Ross Video’s Catena integrated into Rapid Industry Solution programme

Following the merger between the Open Services Alliance (OSA) and Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Ross Video’s Catena secure communication standard will now reside under SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solution (RIS) programme. The resulting entity will be known as OSA: A SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution.

Catena is intended to provide a simple way to enable control, status reporting and configuration across a wide array of vendors, with devices, complex products, services, or even very small microservices. The need for Catena arose from the shift to cloud computing for live media production, the need for more seamless multi-vendor integration, and the emergence of security as a priority. Catena builds upon Ross Video’s openGear platform, which has enabled smooth interoperability of on-premises equipment across vendors for over 16 years. Catena takes this to the next level as an open standard, taking cloud and hybrid environments into account, as well as security.

The addition of Catena into OSA: A SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution is expected to result in a suite of documents being published by SMPTE that will cover aspects such as registration, status, control, commands/API, security and orchestration.

“We are thrilled to see the home for Catena will now be in OSA: A SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution. We look forward to working with the industry to create an open standard designed to ensure that solutions and platforms from various vendors can work together seamlessly,” said Troy English, CTO of Ross Video. “We are confident that this collaboration will result in an innovative, scalable solution for the media industry that will help accelerate innovation and enable true interoperability.”

“Following several successful rapid-fire initiatives over the past three years, the OSA expects Catena to be one of its most exciting projects yet, and with the increased visibility and reach of the OSA now being a SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution, we think this will be a huge benefit to the Catena initiative as a whole,” said Chris Lennon, executive director of the OSA.