“The pandemic has made digital meeting applications such as Zoom, GoToMeeting and Google Meets a necessity to maintain both business and social communications,” she says. “Supporting all of these is an explosion of streaming technology that incorporates high speed and low latency capabilities to reward those spending time on social media, messaging services, and network TV with a superior viewing experience.”

Brady also highlights VR and AI as increasingly adding to end user possibilities “with multiple levels of control providing the end user with the ability to select their own preferred view or audio reproduction. Moving forward this need will only grow. Data catching capabilities will enable providers to identify individual end-user preferences.”

At NAB, Cobalt Digital is introducing the +UDX-Dante-16x16, a claimed industry first license-based 12G-SDI bridge to Dante audio. Cobalt has made Dante’s IP-based audio networking solution available to users on a license-basis, which is field upgradable, by incorporating the functionality into the company’s 9904-UDX processing card.

Cobalt Digital says that +UDX-Dante-16x16 supports embedding and de-embedding all the way to 12G with full audio routing capabilities between SDI, MADI, and Dante, both input and output, adding up to 32 channels to existing 9904 cards for a high-density solution without the need for any new hardware. Users will be able to ingest and process up to 16 audio channels from the network and will be able to output up to 16 channels back into the network using Dante and the Ethernet port.

In addition to accessing Dante on Cobalt’s 9904 cards, users will also have access to the card’s other functions such as UDX, colour correction, 3D-LUT, frame-sync, audio mixing which are still available while embedding and de-embedding to/from SDI.

At NAB, Cobalt will also show Indigo 2110-DC-01, its new openGear-based SMPTE ST-2110 solution with dual 25G interfaces and 4K support. This highly integrated factory option offers best-of-class native ST 2110 audio/video processing to the company’s 9904-UDX-4K and 9905-MPx audio/video processor cards. On the compression side, the 9992-ENC/DEC line has been enhanced with support for decoding Dolby AC-4 and Dolby E, as well as transport protocols such as SRT and soon, Zixi.

Cobalt will conduct multiple demonstrations including ST 2110 processing, multi-link RIST in switching mode using SMPTE ST 2022-7, and a new feature from Technicolor that allows reversible inverse tone mapping SDR to HDR, followed by SL-HDR1 in seamless fashion.