TICO ALLIANCE FORMS TO SUPPORT 4K
14 April 2015
A growing consortium of companies including broadcasters, manufacturers, and OEM providers have united to form the TICO Alliance, to address 4K/UHD video delivery workflows.
TICO is a lightweight compression technology that enables 4K to be transported over legacy SDI infrastructure and modern IP production and contribution networks. Developed by Belgian AV tech company intoPIX, TICO has support from Altera Corporation, Artel Video Systems, Embrionix, Grass Valley, Image Matters, Imagine Communications, Keisoku Giken, Macnica Americas, Nevion, Ross Video and Xilinx.
Its backers say TICO is designed to enhance live IP systems by increasing efficiency and reducing cost for both HD and 4K/UHD video. It supports visually lossless compression up to 4:1, and enables the mapping of a single 4K/UHD 2160p60 stream over a single 3G-SDI link. Over 10Gbps Ethernet, it allows the simultaneous transmission of up to three 4K streams. It provides an extremely low latency (limited to just a few pixel lines), preserves video quality across multiple generations of encoding/decoding, fits into the smallest cost-effective FPGA devices, and runs efficiently in software.
“Our company sees the advantage of TICO for live production environments,” says Grass Valley CTO of production, Charles Meyer. “The UHD TV roadmap calls for ever increasing data rates. TICO allows us to provide our customers infrastructure scalability for the next decade while simultaneously reducing latency to imperceptible levels.”
“The broadcast industry faces heavy investments to enable the transport of 4K video in a regular way,” says intoPIX chief technology officer Gael Rouvroy. “Using intoPIX TICO light-weight video compression over 10GbE IP networks or through 3G-SDI mapping is a smart upgrade path to manage UHDTV 4K streams while assuring visual quality and very low hardware complexity and cost.”
intoPIX is demonstrating the FPGA IP-cores implementations combined with the SMPTE 2022 IP transport standard with 3G-SDI mapping at the NAB Show this week with partners Altera, Macnica Americas and Xilinx, and more product releases are scheduled during the second and third quarters of the year.
Source: TICO Alliance media release
LINKS
TICO Alliance: www.tico-alliance.org
intoPIX: www.intopix.com
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