What a year it has been; 2025 has delivered its share of volatility to the industry, proving to be a continuous learning experience as new technologies and ideas push their way into the media technology mainstream.
The talking points at the start of the year were rapidly overtaken by new topics. While artificial intelligence continued to loom large, it was agentic AI—rather than generative AI—that truly dominated the media tech industry discourse. I’m keen to follow this trend into next year.
A number of new acronyms entered my vocabulary this year: DMF (Dynamic Media Facility), MXL (Media eXchange Layer) and TAMS (Time Addressable Media Store).
It feels like the industry is entering a new phase when we discuss interoperability. Yes, the idea has been around for a long time (anyone remember the Internet of Things?), but now vendors and end-users are working together to finally make it happen.
If you’re not familiar with MXL, the best analogy I’ve heard so far came from Appear’s Andy Rayner, who explained that SMPTE ST 2110 is like a hosepipe with content passing through it all the time. With MXL, that content travels in buckets.
The official explanation from the European Broadcasting Union (which has been leading the charge in getting broadcasters and vendors together to discuss MXL’s opportunities) is that MXL will create a standardised framework for real-time, in-memory sharing of audio, video, and metadata between different applications.
The framework currently consists of three layers: at the base lies the physical IT equipment, moving up to applications and user interfaces at the top. “The idea is not to go outside of the software on one computer; we want applications to share video frames and audio chunks directly within a computer’s memory,” Félix Poulin, co-chair of the Dynamic Media Facility Group at the EBU and director, global innovation collaborations, CBC/Radio-Canada, told me earlier this year.
Early experiments have shown latencies of less than a millisecond for each transfer of video, a significant improvement over the 20 milliseconds per device typically expected with standards such as SMPTE ST 2110.
MXL has been deliberately made open source so that it doesn’t have to go through the traditional standardisation process, which can often take years. Instead, all the vendors involved in the project have worked together to develop a software development kit, thus making it automatically interoperable.
MXL represents a significant leap forward for the broadcasting industry, promising greater interoperability, efficiency, and adaptability in an increasingly software-driven world. However, it’s not the only example of interoperability that has been making headlines in 2025.
In April, the EBU introduced OGraf, a project that aims to enable media organisations to deliver consistent graphics experiences across a diverse range of platforms.
The initiative is driven by the EBU HTML Graphics group, focusing on a modular approach to enable integration into existing packages and allow graphics to be rendered on digital platforms, traditional broadcasts, web streams, video editing tools and more.
On the vendor side, TVU Networks introduced MediaMesh, a cloud-based platform that aims to simplify and unify live video production by using a “global shared memory” model to make live video feeds accessible anywhere.
It removes barriers to cloud adoption in live production by providing open APIs for developers to build custom workflows and integrate different applications and vendors. Key features include dynamic live media processing, sub-frame latency, and a cloud-native architecture that can also connect to on-premise systems.
The company has already brought the likes of Grass Valley, Telos Alliance, EVS, Vizrt and Solid State Logic on board as development partners, proving that MediaMesh is going to be key to powering live productions.
Any technology that makes it easier for broadcasters, streaming services, and content creators to get their technology to “talk” to each other has to be a step forward for the industry. I’m excited to see them all take their next steps in 2026.
