Video over IP
Video over IP moves pictures across the same kind of Ethernet network as everything else, and the whole subject turns on a single trade-off: compression against bandwidth. Uncompressed video keeps full quality with minimal latency, but it is enormous — a single uncompressed 1080p stream runs at around 3 gigabits per second. That is why professional uncompressed IP video, standardised as SMPTE ST 2110, demands 10-gigabit-and-up infrastructure and careful engineering. Compression shrinks that dramatically: visually lossless schemes like JPEG-XS and NDI keep latency low while using only a fraction of the bandwidth, and codecs like H.264 and H.265 squeeze it further still, at the cost of adding more latency.
The discipline this asks of you is matching bandwidth to the medium honestly. A handful of NDI streams fit comfortably onto gigabit, but the same number of uncompressed feeds will not — and oversubscribing the link drops packets, which in video terms means tearing, freezing, and blocky artifacts rather than a graceful fade.
So the planning comes first, before the gear. Count the streams, multiply by their real bitrate, add some headroom, and then choose the network class — 1G, 10G, 25G — to suit the total. It is the available bandwidth that defines what is actually possible, not the badge on the equipment.
Bandwidth defines what's possible — not the gear.