SMPTE ST 2138: A Standardized Approach to Control

Today's reality in the world of media is a hybrid environment, encompassing a combination of on-premises and cloud environments. Solutions span a variety of platforms, from a wide array of vendors, and must interoperate, regardless of where they are hosted. We spent a lot of time as an industry on how to move media around in an IP world, but we have yet to tackle the control plane. The control plane defines how all of these diverse devices and services can be managed and controlled. End users want to choose best of breed solutions and want these solutions to interoperate seamlessly. This whole problem only becomes more acute with the popularity of microservices. Today, users deal with dozens or even hundreds of proprietary protocols to control things in their environments. Almost always, these are proprietary and with no security at all. This was fine in the “good old days” when you had no internet connection from these systems, but that is no longer the case. Now, control of these systems must be highly secure, or you risk unintended intrusions from bad actors. SMPTE, through its RIS-OSA (Rapid Industry Solutions - Open Services Alliance) group and its Standards Community, has been working toward an open-standard, open-source solution to this problem. Known as Catena, SMPTE ST 2138 provides everything needed to evolve away from the control plane challenges of today into a simple, scalable and secure answer to the control plane problem.

Published

2025-10-13

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

catena, control plane, smpte, ris-osa, interoperability

ISBN

978-1-61482-966-9