IBC 2026 Preview: Standards compliance is no longer the interoperability finish line

As facilities modernize, interoperability remains central to how IP infrastructure gets built. At IBC 2026, running Sept. 11-14 in Amsterdam, coverage of the topic is expected to focus on SMPTE ST 2110, NMOS, JPEG XS, timing, synchronization and the open architectures supporting flexible, multi-vendor production environments.

“Modernizing production facilities increasingly depends on IP‑native infrastructure and open standards such as SMPTE ST 2110, NMOS, and JPEG XS. These frameworks give broadcasters the flexibility to scale, virtualize, and integrate multi‑vendor systems without being locked into fixed hardware architectures,” said Costa Nikols, strategy advisor for M&E at Telos Alliance.

“The interoperability conversation has shifted from whether ST 2110 will be adopted to how facilities manage multi-vendor environments where timing and synchronization failures, not protocol adoption, are now the most common operational headache,” said Michael Demb, vice president of product strategy at TAG Video Systems.

Demb pointed to JPEG XS as a near-term story worth watching, since it addresses a bandwidth limitation ST 2110 alone did not solve, particularly for facilities trying to run more channels over existing infrastructure. Looking further out, he said MXL is positioned to become the standard way software components inside a facility exchange media, working alongside ST 2110 rather than replacing it.

“Open standards also improve efficiency by enabling dynamic routing, elastic processing, and software‑defined workflows that adapt to changing production demands. Innovations like MXL push this further by eliminating traditional ingest/egress cycles, reducing latency, and allowing applications to exchange media directly in host memory. This minimizes format conversions, lowers operational complexity, and supports true interoperability across vendors. Together, IP and open standards provide a future‑proof foundation that lets facilities evolve at the pace of innovation rather than be constrained by infrastructure,” said Nikols.

Building the software-defined stack

“Interoperability has become the defining requirement of IP infrastructure, and attention is shifting from established standards like ST 2110 and NMOS towards newer frameworks such as MXL and TAMS, which the EBU and AMWA are driving through the Dynamic Media Facility initiative,” said David Edwards, product manager at Techex.

Edwards said the direction is toward production environments where functions are modular and software-based, able to be deployed, retired or replaced on demand rather than fixed to dedicated hardware. He pointed to native support for MXL and TAMS in the company’s TX Darwin product as evidence of how quickly the shift is moving from broadcaster ambition into deployable, multi-vendor practice.

Steve Reynolds, chief executive of Imagine Communications, said the industry’s challenge is no longer deploying individual software applications but enabling software from multiple vendors to work together across shared on-premises or cloud infrastructure. He said the Dynamic Media Facility framework is intended to address that through an open architecture for deploying, connecting, orchestrating and managing applications across their lifecycle, and because the framework is still evolving, its success will depend on the same kind of broad industry collaboration that shaped ST 2110.

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“Rigid, closed architectures cost too much, and that cost lands on the consumer,” said Marc Aldrich, chief executive of Zixi. “At Zixi, we build around one principle: open. We believe in open standards, plug-and-play interoperability, quality in every stream, and a network that’s open end to end.”

“The next step will be greater interoperability between cloud-native services and the operational infrastructure that broadcasters already have in place,” said Ian Godfrey, CTO at TSL. “MXL and DMF have really started to gain significant momentum, with the potential to further advance interoperability across increasingly software-defined media environments. We’re particularly interested in how MXL will be adopted by SaaS media processing vendors and are focused on ensuring that monitoring and control workflows can operate seamlessly across these platforms.”

Compliance is not the same as interoperability

A cluster of executives cautioned that meeting a standard on paper does not guarantee that multi-vendor systems will work together in practice.

“It’s true that a lot of equipment now claims to support ST 2110, but that doesn’t mean it will slot neatly into a mixed IP, SDI, HDMI and RF workflow, or that anyone will know where to start when it goes wrong,” said Alistair Horne, director at Hornets Tech. He said the industry sometimes talks about interoperability as though agreeing on a standard solves the whole problem, but timing, control and fault-finding remain where mixed systems come unstuck, and he expects that to remain the case for years.

“ST 2110 has proven that open standards can work, but compliance doesn’t guarantee true interoperability,” said Miroslav Jeras, chief technology officer of Pebble. He said the standard defines how video, audio and ancillary data move as separate IP streams, but the discovery, connection management and security layers that let systems from different vendors actually work together sit in related standards such as NMOS, which get implemented with varying completeness. Jeras said the industry needs tougher interoperability testing across that full stack, along with clearer practical guidance, so broadcasters stop paying for bespoke engineering every time two compliant products meet.

Sergio Ammirata, chief scientist at SipRadius, made a similar point, saying years of standardizing individual parts of the IP chain have not on their own guaranteed practical interoperability. He said the next challenge is making discovery, routing, timing, transport and security work coherently across ST 2110, NMOS, RIST, IPMX and other environments without creating separate operational silos.

“At IBC, attendees should look beyond protocol support and ask whether systems can work securely across vendors, sites and network boundaries,” Ammirata said.

Other executives raised related concerns about the operational side of that gap. William Viker, chief technology officer of Bitfocus, said open standards have solved much of the connectivity problem but have not automatically made systems easy to operate, often leaving engineers to manage separate interfaces and inconsistent APIs. Russell Johnson, director at Hitomi Broadcast, said timing can still shift as signals pass through buffers, network routes and processing stages, and that teams need a practical way to prove synchronization is holding across a multi-vendor environment, not just confirm that systems are connected.

Moving off satellite

A separate but related shift is playing out in distribution, where rising costs and spectrum pressure are pushing some broadcasters toward IP more urgently.

“The upcoming upper C-band auction marks a pivotal moment for the industry – we’re seeing more urgency behind the shift from satellite media distribution to IP than at any point in history,” said Dimitri Tarassenko, senior vice president of product management at LTN. He said no two migrations look the same, and for most broadcasters the shift will happen gradually, with hybrid satellite and IP environments running side by side before full replacement. Tarassenko said the trend has dominated discussion in North America this year but is not isolated to the region, with broadcasters in Europe and elsewhere watching the pace of change in the U.S. and making their own moves toward IP-first infrastructure for cost and regionalization reasons.

Andy Rayner, chief technology officer at Appear, said IP migration is now less about proving the technology works and more about finding a practical route forward that reduces the cost and complexity of legacy satellite, leased-circuit and SDI infrastructure without disrupting live services or writing off prior investment.

“The priority is therefore a phased transition that protects operational resilience while creating greater flexibility for the future,” Rayner said. He said platforms that bring SDI and IP workflows together, support multiple codecs and provide secure, hardware-accelerated transport let organizations modernize primary and affiliate distribution at their own pace, increasing capacity and routing content more dynamically without an all-at-once replacement.

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