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Events & Trade Shows

NAB 2026: The Year the Industry Ran Out of Excuses

Themes, Shifts, and What It All Means

The 2026 NAB Show didn’t just wrap with a record 58,000+ registered attendees. It wrapped with a verdict: the broadcast and media technology industry has officially moved past the proof-of-concept phase. The questions that dominated the floor in 2024 and 2025 — “Can AI do this?” “Is cloud viable for live?” “Will IP replace SDI?” — have been answered. What replaced them was harder and more interesting: “How do we operationalize all of this without doubling headcount or tripling our infrastructure budget?”

Nearly half of those 58,000 attendees were first-timers. Content creators registered at more than double the rate of 2025. Corporate media professionals nearly doubled to over 13,000. Sports organizations sent representatives from 75 professional teams, 22 leagues, and 30 venues. The composition of the room changed, and with it, the nature of the conversation.

Here’s what we observed, what it means, and where we believe it’s heading.

AI Gets a Job Description

If NAB 2025 was the year everyone demonstrated AI, NAB 2026 was the year the industry collectively demanded receipts. The shift was unmistakable: two dedicated AI Pavilions, nearly double the AI exhibitors from the prior year, and AI woven into virtually every product story on the floor. But the tenor of the conversation changed.

The industry has quietly but decisively split AI into two camps. And understanding the distinction matters more than any product announcement.

Analytical AI: The Workhorse

The first camp is analytical AI: the kind that automates the tedious, repetitive, time-consuming work that has always been the hidden tax on production. Speech-to-text transcription. Facial detection. Logo identification. Shot classification. Automated metadata enrichment. Intelligent content routing. Scene description. Object recognition.

These capabilities aren’t headline-grabbing. They’re the work that a junior coordinator used to spend 40 hours a week doing manually, and they’re now running autonomously inside production platforms across the industry. The consensus among production professionals has tilted decisively toward this kind of AI, the kind that saves you a hire, not the kind that replaces one.

What made this year different is scale. These tools aren’t being piloted anymore. They’re running in production, and the reported efficiency gains are significant. One analysis cited an estimated 34% overall time savings across productions using AI-assisted workflows. Whether that number holds across every environment is debatable, but the direction is not.

Agentic AI: The New Frontier

The second camp is where things get genuinely interesting, and genuinely new. Agentic AI refers to systems that don’t just respond to commands but reason through multi-step goals, use specialized tools, and take autonomous action with human oversight.

The most visible example: the Avid–Google Cloud partnership, which integrates Gemini models and Vertex AI directly into Media Composer and Avid’s new Content Core platform. Editors can query media archives in natural language, automate logging, and leverage AI that understands visual, audio, and dialogue context simultaneously. AWS demonstrated the same pattern with the PGA TOUR’s automated broadcast production, where real-time shot data triggers intelligent production decisions across multiple courses.

In the newsroom space, agentic architectures are starting to appear in story automation, with systems that deploy hierarchies of AI agents to handle the retrieval, categorization, and scoring of incoming stories based on recency, relevance, and editorial priorities. The vision is that producers and editors spend more time on storytelling and less on the mechanical assembly of news packages.

This is just scratching the surface. Agentic AI will be a much larger story at NAB 2027 and beyond. The infrastructure is being laid now, but the production-grade deployments are still early. The organizations investing in understanding agentic patterns today will have a meaningful head start when the tooling matures.

AI Editing Assistants: The Third Rail

One category drew significant floor traffic and significant debate: AI editing assistants. Not generative tools that create synthetic footage. These solve the most persistent, unglamorous problem in post-production: the crushing volume of footage that no human team can efficiently review, organize, and cut. Editors consistently report spending 80% of their time finding and preparing footage and only 20% on the actual creative work. These tools are trying to flip that equation.

Eddie AI had their first NAB booth and it was packed. The v3 release debuted Night Shift, an overnight batch mode where editors drop a folder of media and Eddie sorts interviews from B-roll, syncs multicams, logs everything, and assembles a narrative rough cut ready to open in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro by morning. The system proposes a story framework, assembles beat by beat, logs available B-roll, and places it over the A-roll spine automatically, using only real footage. Editors can even text a footage link to Eddie via SMS and receive the edit by 8 AM. Supports multilingual transcription, up to 6-camera multicam, and rough cuts up to 40 minutes.

Quickture, created by reality TV producer Irad Eyal (Bravo’s Southern Charm, Netflix’s Floor Is Lava), was demoed at the Avid booth. Built specifically for long-form unscripted content, Quickture works as a panel inside Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer rather than as a standalone app. A deliberate choice, since as Eyal noted, “editors won’t let you change the color of a menu, let alone learn a whole new system.” Quickture Vision adds visual understanding, recognizing objects, locations, and actions to build assembled sequences matching B-roll to interview content. Its speaker ID system can distinguish 30+ voices in a single episode. Used by teams at A+E, ITV, Paramount, Banijay, and EndemolShine.

Selects by Cutback (San Francisco/Seoul) debuted at NAB targeting the phase before editors even open their NLE: multi-cam sync, angle alignment, and clip organization. The tool automatically structures raw multi-cam footage into a draft edit ready for handoff to Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve.

