Valuable Tools and Resources for Pro AV from the SDVoE™ Alliance

The SDVoE Alliance® is a non-profit technology consortium for professional AV. The mission of the SDVoE Alliance is to promote and accelerate the pro AV industry’s transition to using Ethernet as the primary infrastructure for delivering audio and video signals and replace the venerable matrix switch with software-defined video over Ethernet (SDVoE™). Today the SDVoE Alliance boasts a membership of 41 companies and is continuously growing.

Semtech relates to the SDVoE Alliance in several important ways. Semtech is a founding member of the SDVoE Alliance and Semtech’s BlueRiver® chipsets power the AV engine inside all SDVoE-enabled products. I serve as president of the SDVoE Alliance, a role I have held since the group’s founding in late 2016. 2019 kicks off the third year of activities for the SDVoE Alliance, and we have a lot of exciting things happening and planned.

ISE 2019

In the first week of February, the SDVoE Alliance participated in the biggest pro AV tradeshow of the year, Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), in Amsterdam. The show’s attendance of over 81,000 was the highest ever for this fast-growing industry. Check out my personal commentary on ISE 2019.

Speaking of commentary, the SDVoE Alliance has recently launched a new blog where we will deliver pro AV news and insight not only from me, but from other member companies as well as trusted industry experts. Our first guest post was provided by Thomas Wendler of LANG AG, explaining why interoperability between pro AV manufacturers is so important to a leading systems integration firm like LANG. This kind of interoperability in the world of AV over IP is unique to the SDVoE platform.

Historical communication trends from the SDVoE Alliance blog: Why Transform the Matrix?

Focus on Education

This year we will turn our focus to the educational component of the SDVoE Alliance’s mission. In 2018 we launched a free online learning platform called SDVoE Academy™. Along with the SDVoE Academy, we launched the SDVoE Design Partner™ program. The SDVoE Design Partner program is a certification with a focus on teaching experienced AV system designers familiar with the constraints of the matrix switch how to successfully design and deploy systems based on SDVoE. What are the new design considerations? What are the new possibilities? These questions are answered in the 60-minute online training, which is broken into five subject modules and a knowledge assessment at the end.

Further, the SDVoE Design Partner program is now qualified by Avixa, so those who successfully complete the course may receive CTS renewal units.

Today, SDVoE Academy is reaching far beyond the SDVoE Design Partner certification. In January and February we have added six new courses to the curriculum, with a roadmap to add a new course almost every week through the year.

The mission of the SDVoE Academy is to establish a trusted resource for AV professionals – designers, installers, sales people, and system owners. Anyone in the AV ecosystem who wonders things like ‘what are the tradeoffs between different AV over IP systems?’, or ‘how does multicast actually work?’ or even ‘what is chroma subsampling?’ can come to the SDVoE Academy and grow their knowledge for free.

SDVoE Academy course: What is Chroma Subsampling?

A lot has happened in the first two months of 2019, and there is much more to come. Visit the SDVoE blog to stay up to date, and watch for us at Infocomm 2019 in Orlando, where we will feature the SDVoE 20/20 stage – 20 topics, 20 minutes each delivered by 20 member companies. Our members have so much knowledge to share, and we hope you are excited to learn.

BlueRiver is a registered trademark of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates, and SDVoE is a trademark or service mark of the SDVoE Alliance.