Growing support for NewTek NDI makes it an ideal additional streaming format for StreamMaster based playout and low latency proxy monitoring
Pixel Power, the global automation, branding and graphics innovator, has added the NewTek’s NDI® technology to its StreamMaster integrated playout platform. NDI is a royalty-free standard that can be readily implemented across an IP infrastructure and is supported by a broad mix of vendors, ensuring broadcasters and media companies can build a complete infrastructure around it.
The primary application of NDI in StreamMaster is as a means of generating and monitoring low latency proxies. These allow operators to view multiple output buses from convenient locations, either within the Pixel Power Gallium Automation user interface or via a third-party multiviewer that supports NDI. StreamMaster otherwise uses low bitrate H.264 streams for proxies, which have higher latency and require more processing to encode and decode.
StreamMaster can also use NDI as a delivery format, as part of a wider NDI architecture and can be integrated within production environments for graphics & clip playback.
“The addition of NDI support to the StreamMaster platform was completed in less than two weeks,” said James Gilbert, CEO of Pixel Power. “This demonstrates the major benefit of a future-proof software defined architecture by being able to deploy new standards or features into existing deployments quickly and easily.
“Our users want to move to the most efficient architecture and operation that meets their commercial requirements,” Gilbert added. “They see that IP connectivity and virtualized applications are key steps on that path, with the StreamMaster platform a natural fit. NDI is a pragmatic connectivity choice, delivering key operational benefits like low latency monitoring.
“For a live channel, in particular, it is very reassuring to be able to command an action – like go to a commercial break in a sports event – and see that it has happened without having to wait seconds for an H.264 encode and decode to complete. NDI is frame accurate and gives us a latency of less than a frame,” Gilbert concluded.