CaraOne (by Obvious Future GmbH, deployed via Scale Logic) takes a fundamentally different architectural approach: fully on-premises, running on a 2U GPU server with no internet connection required. For studios and broadcasters with strict data sovereignty requirements, this matters. Beyond search, CaraOne assembles rough cuts by intelligently sequencing clips into narrative structures, and its conversational interface lets teams ask questions about their footage in natural language. Supports 170 languages and integrates directly with Avid Media Composer, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Flame.

creative.space Intelligence (CSI) by DigitalGlue also debuted at NAB, automatically generating rough cuts, stringouts, and alternate versions of content. Its conversational interface lets producers and non-editors work directly with footage without waiting on editorial time. 

Imagen Video left beta at NAB with a different angle entirely: AI-powered color grading integrated into Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, automating the clip-by-clip corrections that traditionally consume hours of finishing time.

The editorial community remains split on these tools. But the practical reality is hard to argue with: when the footage ratio is 500:1 and the deadline hasn’t moved, anything that helps an editor find the right moment faster deserves evaluation. The tools gaining traction are the ones firmly in the assistance camp, handling logging, syncing, organizing, and initial assembly so human editors can focus on narrative, pacing, and emotional impact. The storytelling remains irreplaceable. The mechanical assembly increasingly doesn’t need to be.

Where Generative AI Landed (and Didn’t)

Generative AI, the shiny object of the last two NABs, took a notably quieter position in 2026. It wasn’t absent. But it wasn’t leading conversations the way it did in 2024 and 2025. The industry has grown appropriately cautious about generative content in professional production workflows, particularly around provenance, rights, and the risk of AI-generated material being indistinguishable from captured footage.

That said, several vendors pushed generative capabilities further into production-adjacent territory. Avid and Google Cloud demonstrated generative video creation directly inside Media Composer using Gemini models. The demo showed text-prompt-directed scene generation where an operator could instruct an AI-generated character to perform specific actions, with natural movement and realistic environments. The pitch: B-roll generation and visual ideation without leaving the NLE. Pricing and release date remain TBD, but the integration signals how close generative video is getting to the editorial timeline. Adobe expanded its Firefly platform into a browser-based video editor that combines generated clips, imported footage, and AI audio tools in a multi-track timeline, positioning Firefly as a production tool, not just a playground. ENCO demonstrated SPECai, which generates client spec ads using multiple scripts, varied background music, and dozens of AI voices, producing a finished spot in seconds. Amagi showed automated artwork generation with subject-aware cropping that formats content for platform-specific requirements across FAST and OTT channels. NVIDIA demonstrated an agentic control plane that coordinates multiple AI agents to collaboratively generate scripts and animated characters.

The pattern across these demos: the generative applications that resonated were narrow and well-scoped. B-roll ideation within controlled editorial environments. Spec ad generation for sales teams. Automated artwork for multi-platform distribution. These are workflows where generative AI solves a specific, bounded problem rather than attempting to replace human creative judgment wholesale. The fully autonomous content pipelines that some startups are building remain further out and further from industry comfort.

The broader signal: analytical and operational AI are hitting mainstream adoption. Agentic AI is building momentum but still early. Generative AI in production workflows remains a case-by-case evaluation with real guardrails required.

The MAM Evolution: From Search to Understanding

Media Asset Management has been a mature category for decades. But NAB 2026 exposed a generational fault line running through the middle of it, and the fault line is architectural.

The incumbent MAM platforms were built on traditional relational databases. Structured metadata. Manual tagging. Keyword search. These systems work when content is meticulously cataloged by humans. They struggle when the volume of content overwhelms the capacity to tag it, and they break entirely when the question being asked doesn’t map to a field someone thought to create.

A newer generation of platforms leads with a fundamentally different foundation: vector databases and semantic search powered by AI models that understand the content itself. Instead of matching keywords in a metadata field, these systems let users describe what they’re looking for in natural language (“a person skiing while holding a laptop,” “the CEO speaking at the Q3 town hall,” “a close-up of our product packaging on a retail shelf”) and the system finds the specific moment inside a video that matches. Platforms like Twelve Labs and Moments Lab exhibited at NAB with multimodal AI models that generate embeddings across visual, audio, and dialogue content, enabling contextual understanding that no amount of manual tagging could replicate at scale. CaraOne, mentioned earlier, takes this approach entirely on-prem, using computer vision, NLP, and emotional analysis to make archives searchable by concept, scene, spoken word, and context, without any data leaving the facility. Shade, the startup that won NAB Product of the Year, leads with neural search and automated tagging as core capabilities baked into its all-in-one platform.

Then there are the platforms working to bridge both worlds. Mimir offers what may be the most instructive example of where the category is heading. The platform has offered AI-powered auto-tagging for years, but at NAB 2026, Mimir showcased agnostic semantic search as a layer on top of its existing structured metadata foundation. Users can toggle between traditional term-matching search and natural language semantic search within the same interface. Mimir integrates with multiple AI video discovery platforms (including AWS, Google, Twelve Labs, and CoActive AI), letting customers choose their preferred intelligence stack while standardizing the search-to-edit workflow in Mimir. The agnostic approach is deliberate: rather than building proprietary AI, Mimir connects to whichever semantic engine fits the customer’s needs and budget.

Platforms like Iconik (Backlight) are taking a different approach entirely: rather than chasing semantic search, they’re doubling down on structured metadata as the governance layer AI needs to function properly. At NAB 2026, Iconik introduced AI-powered metadata enrichment that leverages what the system already knows about an asset to intelligently suggest new values, making the relational database increasingly self-populating rather than manually maintained. Their thesis is straightforward: at 903 million assets under management and 11 terabytes of new media ingested every hour, the permissions, rights tracking, and workflow control that a structured MAM provides isn’t optional. It’s the foundation everything else runs on.

