Major advances in cloud virtualization and vendor interoperability are finally unleashing the cost-effective transition to IP-based live production workflows that has become an urgent priority worldwide.
The question is, how far does the industry want to go in upsetting old apple carts?
Standing out among a multitude of approaches to speeding the IP transition is the release of an open-source software development kit (SDK) supporting what’s known as the Media eXchange Layer (MXL). The innovation is part of the Digital Media Framework Reference Architecture (DMF RA) that was formulated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and a handful of vendors and media companies at workshops in late 2024.
In June the nascent effort was organized into the MXL Project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Collaborators include the EBU, the North American Broadcaster Association (NABA) and a growing coterie of European and Canadian media companies such as CBC/Radio-Canada, BBC France TV, RTÉ (Ireland), SRG SSR (Switzerland), SVT (Sweden), SWR/ARD (Germany), and VRT (Belgium). Extending the reach to global proportions, including the U.S., are vendor “implementers” Appear, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Intel, Lawo, Matrox, NVIDIA, Riedel Communications, and Telos Alliance.
The MXL Project agenda eschews the standards-building approach to transformation in favor of wide agreement on an SDK that can be put to practical use immediately with ongoing refinements based on consensus around new ideas arising out of user experiences. The SDK documents an API abstracted from underlying hardware to encompass data structures, commands and variable definitions describing how microservices in container-virtualized datacenters perform their functions.
This obviates any need for “reams of standards documents to define how the interface should work,” says independent IT expert and author Tony Orme in a Broadcast Bridge article describing software-defined architecture. “It’s self-documenting and self-explanatory.”
As seen by Ian Fletcher, CTO at Grass Valley, MXL is at the heart of an impending “transformative revolution” impacting traditional and IP-based broadcasting by virtue of its potential to eliminate barriers to use of microservices in the containerized version of datacenter virtualization. There’s no denying the urgency propelling MXL development.
Something Has to Give
Whether via MXL or other means, the industry-wide consensus is that something has to give if the prospects for IP-based production are to flourish. Up to now, the dominant trend has centered on hybrid approaches that retain use of traditional Serial Digital Interface (SDI) hardware amid the incremental introduction of SMPTE’s ST 2110 platform in core A/V production workflows, while leveraging ST 2110 and, with ever-greater frequency, the Network Device Interface (NDI) IP transmission protocol to transport IP streams into and out of those workflows.
As measured by Haivision in its latest annual survey of hundreds of broadcasters worldwide, 50% of respondents were using a hybrid video infrastructure combining SDI, IP, and cloud technologies as of late 2024, compared to 44% a year earlier. But 31% still solely relied on SDI and only 14% had moved to all-IP.
For many broadcasters trying to remain competitive in a fragmented multi-device market demanding new features and applications, the leap to IP has now become table stakes. “It scales better than any other technology, which is why we see most of our largest customers eager to make the transition,” says Alun Fryer, technical marketing lead for hyperconverged solutions at Ross Video.
“NDI doesn’t need 2110 to work with SDI,” he notes, but it takes 2110 to do in IP what SDI does with “the flexibility to work with audio and video separately.” That means for users of NDI who want to get to an all-IP mode of production the question is, “How do I bring NDI into the 2110 world?”
Multiple Vendor Solutions to Interoperability
Ross’s answer is the Ultrix platform, an appliance that integrates routing, signal processing and switching equipment to overcome the hassles of managing separate components. By abstracting SDI, ST 2110, and NDI along with newer IP transport frameworks like Dante AV and possibly Internet Protocol Media Experience (IPMX) if demand warrants, the format-agnostic Ultrix platform consolidates everything for management on a single user interface, Fryer says.
Imagine Communications, too, has taken new steps to accommodate the multiplying approaches to moving beyond SDI. At the annual IBC gathering in Amsterdam Imagine expanded its playout portfolio with introduction of the XVR playout engine, which it said was designed from the ground up “to streamline the launch and management of broadcast-quality linear and live streaming channels across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments.”
