The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has released the initial documentation for Catena, a groundbreaking open-source control plane standard. This announcement follows the recent quarterly Technology Committee meetings (June 1-3) in Tokyo at Imagica.
Developed by the SMPTE Rapid Industry Solutions Open Services Alliance (RIS-OSA), Catena is envisioned as a universal, secure, and vendor-neutral protocol for managing media devices and services across various deployment models – on-premises, cloud, and hybrid.
The initial documents, categorized as the ST 2138 series, have been submitted to SMPTE’s 34CS Technology Committee, which specializes in media systems control and services. “Catena represents one of the most ambitious and essential standardization efforts SMPTE has undertaken in recent years,” noted Chris Lennon, director of standards strategy for Ross Video and a SMPTE Fellow, highlighting the urgent need for unified protocols in increasingly intricate media workflows.
The current media industry relies on a vast array of proprietary control protocols, a situation SMPTE aims to rectify with the Catena standard. Thomas Bause Mason, SMPTE’s director of standards development, explained that Catena is designed for flexibility and can manage both microservices and sophisticated physical devices.
The released documents, available on a GitHub repository, include interface files, schema, and other supporting materials. SMPTE intends to progress these documents to Public Committee Draft status, followed by a period for implementation and feedback before final standardization.
Stan Moote, chief technology officer of IABM, commended Catena for addressing current industry needs and praised the collaborative efforts of the IABM Control Plane Working Group and other key participants.