SMPTE has introduced the initial documents defining the Catena control plane standard.
Aiming to begin the official standardisation process, the documents, known as the ST 2138 suite, were introduced to the SMPTE Standards Community at its quarterly SMPTE Technology Committee meetings between June 1-3 in Tokyo.
By defining and standardising Catena, SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solutions Open Services Alliance group (RIS-OSA), aims to meet the industry’s control plane challenge resulting from the multiplicity of proprietary protocols used to control media devices, providing what it said will be the first and only standardised open-source solution. Vendor and platform agnostic, Catena will provide a single secure protocol capable of controlling devices and services of all sizes in use across the media industry.
Chris Lennon, director of standards strategy for Ross Video and a SMPTE Fellow, commented, “Catena represents one of the most ambitious and essential standardisation efforts SMPTE has undertaken in recent years. With media workflows now spanning on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments, the need for a unified, secure, and vendor-agnostic control plane is more urgent than ever. By introducing the initial Catena documents into the SMPTE Standards Community, we’re inviting the broader industry to help shape a solution that works for everyone, regardless of where their services reside or what platform they use.”
The Catena documents introduced consist of:
- ST 2138-00: Catena Overview
- ST 2138-10: Catena Model
- ST 2138-11: gRPC Connection Type
- ST 2138-12: REST Connection Type
- ST 2138-50: Catena Security
Beginning the process of standardisation, these documents are transitioning into SMPTE’s 34CS TC and are also in the Catena repository on GitHub, including interface files, schema and further resources. SMPTE intends to advance their status to Public Committee Draft (PCD) as soon as practical, enabling implementers to integrate the standard into their products and provide development feedback, after which Catena will move forward to final standardisation and approval.
Stan Moote, CTO at IABM, said, “The industry has long needed a common control layer that actually reflects how we operate today — across clouds, platforms, and vendors. Catena offers a standards-based path forward that brings the transparency and scalability needed for smart, efficient resource management in distributed environments. It’s encouraging to see this kind of progress being made openly, with broad collaboration through SMPTE and engagement from IABM’s Control Plane Working Group, bringing the supplier community into the process.”
Thomas Bause Mason, SMPTE director of standards development, added, “One of the fundamental challenges facing our industry is managing devices and services across a fragmented infrastructure, and proprietary control protocols are simply not up to the task. Catena offers a new model based on open standards, community-driven development, and a pragmatic path to implementation. Designed to address every device, service, and system in any environment, it offers the adaptable, future-proof approach we need.”