Here’s the honest assessment: neither approach alone is the complete answer. Relational databases excel at structured workflow management (who has access, what version is approved, where does it go next). Vector search excels at content discovery: finding the moment you need across petabytes of media you couldn’t manually tag in a lifetime. The Shangri-La is the platform that seamlessly integrates both: structured workflow control with AI-driven content understanding, where an editor can search semantically for the right shot and the system simultaneously enforces permissions, tracks versions, and routes the asset through the correct approval chain.

Nobody has fully arrived there yet. But the platforms moving fastest toward that integration — whether by building semantic capabilities into relational systems, or by adding workflow management around vector search engines — are the ones that will define the next generation of media asset management. The organizations that figure out how to marry these two worlds will have a significant operational advantage over those still relying exclusively on either approach alone.

The Connectivity Revolution: MCP, Orchestration, and the End of the Custom Connector

Here’s a theme that didn’t get a dedicated pavilion at NAB but may end up being the most consequential shift of all: the way production tools connect to each other is about to fundamentally change.

For years, connecting one production platform to another (getting your work management platform to talk to your MAM, your NLE to talk to your Slack channel, your review tool to talk to your delivery platform) required custom integration work. APIs, webhooks, middleware, bespoke connector development. Companies like Embrace, Qibb, Helmut Cloud, Zapier, Make and others built businesses around orchestrating these connections, creating workflow automation layers that bridge the gaps between tools that weren’t designed to talk to each other.

That work is real, valuable, and not going away overnight. But something is shifting underneath it.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic in late 2024 and now supported by OpenAI, Google, and a growing ecosystem, has emerged as an open standard for how AI systems connect to external tools and data sources. Think of it as a universal adapter layer: one standardized protocol that lets any AI application discover and interact with any compliant tool without bespoke integration code.

The implications for media workflows are significant, even if they weren’t explicitly demonstrated on the NAB floor this year. The current integration model in media production is what engineers call an “N×M problem” where every tool needs a custom connection to every other tool. MCP collapses that to “N+M”: build a server once, and any compliant client can use it.

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 75% of API gateway vendors and 50% of iPaaS (integration platform) vendors will have MCP features. Forrester predicts that 30% of enterprise application vendors will launch their own MCP servers. The community has already built thousands of MCP servers for common integrations: file systems, databases, Slack, Google Drive, and more.

What does this mean for media organizations? We’re approaching a world where AI becomes the orchestration layer between production tools. Instead of building custom connectors or purchasing middleware, an AI agent with access to MCP servers for your MAM, your storage, your NLE, and your delivery platform can coordinate actions across all of them, triggered by natural language instructions rather than coded workflows.

This doesn’t replace the workflow orchestration platforms. It changes what sits on top of them. The hard-won integration work that companies like Embrace, Qibb and Helmut have built becomes the foundation that AI agents operate through, not a layer that gets bypassed. But the expectation from production teams is going to shift: they’ll increasingly expect tools to exchange information with each other natively, and AI to manage the coordination.

We’re early in this transition. But if the pace of MCP adoption in the broader technology landscape is any indicator, media production will feel the effects sooner than most expect.

The Cloud NAS Space Race

There is a legitimate space race happening in media production storage right now, and NAB 2026 made it impossible to ignore.

The category that LucidLink effectively created, cloud-native shared file systems that behave like local storage, has matured into a competitive market with multiple serious players and fundamentally different architectural approaches. LucidLink announced LucidLink Connect, which enables teams to access and stream content from external sources like S3, Frame.io, Google Drive, and others directly inside the LucidLink workspace without copying or re-ingesting. Suite Studios landed one of the show’s most significant partnerships, embedding their file streaming technology into Adobe’s new Frame.io Drive application, and separately announced S3 Native File Streaming in beta, a direct read/write capability to S3-compatible storage without proprietary file formats or intermediary layers. Storj’s Object Mount offers full read/write access to any S3-compatible storage at dramatically lower price points. Shade arrived with $14 million in funding and a Product of the Year award for an all-in-one platform that combines cloud NAS, AI search, MAM, and review into a single system. Amove continues to carve out the multi-cloud management layer, mounting storage buckets from 30+ providers directly to the desktop and giving teams a unified interface for accessing, migrating, and managing content across cloud environments.

Strada Connect arrived with the most contrarian thesis on the floor: what if you didn’t need the cloud at all? Rather than mounting cloud storage locally, Strada lets remote collaborators access your existing local storage directly (drives, NAS, SAN) with folder-level permissions, no third-party bucket required. The media never moves. No cloud costs, no egress fees. At the booth, they streamed a 28GB BRAW file live from California to Las Vegas inside a web browser. Starts at $8/month.

And then, two weeks before NAB opened, AWS launched S3 Files, a feature that lets you mount any S3 bucket as a native file system directly on AWS compute resources with full read/write. Not a desktop product today. But the signal is loud.

The architectural race underneath all of this is the drive toward direct read/write access to cloud object storage without proprietary intermediary layers, or in Strada’s case, the argument that bypassing cloud entirely is the better answer. Different vendors are approaching this from fundamentally different angles, and the right choice depends heavily on your workflow, team distribution, and existing infrastructure.

