NetStreams Dares Dealers: Compare DVI to IP

After demonstrating its IP-based video distribution for many months to small groups of dealers and analysts, NetStreams brought the DigiLinx video technology into the open at the CEDIA and Electronic House Expos.

There, the company dared attendees to guess which of two displays was showing video from a 10-foot DVI connection, and which was connected to the source via 1,000 feet of Cat 5 cable. The images, according to onlookers, were virtually identical.

The IP video solution consists of the MediaLinx encoder, ViewLinx decoder, and SwitchLinx gigabit Ethernet switch, the combination of which allows streaming HD video content from multiple sources to multiple displays on an IP-based network.

The system streams uncompressed HDTV quality video signals -- 1080i for now, but 1080p is planned -- from native IP and/or legacy analog devices at a rate of 1 GB/second.

"We're sending video uncompressed; we're streaming in real time," says Herman Cardenas, president and CEO NetStreams. "You can put a spectrum analyzer on it, and you can see we are streaming bit per bit."

Other video-over-IP solutions do exist, says Cardenas, "but everyone else has to compress the signal because they don't have the bandwidth."

NetStreams's enabling technology, called PerfectPixel, provides "100-percent accurate picture replication," the company claims.

But the biggest concern among integrators, Cardenas says, is the synchronization of video signals across displays -- it can be unnerving to show the same video on multiple TVs if they are even the slightest bit out of synch. Indeed, NetStreams's patented StreamNet technology synchronizes the video down to 1 millisecond, just as it does with audio, according to the company.

So what's the big deal about IP-based video distribution anyway? NetStreams says that the ability to send synchronized video, audio and control over a single Cat 5 cable using open-standard protocols "greatly reduces system wiring, simplifies installation and set-up ... and offers almost limitless expandability of sources, displays and zones."