NAB 2015: COGO Products Preview

COGO | Booth SU621 | Website: cogohd.com

At NAB 2015, COGO is launching a suite of new transcoding and encoding solutions that address the bandwidth constraints presented by the delivery of superior fidelity images, including 4K.

The video compression technology underpinning the COGO product line ensures extremely low-bit rates so that everyone from video production professionals to broadcasters can work with and deliver high quality content up to 4K over existing standard H.264 networks.

At NAB 2015, COGO will be participating in the dedicated StudioXperience area (booth SU621) to launch and live-demo the full suite of its new products. Four COGO product variants — COGO Cloud, COGO Coder, COGO Live and COGO Broadcast — have been developed, each with a specific target user and a set of applications in mind. At the core of each of these products is the proprietary COGO technology which has been developed over the past six years by the company’s U.S.-based R&D team.

The COGO technology solution was originally focused on addressing the backhaul problems associated with moving large video files between post-production facilities and visual effects houses to avoid shipping footage on physical media, and lowering costs of storage and streaming. With the advent of better quality screens and cameras that improve picture quality, and consumer demand for an improved viewing experience, the development team recognized the greater opportunity to address the challenges being faced by users across the video creation, production and distribution value chain.

COGO’s encoding technology was successfully trialed in the field for the first time, at the 2015 South by Southwest (SXSW) Music Conference and Festival, as an integral part of the solution used to deliver the very first concert streamed live in 4K worldwide from the festival.

“The proliferation of available video services including OTT and the rising demand for higher picture quality is pushing network bandwidths to their absolute limit,” said Todd Bryant, CTO, COGO. “The solution we demonstrated at SXSW earlier this year in a live production environment addressed this problem head-on by enabling the delivery of 4K high quality video at rates that are sub 10 megabits per second, a huge improvement over current solutions. There is no doubt that it is absolutely the right time to be bringing to market an H.264-compliant 4K encoding solution that bridges the gap between content demand and current bandwidth limitations.”

The four variants in the COGO suite of solutions being launched at NAB 2015 are:

• COGO Cloud is the entry-level, cloud-based transcoding solution which has been designed to deliver the best video quality at the lowest bit rate for online distribution. With COGO CLOUD resolution, bit rate and container type can all be changed while allowing multiple resolutions from a single file.

• COGO Coder is the desktop variant of the cloud-based solutions, delivering H.264 compliant files with the highest picture quality at the lowest bit rate. Video production professionals looking for a secure way of addressing how to deliver large video files to intermediaries and end-clients can use COGO Coder.

• COGO Live sees the COGO technology integrated within an off-the-shelf hardware device form factor to deliver live streaming of high quality video over the internet. Field testing of the new solution at the recent SXSW achieved bit rates for high quality HD video as low as 3Mbps and 4K bit rates of 10Mbps. The goal is to achieve bit rates for 4K in the 6-7Mbps range by NAB or shortly thereafter.

• COGO Broadcast is designed to meet the need of broadcasters. A Linux-based encoding platform COGO Broadcast can distribute content to consumers through UDP to TCP, CBR to ABR and live to recorded content.