Dante AV-A Turns Video Into A Dante Subscription

For years the phrase Dante AV-A described a codec profile and a licence. In the last quarter it turned into an actual product line. BSS, AMX (as the N2600 Series S models), Turtle AV with its CHAZY 4K family, Lightware and Lightware-adjacent brands now ship transmitters, receivers, wall plates, multiviewers and control applications that put 4K60 4:4:4 video into Dante Controller next to the microphones and the loudspeakers. JPEG 2000 at up to 2160p60 with HDR passes over ordinary 1GbE, and because the video stream is a Dante subscription, the person who already knows how to patch a Dante network can patch the video too.

On 19 October Audinate went further, agreeing to acquire Iris Studio, the US developer behind an AI-powered, cloud-based camera control platform. Iris is brand-agnostic and already enabled on a wide range of PTZ cameras from 14 manufacturers including Lumens, PTZOptics, Marshall, BirdDog, Telycam and AIDA, and its software also applies to encoders, decoders and vision mixers. According to Audinate chief executive Aidan Williams, the point is to combine Iris remote production features with cloud management such as Dante Director, so that the millions of Dante devices already installed can be reached without new hardware. Read the two announcements together and the direction is clear: the networked AV control plane is being consolidated into the platform that already holds the audio clock.

Four things change in how such a room should be specified. First, the switch. Dante AV-A wants a managed switch with IGMP snooping, a defined multicast policy and QoS, and the video traffic is now visible to the same IT team that polices the audio VLAN, which is a governance question before it is a bandwidth question. Second, clocking. A converged audio and video network has one PTP domain to defend, and an office switch with energy-efficient Ethernet enabled by default is a common cause of wandering clocks. Third, single points of failure. A tile that replaces a 16x16 matrix with one encoder per source and one decoder per display removes the matrix as a failure object and replaces it with the switch, so the switch needs a spare and a documented recovery procedure. Fourth, licences and firmware. Dante AV-A devices carry a licence and a firmware branch, and an estate that mixes audio-only and video Dante endpoints needs one inventory, not two.

Amtune's position is that convergence should be incremental. Audio stays on Dante and AES67 interfaces and on Dante audio modules that can be dropped into OEM chassis, while video continues to run on seamless hybrid matrix switchers, HDBaseT extenders and networked decoders until a site has the switch, the policy and the skills for a fully converged design. AES67 modules keep the audio side open to whichever video transport a consultant eventually chooses. Enquiries at sales@amtune.com.