The SDVoE Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of technology providers collaborating to standardize the adoption of Ethernet to transport AV signals in professional AV environments, will showcase a solution for uncompressed video transmission to create a sustainable, eco-friendly approach to AV at ISE 2023 — and 8K via SDVoE too!

The SDVoE Alliance has strongly emphasized high-performance AV that promotes sustainability. As hardware devices become more complex, they consume more power. Higher compression ratios demand more complex and power-hungry algorithms. FPGA-based products consume up to four times the power of ASIC-based devices. With 8K resolutions on the horizon, compressions will have to evolve to fit the new demands, which results in larger boxes, more fans, and limited performance.

“An SDVoE Alliance member recently supported an installation with over 1,000 endpoints at a large facility in Brussels,” said Justin Kennington, president of the SDVoE Alliance. “The installation resulted in over 150,000 kWh annual energy savings. For reference, the cost of electricity in Belgium is now over 17 cents per kWh. As a result, SDVoE’s technology has saved the customer over $26,000 per year in electricity costs alone!”

Kennington added, “An ASIC-based device might consume up to 80% less power than an FPGA-based device performing the same job. The ASIC power consumption is an important savings for 4K. Still, it will become even more critical as resolutions increase because the higher the pixel rate, the higher the power consumption. Today’s FPGAs are simply incapable of processing 8K resolution. The FPGAs of tomorrow are power-hungry and extremely expensive. An ASIC-based solution, like SDVoE, is the only way forward.”

SDVoE is the only AV-over-IP solution that can match the performance of a matrix switch. With 8K on the horizon, SDVoE has standardized the first 8K AV-over-IP transport solution. HDMI 2.1 defines many 8K formats with varying bit depth, chroma subsampling, frame rate, and color space. SDVoE’s 8K technology supports these formats without adding compression or latency.