The Technology that Makes AV/IT Real

We’ve been talking about digital audiovisual technology for quite some time now and have gotten quite a bit of press coverage for our AV/IT implementations.

Innovative architects and contractors involved with new builds are becoming intrigued by the ability to run all of the AV signals in a building through a unified network – the same cables, routers and switches that are used by the information technology people.

Here at ExhibitOne, we can appreciate that a CIO/CTO might get a little uneasy at an outsider’s suggestion of running all of their company’s AV through their data network.

While making it all work takes a fair bit of systems integration experience and knowledge – there is some technology we use in these implementations that will quickly convert the nervous nellies into true AV/IT believers.

The technology is from a company called SVSi. Their equipment converts raw video and audio to IP packets that are switchable and routable from any network drop to any network drop across standard network appliances.

I’ll forgo the technical specs and let someone who knows a thing or two about IT networks do all of the talking. And that would be Juniper Networks, one of the world’s leading makers of networking products like routers, switches, network management software, network security products, etc. They are all-in when it comes to SVSi technology. It is integrated throughout their newly-built Sunnyvale, CA headquarters.

With more than 300 conference rooms, every projector, display, projection screen, CODEC, and DSP on the Juniper campus has a network connection. More specifically, that’s nearly 1200 SVSi encoders as input sources with more than 900 decoders for output, 120 ATR audio transceivers and 25 windowing processors. Collectively, it’s the largest AV matrix in the world.

Notes Juniper IT CTO and Vice President, Technology Services Gary Clark, “There’s only one LAN for the whole building. The key principal in our vision was to enable everything on an IP network, highlighting a different way of executing an AV project. “We wanted to show that you could make a reasonable, cost-effective system to share expensive components on the network and to stream data over that network.

All said and done, Juniper estimates the cost of their AV implementation was about half of what it would have been had they implemented a traditional RS232-based AV design.