The high-level takeaway: cloud NAS has become the default production storage conversation for distributed teams. On-prem storage hasn’t died. It’s shifted to a secondary but essential role as high-performance active archive, business continuity, and disaster recovery. The organizations controlling costs are the ones implementing intelligent lifecycle tiering between these tiers today.

Meanwhile, Quietly in the Corner: TAMS

While every vendor in the cloud NAS space was arguing over the best way to mount files from the cloud, a small but architecturally serious contingent at NAB 2026 was asking a different question entirely: what if the file is the wrong unit of work?

TAMS (Time Addressable Media Store) is an open-source API specification developed by BBC Research & Development that takes a fundamentally different approach to media storage. Instead of storing content as monolithic files that get mounted, streamed, synced, or transferred, TAMS breaks media into time-addressable chunks stored in cloud object storage, accessible via an open HTTP API indexed by timeline position. Any authorized system can request any portion of content by time range without downloading a file, mounting a drive, or installing a proprietary client. Live content becomes queryable the moment it’s captured. There’s no boundary between live and VOD. You don’t generate a new master file every time you add a track — the system simply references when each element plays alongside the others.

TAMS showed up in multiple places at NAB. AWS featured it in the West Hall booth. LucidLink hosted a session on their stage where AWS EMEA’s Chris Swan walked through how TAMS is transforming fast-turnaround workflows. Mavis Camera announced a beta TAMS integration for Camera-to-Cloud, enabling iPhone-captured content to upload progressively as discrete time-addressed chunks rather than waiting for a finished file. Konstrukt’s open-source Omakase Player added native TAMS playback. Norsk integrated TAMS so live content becomes immediately searchable as it’s being recorded. The specification has been adopted by AWS, Adobe, Sky, and others.

This isn’t replacing anyone’s production storage tomorrow. But it’s the kind of foundational open-standards work that, if adoption accelerates, could eventually reframe the entire conversation about how media is stored, accessed, and exchanged. Every vendor in the cloud NAS race is building a better way to work with files. TAMS is betting the file itself is the problem. Worth watching.

The IP Infrastructure Tipping Point

If there was a single product story that defined NAB 2026, it was the complete, end-to-end 100G Ethernet and SMPTE-2110 broadcast infrastructure stack announced by Blackmagic Design. Not a roadmap. Not a demo. Shipping products: cameras, switchers, recorders, converters, storage, network switches, and a free software-based audio mixer, all native 100G IP, all priced at levels that fundamentally change the cost equation for IP migration.

This wasn’t the only signal. Sony introduced MOXELA, a software-based media processing platform designed to run on commercial off-the-shelf servers. Ross Video’s Ultrix platform passed 5,000 frames deployed globally. FOR-A, a company that has exhibited hardware at NAB since 1980, pivoted its entire booth to software-defined, GPU-based solutions. When a 45-year hardware company says the future is software, the rest of the industry should pay attention.

For facilities planning infrastructure work in the next 12–24 months, the planning question has changed. It’s no longer “should we go IP.” It’s what speed, what timeline, and what migration path protects your current investment while getting you there. And critically: budget for network engineering skills. The transition from SDI to IP is as much a people challenge as a technology one. Most broadcast engineers didn’t grow up managing Ethernet fabrics, and closing that skills gap takes time.

What Caught Us Off Guard

Every NAB has moments that don’t fit neatly into trend narratives. These are the observations that made us stop, reconsider an assumption, or pull a colleague over to look.

Content authenticity is becoming infrastructure. Sony’s PXW-Z300 is the first ENG camera supporting the C2PA standard for video provenance, providing camera-originated proof that footage is real. In a world where AI-generated video approaches photorealism, the ability to establish chain of custody from capture to distribution is shifting from philosophical concern to operational requirement. News organizations will need this first. Everyone else will need it soon after.

Projection-based virtual production went multi-camera. A coalition including Christie, Vizrt, Disguise, HP, NVIDIA, Matrox, and Evertz demonstrated the first publicly shown multi-camera, projection-based VP workflow for broadcast. If projection achieves comparable results to LED volumes at lower cost, the addressable market for virtual production expands dramatically.

AI saved an estimated 34% of production time. That stat circulated widely at the show. Whether it holds up to scrutiny across all environments, it reflects the magnitude of the efficiency claims being made, and the urgency driving adoption.

Vertical video became a first-class production output. AWS Elemental Inference demonstrated automated 16:9 to 9:16 crop generation in 6–10 seconds, running AI in parallel with live video encoding. With Gen Z consuming 88% of streaming content on smartphones, vertical isn’t an afterthought anymore — it’s a primary deliverable.

The creator economy got serious infrastructure. The expanded Creator Lab in Central Hall, co-presented by Adobe and Blackmagic Design, focused not on follower counts but on monetization strategy, IP ownership, and the operational mechanics of running a content business. These creators are growing up, and their infrastructure needs are evolving from modest to serious. The vendors and integrators that figure out how to serve them will own a rapidly growing market segment.

Where It’s All Going

We walked the floor with a specific question: if a client called us the Monday after NAB, what should they actually be doing differently?

Invest in AI that has a job description. If you can name the specific manual workflow an AI tool replaces and measure the hours it saves in the first 90 days, proceed. If the value proposition requires a whiteboard and three hypothetical scenarios, wait.

Design for IP-native. If you’re specifying new infrastructure, SDI-only is legacy. Budget for 25G or 100G Ethernet and include network engineering in your staffing plan.

Get your storage lifecycle in order. If your architecture doesn’t have automated tiering between production, active archive, and deep archive, you’re overspending every month. The tools exist. The excuses don’t.

