AVnu Alliance Seeks to Penetrate CE Via IEEE-Based AV Bridging Standards

The four-year-old AVnu Alliance -- a forum promoting the adoption of IEEE 802.1-based AV bridging (AVB) specifications -- is hoping to leverage its budding presence in pro audio and automotive markets as it looks to bring interoperability for networked AV devices to CE products, Greg Schlechter, AVnu Alliance marketing work group chairman, told us. The alliance has begun establishing testing requirements for AVB standards for “reliable, time-synched AV streaming” over ethernet and Wi-Fi networks in residential applications, Schlechter said on a media tour in New York Wednesday.

With AVB, AV environments benefit from “vastly simplified network infrastructure, reduced implementation costs, unified management, and the ability to ensure delivery of next-generation video and audio applications,” according to a backgrounder. “It’s not a bandwidth thing,” Schlechter said. “It’s how you use that bandwidth."

The value of the standard for AV manufacturers is to render streamed AV with reliability and time synchronization over ethernet and Wi-Fi networks, Schlechter told us. In an AVB environment, speakers and receivers become network devices with the ability to do “time deterministic” audio and video. Multiple speakers in different locations play in synch, something that’s not necessarily true in current streamed audio systems, he said. In a wired world, audio is synchronized but when it’s on a network “you have to have a common clock to do it,” he said. Once you're on a wireless network you need to have technology to synchronize the audio in the way “wired” does, he said.

The IEEE ratified the first of its core AV bridging standards in 2010 and the AVnu Alliance is beginning to talk to consumer audio manufacturers, installers and end users, Schlechter said. “We want to let manufacturers looking to do networked audio solutions know that this is an option they should look into and evaluate,” Schlechter said.

On the automotive side, AVB is being designed into components that will come out in cars during the 2015 calendar year, Schlechter said. Engineers in the automotive space are “all trying to figure out an ethernet backbone for infotainment and cameras coming in and AVB is a key piece of that,” he said. On the pro audio side, products using AVB are shipping now, Schlechter said. Certification began earlier this year. There’s “some crossover” in pro audio applications with the residential side, but the pro applications are all wired ethernet, and the home side needs to work over wired and Wi-Fi, he said. Also, a residential ecosystem has to support multiple audio and video streaming formats, he said. The Alliance has opened certification testing for AVB-enabled networking bridges and endpoints for the professional market and hopes to build off that momentum to create a certified AVB networking ecosystem for the consumer and residential markets, it said. The alliance envisions AVB-enabled products for both the custom and mainstream do-it-yourself markets, he said.

AVnu Alliance wants to create a “ubiquitous evolution” of open standards with “broad market appeal,” according to a backgrounder. The goal is to achieve multi-vendor implementation and ultimately a “wide ecosystem of interoperable devices that creates an easy-to-use, easy-to-integrate, many-to-many” network of devices. Schlechter gave a timetable of “a couple of years” before AVnu products hit the residential market. Chipsets would go inside speakers, TVs and the network infrastructure, including routers and switches, he said.

The alliance boasts a member list of some 60 companies including Intel, where Schlechter is initiative manager. Other member companies include Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Marvell and Cisco. Cross-category companies include Bose, which recently joined, along with General Motors, Harman, Onkyo parent and pro audio company Gibson, Yamaha, Hyundai and Dolby. LG is a member company, but not yet on the CE side, Schlechter said.

As part of its outreach to the consumer market, the alliance is forming a residential dealer work group to prioritize “evolving wireless audio needs” in residential networks, Schlechter said. The alliance is looking to CEDIA-level integrators to learn challenges that installers are encountering in the field as multi-room AV systems move from analog to digital, he said. It’s opening membership participation to a “select number” of dealers that will help frame the future of residential networked audio standards, he said, and it plans to announce the advisory group at CEDIA Expo next month.

"We've been talking about convergence for so long,” Schlechter said. “Now that there’s streaming content coming in, people want networked speakers. This is about upgrading the network to be best for audio and video,” he said. With a base network infrastructure in place, manufacturers can add their own “bells and whistles” to differentiate their products, he said. “Different network protocols for every manufacturer would be a mess” for the consumer and the integrator, which is what led IEEE to address the issue, he said. “Standardize how products talk together first and then manufacturers can focus on what they want to focus on,” such as quality of audio, he said.

On the likelihood of CE companies wanting to standardize a networking specification in a highly competitive environment, Schlechter said, “you always want to certify the interoperability of what people don’t want to differentiate on.” In this case that’s the networking aspect, he said. For companies that have tried unsuccessfully to take a proprietary route to AV networking in the past, Schlechter said, it’s “not something that’s worth trying to differentiate on.”

Schlechter expects the first AVB-enabled products to be wireless networked speakers and audio. In an AVB ecosystem every device that has a network link for AV will have support for the AVB protocol, including receivers, speakers and TVs, he said.