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The key to future success is converting from legacy infrastructure to IP-based tools wherever feasible, according to top technology executives who gathered last week for the TVNewsCheck webinar “Technology Leaders on Predictions for 2026,” moderated by this reporter. They emphasized that moving to IP is essential, both to be able to fully monetize new OTT programming as well as to take full advantage of AI in improving production and back-office workflows.
Over the past two decades, broadcasters have been steadily moving from proprietary hardware to software-based systems, and in particular, from SDI infrastructure to IP networking. Several major new facilities have been built using an ST 2110 core routing infrastructure, including CNN’s New York headquarters at 30 Hudson Yards and Fox’s cloud-based technical hub in Tempe, Ariz. The latest big 2110 project to be completed is Disney’s new downtown New York headquarters at 7 Hudson Square, which is the new home for ABC News.
“It could never have been done without IP technologies,” said Mike Strein, director of engineering and technology, ABC News, who described 7 Hudson Square as “one of the biggest, if not biggest, media production facilities” in the world.
Going Big With IP For ABC
All of the facility’s non-real-time workflows are software-based, most running on VM (virtual machine) farms either located on-premise or in outside data centers. But all the real-time workflows are hardware-based and run through 2110 infrastructure.
“At any given time at this facility, we have 70,000 to 80,000 flows originating from 16,000 sources to roughly 24,000 destinations, and they all run on one dual-redundant red/blue media fabric,” Strein said. “That is something you could never accomplish with SDI. You would have had a dozen different routers with tie lines between them, and management would be a nightmare.”
Some early 2110 projects were plagued by interoperability issues between different vendors’ products. But those problems had been solved by the time ABC was integrating its 2110 systems over the past two years, between “interop” events and the adoption of NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications) for discovering and connecting third-party devices. Strein said that while ABC is still doing some “fine-tuning,” the new plant is working very well.
“Most of the issues we had and I think most people have, at least in the build, are scale issues,” Strein added. “You can model things out in a lab, and you can connect 100 devices in a POC. But you can’t connect 10,000, you need to go into production to do that. And those are the things you recognize and start to see where issues come up. But 2110 itself is pretty fully baked as far as I’m concerned at this point.”
Broad 2110 Adoption For Imagine
As Imagine heads into 2026, it is seeing increased adoption of 2110, particularly for big network projects and for facilities that need to produce and/or playout 4K, said Imagine CEO Steve Reynolds. But the company is also seeing the technology move down-market into corporate A/V, houses of worship and sports stadiums.
“What we’re really seeing is more of a widening out of 2110 as being kind of the basic fabric that people are working in,” Reynolds said. “And by the way, 2110 is still seen widely as being the on-ramp to cloud. If you’re not doing 2110 on the ground, it makes it harder to do anything with IP in the cloud.”
That said, Reynolds has seen a pull-back in cloud adoption after the hype of five or so years ago, when many broadcasters were talking about moving all off their key production and playout workflows into public cloud platforms. Instead, most have settled on employing the cloud for occasional-use or disaster recovery applications.
“That has been rationalized to quite a degree, where now people are looking at the TCO [total cost of ownership], they’re looking at whether moving things into the cloud actually makes sense,” he said. “And if you’re running a media operation, 24x7x365, and you already have a building, and you already have power and cooling and you already have people in that building, it probably doesn’t make sense to move everything up into the cloud full-time.”
When asked if the improved reporting and analytics tools offered by cloud applications are what allowed broadcasters to see that the cloud didn’t make financial sense compared to on-premise systems, Reynolds didn’t agree. He said the same kind of metering and cost analysis capabilities are already available today on the ground.
“What really enables that is moving towards virtualization,” Reynolds said. “Because then we can build better instrumentation and we can add in those kinds of measurement capabilities. Whether it’s on the video servers, in the playout systems, in the multiviewers or in the monitoring systems, we have a lot better opportunity to do that kind of telemetry once we start to move things into packets and have that kind of processing capability within the software.”
Serving Multiple Masters At Fox
One broadcaster that has successfully married on-premise 2110 infrastructure with public cloud storage and playout is Fox. Fox serves all its linear networks and OTT properties from the aforementioned content hub in Tempe, which went live in 2021 and tightly integrates a 2110 core with the AWS public cloud.
Since it was effectively starting with a clean technical slate in Tempe, Fox designed the facility with the idea of simultaneously supporting broadcast and digital programming from a common technology stack. That strategy has paid off with events like last February’s Super Bowl, where Fox streamed the game on its Tubi OTT platform and posted record numbers, including a peak of 15.5 million concurrent streams and 13.6 million AMA [average minute audience] and 24 million unique viewers. The new facility also was used to launch the Fox One subscription DTC product in August.
“As we look forward to 2026 our focus, as it has always been, has been on scale, reliability and the convergence of linear and digital,” said Jeff Dow, EVP platform and media technology, Fox Corp. “A great example for us was this past Thanksgiving holiday, our early Fox NFL game. We distributed that programming on traditional linear broadcast, but also through Tubi and our Fox One direct-to-consumer platform. So that was an example of having a team, a facility, a tech stack, which includes our tech center in Tempe and also AWS, to be able to simultaneously air that programming on those three platforms. And what was interesting — and 2110 is a reason we were able to accomplish this — from our tech center in Tempe we extend our video player into other applications. So on that day, specifically, if you were to watch the NFL game on our Fox One platform, it was with the same player that we had extended into the Tubi platform.”