Expanding on the capabilities of Imagine’s decade-old direct-to-air Versio playout platform, XVR is “purpose-built for scalable, cloud-optimized deployments,” says John Mailhot, senior vice president of product management. With open APIs enabling DevOps tools and systems integrations, the playout engine supports a full range of interface requirements, including SDI, 12G SDI, ST 2110, TS, and SRT and eliminates the need for transcoding between video file formats, he adds.
In one of the more aggressive turns to open networking, TVU, long a leading force behind the connection of remote news and sports camera feeds over IP links to distributed production workflows, has responded to broadcasters’ migrations to cloud production by opening its Media Mesh-based Remote Production Ecosystem to access by competitors.
TVU’s cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution set allows operators anywhere to synchronously manage production from their web browsers with edits executed on resolution-reduced proxies instantly transferred to core high-res frames. At IBC the company debuted TVU MediaMesh as a shared memory space for live video with open APIs that make live signals instantly accessible to any authorized tool or production team anywhere.
At the same time, TVU made its SaaS solution components available as microservices. This allows “users to build unique solutions to accomplish one thing without using all the bells and whistles,” says Matt McEwen, vice president of product management at TVU.
For some vendors like Lawo, rather than creating transitional platforms, the focus is on making sure broadcasters jumping all in to IP production have the best possible environment to work in. Until now, not enough decision makers have been ready to take a serious look at the options, says Christian Scheck, head of content marketing at Lawo, which, as noted, is part of the MXL consortium.
“Unfortunately, a huge number of customers still think SDI works for them, but it’s not future proof,” he says. “If operations grow, as they invariably will, the capacity limitations of SDI routing will always be a problem.”
Lawo’s latest moves in the direction of making production over IP more attractive entail enhancements to its core HOME platform, which offers centralized on-site or remote discovery, authentication, security management and monitoring of all production-connected devices from a single user interface. The new HOME Apps include a new UI, a new production Multiviewer minimizing bandwidth and CPU usage, and a HOME ecosystem extension that enables maximum infrastructure utilization in the creation of production facilities.
New Dynamism in Camera Output
Meanwhile, leading suppliers of the video cameras that feed live sports, news and other coverage into broadcast production workflows are vying to play a major role in driving the shift to IP. They’re providing operators the flexibility to mix camera outflows over SDI and IP transport protocols with the use of live production switchers supporting SDI and ST 2110 workflows in whatever end-to-end combinations work for them.
“We’re seeing a shift to IP-based workflows, especially in the high-end broadcast space,” says Peyton Thomas, a product manager at Panasonic. “And 2110 has become a more viable option even in mid-market broadcast operations.”
Panasonic’s 4K Studio and soon-to-be-released 4K Multipurpose Cameras enable the selection of multiple transport options, including ST 2110, NDI, SRT and dual 12G-SDI outputs, without the use of an external camera control unit (CCU). These can be fed into live production workflows by Panasonic’s KAIROS IT/IP software system running on core server mainframes that combine GPUs and CPUs to enable live A/V production processing with an unrestricted number of media effects utilizing SDI baseband or IP signals formatted to ST 2110, NDI or SRT.
“Our selling point for KAIROS is it’s an all-in-one kind of solution,” Thomas says. “It can be used by a single operator performing the entire production or with production split among multiple specialists.”
Sony Electronics, too, has put a lot of innovative energy into simplifying the transition to live production through its Networked Live portfolio of cameras, switchers, media edge processors and other tools. It’s an ecosystem that’s designed with a commitment to open interfaces that enable customers to mix other vendors’ products into operations as they see fit, according to Rob Thorne, Networked Live category head for the Live Production Solutions team at Sony Europe. There’s much mixing of SDI, 2110, NDI and SRT now, which is “something we never saw before,” he notes.
Sony’s latest generation of high-end HDC-5500/5500V cameras used to capture sports and other live events come with optional adapters enabling ST 2110 signal output, including JPEG XS capabilities, without requiring CCU support. The company’s NXL-ME80 high-compression edge encoders, in combination with its MSL-X1 switchers, enable live-production operations that can feed output from remote SDI and IP sources over low-bandwidth connections into core ST 2110 production workflows, with final output conforming to the low-latency requirements of live sports distribution.
