources and software encode and decode operations. It also is backed by IntoPIX and implemented with the goal of interoperability with existing and emerging technologies.

Bluefish444 products like the Epoch | 4K Neutron, Epoch | 4K Supernova and Epoch | 4K Supernova S+ cards will immediately benefit, with more expected to have Tico integrated throughout 2016.

The Tico Alliance was founded in April 2015 and is an open coalition of broadcast equipment manufacturers, OEM providers, broadcasters, electronics brands and technology companies with the goal of establishing next generation infrastructure.

STANSTED, ENGLAND—The Tico Alliance, a coalition of companies who are working to establish the Tico lightweight compression technology in the IP-based Live ecosystem for UHD/4K, is adding another company to its ranks, as Media Global Links Co. has announced it will join the group. Media Links is a developer of broadcast network infrastructure and media transport technologies.

Founded in April 2015, the Tico Alliance brings together broadcast equipment manufacturers, OEM providers, broadcasters, electronic brands and technology companies. Membership is open to any company active in the broadcast industry.

“As more broadcasters explore the use of IP video, the alliance’s efforts have become part of a larger trend set by a variety of industry players to find better approaches for delivering IP video,” said John Dale, director, Media Global Links.

Media Links joins fellow broadcast companies including Altera Corporation, Artel Video Systems, Grass Valley, Deltacast, EVS Broadcast Equipment, Image Matters, Imagine Communications, Keisoku Giken, Macnica Americas, Nevion, Ross Video, Tektronix and Xilinix.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Despite the fact that HD broadcasting is relatively recent, and most people in the U.S. bought their first HDTV only in the past seven years, there is growing pressure to shoot, produce and distribute programming in 4K resolution. There are already a couple episodic TV shows available for viewers in 4K, and more are on the way. Of course, big sporting events will also be shot in 4K, but there are a number of reasons why broadcasters can’t yet deliver 4K to viewers.

One reason has to do with the broadcast infrastructure inside every TV station and network control facility. Although most television broadcast facilities in the U.S. have HD-SDI and 3G-SDI infrastructure that can move signals around at a data rates up to 3 Gbps (which is uncompressed 1080p HD video), the gear can’t go higher than that. And broadcasters, who had to upgrade their plants from SD to HD in the past 15 years, aren’t ready to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to upgrade yet again to carry the 12 Gbps data streams required for 4K.

Yet the interest in 4K continues and there have been multiple tests showing that it’s possible to transmit 4K in a standard 6 MHz TV channel and still have room for secondary channels. Consumers have been buying TVs with 4K resolution capability, so the elements are starting to fall into place to envision 4K as a broadcast format in the reasonable future.

Jean-Baptiste Lorent

Still, how do you carry broadcast quality 4K signals in a video facility without tearing everything out and starting from scratch? That scenario is simply out of the question for most broadcasters.

The TICO Alliance thinks it has the answer. It is promoting “non-destructive” compression of 4K that will enable the signal to work in a 3G-SDI plant. The proposal is not a standard yet, but the TICO Alliance is working with international bodies to work out the details and make it palatable to broadcasters.

To learn more about the TICO Alliance, Broadcast Engineering Extra spoke to Jean-Baptiste Lorent, who is the product and marketing manager at intoPIX and leads TICO Alliance’s development and activities. Lorent joined intoPIX in 2007, where he is now responsible for product innovation, marketing strategies and standardization (VSF, SMPTE, EBU) in the broadcast and pro-AV industries.

BE Extra: What is the TICO Alliance? What is it looking to accomplish?

Lorent: TICO alliance is a coalition of companies united to establish TICO lightweight compression in the new IP-based live-production ecosystem. It will allow users to update and upgrade existing SDI-based workflows to 4K/UHD without the cost of a complete renewal.

Launched at NAB Show 2015, the group wants to solve three important challenges to move to 4K and to IP-based workflows with TICO: UHDTV needs more video bandwidth; broadcaster have massively invested in 3G-SDI and don’t want to replace it; and in the transition to IP, 4K has more data than can fit on a 10Gbps Ethernet port.

