The professional audio industry in 2011 has been abuzz yet again with a recurring theme that I like to refer to as the “can’t we all just get along?” conversation.
As in years past, the topic of unifying standards between different manufacturers’ equipment to make exchange of information easier and more seamless was everywhere.
This has been going on for some time, and has lived under different names and terms: “interconnectivity,” “convergence,” and the most recent model, “interoperability.”
However, this year marked a rather interesting turn of events. An increasing number of folks finally seem to all agree that this is not just a good idea, but further, serious conversations are being had about just how to go about getting it done. Customers are asking for it, manufacturers are honestly and openly talking about it, and huge levels of cooperation are emerging from the sturm and drang that frequently hinders real progress in this area.
Industry standards and initiatives such as AVB (IEEE 802.1 Ethernet Audio/Video Bridging) and X192 (AES standards task group for audio interoperability over high-performance IP networks) are not only starting the conversation about transport and content interoperability, but are backing it up with real work to promote the topic, bringing people to the table and making it happen.
Previously, the topic of interoperability was focused mainly on media content and transport. This is a critical and highly valuable part of the conversation, to be sure, but something was missing: system control. It’s an element that every system designer is acutely aware of and struggles with daily, yet until recently, it was absent from most discussions.
Close Collaboration
While the ability to exchange media freely between devices provides an obvious benefit, there is still a huge issue of how to tell these devices what to actually do with it once they have it. In other words, how do you control, configure, monitor, reconfigure, operate, adjust, modify, edit and generally manage these devices?
To tackle this issue, a new organization has been formed called the OCA Alliance, made up of individuals from nine companies who share the vision of an open, flexible, powerful system control solution for professional media networks. To this end, the group is collaborating closely to develop a system control network protocol suite known as the Open Control Architecture, or OCA. It’s the goal of the alliance to transfer OCA into the public standards domain as soon as possible, so that anybody may use it.
After the announcement of the OCA Alliance went public, I had numerous conversations with people from highly divergent areas of the AV industry, and a lot of their reactions went pretty much like this:
“You guys are working on an open control standard, huh? Cool!” (Pause) “So that means that anybody would potentially be able to implement and use this in their products? Neat!” (Slightly longer pause) “Wait – why would anybody actually want to do that?”
It’s a valid question. Upon first hearing about a unifying control technology, people are generally filled with joyful visions of how the AV industry might finally have the benefit of control interoperability that MIDI, DMX512 and others have provided to other technologies and markets. However, as one begins to think about the practical ramifications and implementations of a technology like OCA, doubts begin to creep in and one may wonder why exactly this is something that any sane manufacturer would actually want to adopt.
I can assure you that the members of the OCA Alliance are quite sane and have a very clear vision of what a technology like this means for our industry. But to see that vision, we need to look beyond how we have been working within our industry and take a longer view of how we would like to work.
So for the moment, let’s set aside the hows, bits, bytes and technical details of OCA and focus on the whys.