With the Super Bowl, Fox was able to deliver Tubi streaming to some devices faster than the OTA signal, Dow said, and Fox is looking for continued improvement in latency and picture quality as it readies for coverage of the 2026 FIFA World Cup next summer. Fox has also developed a new “multiview” product for World Cup and is exploring how it can generate additional revenue, working with its AdRise internal ad tech team on server-guided ad insertion.
“We’re doing some pretty amazing things right now that we’re testing out with screens on multiview,” Dow said.
Lawo Pursues The “Dynamic Media Facility”
Lawo is currently working with the European Broadcast Union (EBU) on two significant technology initiatives. One is the Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) project, which is aimed at creating completely software-based, truly flexible broadcast architectures that can be quickly scaled up or down to meet changing production requirements.
The other, called Media eXchange Layer (MXL), was born out of the DMF work and is aimed at developing new “virtual cabling” technology for handling uncompressed video in the IP domain. MXL will also foster interoperability by allowing software applications from different vendors to simultaneously access and work with video in shared memory, either on the same server or between networked compute nodes.
Lawo had already been working on some of the same core technology when the EBU first announced DMF in 2023, said Lawo CTO Phil Myers, and so it was an easy decision to dive into DMF and MXL.
“Our view at Lawo has always been that the migration towards IP is like a stepping stone to where we really want to get to, which is generic compute and to be able to dynamically assign media functions where they’re needed to get a really high level of utilization of those media functions,” Myers said. “I think that all the benefits you get from IP by moving the signals in a network is the first step. But being able to move the media functions the way you need to process is really important.”
Besides allowing broadcasters to get much better utilization of their infrastructure, DMF will also give them a much better sense of the TCO of that infrastructure, including when they turn compute on and off, what resources it’s using and where it’s located.
“It’s not exclusive to the public cloud, but using cloud-native technology on premise gives you the same level of telemetry and metrics,” Myers said.
The other big change in moving to generic IT — which is embodied by the interoperability promised by MXL, he said — is to make the industry vendor-agnostic as opposed to “buying an appliance from one vendor which does a single function or a handful of functions.” By working directly in shared memory, MXL will also process video in asynchronous fashion, which should make it faster than 2110 for certain applications.
Since Lawo began work on MXL in November 2024 with five other key vendors, Myers is excited by the quick progress of the initiative. MXL was featured in several live demonstrations at IBC 2025 and is on schedule for an initial specification in early 2026 followed by MXL-capable products. But he emphasized that MXL will serve as a complement to 2110, not a replacement.
“What I say to people is that 2110, NDI, SRT, they won’t go away,” Myers said. “These will be well established, and they are well-established ways, to bring transport between infrastructures. What we’re really talking about here is what’s the most efficient way to move data between media functions when it’s inside generic compute? And I think that the key to this is we don’t really as an industry want to have a server from Vendor A and a server from Vendor B. We just want to have a server that can run vendor A, B, C and D’s applications on it in the most efficient way, reducing the computational cost, reducing latency, bandwidth and all the other things that you get by using that technology stack.”
Scripps Eyes 3.0 Data Opportunities
For its part, station group E.W. Scripps is looking beyond internal infrastructure as it heads into 2026. Instead, the group is focused on the opportunity to launch new datacasting businesses using the ATSC 3.0 television standard, said Dave Francois, VP, consumer product, E.W. Scripps.
Scripps is pursuing 3.0 datacasting through EdgeBeam, a joint venture of Scripps, Sinclair, Gray Media and Nexstar Media Group that is pooling their 3.0 stations to create a national platform for data delivery. Opportunities include delivering content and files as well as more esoteric applications like enhanced GPS (eGPS), which uses 3.0 signals to provide real-time correction of conventional GPS data for applications like surveying; and Broadcast Positioning System [BPS], an NAB-led initiative aimed at creating a 3.0-based backup system to GPS itself.
“Concretely, that means three things,” Francois said. “First, the convergence of the ATSC 3.0 over-the-air standard with IP as a whole — cellular networks, but also 5G and Wi-Fi through efforts like B2X [Broadcast to Everything] and standards compatibility with things like 3GPP becoming globally interoperable effectively. We’re focused on use cases like software updates to cars and devices, content distribution to edge caches, resilient links for public safety, that kind of stuff, and a really early vertical is digital signage.
“Secondly, the foundation for services and applications including things like eGPS and BPS, positioning yourself in a place where we can deliver part of the backbone of defense and PNT [Position, Navigation and Timing] infrastructure,” he continued. “And then third, real use cases in revenue. We’re past the science project part on this stuff.”
As a board observer for EdgeBeam, Francois said his job is to narrow down the opportunities to a few verticals where 3.0 station can solve “very specific problems for businesses better than anyone else,” prove out the economics, and then repeat that at scale.
“Datacasting is really about turning broadcast into another piece of the internet infrastructure,” Francois said.
The post Tech Leaders See More IP, AI In 2026 appeared first on TV News Check.
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