Radical Transformation via MXL
Amid this outpouring of IP transition modes, Grass Valley CTO Fletcher’s point that MXL is the real engine for transformation could turn out to be less hyperbolic than it sounds if Grass Valley’s vision takes hold. He asserts that by leveraging container-based virtualization of video, audio and data essences packetized into individual microservices that are mapped in open-source mode to a commonly used template, MXL could allow producers to bypass the current ST 2110 bridge from SDI to IP production on commodity servers.
ST 2110 is not an efficient way to operate using “modern computer architecture,” Fletcher says, By chopping the essences comprising a professional video production “into little packets” enabling “efficient sharing of technology in the same frames,” camera output converted to IP can be fed directly to the cloud for rapid production by dispersed operators with final productions flowing directly into playout to distributors or end users, depending on business models.
“We’re not looking to replace 2110 with a new standard,” says Grass Valley CEO Jon Wilson. “But we’re working with customers who see the possibilities, so we’ll see where it leads.”
One of those customers is NEP Group, a major player in live sports productions worldwide, including in-venue as well as remotely streamed services. “True transformation is the ability to go back and forth between [in-venue] hardware and the cloud,” says John Guntenaar, CTO for NEP’s European operations. Rather than using mobile production trucks packed with hardware, the on-site crews will use trucks running “smartware” with reliance on MXL-formatted microservices governing use of commodity hardware in the cloud to deliver “pop-up functionality when you need it.”
“We’re still working in the 2110 space because we’re working with hybrid workflows” that bridge between SDI production hardware and IP production in the cloud, Guntenaar adds. He says NEP has already put the strategy to work in production involving an unnamed “mainstream French-speaking sports event.”
For Grass Valley, MVL is the next logical step on the path it’s been following since its acquisition in early 2020 by the private equity firm Black Dragon Capital led by Louis Hernandez Jr, who now serves as Grass Valley’s executive chairman after turning over the CEO job to Wilson earlier this year. Hernandez pushed the company to revamp its product line into a portfolio of software-defined solutions mirroring the capabilities of its Field Programmable Gateway Array (FPGA)-based hardware.
This led to the recent launch of its “GV Media Universe” as a multivendor environment in which its virtualized Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP) operates as a single control layer seamlessly integrating live production workflows across its own and other hardware and software solutions. In the latest advance, the soon-to-be-released Agile Computing Engine (ACE) 3901 server card will be available as an accelerator to cloud-based IP migration that can bring microservices into play with the AMPP OS while utilizing the company’s new AMPP GRID fabric to orchestrate the containerized applications in a shared multi-server environment.
Combining AMPP GRID with AMPP OS via the ACE 3901 platform “allows you to run over 300 native apps in live production,” says Adam Marshall, chief product officer at Grass Valley. Customers “are looking for the flexibility and agility that IP brings, which is absolutely tantamount to being successful from a technology spend perspective,” Marshall adds. And they want to do it in an interoperable environment.
But that’s not possible to do with the speed essential to live production if, as Grass Valley director of product marketing Klaus Weber puts it, customers are confined to running “on a one-on-one platform,” which is where MXL comes in. Up to now it’s only been possible to work with software-defined production in a container-virtualized multi-vendor environment by relying on APIs to convert from one function to another, which adds latency.
The compute-first MXL SDK describes how live uncompressed production video, audio, and metadata can be processed by multi-vendor software media functions embodied in microservices without going through diverse API conversion processes. In other words, it’s a solution to how media is moved around the cloud across public and private datacenters. This creates a huge speed advantage and much shorter startup times as well as greater stability, Weber says.
All well and good when it comes to enabling shared multi-vendor access to a producer’s stored assets, says Imagine Communications CEO Steve Reynolds, noting his company’s participation in the MXL Project. But he thinks the idea of using MXL to eliminate the need for ST 2110 is a bridge too far.
Microservices operating on shared memory objects have been a part of the Versio framework for a long time, Reynolds says. MXL simply adds a vendor-interoperable approach to that.
“You still need to take SDI and turn it into framing and encapsulating for IP production,” he notes. “You need defined protocols moving common essences. If you don’t have a standard like ST 2110 to work with, how do you build interoperability?”
