New PESA Blade System Integrates High-Density Streaming Into Traditional Baseband

PESA (Booth SL4617) will introduce the PESA Blade System (PBS). The first two cards for the proprietary frame will provide dual-channel H.264 encoding and decoding for streaming video. Housed in a 2RU chassis, the PBS holds up to 10 cards and is controlled through Cattrax, PESA’s Windows-based system-control software, for seamless integration of high-density IP-based video into baseband environments.

Both the C22-PBS, which supports RTSP and RTMP streams, and the C22-PBS-T, which supports MPEG transport streams, are based on the PESAXstream C22 compact streaming appliance introduced last year. Each C22 card can be configured as a two-port video encoder or two-port decoder or can include one of each. Two external audio sources can be synchronized to either or both video streams during an event. Plus, the C22s feature HDMI I/O ports for encoding HDMI sources or local HDMI monitoring.

Each PBS chassis can be tailored for any operation. When populated with C22 cards, for example, one PBS chassis can be dedicated to decoding IP streams that can be distributed through a PESA Cheetah router (or any baseband router); another chassis can be used to accept baseband signals and encode them for IP-based distribution. The result is up to 10 dual-channel cards supporting streaming video in each compact PBS frame.

The power-efficient 2RU PBS chassis includes all standard network-connectivity standards, and redundant power is available. With the addition of the PBS, the PESA infrastructure now supports streaming as well as legacy SD, HD, and UHD (4K) signal sources.

The C22s will be the first cards available for the PBS, but PESA is developing additional proprietary cards to handle signal conversion and scaling. The PESA Blade System with the C22 cards will be available in the second quarter.