Dante is understood and used by all integrators. For the 20th anniversary edition, Stuart Corner takes a look back at the standard and how it came to be.

Electronic communication involves transferring information between two pieces of equipment, either over wires or by electromagnetic radiation. Communication is possible only if equipment A can understand the signals from equipment B, and vice-versa. So, standards are hugely important, and have been since the beginning.

In 1865, representatives of 20 European States met in Paris to set standards for the telegraph systems of Europe. This was the genesis of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) which, with 193 nation-states as members, still plays a key standards-setting role today.

Other internationally agreed electronic communications standards have followed: Ethernet, cellular mobile, Zigbee, Bluetooth and many more. Today, all these are developed and maintained by their respective industry bodies and by collaboration between multiple, often global, industry players.

There is one standout exception: a proprietary technology that completely dominates its market segment and it’s developed in Australia. That technology is Dante (Digital Audio Network Through Ethernet). It enables audio to be carried over an Ethernet network. Its developer is Audinate, a company spun out of the Australian Government’s ICT research centre of excellence, National ICT Australia (NICTA), in 2007 and which has been listed on the ASX since 2017.

Back in 2019, when Dante’s market share was considerably less than today, one market analyst likened its market power to that of Bluetooth. He described Bluetooth as being “managed by a not-for-profit group controlled by about 30,000 industry participants that use it,” adding: “Imagine if it was privately owned and you get close to what Dante could do for Audinate.”

Dante has done great things for Audinate. In the ensuing five years, Dante’s market dominance has increased considerably, as Graph 1 from RH Consulting shows. (The numbers are those of the different products incorporating Dante, not the numbers of products sold).

Total audio products per protocol

What Dante and all the wannabes down the bottom do is enable audio signals to be carried over an Ethernet network. This greatly simplifies the hooking together of the huge numbers of bits of gear necessary for any audio performance or recording session. Without Dante, or similar, every piece of equipment requires a dedicated connection carrying audio as an analogue electrical signal to or from a central control console. These analogue signals are prone to degradation and interference with increasing cable length and installation complexity.

However, replacing this spaghetti network of dedicated point-to-point links carrying analogue signals for each input or output device with a single Ethernet network carrying the audio for every bit of gear as digital data was no small feat. To carry audio over Ethernet the continuous analogue audio stream is digitised and chopped up into packets each of which is then sent on a cable that it shares with many other packets with no guarantee of immediate delivery: Collisions can occur requiring packets to be retransmitted.

It’s not hard to imagine what excessive delay or packet loss could do for a bunch of musicians trying to play in sync and harmony.

Back in 2008 – when Audinate announced $4 million of Series A investment from Innovation Capital – it explained the challenges saying: “There has been limited market adoption of digital networking solutions because of inherent issues with setup, latency and synchronisation… Several proprietary solutions have either failed to address these issues or require specialised networking equipment and setup on isolated networks.

“Audinate has solved these problems with patented technology in two areas; Dante technology covers methods for tightly synchronising the clocks that control analogue to digital conversions for all the equipment on a multi-use network, and for keeping transmission latency to a minimum.”

Today, Audinate makes most of its revenue from selling hardware and software that enable manufacturers of audio equipment to incorporate Dante into their products. This enables the vast array of different audio devices required for a performance or recording session to be easily interconnected using Ethernet.

Audinate claims these manufacturers shipped a record one million products in FY2023, a 30% increase on 2022. It says more than 550 OEMs currently license Dante technology, “delivering over 3,800 networked and video devices, including video cameras, microphones, loudspeakers and amplifiers.”

Note the emphasis on video. Technology does not stand still and all the benefits accruing from putting audio on an IP network can be realised for video if the much greater challenges of synchronisation and packet loss created by the higher bandwidth of video signals can be overcome.

Audinate was a relatively late starter in this market. It announced its first video over Ethernet products in 2019 and in July 2021 the first products from other vendors incorporating Dante AV technology. As can be seen in Graph 2, market share estimates of the various video-over-Ethernet technologies, Audinate does not enjoy the dominance it holds in audio, and there is real alphabet soup of acronyms for different standards.

Total video products per protocol

Despite Audinate’s late start and small share of the video-over-Ethernet market, RH Consulting’s Roland Hemming is positive about Dante AV’s prospects saying: “NDI still leads the product numbers. NDI and ST2110 added a very similar number of actual products but the highest percentage growth was from the relative newcomer Dante AV.”

And Audinate does appear to be making good progress in the video market. In its 1H24 investor presentation, the company claimed to have achieved six months early its FY24 target of seeing more than 30,000 products incorporating Dante AV shipped, to have increased the number of OEMs licencing Dante video from 30 to 50 in the 12 months to 31 December 2023 and to have seen the number of products incorporating Dante video grow from 20 to 66 in a year.

It remains to be seen whether Dante AV will replicate Dante’s dominance of the audio market, but the company is not putting all its eggs in these baskets, it is focussing on the configuration and management of large audio and video networks. In March 2024, chief marketing officer Joshua Rush told the UK’s AVNetwork that Audinate was looking beyond the growth in video and planning to add more value, services and capabilities to Dante networks.

“We’ve made huge strides in cloud-based management and control offerings with the recent launch of Dante Connect and our beta program for Dante Director,” he says.

With Dante Connect, announced in April 2023, a network of Dante audio products can send up to 256 channels of synchronised audio from any site to cloud-based virtual machines for broadcast editing and production. Dante Director—still in beta in March 2024—is a cloud-based application that enables Dante devices to be organised in logical groups and Dante networks to be managed remotely.

The different kinds of audio

NDI (Network Device Interface) is a royalty-free software specification for video over Ethernet developed by technology company NewTek.

SDVoE (Software Defined Video-over-Ethernet) was developed by a group of pro AV manufacturers, system designers, integrators and technology managers.

SMPTE 2110 is a suite of standards from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers that describes how to send digital media over an IP network.

PMX (Internet Protocol Media Experience) is a proposed set of open standards and specifications to enable the carriage of compressed and uncompressed video, audio and data over IP networks for the pro AV market. It includes provisions for control, copy protection, connection management and security.

IPMX (Internet Protocol Media Experience) was created by the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), a non-profit trade alliance that fosters the adoption of one set of common, ubiquitous, standards-based protocols for interoperability over IP in the media and entertainment and professional AV industries.