Thanks to all the innovations on offer across the vendor ecosystem, the path to IP production is smoother than ever. But it remains to be seen how far the transformation goes in the direction of revolution.
The question is, how far does the industry want to go in upsetting old apple carts?
Standing out among a multitude of approaches to speeding the IP transition is the release of an open-source software development kit (SDK) supporting what’s known as the Media eXchange Layer (MXL). The innovation is part of the Digital Media Framework Reference Architecture (DMF RA) that was formulated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and a handful of vendors and media companies at workshops in late 2024.
In June the nascent effort was organized into the MXL Project hosted by the Linux Foundation. Collaborators include the EBU, the North American Broadcaster Association (NABA) and a growing coterie of European and Canadian media companies such as CBC/Radio-Canada, BBC France TV, RTÉ (Ireland), SRG SSR (Switzerland), SVT (Sweden), SWR/ARD (Germany), and VRT (Belgium). Extending the reach to global proportions, including the U.S., are vendor “implementers” Appear, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Intel, Lawo, Matrox, NVIDIA, Riedel Communications, and Telos Alliance.
The MXL Project agenda eschews the standards-building approach to transformation in favor of wide agreement on an SDK that can be put to practical use immediately with ongoing refinements based on consensus around new ideas arising out of user experiences. The SDK documents an API abstracted from underlying hardware to encompass data structures, commands and variable definitions describing how microservices in container-virtualized datacenters perform their functions.
This obviates any need for “reams of standards documents to define how the interface should work,” says independent IT expert and author Tony Orme in a Broadcast Bridge article describing software-defined architecture. “It’s self-documenting and self-explanatory.”
As seen by Ian Fletcher, CTO at Grass Valley, MXL is at the heart of an impending “transformative revolution” impacting traditional and IP-based broadcasting by virtue of its potential to eliminate barriers to use of microservices in the containerized version of datacenter virtualization. There’s no denying the urgency propelling MXL development.
Whether via MXL or other means, the industry-wide consensus is that something has to give if the prospects for IP-based production are to flourish. Up to now, the dominant trend has centered on hybrid approaches that retain use of traditional Serial Digital Interface (SDI) hardware amid the incremental introduction of SMPTE’s ST 2110 platform in core A/V production workflows, while leveraging ST 2110 and, with ever-greater frequency, the Network Device Interface (NDI) IP transmission protocol to transport IP streams into and out of those workflows.
As measured by Haivision in its latest annual survey of hundreds of broadcasters worldwide, 50% of respondents were using a hybrid video infrastructure combining SDI, IP, and cloud technologies as of late 2024, compared to 44% a year earlier. But 31% still solely relied on SDI and only 14% had moved to all-IP.
For many broadcasters trying to remain competitive in a fragmented multi-device market demanding new features and applications, the leap to IP has now become table stakes. “It scales better than any other technology, which is why we see most of our largest customers eager to make the transition,” says Alun Fryer, technical marketing lead for hyperconverged solutions at Ross Video.
“NDI doesn’t need 2110 to work with SDI,” he notes, but it takes 2110 to do in IP what SDI does with “the flexibility to work with audio and video separately.” That means for users of NDI who want to get to an all-IP mode of production the question is, “How do I bring NDI into the 2110 world?”
Ross’s answer is the Ultrix platform, an appliance that integrates routing, signal processing and switching equipment to overcome the hassles of managing separate components. By abstracting SDI, ST 2110, and NDI along with newer IP transport frameworks like Dante AV and possibly Internet Protocol Media Experience (IPMX) if demand warrants, the format-agnostic Ultrix platform consolidates everything for management on a single user interface, Fryer says.
Imagine Communications, too, has taken new steps to accommodate the multiplying approaches to moving beyond SDI. At the annual IBC gathering in Amsterdam Imagine expanded its playout portfolio with introduction of the XVR playout engine, which it said was designed from the ground up “to streamline the launch and management of broadcast-quality linear and live streaming channels across on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments.”
Expanding on the capabilities of Imagine’s decade-old direct-to-air Versio playout platform, XVR is “purpose-built for scalable, cloud-optimized deployments,” says John Mailhot, senior vice president of product management. With open APIs enabling DevOps tools and systems integrations, the playout engine supports a full range of interface requirements, including SDI, 12G SDI, ST 2110, TS, and SRT and eliminates the need for transcoding between video file formats, he adds.
