The case for broadcasters’ transition to IP-based live content production is stronger than ever as suppliers of every stripe roll out products built to standards that support vendor interoperability and common approaches to creating customer-specific AI solutions.
Much of this transformation is fueled by increased interest in how MXL (Media eXchange Layer) is impacting product development. Launched as part of the European Broadcasting Union’s Digital Media Facility initiative in 2024, MXL promotes software interoperability via shared compute, allowing the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to standardize how AI agents and large language models (LLMs) connect to broadcast systems.
Although these specifications were in tire-kicking mode just a year ago, solutions introduced at September’s IBC Show in Amsterdam are equipping broadcasters with unprecedented levels of efficiency and functionality as they transition to ever-greater reliance on IP production workflows. From now on, producers of sports, news and other live content will be able to seize new opportunities to serve consumers whenever and wherever they arise without enduring the learning curves and forklifting that have long plagued industry advancement.
Or, as Grass Valley Chief Revenue Officer Tim Banks put it at a customer gathering in Amsterdam, “Transformation has become business as usual.” With AI tools at hand and hardware- and software-level vendor lock-in in the rearview mirror, the widely shared goal of doing “ever more for ever less” is no longer out of reach, Banks said.
AI Everywhere
Those are bold assertions, but at IBC they were backed by a chorus singing the same tune wherever you turned. While “doing ever more” has long been a selling point for the IP-based software versatility associated with general-purpose commodity processors, the notion of “doing everything for ever less,” as enabled by AI, might be what seals the case for IP.
As at NAB Show, AI was ubiquitously present in vendor solutions of every stripe. The big difference at this event was the extent to which vendors facilitated customer-built agentic AI solutions using open LLMs without being shoehorned into prebuilt AI tools. Critically, along with enabling customization, the DIY approach avoids opening broadcasters’ databases to third-party suppliers.
For example, Imagine Communications has adjusted its strategy to ensure customers can use its core products while leveraging the liberating force of commonly supported MCP interfaces to infuse workflows with AI capabilities, according to Chief Revenue Officer Glodina Lostanlen. Imagine, now an independent operating unit of Lumine Group, is focused on seamless integration, she said.
By providing their AI systems with secure, governed access to Imagine’s platforms through standardized gateways, “we’re able to show customers how to personalize their own experiences instead of us trying to cover everything,” Lostanlen said. “We’re going to focus on what we’re good at and make it easier for our channel partners and customers to take it to the next level.”
Those benefits also extend to deploying vendor-built AI solutions. By using MCP interfaces, Imagine and all others working in this new environment make it easier for customers to choose between their own custom-built agents and supplier-developed AI tools.
As vendor support for MCP helps broadcasters maximize the benefits of AI, growing adoption of the EBU’s DMF guidelines and MXL specifications is transforming cross-vendor interoperability. Together, these open standards allow media organizations to get the most from their real-time production workflows. DMF, a work in progress that’s formalizing standards for software-based media processing, and the MXL SDK are game-changers. That’s true for a company like Grass Valley, whose AMPP platform has long supported vendor interoperability across different infrastructure environments on-premises and in the cloud.
“We don’t believe customers have to make economic bets on which technologies are best,” said Grass Valley CEO Jon Wilson. Answering the question of “how do I modernize without disrupting what I have?” won’t be “about one technology replacing another,” he added. “It’s about having the right technology in the right place as needs evolve.”
In one of the many instances where the new approach to interchanging competing vendor options has taken hold, Grass Valley and Lawo are leveraging DMF and MXL to enable customers to validate orchestration, control and media exchange integration between the AMPP and Lawo HOME platforms, both of which provide a software-based foundation for live production and media workflows across cloud, edge and hybrid environments. A broadcaster working with an AMPP-based workflow “can route HOME into Grass Valley infrastructure and control it from there or do it the other way around where Lawo can control AMPP,” Wilson said.
Andreas Hilmer, chief marketing officer at Lawo, said this allows the company to offer “far greater flexibility following the principles of DMF with generic support for processing any function on the same stack of commodity hardware.”
“In live production, we can spin up whatever processing support we need on a per-app basis,” he added. While Lawo supports screen conversions in real time across NDI, SRT and ST 2110, ST 2110 is proving itself as the go-to solution for IP-based live production, he said.
