It’s been an interesting couple of months in signal distribution and control. I know, it’s always interesting, right? But lately just a little more so.
For example, as we went to press, Audinate announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Iris Studio Inc. (tryiris.ai), a US company specializing in AI-powered, cloud-based camera control technology. You’ve already heard of AI-driven camera auto tracking and color correction, often built into hardware. Iris is a brand-agnostic cloud platform that can drive those functions from the cloud. It reportedly is currently enabled on some 14 PTZ cameras on the market, including cameras from Lumens, PTZOptics, Marshall, BirdDog, and Telycam, among others. The Iris software platform is reportedly also applicable to a variety of AV products, including encoders, decoders, vision mixers (whatever those are), and more (whatever more is). For now, it’s a so-called white-label service, with Audinate promising a public launch sometime this year
This is obviously part of Audinate’s expansion into video with the wider play being interoperable control and management across audio and video. With Dante being the de facto audio networking standard for most applications, and with the solid reputation of Dante Controller and Domain Manager (and now Dante Director for cloud), it’s understandable that Audinate would see room for their existing relationships to extend to video and beyond. Since cloud and AI are part of that frontier, why not do it all at once? So even though Dante AV is not yet widespread, the Audinate ecosystem is expanding in multiple directions. Don’t forget Dante Studio. Audinate is intersecting with interoperable, production-ready, cloud-based, AI-driven AV at an interesting time when it’s still not clear what all that will mean. It’s also not clear whether any ecosystem—proprietary or standards based—will dominate.
Speaking of dominating, the other news is a new standards competitor, maybe. For sure there’s a new acronym. GPMI is General Purpose Media Interface. It’s a wired communication standard that comes from the Shenzhen 8K UHD Video Industry Cooperation Alliance, which is made up of about 50 Chinese companies and the Chinese government. It supports 8K, and reportedly has a bananas max bandwidth of 192 Gbps while delivering 480W of power (via the GPMI-B cables). That’s twice as much bandwidth as DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR20 and HDMI 2.2. Looking at it another way, when Thunderbolt delivers 240W of power, it’s with a bandwidth of 40 Gbps. So the Alliance is chasing the one-wire dream with GPMI.
GPMI also has a USB-C cable which delivers half the bandwidth and power (so more like HDMI 2.2). There hasn’t been much in the way of explanation of why there are two different cables under the GPMI umbrella or how that plays into the competitive roadmap. There’s no product yet, and LG, Samsung, and Sony haven’t committed (though Hisense, Huawei, and TCL have). For now it’s just some tantalizing news for those of us who like to follow that kind of thing.
