Grass Valley and Lawo integrate platforms to advance EBU interoperability standards

This partnership signals a critical shift from proprietary ecosystems to standardized interoperability in software-defined production. By aligning with EBU's DMF and MXL frameworks, two major rivals are prioritizing a shared 'plumbing' layer for uncompressed media, reducing the high integration costs that previously hindered hybrid cloud adoption. For the market, this move validates that next-generation facilities will treat media as memory-to-memory operations rather than traditional network packets. To track progress, watch for the validation of remote direct memory access (RDMA) implementations between these platforms, which will determine if software workflows can achieve the sub-frame latency required for top-tier live sports.

The EBU’s Media eXchange Layer (MXL) reached a significant milestone in early 2026 with the release of the v1.0.0 Release Candidate by the Linux Foundation, per TVBEurope, March 2026. This release provided the first stable API for vendors to build commercial implementations. Unlike SMPTE ST 2110, which handles precision transport over physical networks, MXL is designed to move media between containerized software functions using shared memory and OS-bypass networking, fundamentally reducing the CPU overhead of packetization in virtualized environments.

Commercial adoption of these principles follows years of separate platform development. Lawo launched HOME 4.0 in July 2025, introducing its 'HOME Passes' licensing model to manage third-party and NMOS-compliant devices across cloud and on-premise setups, per Mix Online, July 2025. Meanwhile, Grass Valley’s AMPP reached over 10 million hours of usage per month by January 2025, according to TMBroadcast. The Joint Taskforce on Dynamic Media Facilities (JT-DMF), formed by the EBU and AMWA in late 2025, continues to define the upper layers of this architecture, including discovery and registry protocols necessary for multi-vendor clusters.

At the IBC 2025 trade show, initial multi-vendor demonstrations involving Grass Valley, Lawo, and AWS showcased how MXL facilitates uncompressed 4K video exchange on standard COTS servers, per NAB Show reporting, April 2026. This collaborative momentum is largely driven by Tier 1 broadcasters such as the BBC and CBC/Radio-Canada, who are pressuring vendors to move away from monolithic hardware in favor of elastic, interoperable software modules that can scale for major global events.