OCA Alliance Introduces New Technologies, New Standards, and Receives Support From New Members

The ISE 2023 show in Barcelona saw the OCA Alliance bring forward several new developments and announcements that will continue to push the horizons of the AES70 control standard. During the show, presentations, demonstrations, and new members to the trade association showcased current and future technologies and tools that will further broaden the Open Control Architecture (OCA) Ecosystem.

The OCA Alliance is heading to Integrated Systems Europe 2023 in Barcelona to promote the latest AES70-2023 set of updates to the AES70 open control and monitoring standard for professional audio and AV media network devices. The AES70-2023 standard brings new features, options, usability and flexibility additions, being fully backwards compatible with all existing AES70 devices. The updates implement important adaptations to work with standard media transports and meet emerging industry requirements.

DeusO GmbH has released a software named AES70 Explorer to support hardware engineers developing or integrating AES70 into Pro Audio devices. AES70 Explorer is designed to connect, expose and control parameters in OCA objects. The software provides a UI builder for fast setup of engineering interfaces and can simultaneously test multiple devices using an array of Pro Audio control widgets.

Centre stage on the OCA Alliance booth at the recent ISE show was the expanded feature set of the new AES70-2018 revision of the open control and monitoring standard for professional audio and AV media networks. The result of several years of collaborative work within the OCA Alliance and the AES, AES70-2018 is an evolutionary upgrade providing numerous new and improved features.

During my time at the Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2019 show, I looked closely at how companies are dealing with the transition to IP networks, how prevalent some proprietary technologies still are in commercial installation and AV in particular (e.g., HDBaseT), and how manufacturers are introducing new products and concepts to integrate those networked systems, in particular those protocols that support AES67 audio and the latest SMPTE ST-2110 suite of standards in general.