INTERVIEW: ETHAN WETZELL, BOSCH COMMUNICATIONS
Ethan Wetzell – a brief biography
Ethan Wetzell has a Bachelor of Science degree in information technology from Globe University-Minneapolis, and has worked as a freelance audio engineer for nearly 20 years
He joined Electro-Voice in 2003 as a senior technical applications specialist, progressing to technical product manager within Bosch Communications in 2005 and global product manager for E-V signal processing in 2007
Since October 2011 he has had the additional role of platform strategist within Bosch Communications, helping to co-ordinate common development activities and develop long-term strategic initiatives across the company’s professional sound, critical communications, PA and conferencing lines
course will evolve to address a lot of different elements – Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic, how to deal with synchronisation, traffic shaping, all of those different elements. We're still in relatively early days with this stuff. Once the industry gets a taste of this trend towards interoperability, they're only going to demand more. On the control side, this is also something that I think is going to continue to converge. When we go back in history, there really weren’t a whole lot of standards out there that would allow the type of robust device control and communication that we see today. Also for many years the hardware was limiting – you had processors that would only go so fast, you only had so much memory available, so there was the need to do heavy customisation and
optimisation of these types of control protocol. A lot of those limitations from the hardware and design perspective are starting to fade away. So people have more flexibility to do what they want to do within their systems – and they want more interoperability, more control and richer experiences with their equipment.
www.installation-international.com
So it’s definitely our opinion that OCA offers a really interesting, innovative and flexible solution to bring those open standards towards the market and allow manufacturers to adopt them. Finally I should talk about
how we expand outside the pro-audio world. Already within AVnu Alliance, for example, we have seen interest from a variety of other markets outside the traditional AV world; for example, automotive manufacturers and CE manufacturers find a lot of interesting things within AVB. It’s going to be very interesting to see how the market responds to what AVB can bring and what some of these other protocols can bring to the party – and how is this going to fit into new and novel use cases that we might not be able to imagine yet. When you look at
installations in hospitality, for example – if I check into a hotel room, nine times out of ten there’s a dock on the alarm clock for my iPhone so I can connect my personal device with one of the ‘subsystems’ in the room. But what if we go further than that? How do we bring that next level of connectivity and
personalisation into those types of installations? I think those are use cases that are evolving, and how those evolve will dictate how the work that we’re doing in the pro-audio community will expand out into other adjacent and even new markets. It’s tough to project, but I think we’re doing some novel things and what the customers and the end-users are demanding of integration and systems are really going to help shape that. So I think the convergence of standards and the commonality is really going to increase going forward.
We haven't spoken much about video. That’s a key component of OMNEO as well as AVB, isn’t it? Absolutely. The video world is an interesting one. Within audio there are all sorts of flavours, functions and applications, and video is really the same way. You've got a wide range of uses and technologies – everything from 4K broadcast quality all the way down to relatively low-res industrial video that might be used in CCTV or
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reversing cameras on an automobile. They bring different applications, different products and different demands on technology. If I’m looking at a CCTV feed that may be working with MJPEGs or even H.264 video, that’s a radically different need and use case for the technology than something like a 4K high-definition camera for a broadcast installation.
I think what we are going to see is the different markets and the different
application of video are going to start to adopt the technology in slightly different ways – based on not only the standards and the protocols that are available but also things like infrastructure. I can route hundreds of channels of compressed video across an IP network today. But when we get into really high- definition applications and products, those have such a radically different bandwidth requirement that we need to look at what’s existing on the IT infrastructure side –
ONLINE EXTRA
Ethan Wetzell discusses if there’s any strategic risk associated with backing Audinate’s Dante and why AVB shouldn’t be seen as a competitor to OMNEO
www.installation-international.com
we need to be looking at 10Gig, 40Gig, even 100Gig infrastructure to really start to support those technologies in a robust and common way. I think we’re going to see the adoption of these standards in the video market happening in increments, and it will evolve in different ways across the different market segments. Much the same way that we’ve seen happen with audio, honestly.
www.boschcommunications.com
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