WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The initial documents defining the Catena control plane standard were introduced June 1-3 in Tokyo at Imagica SMPTE during the society’s Technology Committee meetings, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) said today.
The product of extensive work by SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solutions Open Services Alliance group (RIS-OSA), the initial Catena documents (known as the ST 2138 suite) were introduced to the SMPTE Standards Community (and its 34CS Technology Committee that focuses on Media Systems Control and Services). The move begins Catena’s official standardization process.
“Catena represents one of the most ambitious and essential standardization efforts SMPTE has undertaken in recent years,” said Chris Lennon, director of Standards Strategy at Ross Video and an SMPTE Fellow.
“With media workflows now spanning on-prem, cloud and hybrid environments, the need for a unified, secure and vendor-agnostic control plane is more urgent than ever,” Lennon said. “By introducing the initial Catena documents into the SMPTE Standards Community, we’re inviting the broader industry to help shape a solution that works for everyone, regardless of where their services reside or what platform they use.”
Hundreds of proprietary protocols are used today to control media devices, creating a control plane challenge across the media industry. In defining and standardizing Catena, SMPTE aims to provide the first and only standardized open-source solution to this challenge. In providing a vendor- and platform-agnostic solution, Catena offers a single secure protocol that is equally suited to controlling very small devices and microservices as it is to controlling the most complex physical devices and services in use by the media industry.
The initial suite of Catena documents introduced this week consists of:
- ST 2138-00: Catena Overview
- ST 2138-10: Catena Model
- ST 2138-11: gRPC Connection Type
- ST 2138-12: REST Connection Type
- ST 2138-50: Catena Security
These documents are transitioning into SMPTE’s 34CS TC to begin the official standardization process. SMPTE has also stood up its Catena repository on GitHub, which includes interface files, schema and other supporting resources, it said.
SMPTE’s plan is to advance these initial Catena documents to Public Committee Draft (PCD) status as soon as practical, then pause development to give implementers time to integrate Catena into their products and provide feedback. Following this implementation and review period, the documents will quickly move forward through the final standardization and approval stages, the group said.
More information is available on the SMPTE website.
