Future-proofing the broadcast industry

Insights from the SMPTE UK Control Plane Event

The media industry is undergoing one of the most significant architectural shifts in its history. As broadcasters and vendors transition from fixed, hardware-based infrastructures toward software-defined, distributed, and cloud-enabled environments, the control layer—traditionally an afterthought—has become a mission-critical component. Recognizing this rapid change, SMPTE UK held a two-part event at Atos’s MidCity Place office on 26 February 2026, drawing a full house of technologists, engineers, and senior industry leaders to explore the control plane’s challenges, opportunities, and emerging standards.

The SMPTE UK Control Plane Event—a half day program—was structured with a technically focused afternoon session, followed by an open evening event that reflected a growing appetite within the sector for deeper, standards-driven dialogue around interoperability, security, orchestration, and system governance.

Let’s take a look at some of the key conversations and takeaways of the event.

Diving deep at the afternoon technical workshop

The afternoon event was intentionally restricted to 25 expert attendees, ensuring space for genuine debate and technical depth. This session focused on the most pressing control plane discussions emerging from broadcast environments worldwide.

The session opened with detailed explorations of several major control technologies:

SMPTE ST 2138 / Catena — A new, model-driven approach to describing and orchestrating control behaviors across distributed systems

MOS IS12N — The AMWA specification enabling lightweight, IP-based connection management
GV AMPP Control — Exemplifying proprietary models built for cloud-native operations

Legacy serial-based protocols — Still prevalent, often insecure, and frequently retro fitted into modern IP workflows

These topics were paired with critical questions: How should systems represent identity and authorization? Where does orchestration logic truly belong? How do we evolve fractured systems without abandoning legacy integrations?

The afternoon workshop was an experiment for SMPTE, who historically focus on open evening meetings but it was a successful one. The general consensus was that it “…seemed to be well received and satisfied my desire to go into a bit more detail on these topics.”

These remarks captured the prevailing mood: Yes, the industry is hungry for more indepth technical sessions that go beyond introductory overviews.

One of the core successes of the afternoon was the alignment it fostered across broadcasters, integrators, and vendors. Participants openly discussed areas of disagreement, especially around security models and migration approaches, recognizing that cross vendor alignment is necessary for futureproof workflows.

Sharing insights at the open evening event

The event transitioned to an evening session, welcoming a much broader audience. Doors opened at 6pm, with attendees gathering for drinks and networking before the program formally began shortly after 7pm. Pizza and refreshments helped fuel conversation as new groups arrived and reconnected.

A broadcaster’s perspective

The evening opened with a presentation by Lydia Hubbard of BBC, offering a broadcaster’s viewpoint on the challenges emerging from new software-defined, distributed environments. Her talk highlighted rising security concerns, shifting operational behaviors, and the need for more consistent control frameworks across production, playout, and live environments, utilizing examples from Atos BNCS control system, which is used throughout BBC.

Catena / ST 2138: Unpacking the standard

John Naylor, VP Product Security at Ross Video, followed with a detailed breakdown of Catena and the ST 2138 suite. Attendees gained insights into:

Modelled definitions of system states
New approaches to command orchestration
Documentation and SDK resources
Real world deployments and opensource reference materials
His session helped attendees understand not only the specification itself, but the growing ecosystem forming around it.

Panel discussion: The big questions

The evening culminated in a multivendor panel chaired by Atos’s Senior Architect Chris Gil and featuring representatives from BBC, Ross Video, Grass Valley, and TSL Products.

The conversation explored the following hot topics

Where security enforcement should sit
How to evolve systems while maintaining live resilience
The value of vendor agnostic standards
The future role of orchestration vs. control
Industry readiness for model based protocols

This open exchange allowed attendees to see where major vendors align and where real differences remain.

Carrying the conversation forward

As often happens at SMPTE UK events, the energy carried past the formal close. Attendees continued debating ideas and sharing experiences which will be taken up in their upcoming European Conference at MPTS in May.

The control plane and why it matters now

Across both the afternoon workshop and the evening session, one message became impossible to ignore: the control plane is no longer a peripheral consideration, it is now a strategic foundation of modern media infrastructure.

As organizations move at pace toward hybrid, distributed, and IP-based production environments, the expectations placed on control systems have grown dramatically.

A growing and urgent technical challenge

Today’s media architectures must juggle a complex set of operational demands:

Orchestrating workflows across multivendor, multisite environments
Maintaining security in legacy protocols never designed for modern, internet facing systems
Ensuring interoperability across mixed proprietary and standards based components
Scaling systems reliably without compromising resilience, redundancy, or operator visibility

These challenges are no longer the domain of specialist engineering teams, they have become strategic infrastructure concerns that influence cost, capability, competitiveness and risk exposure at an organizational level.

Security pressures are quickly rising

A key part of the discussions focused on the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and its far reaching implications for vendors, systems integrators, and solution providers. The CRA introduces requirements around:

Secure by design product development
Vulnerability disclosure obligations
Transparency around software components
Demonstrable controls around cybersecurity lifecycle management

For an industry historically reliant on legacy devices, bespoke integrations, and long product lifecycles, the CRA represents a seismic shift. Vendors and integrators must now plan for continuous compliance, not one off certification, and must redesign how control protocols and orchestration systems manage identity, authorization, and secure communication.

Security is no longer an optional enhancement; it is becoming a regulatory obligation woven into every layer of a media system.

The security implications of AI in control systems

Alongside regulatory pressure, attendees raised important concerns about the accelerating use of AI within system control, observability, and automation.

While AI can enhance diagnostics, configuration, and operational decision making, it introduces new classes of risk:

Model poisoning or manipulation
Over automation that obscures operator intent
Hallucinations that could generate invalid or unsafe control actions
Opaque decision making in mission-critical broadcast environments

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in orchestration logic and realtime system monitoring, the industry must adopt robust safeguards, contextaware oversight mechanisms, and clear boundaries around human vs. automated control.

Attendees were clear: if AI is part of the control plane, then security, auditability, and transparency must be part of the design from day one.

A call for true industry alignment

SMPTE ST 2138 / Catena, AMWA NMOS models, and next-generation control plane proposals all point in the same direction: the industry urgently needs shared, standards-based frameworks that reduce fragmentation and promote interoperability.

Model-based descriptions, consistent terminology, and a common reference architecture are essential if broadcasters and vendors are to reduce integration overhead, improve system resilience and respond quickly to emerging threats.

The conversations at this event demonstrated genuine momentum: people are ready to move beyond ad-hoc solutions and invest in a unified, futureproofed approach to control.

Looking ahead

The SMPTE UK Control Plane Event at Atos made one thing clear: this is the beginning, not the end, of a critical industry conversation. With SMPTE UK expanding its activities, vendors collaborating more openly, and broadcasters articulating real-world operational needs, the direction of travel is unambiguous.

The control layer must evolve in lockstep with cloud production, IP transport, cybersecurity regulation, and the expansion of AI-driven operations. And, judging by the energy, engagement, and constructive debate across both sessions, it is a future the industry is not only ready for but eager to build together.

>> Learn more about Atos’s control plane and how the control layer is the backbone of modern media systems: Atos - BNCS

>> Connect with me to learn more about the advantages of an AI-centric control plane. Let’s discuss how you can use this to infuse transparency, auditability and security in your business early in the process.

Posted: 23/03/26