Start evaluating how your tools connect. The MCP-driven future where AI orchestrates cross-platform workflows is coming faster than the media industry expects. Understand which of your vendors are building toward open connectivity and which are still operating as closed ecosystems.

Put content authenticity on your roadmap. The C2PA standard and camera-to-distribution provenance chains are early, but the regulatory and market forces driving them are accelerating.

The Uncomfortable Summary

NAB 2026 was not a show of breakthroughs. It was a show of accountability. The technologies that the industry spent three years evaluating are mature enough that the evaluation phase is over. The gap between organizations that are deploying and organizations that are still studying is widening.

The vendors winning right now are the ones that understand they’re not selling technology. They’re selling time back to teams that don’t have enough of it.

The integrators winning right now are the ones helping clients navigate architectural decisions with honest trade-off analysis, not product pitches dressed up as consulting.

And the media organizations winning right now are the ones that stopped waiting for perfect clarity and started building with the tools that are ready today.

We’d rather be in that last group. We suspect you would too.

One More Thing: What’s Better Than Reading About a Show?

Having someone walk it with you.

Trade shows are a firehose. Hundreds of vendors. Overlapping product claims. Marketing gloss layered over genuine roadmap movement. A show floor explicitly designed to give you more information than you can process. Most teams walk out of NAB with a stack of business cards and a vague sense that they saw the right things — but no clear picture of what any of it means for their actual environment.

That’s the problem CHESA Consulting “Show Intelligence” exists to solve.

As part of the Chesa Strategic Services Partnership, Show Intelligence is built into the relationship for every event we attend. We come to the show with your team. We curate the vendor list against your real pain points. We facilitate the meetings. We provide an independent read on every claim, every demo, and every roadmap commitment, filtered against what we know about your workflows, your constraints, and your operating model.

After the show, we deliver a structured briefing: conversation summaries drawn from transcripts, announcements researched and verified, open decisions named, and a consolidated action register that tells you exactly what needs to happen next and who owns it. For a recent client, that meant 12 structured vendor engagements across 3 days, with complete full transcripts synthesized, and a post-show document that surfaced three critical decisions, including an infrastructure risk that wasn’t on the original agenda.

That’s not show coverage. That’s operational intelligence.

And it’s not limited to NAB. For any show we don’t already attend (IBC, HPA, InfoComm, or anything else on your calendar), we offer Show Intelligence as a standalone engagement. Pre-planning, vendor scheduling, on-floor facilitation, transcription, and a post-show deliverable. Same product, any event.

If your team is going to a show this year, go with a plan and come back with evidence. That’s what we build.

Categories
Case Studies

From Legacy SDI to Full ST 2110

Modernizing Broadcast at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

How CHESA designed, staged, and deployed a complete SMPTE ST 2110 broadcast infrastructure for one of the largest federal communications operations in Washington, D.C.

AT A GLANCE

Category Details
Client U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHSTV)
Scope Complete broadcast facility modernization: SDI to ST 2110
Key Technologies SMPTE ST 2110 / 2022-7, Cisco Nexus 9000, EVS Cerebrum, Imagine Communications Selenio Network Processor (SNP), Telestream, Riedel, Studio Technologies, TAG Video Systems, Christie, Vizrt 
Production Spaces Main Studio, Auditorium, Great Hall, Room 800
Redundancy End-to-end dual-path ST 2022-7 across all signal flows
Staging 60% of system validated off-site before deployment

THE SITUATION

The broadcast facility at HHS serves a public affairs mission that does not tolerate downtime. HHSTV produces live and recorded programming across multiple production spaces in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, supporting everything from press briefings and executive communications to internal agency programming. 

When the facility’s aging infrastructure began limiting what the production team could deliver, HHS leadership made the decision to modernize. The existing environment was built on a conventional SDI architecture centered on a Utah Scientific router at roughly 64×64. Signals traveled as home-run SDI paths terminating in the Central Equipment Room, with remote production areas connected via SDI-to-fiber extenders. The system operated in 1080i with limited 720p sources. No 3G-SDI. No progressive HD. No UHD capability anywhere in the chain. 

Audio routing was handled ad hoc. Standalone converters from AJA and Blackmagic were inserted into signal paths for embedding and de-embedding as needed, creating fragmented signal chains with undocumented insertion points and increasing troubleshooting complexity during live production. Monitoring relied on a legacy SDI multiviewer and older waveform tools. Display infrastructure consisted of consumer-grade televisions mounted in grid arrangements. 

The system had no redundancy of any kind. No alternate signal paths, no failover, no automated recovery. Any failure required manual intervention, often while a production was live. 

THE APPROACH

CHESA was engaged as the sole systems integrator, responsible for architecture, design, procurement, staging, deployment, and commissioning. The mandate was clear: build it right, build it once. 

The design had to meet four non-negotiable requirements: deterministic behavior under live production conditions, elimination of all single points of failure, consolidation of signal processing into core infrastructure platforms, and reduced dependency on engineering intervention for routine operations. 

Those requirements drove the selection of SMPTE ST 2110 as the transport architecture, with ST 2022-7 seamless protection switching as a baseline across all signal flows. The entire media network was built on a Cisco Nexus 9000 spine-leaf topology implementing two fully independent fabrics that carry identical flows simultaneously. The SDI router was eliminated entirely and replaced with EVS Cerebrum as the orchestration layer, managing signal routing, device control, tally, and UMD coordination through NMOS discovery and connection management. 

