Advanced Television

World first live HEVC broadcast encoders: AL1200/AL2200

September 4, 2012

Allegro DVT is proud to announce the world first HEVC broadcast appliances: AL1200 HD-SDI encoder and AL2200 IP Transcoder. These new products target high end operators and broadcasters willing to early adopt this upcoming compression standard. While the final standard is to be expected in early 2013, Allegro DVT HEVC encoders evolve as new drafts of the standard are submitted.

– Which use cases can be addressed by this new product?
In the long term, any application where bandwidth consumption is critical to the operator, can be targeted by HEVC. In the short term, hardware HEVC decoders shouldn’t be expected before 2014, consequently and until that time, HEVC will be most interesting for applications where software decoding may apply, such as multiscreen delivery.

– What kind of bitrate savings are to be expected with the HEVC standard?
This of course varies according to the resolutions and bitrates in use, but it is commonly accepted that the finalised HEVC standard will bring bitrate savings somewhat between 30 per cent and 50 per cent compared to equivalent H.264 encodings.

– Does this make sense for operators to start investing in the HEVC standard?
Eventually, HEVC will be to H.264 what H.264 was to MPEG-2. HEVC will be allowing premium video delivery at resolutions and places that operators and broadcasters were only dreaming of before. Most of the delivery pipeline will remain untouched, since HEVC will make use of agnostic delivery protocols such as MPEG-2 Transport Stream and MPEG-DASH.

– HEVC ecosystems are yet to emerge, how can Allegro DVT live HEVC encoder already be demonstrated ?
On our booth at IBC, will be demonstrated an end to end HEVC delivery system, based on Allegro DVT live HEVC encoder, being provided a live IP video source. The encoded result will be delivered to a custom version of HM reference decoder, that we adapted to support playout of live content.

Any company that has interest on the HEVC topic is invited to contact us at info@allegrodvt.com, and book a private demonstration on our stand 1.A46.

The Allegro team.

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