Going into this year’s IBC Show, I had heard of the Media eXchange Layer, mostly thanks to David Davies’ article on Dynamic Media Facilities from earlier in the summer.
I knew that the EBU was collaborating with Linux and several media technology vendors on the initiative, but I thought it was still a long way from becoming a major topic of discussion.
How wrong I was.
From my first night in Amsterdam, spent at Grass Valley’s annual GV Forum, through to my final meeting on Sunday, everyone wanted to talk about MXL.
I admit, I’m not great at understanding some of the more complicated areas of technology that I write about, so it’s taken me most of the weekend to really understand exactly what MXL is.
Probably the best analogy was 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 EBU explanation is that it aims to create a standardised framework for real-time, in-memory sharing of audio, video, and metadata between different applications. In other words, it’s going to make broadcast technology interoperable—something that was mooted when I first joined TVBEurope back in 2017 (and probably even before that).
All of this comes with a warning, though. While I, and many manufacturers, are extremely excited about MXL, it really is in its infancy. To use another analogy from Imagine Communications’ Steve Reynolds, the MXL train hasn’t entered the station to start its journey yet. And who knows how many passengers are going to get on?
But, whatever happens, I feel like MXL is going to be something that we’ll be keeping a close eye on in the coming months.
