‘Killer Apps’ Will Drive SDVoE Adoption, Christie Says

With all the acronyms that seem to be competing for AV system designer’s attention when it comes to AV networking – SDVoE, HDBaseT, AVB, you name it – how does one gain traction over the others?

How did VHS outpace Betamax?

How did Apple iPod leapfrog Sony Walkman?

[related]Usually, in the case of competing technologies, the winner is decided based on which one offers the most beneficial applications for the users – or best “killer apps,” says Christie senior product manager Karl Johnson.

Christie is a founding member of the SDVoE (Software Defined Video over Ethernet) Alliance. When it launched during Integrated Systems Europe 2017, they sought to speed up and optimize the transition to AV over IP by bringing manufacturers together around a standardized hardware and software platform.

For its part, Christie was all in on SDVoE from the beginning because it liked the foundational support that it would provide AV system designers, as Johnson explains in a Commercial Integrator video interview.

SDVoE and Killer Apps

One of the reasons Christie embraces SDVoE (and a reason it sees it as a great system design platform for integrators) is the flexibility that it offers. It offers “a very efficient design,” Johnson says.

“We’re not restricted to an even number of inputs and outputs. You can have a couple transmitters and lots of receivers — or the inverse of that. We don’t need fixed size 8 x 8 or 16 x 16.”

Another “killer app” that SDVoE offers integrators, according to Johnson, revolves around monitoring.

In situations where there is a switching system and the sources need to be monitored, e.g., making sure the content is alive and delivered with high quality perhaps for a live presentation, “every receiver can be operated as a multi-viewer,” he says.

“We can downscale our sources, assemble them on a multi viewer and all I’ve done is add one receiver to a solution.”

Watch the entire video interview for more on why Christie has embraced SDVoE.