At the boundary between the legacy SDI toolchain and the new IP fabric, Imagine Communications Selenio Network Processor (SNP) handles all encapsulation and decapsulation. SNP is what makes the dual-fabric architecture work at the I/O layer: every SDI source is encapsulated into both 2022-7 legs simultaneously, and every SDI destination reconstructs its essence from whichever fabric path is healthy, with no operator action and no perceptible artifact during a path failure. SNP also provides the headroom that makes the rest of the system’s future-ready claims credible. The current operation is HD, but the edge processing layer is already capable of 12G-SDI and UHD, so format expansion will not require an edge hardware refresh. 

A critical design decision was to stage approximately 60% of the system off-site before deployment. The full media fabric was constructed, configured, and tested in a controlled environment, covering network bring-up, switch configuration, PTP timing validation, NMOS registration, and initial endpoint commissioning. This approach substantially reduced on-site integration risk and compressed the deployment timeline. 

HHS provided a temporary production capability during the transition period, enabling a hard cutover rather than a phased migration. On-site execution followed a structured sequence: rack deployment, network bring-up, system integration, and endpoint connection, followed by full production walkthroughs under live conditions.

KEY ENGINEERING CHALLENGES

Timing as Infrastructure

In an ST 2110 environment, timing is not a configuration detail. It is load-bearing infrastructure. Timing failures manifest as audio/video sync loss, frame discontinuities, and in severe cases, complete flow failure. The system uses a redundant pair of Telestream SPG9000 sync pulse generators as GNSS-locked PTP primary reference time clocks, with GPS antennas physically separated on the HHS rooftop to eliminate single-point timing failures. Boundary clock operation is distributed across every switch in the media path. 

Encapsulating SDI Into a Dual-Fabric IP Network

In a facility where cameras, monitors, intercom panels, and ancillary devices still speak SDI, the edge of the IP fabric is where dual-path redundancy either holds together or quietly collapses. Every SDI source has to be encapsulated into ST 2110 essence and injected into both fabrics at the same time. Every SDI destination has to reconstruct video, audio, and ANC data from whichever fabric is healthy, with seamless ST 2022-7 hitless switching when the other one is not. 

The facility uses Imagine Communications SNP as the edge gateway throughout. Each SNP performs SDI-to-IP encapsulation and decapsulation, frame synchronization, color and format conversion, and signal processing in a single device. From the network’s perspective, each SNP is a native ST 2110 endpoint, discovered and managed through NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 and routed via EVS Cerebrum. 

Three architectural outcomes follow directly from this choice: 

  • Simultaneous dual-fabric injection. Sources are encapsulated into both 2022-7 legs concurrently. There is no active/standby behavior to manage at the edge. 
  • Native 12G-SDI and UHD headroom. The current operation is HD, but the edge processing layer is already capable of 12G and 4K. Format expansion is a configuration change, not a hardware swap. 
  • Stream count expansion without re-architecture. Additional channels are provisioned within the existing SNP footprint or by adding capacity to the same platform, without disrupting the topology. 

This is the layer that makes phrases like ‘software-defined routing’ and ‘UHD-ready infrastructure’ actually mean something operationally. Without a deterministic, redundant, NMOS-managed edge, those phrases are marketing. 

Bridging Dante and ST 2110 Audio

The audio system required bridging two fundamentally different timing domains. The production console is a Yamaha CL5 operating natively on Dante, which uses a 1 ms packet boundary. The ST 2110 fabric transports audio on ST 2110-30 at a 125 µs packet time. A Studio Technologies Model 5682 provides 64-channel bidirectional conversion, but resolving the timing alignment required direct analysis of the relevant SMPTE standards and iterative testing with the bridge vendor to validate behavior under production load. This is representative of a broader pattern in ST 2110 integration: domain boundaries concentrate integration risk, and vendor documentation alone is not a substitute for validation. 

Vendor Interoperability in Practice

The system uses NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 for discovery and connection management. In principle, NMOS provides a vendor-neutral control surface. In practice, CHESA’s integration team encountered implementation-level differences across vendors, including inconsistencies in how frame rate information was represented in SDP descriptions. These issues are resolvable, but they underscore the importance of hands-on interoperability testing during equipment evaluation rather than relying solely on compliance declarations.

THE RESULTS

HHS now operates a fully modernized broadcast facility built for the next decade. The infrastructure supports current HD production with a clear architectural path to UHD. Format expansion and workflow changes can be achieved through configuration rather than physical infrastructure modifications. 

Capability What It Means
Full ST 2022-7 Redundancy Dual-path protection switching across every signal flow. No single points of failure.
Deterministic SDI/IP Edge Imagine Communications SNP performs encap, decap, and processing at every SDI boundary with simultaneous dual-fabric injection and seamless protection switching.
Software-Defined Routing Physical crosspoint switching replaced with network-based flow management via EVS Cerebrum and NMOS. 
12G and UHD-Ready Infrastructure  Native ST 2110 transport plus 12G-capable edge processing via Imagine Communications SNP. Format expansion through configuration, not construction.
Unified Wireless Intercom  Riedel Bolero coverage across four production spaces under a single coordinated system. 
Three-Tier Monitoring  TAG multiviewer for operations, Telestream PRISM for T&M, Inspect 2110 for deep diagnostics. 
Professional Display  Christie LED videowalls driven by Vizrt Multiplay replace consumer TV grids. 

