UHD data rates get astronomical for uncompressed formats. The first and expensive way to take on this challenge is to get more bandwidth over the network infrastructure (from 10G, to 40G to 100G…) or more cables within the AV facilities. But it is not cost effective and sustainable. 10GbE ports are commonly available, deployed and affordable today and will continue to be massively deployed in the near future.
To answer the strong desire to manage UHD 4K and UHD 8K content in a practical and cost-effective way on this existing infrastructure, a high-quality UltraHD mezzanine compression is needed.
TICO is a new compression technology, recently submitted to the SMPTE, and based on a market-driven research for lightweight compression. It aims to be utilised to enable a mezzanine 4K/8K workflow up to 4:1 compression with no effect on quality and latency: it is visually lossless with only a few pixel lines of latency.
TICO enables users to map 4K over a single 3G-SDI, or 10GbE link: it offers a smart infrastructure upgrade to 4K at an equivalent price and complexity than existing baseband HD operations. With its pixel-lines-based-latency, it is easy to combine TICO with all existing transport schemes. Moreover, the compression is extremely tiny in
FPGA using no external DDR memory and only a few logic resources.
The industry is moving on to what is sure to be one of the biggest technology trends over the next five-plus years. intoPIX mezzanine compression technologies are great examples of how we can push the boundaries and contribute towards the move to full IP infrastructure supporting HD but also 4K and 8K.
