StreamGuys has announced the imminent availability of Reflector EVO, a new cloud service for enterprise-level audio contribution and distribution that begins shipping as the upcoming 2024 NAB Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center opens.
Developed in partnership with the Audio over IP (AoIP) team at Barix, StreamGuys will lead sales efforts and provide service hosting and 24/7 technical support for customers that require a scalable, one-to-many cloud networking architecture for content delivery. StreamGuys will demonstrate Reflector EVO at the show, where the company will share space at the ENCO booth (W1743).
Reflector EVO is the second generation of the Reflector service, which was developed 14 years ago to help broadcasters move audio over the public internet. The original version removed network configuration challenges and made it more simple to immediately send audio between studios and transmitters sites upon connecting a Barix encoder and decoder.
Reflector EVO expands the horizons as a cloud service that can transport bulk audio streams to many locations at once, including uncompressed PCM signals with high bandwidth requirements. In addition, StreamGuys has strengthened redundancy for mission-critical broadcast delivery, with primary and backup streams operating in parallel to help optimize signal integrity. The redundant streams borrow packets from each other as drops occur, ensuring streams are reassembled upon reaching end points.
Barix has updated its encoding and decoding hardware for additional network resiliency, along with enabling fast switching between encoders and adding support for lossless audio compression. Barix’s new LX400 broadcast codec, also to be introduced at NAB (booth C2348), offers OPUS audio support for customers that want very high audio quality and bandwidth conservation, with support for constant and variable bitrates (6kb/s to 510kb/s). Customers can manually configure encoding quality and the audio delay level of the receiving decoder (between three and 30 seconds), with communication between each device worldwide.
The LX400 devices also include standard Barix AoIP codec features such as selectable input gain, relay support and contact closures, the latter of which allows broadcast networks to provide affiliates with precisely timed triggers for local ad breaks over EVO. In addition, StreamGuys has improved alerting applications that allow networks to target alerts to help ensure important notifications are prioritized for affected stations only, rather than being disseminated to all engineers in the network.
“Reflector EVO isn’t merely an improvement on the original – it’s a reimagining of the infrastructure for the reliable transport of large media workloads, and modernized for today’s enterprise broadcast networks,” says Eduardo Martinez, vice president of technology, StreamGuys. “With options for uncompressed transport, lossless compression and legacy compression, broadcasters have an array of options for high-quality deliver of speech and music and are assured a high level of service and consistent uptime for all cloud networking applications.”
StreamGuys will offer several service plan options for Reflector EVO across technical formats (compressed or uncompressed), hardware (purchase or lease) and support (standard tech support, or direct StreamGuys support for all affiliates).