The transition from consumer display grids to Christie LED videowalls driven by Vizrt Multiplay gives operators a configurable visual canvas rather than a fixed array of independent screens. Wireless intercom coverage via Riedel Bolero spans four discrete production spaces, enabling production coordination across the entire facility without reliance on fixed panels. 

WHY IT WORKED

Stage first, integrate once. Off-site staging and pre-validation of the media fabric is the primary risk management mechanism on a project of this complexity. Building and testing 60% of the system before it ever reached the site compressed the deployment timeline and eliminated categories of integration risk entirely.

Treat timing and multicast like structural engineering. GNSS-locked redundant PTP, boundary clock distribution across the fabric, and rigorous IGMP and QoS policy are what make an ST 2110 system behave deterministically. These are design elements, not tuning tasks.

Design the edge for the architecture you want, not the one you have. Selecting Imagine Communications SNP at the SDI/IP boundary meant that simultaneous dual-fabric injection, NMOS-managed routing, and a clean path to 12G and UHD were architectural properties of the system, not retrofits. Edge gateway selection is one of the highest-leverage decisions on any 2110 facility build, because it determines what redundancy, scalability, and format expansion actually cost later. 

Validate interoperability through integration, not spec sheets. Compliance declarations are a starting point. Real-world interoperability requires testing with specific attention to implementation-level details at domain boundaries.

Full accountability from architecture through commissioning. CHESA carried systems integration responsibility across every phase: design, procurement, staging, deployment, commissioning, and ongoing support. A single accountable integrator eliminates the gaps between disciplines that produce delays and finger-pointing on complex projects.

READY TO MODERNIZE YOUR FACILITY?

If your broadcast or production facility is running on aging SDI infrastructure, you are not alone. Many federal agencies, sports organizations, and enterprise media operations are facing the same decision HHS faced: continue patching legacy systems, or build a foundation designed for the next decade. 

CHESA provides architecture assessment, detailed design, and complete deployment and commissioning services for broadcast facility modernization projects. We bring both the broadcast engineering expertise and the IP network engineering discipline that ST 2110 transitions require. 

Categories
Events & Trade Shows

Inside the Broadcast Revolution: Key Takeaways from DCMUG’s Night at Monumental Sports

On March 9th, the DC Media Users Group (DCMUG) gathered for what turned out to be one of its best events yet. Hosted by CHESA and a roster of top-tier technology sponsors, the evening kicked off at Clyde’s of Gallery Place before moving into an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the Monumental Sports Network Production Studio and Control Rooms at Capital One Arena. The night capped off with a suite for the Washington Capitals vs. Calgary Flames matchup.

The real main event, though, happened in between the tour and the puck drop: a wide-open Q&A session featuring a panel of practitioners who pulled no punches about what it actually takes to build, run, and future-proof a modern broadcast facility. The conversation touched on IP infrastructure, workforce evolution, cybersecurity, and the age-old question of when cutting-edge technology is the right call, and when it isn’t.

Here’s a deep dive into everything that came out of the room.

MEET THE VOICES IN THE ROOM

Leading the discussion was Jon Bednar, Founder and Principal Consultant of Codeso, and the architect behind the Monumental Sports Network facility, which the group had just toured. Jon is SMPTE 2110 Certified, a former Navy broadcast engineer and instructor. He has designed IP-based broadcast environments for clients ranging from the United Nations and the NFL to HHS and the US Department of State. His real-world candor set the tone for the entire conversation.

The CHESA team, rounding out the panel, included:

  • Patrick Johnson, Director of Federal Sales at CHESA, opened the event and kept the conversation moving.
  • Jason Paquin, CEO of CHESA, moderated the Q&A and brought context from years of client-facing discovery and integration work.
  • Jason “Pep” Pepino, Director of Media Systems Design & Engineering at CHESA, weighed in on the technical and design side throughout.
  • Roger Sherman, Senior Solutions Consultant at CHESA and former Chief Broadcast Technology Officer at Voice of America, offered a rare federal practitioner’s perspective on the 2110 decision.

The audience was a mix of federal agency broadcast professionals, including teams from HHS and HUD, and commercial media operators from around the DC metro area. The back-and-forth was as honest as it gets.

THE HARDEST PART OF A 2110 BUILD ISN’T THE TECHNOLOGY

When Jason Pepino asked Jon Bednar what the biggest challenge was in upgrading the Monumental Sports facility, a project that ran from conceptual design in 2021 through its launch in May 2024, the answer was immediate.

“Honestly, the people.”

The facility had been the NBC RSN operation, running on legacy SDI infrastructure for 10 to 12 years. The engineering team knew that world intimately. The upgrade took them from a traditional Grass Valley-based routing infrastructure to Panasonic’s Kairos production switcher and an EVS-based IP routing environment.  It would be hard to find a more dramatic technology transition in the broadcast world.

“A lot of legacy engineers lived in the SDI world for so long, and then everything changed,” Jon explained. “You can install the best, most well-engineered platform in the world, but if you don’t have people that can operate and maintain it, it’s only as good as the people.”

The philosophical shift between SDI and 2110 is significant. In an SDI environment, troubleshooting is reactive and tactile: plug in a meter, see the video, hear the audio, wait for something to break, and fix it. In 2110, that approach doesn’t work.

“With 2110, you have to be proactive. You constantly have to monitor and massage it. If something breaks, you can’t just put a meter on it. You have to know where the packet goes, where it was lost, what the fail rate is, whether it’s the red or the blue side.”

