TICO Alliance Moves Forward with SMPTE for Transporting UHD-4K over IP and SDI, Adds New Members and Shows Live 4K Demos at IBC 2015

The rapidly growing membership reflects the importance of TICO® to ease the move to 4K and IP within Broadcast Production facilities.

Amsterdam, September 7, 2015 -- The TICO Alliance (www.tico-alliance.org ) has announced that their standardization work is moving rapidly forward and that new companies are joining the group. IBC2015 will see more TICO implementations.

“The efforts done by the Alliance are increasing in importance and will help Broadcasters to fully benefit from a seamless, integrated and high-quality Ultra-HD Live production ecosystem from SDI to IP” observed Jean-Baptiste Lorent, manager of the Alliance. “The mission of the Alliance is to enhance live IP systems by increasing efficiency and reducing cost for both HD and 4K/UHD video thanks to the TICO lightweight compression technology. TICO enables 4K/UHD to be transported over the current 3G-SDI and the 10GbE IP-based infrastructures.”

Standardizing TICO across the industry and guaranteeing interoperability

The recently created TICO Alliance is working on an open and collaborative way with industry organizations, including SMPTE, VSF, and JT-NM (Joint Task Force on Networked Media) and want to guarantee an interoperable adoption. intoPIX TICO compression and its mapping over 3G-SDI and over SMPTE2022 5/6/7 are in the process of becoming a registered disclosure document (RDD) through SMPTE.

The leading broadcast industry organizations want to create an easy path to move UHD over the existing SDI infrastructure and the IP Networks. TICO lightweight compression delivers unrivalled quality with an extremely low latency of few pixel lines running on low cost FPGA chips and being also fast in CPU for 4K or even 8K.

More companies joining the Alliance

The newest members of the TICO Alliance include Deltacast, EVS, Media Global Links and Tektronix.

Christian Dutilleux, CEO of Deltacast said: “Our customers can smoothly evolve from standard to standard, without changing their application. TICO is part of those new standards and is very appealing, especially because its ecosystem is defined for mix SDI and IP environments.”

Benoit Fevrier, CTO, EVS said: “With the steady transition to IP and the need to move 4K/UHD and even higher resolutions and frame rates in the future, precise compression is essential to next-generation video production and distribution. TICO is an important step in this evolution and we’re committed to developing the standard and to the larger IP-based live ecosystem.”

John Dale III, Director, Media Global Links said: " It looks like TICO Lightweight Compression could enable some compelling new solutions for managing UHD links within and outside the studio while providing a great balance between performance and cost."

Charlie Dunn, general manager, Video Product Line, Tektronix said: “By joining the TICO Alliance, we are continuing to demonstrate our leadership in enabling the transition to 4K/UHD and IP. TICO compression technology effectively balances quality, bit rate and latency to keep data rates for 4K content below 10G.”

Live 4K with TICO at IBC 2015

Several demos, products and workflows using TICO will be shown at IBC2015. Both UHD4K transport over 3G-SDI and SMPTE2022 IP will be presented. intoPIX is also releasing new TICO FPGA implementation, supporting 4K up to 120fps or running 4K on lower frequency FPGAs. The company releases also the Accelerated CPU decoder SDK supporting up to 8K resolution. More info about the Alliance member’s demos can be obtained on intoPIX booth (Hall 10, 10D31d).

About the TICO Alliance

The Alliance was founded in April 2015 and is a growing coalition of leading Broadcast equipment manufacturers, OEM providers, broadcasters, electronics brands and technology companies. The group is united to set the bar for next generation infrastructure by establishing TICO lightweight compression technology in the new IP-based Live production ecosystem that allows users to seamlessly leverage the existing SDI-based workflows to 4K/UHD. Membership is open to any company active in the Broadcast industry.

The current Alliance members are: Altera Corporation, Artel Video Systems, Belden Grass Valley, Embrionix, Deltacast, EVS Broadcast Equipment, Image Matters, Imagine Communications, Keisoku Giken, Macnica Americas, MediaLinks, Nevion, Ross Video, Tektronix, and Xilinx.

For additional information on TICO Alliance, visit www.tico-alliance.org. To join the Alliance, contact the Alliance at info@tico-alliance.org