Ravenna arrives in China with Infomedia
Published: ASIA
CHINA: The Ravenna open-standard IP networking protocol has received a significant endorsement in Asia following the announcement of Chinese broadcasting specialist Infomedia as a Ravenna partner.
Andreas Hildebrand, senior product manager of ALC NetworX, the company behind the technology, has commented that the deal is expected to lead to ‘excellent support for Ravenna-based network roll-out’.
Based in Beijing, Infomedia has served the Chinese broadcasting sector for 10 years, focusing primarily on end-to-end solutions for the country’s thriving regional radio sector. It describes itself as offering ‘audio and video editing systems, radio and video play-out systems, MCR software for radio, networked audio routing systems, streaming platforms, IP audio codec technology, portable audio recording units and media asset management software’.
Prior to the announcement of its alignment with Ravenna, the company was an advocate of CobraNet. ‘Infomedia is actively engaged in the development of audio routing units based on networking technology,’ explained Zhou Nan, Infomedia’s chief technology officer.
‘Low latency is one of the key issues for audio routing systems made for radio stations. Another important issue is synchronisation of digital audio clock among the routing units,’ he continued. ‘Since up to now it has been impossible to guarantee a fixed synchronisation of digital clock and very low latency with any regular audio-over-IP technology, Infomedia had chosen CobraNet.’
He added, however, that ‘Ravenna offers the flexibility and scalability of an IP-based protocol, but adds accurate synchronisation of digital audio clock together with a fixed and ultra-low latency’.
‘We are extremely happy, that - after receiving strong commitment in the US through the Telos Alliance – Ravenna technology has now arrived in China,’ enthused Mr Hildebrand. ‘Infomedia has already gained substantial experience in the field of audio networking through their CobraNet implementations. We are very confident that the skills of Infomedia’s R&D team will lead to a high-performance Ravenna implementation in their devices.’