Imagine & Sony kick off Ultra HD, 4K collaboration

Imagine Communications has kicked off an initiative with Sony to enable the transition to Ultra HD 4K, and from legacy SDI to IP-based network infrastructures. The two are collaborating on the adoption of Sony’s Networked Media Interface.

“Together with Sony, we are pleased to initiate an industry-wide adoption of the Sony’s Networked Media Interface, which resolves the issue of managing the distribution of UHD/4K signals in the network infrastructure,” said Steve Reynolds, CTO of Imagine. “This embrace of Sony’s new innovation is not a result of any single vendor’s unique efforts, but instead is a collaboration of the vendor community to ensure that our media and entertainment customers can transition to the next great leap in video quality enhancements and IP innovation.”

Rapid TV News reports the increased bandwidth to support UHD/4k would normally require four HD-SDI cables, representing a massive cabling increase throughout the network infrastructure. Sony’s Networked Media Interface is instead an AV-over-IP interface for IP-based networking that provides low latency transport of UHD/4K video, audio, reference, metadata and control data with minimal compression of the signal, to enable it to be carried in packet form over common 10 GBEs fibre or twisted pair cabling.

“The logistical issues associated with the massive bandwidth increase required for UHD/4K are almost forcing the industry to migrate to an IP-centric network environment,” Reynolds added. “Fortunately, we have enablers that help us in this transition such as Sony’s Networked Media Interface. Add to that the new capabilities like ubiquitous 10 GBEs and 40 GBE IP switching provided by the reliable IT vendor community and other innovations like Imagine Communications’ recently announced Magellan SDN Orchestrator, and the industry now has complete solutions to enable their gradual transition to UHD/4K.”