For those who came to this blog from the I.T. industry, the focus on the entertainment industry may seem a bit odd. What most people that don’t work behind the scene’s in the Live Entertainment industry is that the technologies used have become more and more tightly integrated with an I.T. based backbone.
When the Disney Corporation built Disney’s Animal Kingdom park in the late 90’s, they used a new technology (at the time) by the company Digigram called CobraNet. For the uninitiated, CobraNet was an early Audio Over IP technology that allowed up to 64 audio channels to run over computer network segment.
A few years later, when Disney built Tokyo DisneySeas, they put in a gigabit backplane throughout the park, specifically to handle the standard data as well as CobraNet traffic. This allows Disney to have a central control room, and push out all the audio to speakers from there. The way the technology works, there is a specific few millisecond of latency added at each router, so they are able to calculate the timing to keep everything synchronized to the frame.
Over the years, CobraNet was replaced with CobraNet 2. That technology has lost market share to Dante, as well as several other Audio Over IP technologies.
Around the same time that Audio Over IP was making headway, work was being made in the lighting industry for controlling concert lighting over IP networks. Leading up to the mid-80’s, just about every company that made theatrical dimmers used their own proprietary control system. In the mid 80’s, industry leaders finally got together to define common protocols, so equipment would be interchangeable (and much easier to cable).
Two protocols came out of that first consolidation: AMX192 and DMX512. Obviously, AMX is an Analog based protocol, and DMX is a digital based protocol. Eventually, almost all the theatrical control systems moved over to DMX (especially as programmable moving lights became prevalent in the industry).
Fairly quickly, DMX was being stretched to the limits of its capabilities. In response, companies started coming out with proprietary protocols for running DMX over IP. With time, a handful of protocols started to dominate the industry. Eventually, again, industry leaders came together to define public protocols, in attempt to standardize the industry.
Currently, the leading proprietary protocols are ShowNet, Pathport and Sandnet. The public protocols are ACN, ArtNet and ESP Net. All of these run over IP networks, and can exist over the same fiber connections as the Audio Over IP devices (running on separate VLAN’s).