SDI is on its way out, right? I mean, anything that’s been around for three-plus decades in the television industry must be either in a museum or just waiting for the final switch to be turned off. Right?
In an industry that has had its technology turned on its head and disposed of at astonishingly fast intervals, somehow the Serial Digital Interface has been one of the few islands in a churning sea of change. First standardized in 1989 as SMPTE 259M, SDI was created to support uncompressed standard-definition television at data rates up to 360 Mbps. It was immediately accepted in high-end products and systems, and eventually found its way down to lower-cost products—as just one example, today you can get an SDI-to-HDMI adapter for less than $40.