In one of the more aggressive turns to open networking, TVU, long a leading force behind the connection of remote news and sports camera feeds over IP links to distributed production workflows, has responded to broadcasters’ migrations to cloud production by opening its Media Mesh-based Remote Production Ecosystem to access by competitors.
TVU’s cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution set allows operators anywhere to synchronously manage production from their web browsers with edits executed on resolution-reduced proxies instantly transferred to core high-res frames. At IBC the company debuted TVU MediaMesh as a shared memory space for live video with open APIs that make live signals instantly accessible to any authorized tool or production team anywhere.
At the same time, TVU made its SaaS solution components available as microservices. This allows “users to build unique solutions to accomplish one thing without using all the bells and whistles,” says Matt McEwen, vice president of product management at TVU.
For some vendors like Lawo, rather than creating transitional platforms, the focus is on making sure broadcasters jumping all in to IP production have the best possible environment to work in. Until now, not enough decision makers have been ready to take a serious look at the options, says Christian Scheck, head of content marketing at Lawo, which, as noted, is part of the MXL consortium.
“Unfortunately, a huge number of customers still think SDI works for them, but it’s not future proof,” he says. “If operations grow, as they invariably will, the capacity limitations of SDI routing will always be a problem.”
Lawo’s latest moves in the direction of making production over IP more attractive entail enhancements to its core HOME platform, which offers centralized on-site or remote discovery, authentication, security management and monitoring of all production-connected devices from a single user interface. The new HOME Apps include a new UI, a new production Multiviewer minimizing bandwidth and CPU usage, and a HOME ecosystem extension that enables maximum infrastructure utilization in the creation of production facilities.
Meanwhile, leading suppliers of the video cameras that feed live sports, news and other coverage into broadcast production workflows are vying to play a major role in driving the shift to IP. They’re providing operators the flexibility to mix camera outflows over SDI and IP transport protocols with the use of live production switchers supporting SDI and ST 2110 workflows in whatever end-to-end combinations work for them.
“We’re seeing a shift to IP-based workflows, especially in the high-end broadcast space,” says Peyton Thomas, a product manager at Panasonic. “And 2110 has become a more viable option even in mid-market broadcast operations.”
Panasonic’s 4K Studio and soon-to-be-released 4K Multipurpose Cameras enable the selection of multiple transport options, including ST 2110, NDI, SRT and dual 12G-SDI outputs, without the use of an external camera control unit (CCU). These can be fed into live production workflows by Panasonic’s KAIROS IT/IP software system running on core server mainframes that combine GPUs and CPUs to enable live A/V production processing with an unrestricted number of media effects utilizing SDI baseband or IP signals formatted to ST 2110, NDI or SRT.
“Our selling point for KAIROS is it’s an all-in-one kind of solution,” Thomas says. “It can be used by a single operator performing the entire production or with production split among multiple specialists.”
Sony Electronics, too, has put a lot of innovative energy into simplifying the transition to live production through its Networked Live portfolio of cameras, switchers, media edge processors and other tools. It’s an ecosystem that’s designed with a commitment to open interfaces that enable customers to mix other vendors’ products into operations as they see fit, according to Rob Thorne, Networked Live category head for the Live Production Solutions team at Sony Europe. There’s much mixing of SDI, 2110, NDI and SRT now, which is “something we never saw before,” he notes.
Sony’s latest generation of high-end HDC-5500/5500V cameras used to capture sports and other live events come with optional adapters enabling ST 2110 signal output, including JPEG XS capabilities, without requiring CCU support. The company’s NXL-ME80 high-compression edge encoders, in combination with its MSL-X1 switchers, enable live-production operations that can feed output from remote SDI and IP sources over low-bandwidth connections into core ST 2110 production workflows, with final output conforming to the low-latency requirements of live sports distribution.