MXL Takes Center Stage
Kevin Cottam, vice president of global sports and live events at Ross Video, agreed with that assessment.
Touting the release of Ross’ new high-capacity Ultrix FR30 routing and signal processing platform at IBC, Cottam said the company has “made leaps and bounds with 2110 right through to filling every pixel with real-time data-driven graphics.” For in-venue and distributed sports productions alike, “we’re able to take in scores with automated updates bound to producers’ graphics templates,” he added.
The 30-rack-unit Ultrix FR30 is a “huge leap,” offering the capacity to scale routing, audio and video processing, and production switching across ST 2110, SRT, NDI and Dante AV flows to new levels, Cottam added. Ross is also seeing strong demand for its XPression.cloud platform, which uses AI to identify appropriate templates and expedite graphics-related asset retrieval, creativity and generation, he said.
“AI is changing everything we do,” he noted. And MXL is taking center stage as “part of the whole distribution strategy.”
That impact is also being felt by Telos Alliance, which has announced a spate of new hardware and software products that leverage partnerships touching on every aspect of the audio workflow.
“In the past, we would have had to develop solutions for companies X, Y and Z,” said John Schur, president of Telos Alliance TV Solutions Group. “Now, because we’ve embraced MXL with both arms, we don’t have to do a lot of additional work to be running in all those places.”
Currently, the “biggest area we’re working on is observability applied to analysis of audio streams and generation of notifications,” Schur added. “Unlike video, where with multiviewing you can pick out anomalies across multiple channels, you can’t listen to 100 streams of audio at once. Our platform’s new enhancements allow us to do the listening for you in an automated fashion.”
‘Fundamental Backbone’
On another front, Sony is using DMF-aligned products with MXL and AI support to expand multivendor interoperability in software-defined live productions large and small by tying workflows directly into camera capture across premises and public cloud locations.
“IP is the fundamental backbone connecting all these tiers of production,” said Rob Thorne, category head for networked live solutions at Sony Europe. “We’re automating and configuring the whole production environment with global management solutions.”
At IBC, Sony’s Nevion division launched its first commercial applications for the recently introduced MOXELA broadcast platform. One product bridges contribution transport over unmanaged networks between on-prem and public cloud processing, and the second supports software-defined broadcasting workflows for more agile, scalable and infrastructure-independent live production environments that integrate with Nevion’s VideoIPath media orchestration platform. Supported functions include multiple A/V compression formats, logo insertion and audio matrix routing, Thorne said, noting, “You don’t have to be an AWS cloud expert to support automation.”
Among other significant developments, Sony brought high-end AI-assisted autoframing capabilities into smaller production PTZ cameras, including the SRG-AS10 and SRG-XS10 models. “AI support tracks images and people, delivering high-quality capture for an immersive viewing experience that takes into account the environment you’re in,” Thorne noted. “Until now, this capability was only available in our top-tier cameras.”
Matrox Video is another longtime production hardware supplier that has been among the most aggressive users of MXL in the migration to IP software-defined workflows. A little over a year ago, Matrox was one of six companies committing to MXL as its software development kit (SDK) hit the market. “Now everybody is talking about DMF and MXL,” said Matrox Senior Marketing Manager Kimberly Brown.
But that doesn’t mean customers should be expected to abandon reliance on powerful hardware workhorses like the Matrox Monarch Edge remote production encoder, she said. “It’s not a software versus hardware story, and we’re sticking with that story,” Brown said. The case was made in a live feed at IBC covering Targa Newfoundland, North America’s only tarmac rally, a long-distance automobile race over paved roads which, in this instance, covered over 2,000 kilometers of remote roads in Newfoundland.
The multivendor project was anchored by blended satellite and terrestrial connectivity provided by Dejero, with Monarch Edge-encoded coverage fed into the GlobalM GMX software-defined cloud media platform using containerized processing for output relayed from reception in Waterloo, Ontario, to Amsterdam. “It’s the first time we’re doing intercontinental remote live production,” Brown said. “What we’re showing really opens up a lot of workflows that stick to the story of doing more with less.”
