SAN FRANCISCO – The Open Control Architecture (OCA) Alliance, the industry collective developing a media networking system control standard for professional applications, today announced that it has been officially incorporated as a non-profit trade association.
More details from OCA (www.oca-alliance.com):
The incorporation represents the latest milestone for the Alliance, which was founded in June 2011 to develop a standardized control and monitoring architecture for professional media networks.
Since its founding, the Alliance has moved rapidly, releasing initial technical documents to its Observer members in October of 2011, and the complete OCA 1.0 Specification to the Observers in May of 2012.
The Specification now stands at Release 1.1. Coincident with its incorporation, the Alliance has placed the entire Release 1.1 Specification on its public website (www.oca-alliance.com) for free download.
In the coming months, the Alliance will transfer the Specification to a public standards organization for ratification as an official open public standard, free for all to use at no cost. Subsequently, the Alliance will actively support the standards-making process, and will at the same time promote and support the adoption of OCA as a tool for the professional media systems industry.
“Incorporation represents another major step forward in the creation of a robust, feature-rich media networking control solution,” said Terry Holton, Senior Manager – Product Planning at Yamaha Corporation’s R&D Centre. “We are making significant progress, with excellent participation from all our founding member companies.”
Bob Tudor, Presonus CTO added, “the cooperation between the founding members was critical to the success of OCA 1.0. We are achieving cross-brand control of parameters in our devices as a result, which is good for our respective customers and a stimulus for market growth.”
Nathan O’Neill, LOUD’s VP Engineering, notes “a key aspect of the OCA specification has been to allow for common control functionality yet provide manufacturers the ability to customize the protocol to their own needs, much like MIDI Sysex messages. In this way they get the best of both worlds – the ability to control functions across a multi-manufacturer system, yet the ability to keep manufacturer-specific algorithms proprietary.”
“With the OCA Alliance moving forward, integration of an audio system with a media control system will definitely get a lot simpler,” commented Marc Weber, Product Manager, d&b audiotechnik. “This means that the integrator can concentrate on the interface to the user rather than on the actual programming itself.”
In its new role as a trade association, the Alliance invites all interested companies to join. The former Observer membership status has ended — it is no longer necessary, since the Specification is now public. But there are new membership options that will allow both large and small companies to participate in the further development and adoption of OCA generally.
“Opening the Alliance to a broader mass market is a pivotal step for the future – the ground work has been done and we are now at the leading edge of what will be the most dominant of all networking technologies. With input from a broader industry group the standard will evolve and provide a wider range of affordable solutions,” said Graham Hendry of TC Group. “Another very encouraging aspect is that we are not limited only to audio applications; we have received encouraging interest from manufacturers looking to add video and monitoring control to the specification.”
Alliance founders are Bosch Communications Systems, d&b audiotechnik, Duran Audio, Loud Technologies, Media Technology Systems, PreSonus Audio Electronics, Salzbrenner StageTec Mediagroup, TC Group, and Yamaha Commercial Audio.