Amid this outpouring of IP transition modes, Grass Valley CTO Fletcher’s point that MXL is the real engine for transformation could turn out to be less hyperbolic than it sounds if Grass Valley’s vision takes hold. He asserts that by leveraging container-based virtualization of video, audio and data essences packetized into individual microservices that are mapped in open-source mode to a commonly used template, MXL could allow producers to bypass the current ST 2110 bridge from SDI to IP production on commodity servers.
ST 2110 is not an efficient way to operate using “modern computer architecture,” Fletcher says, By chopping the essences comprising a professional video production “into little packets” enabling “efficient sharing of technology in the same frames,” camera output converted to IP can be fed directly to the cloud for rapid production by dispersed operators with final productions flowing directly into playout to distributors or end users, depending on business models.
“We’re not looking to replace 2110 with a new standard,” says Grass Valley CEO Jon Wilson. “But we’re working with customers who see the possibilities, so we’ll see where it leads.”
One of those customers is NEP Group, a major player in live sports productions worldwide, including in-venue as well as remotely streamed services. “True transformation is the ability to go back and forth between [in-venue] hardware and the cloud,” says John Guntenaar, CTO for NEP’s European operations. Rather than using mobile production trucks packed with hardware, the on-site crews will use trucks running “smartware” with reliance on MXL-formatted microservices governing use of commodity hardware in the cloud to deliver “pop-up functionality when you need it.”
“We’re still working in the 2110 space because we’re working with hybrid workflows” that bridge between SDI production hardware and IP production in the cloud, Guntenaar adds. He says NEP has already put the strategy to work in production involving an unnamed “mainstream French-speaking sports event.”
For Grass Valley, MVL is the next logical step on the path it’s been following since its acquisition in early 2020 by the private equity firm Black Dragon Capital led by Louis Hernandez Jr, who now serves as Grass Valley’s executive chairman after turning over the CEO job to Wilson earlier this year. Hernandez pushed the company to revamp its product line into a portfolio of software-defined solutions mirroring the capabilities of its Field Programmable Gateway Array (FPGA)-based hardware.
This led to the recent launch of its “GV Media Universe” as a multivendor environment in which its virtualized Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP) operates as a single control layer seamlessly integrating live production workflows across its own and other hardware and software solutions. In the latest advance, the soon-to-be-released Agile Computing Engine (ACE) 3901 server card will be available as an accelerator to cloud-based IP migration that can bring microservices into play with the AMPP OS while utilizing the company’s new AMPP GRID fabric to orchestrate the containerized applications in a shared multi-server environment.
Combining AMPP GRID with AMPP OS via the ACE 3901 platform “allows you to run over 300 native apps in live production,” says Adam Marshall, chief product officer at Grass Valley. Customers “are looking for the flexibility and agility that IP brings, which is absolutely tantamount to being successful from a technology spend perspective,” Marshall adds. And they want to do it in an interoperable environment.
But that’s not possible to do with the speed essential to live production if, as Grass Valley director of product marketing Klaus Weber puts it, customers are confined to running “on a one-on-one platform,” which is where MXL comes in. Up to now it’s only been possible to work with software-defined production in a container-virtualized multi-vendor environment by relying on APIs to convert from one function to another, which adds latency.
The compute-first MXL SDK describes how live uncompressed production video, audio, and metadata can be processed by multi-vendor software media functions embodied in microservices without going through diverse API conversion processes. In other words, it’s a solution to how media is moved around the cloud across public and private datacenters. This creates a huge speed advantage and much shorter startup times as well as greater stability, Weber says.
All well and good when it comes to enabling shared multi-vendor access to a producer’s stored assets, says Imagine Communications CEO Steve Reynolds, noting his company’s participation in the MXL Project. But he thinks the idea of using MXL to eliminate the need for ST 2110 is a bridge too far.
Microservices operating on shared memory objects have been a part of the Versio framework for a long time, Reynolds says. MXL simply adds a vendor-interoperable approach to that.
“You still need to take SDI and turn it into framing and encapsulating for IP production,” he notes. “You need defined protocols moving common essences. If you don’t have a standard like ST 2110 to work with, how do you build interoperability?”
Thanks to all the innovations on offer across the vendor ecosystem, the path to IP production is smoother than ever. But it remains to be seen how far the transformation goes in the direction of revolution.