Unmissable Updates
Posted on Sep 21, 2024 by FEED Staff
With 2024’s edition of IBC Show fast approaching, the industry is aflutter with product launches and technological innovations. This is no less true for professional broadcast manufacturer Cobalt Digital
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To the team at Cobalt Digital, signal processing is about more than just powerful processing and system capabilities. Scalable, cost-effective, real-world solutions that not only meet today’s demands but adapt to tomorrow’s challenges are just as important.
Cobalt believes a scalable, space-efficient, flexible approach to terminal equipment and systems gives the best value without compromising ease of integration, features or economy. The company calls it Engineering Beyond the Signal – a philosophy that guides everything it does.
Thinking outside the box
Cobalt’s growing line of products is built to tackle any broadcast hurdle in today’s multiscreen, multiformat world. It also keeps an eye on the future to anticipate the next big need.
Cue IBC, the annual meeting place for innovators across broadcast and media tech, and the ideal chance for vendors like Cobalt to bring forward the latest in their product lines.
“This year, we are branching out,” introduces Dr Ciro Noronha, CTO at Cobalt Digital. “We’ve always had little utility boxes, but this year, we are moving up on the food chain with 2110 boxes with our own technology inside – unlike others who repackage stuff.
“You have a nice 2110 network, but you need to see it on the screen. We have boxes that convert it to HDMI so you can put it on a monitor.”
The new boxes are being released as part of Cobalt’s SAPPHIRE series and come as both single-, dual- and quad-channel boxes. The conversion function Noronha mentions offers easier access and control, and faster switching capabilities.
“The nice thing about the smaller ones is there’s an option to exclude a fan. If you’re going into a production environment where everything needs to be quiet, you don’t want something making a noise like a jet engine in the background!” he muses. Cobalt is also introducing quad-channel SDI/2110 gateway in openGear form factor.
Taking control
Cobalt is also renowned for its multifaceted control panel solutions, and there will be innovative new updates in this part of its product portfolio to watch out for at IBC too.
“What’s exciting about a control panel full of buttons? Many people have them!” Noronha jests. “But this one is fully configurable. It’s the ideal companion for our WAVE series of routers, but can do more. We open the whole thing for the customer – if you want a control panel to do custom things, we now provide a simple way of configuring it.”
Noronha emphasises that one of Cobalt’s VPs – who came up with the whole concept – will be at the show to give a detailed talk and demo of this update to its WAVE family of routers and control panels.
“Something we don’t hide is that the brains is a little Raspberry Pi, with the Cobalt hardware around it. This means you can run your own code there with a simple environment.”
Compression connoisseurs
Cobalt is also known as a pioneer in compression technology. Its PACIFIC ULL-DEC upgradeable AVC/MPEG-2 software-defined broadcast decoder is a professional multi-standard decoder to meet the most stringent requirements for today’s broadcasters.
“We can now have less than one frame of end-to-end delay,” Noronha expands. “It’s what we get with JPEG XS, but with one-tenth – or even one-hundredth – of the bandwidth.”
Efficiency, in both the green and technological definitions, is also built into each one of Cobalt’s solutions.
“Our sustainability story is that you see people looking purely at software solutions. But, there’s a cost to that energy: using general-purpose processors to do those heavy jobs takes power,” Noronha concludes. “We take a more dedicated approach: power-efficient technology where you can do the same job with much less power.” Visit Cobalt at IBC to learn more – in hall 10, booth B41.
This feature was first published in the Autumn 2024 issue of FEED.
