HDMI’s short-lived reign over the TV cable racks could soon be over, thanks to a new product that combines several connections into a single, standard network cable.
Designed by a coalition of electronics manufacturers, including Sony, Samsung, LG and Valens, HDBaseT promises to not only carry video and audio signals, but also provide a network connection, a USB signal and even electricity using a single cable.
And you won’t even need to buy a fancy new cable to use it. According to the HDBaseT specification chart, you can “use existing network wiring” with a standard Cat5e/6 LAN cable and an RJ-45 connector.
The HDBaseT Alliance, which is made up of the aforementioned electronics companies, has just finalised version 1.0 of the spec, and says it will be available for licensing within the second half of this year.
The Alliance predicts that we’ll start seeing the first HDBaseT creeping into the shops later this year, but says the bigger wave of adoption will occur later in 2011.
In terms of benefits over other connectors, HDBaseT currently boasts a maximum cable length of 100m, compared with just a few metres with some HDMI cables and 15m for a DisplayPort cable. Impressively, it can also carry up to 100W of charging power, which the alliance says is enough to power an entire TV from another device.
HDMI is a compact audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed digital data, used to connect digital audio/video sources such as TV and computer monitors.