The group wants to develop and promote technical specifications with different active groups in this transition, such as SMPTE, EBU or VSF, in order to ensure interoperability among TICO equipment. Recently, intoPIX introduced the TICO SMPTE RDD (registered disclosure document) to ensure interoperability to map a UHD/4K stream within a 3G-SDI signal, as well as to map TICO within RTP. These two maps will enable TICO to be used with UHD/4K production workflows that can be IP-based, SDI-based or hybrid SDI/IP.

BE Extra: What is the bit rate of an uncompressed 4K signal? What is the bit rate after it has been encoded using the TICO process? Can that amount of bit-rate reduction really be considered “lossless”?

Lorent: The table here shows the typical uncompressed UHD data rates vs. the different Ethernet types. TICO compression is typically 4:1, which enable broadcasters to easily support UHD/4K in 3G-SDI 10GbE infrastructures. TICO compression has been designed as an alternative to uncompressed video, with visually lossless quality and no latency.

Preserving quality: TICO compression was studied to be visually lossless with any type of content (not only broadcast videos but also Excel spreadsheets, for example). Mathematically lossless is possible with TICO as it uses a reversible wavelet transform. However at the application level, SDI or IP transmission want to have a guaranteed bitrate, so the TICO rate allocation will guarantee to either add some padding if the content is easy to compress or will activate the rate allocation to reach the expected bitrate. Moreover, another goal of TICO is that it be robust enough to survive multiple encoding generations, which is mandatory for use in production workflows.

No latency: The smallest implementation of TICO has only nine lines of latency in total (six lines at the encoder and three lines at the decoder). Moreover, the latency is fully deterministic (not variable).

Lightweight: TICO compression is conceived as a simple tool to be added on any uncompressed workflow. The inventors have had a strong focus not only on the quality of the compression, but also on the complexity of its implementation which enables existing equipment to be simply upgraded.

4K uncompressed and transmission is unmanageable within current systems and infrastructures. With SDI, 4K needs too many cables (4 x 3G-SDI links) and will require more SDI ports on routers and switchers. An upgrade to 12G-SDI will also cost more than 3G-SDI. Today, 10GbE is the obvious affordable infrastructure solution for intra-plant transport. However, 4K cannot fit in 10GbE Ethernet (11,880 Mbps). Only 4:2:0 goes below 10GbE and higher bandwidth (i.e., 40GbE, 100GbE) ports are too expensive for large-scale adoption. And broadcasters need real 4K 60fps at 4:2:2 or 4:4:4. That’s where the 4:1 compression of TICO plays a role.

BE Extra: What are the audio provisions within TICO processing? For example, does it support simultaneous stereo and surround mixes?

Lorent: The SMPTE RDD of TICO addresses these two questions actually. In the use case of mapping UHD/4K with the active area of 3G-SDI, we do not touch the audio channels that are already transporting with SDI. In the case of RTP mapping, TICO video is transported as an independent payload. Implementers will be following the recommendations made by the SVIP (studio video over IP) workgroup at the VSF organization.

BE Extra: What is the status of TICO with regard to the standardization process? Is SMPTE or any other organization looking into creating a standard that includes the TICO Alliance’s recommendations?

Lorent: The work is done with SMPTE. Currently the Alliance members have been collaborating for the SDI and RTP mapping of TICO, and the work is almost completed. intoPIX will soon submit a first Registered Disclosure Document at SMPTE. TICO Alliance and intoPIX are open to collaborate with industry organizations to standardize TICO and provide recommendations for different applications. Interoperability is an important motivation for all Alliance members.

BE Extra: What else do we need to know about the TICO Alliance and its recommendation for 4K bit-rate reduction?

Lorent: The alliance is growing quite rapidly in a very open and collaborative way. Moving to TICO means less cabling and less cost with more UHD/4K. People interested in this technology should definitely visit IBC2015 and see the different live demos with companies such as Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Nevion, intoPIX and others.