What training methodology worked best? Shadowing. Walking engineers through the commissioning process in real time, letting them ask questions, observe, and build intuition alongside the system as it came to life, proved far more effective than formal classroom instruction alone.

The goal Jon described for a well-designed 2110 environment is elegantly simple: an operator who has spent their entire career on SDI should be able to sit down at the console and not know the difference. The route button makes the route. Switch takes the camera. Fader up means louder. The IP world underneath is invisible to the production operator.

But for the engineers maintaining it? They need to think like network professionals. And some people’s brains, he acknowledged honestly, simply aren’t wired for that — and that’s okay. Those individuals can still contribute in production engineering roles that don’t require deep packet-level troubleshooting.

MONITORING IN A 2110 WORLD: A LAYERED APPROACH

Jason Paquin pushed Jon to talk specifics about monitoring, because it looks fundamentally different in a 2110 environment than in the SDI playbook. What Jon described across both the Capital One Arena and COA North (the off-site production facility) was a layered diagnostic stack, each tool serving a distinct purpose.

EVS serves as the orchestration platform and sits at the foundation. Its APIs integrate with Cisco NDFC and Arista EOS, providing the first level of visibility: bandwidth utilization per port, multicast flow tracking, and signal routing analytics. When a route fails to take, Jon’s first check is bandwidth saturation — “if it’s at 96%, you know why the route dropped.”

Telestream’s Prism Inspect is the next layer. When a signal looks off, routing it into Inspect immediately reveals the full ST 2110 flow: STP file comparisons between the red and blue redundant paths, audio presence, and stream metadata. With the ability to monitor roughly 32 signals simultaneously, it provides a broad at-a-glance health check.

TAG sits on the monitor wall, delivering alarm-based monitoring with penalty boxes and configurable thresholds, with nearly 1,000 alarms available out of the box. It gives operators a broad “something’s wrong” signal. Crucially, though, TAG tells you that you lost video, not why. That’s where the next layer comes in.

Providious handles deeper network-level packet analysis, called in when packet drops or RTP errors need investigation at the multicast level.

And underlying all of it: PTP timing. Precision Time Protocol is the heartbeat of any 2110 plant, and as Jon put it with a laugh, “It’s easy until it’s not.” A disproportionate number of mysterious signal issues can be traced back to PTP drift.

Roger Sherman raised a great observation: SDI alarm systems would often just flag “illegal video” — technically accurate but diagnostically useless. The 2110 monitoring ecosystem, by contrast, actually points you in the right direction. It doesn’t always hand you the answer, but it gives you a direction to start digging.

CONSTRUCTION DELAYS, THE CAPS’ WIN STREAK, AND ADAM SANDLER

One of the lighter, but genuinely instructive, threads of the evening was Jon’s account of what it took to actually complete the build.

The conceptual design started in 2021. The facility launched in May 2024. The biggest delays? Construction, on the heels of COVID, with its material and parts shortages. Arista had lead times of up to 11 months at one point.

But the arena portion of the build had a uniquely Washington problem. The agreement with the city required maintaining operational continuity throughout construction. The start date was locked. It could not move.

“Every time the Caps won, our timeline got shorter and shorter,” Jon said. “My wife would ask what was wrong, and I’d say, ‘They won again.’ Every win pushed us further.”

When the Capitals finally lost, he was the only person in Washington celebrating.

The first live event in the newly completed facility? An Adam Sandler show. Not exactly a stress test for the broadcast infrastructure, but the team used it to run some routing and cameras, a warm-up before the real thing.

Monumental has since built a Verizon dark fiber loop connecting the arena, the Capitals’ practice facility, and the Mystics’ arena. JPEG XS is traversing that loop today, with plans to eventually move all 2110 traffic across all facilities from a centralized production hub.

2110 VS. NDI: THE HONEST ANSWER IS “IT DEPENDS”

One of the most valuable portions of the evening was a direct question from Jason Paquin: setting budget aside, what are the actual deciding factors between going 2110 versus SDI?

The three panelists each offered a different lens.

Jason Pepino’s answer was scalability. In a traditional SDI router environment, a 128×128 frame is essentially maxed at day one. Adding capacity means a second router, tie lines between them, and rapidly escalating costs. With 2110, scaling is adding a network switch. For organizations with growth ambitions, that flexibility is meaningful even if the upfront investment is higher.

Roger Sherman’s answer came from experience at Voice of America. The driving factors there weren’t prestige or future-proofing for its own sake; they were practical. Distributing gateways and endpoints across the facility meant they weren’t pulling all signal paths back to a single central location, saving on copper runs, core holes, and installation labor. A second driver was resolution flexibility: some VOA services operated in SD, while others, particularly Eastern European bureaus, were pushing 4K. A single 2110 environment handled both simultaneously.

But Sherman was equally clear about the limits. He recalled a conversation with TV Martí, a much smaller operation that wanted to pursue 2110. His advice was direct: don’t. “It was prohibitive for their scale and their needs.”

Jon Bednar’s framework was the simplest: always ask why. If a client says they want 2110, his first question is what problem are they trying to solve. He described a client in New York City who wanted a full IP infrastructure, and when pressed, couldn’t articulate why. They ended up with NDI and SDI, and it worked perfectly for them. “They have no roadmap to go to 4K. They’re not scaling across multiple facilities. Save the money and put it somewhere else.”

For organizations making major capital investments, particularly federal customers who may not see a comparable budget for a decade or more, Jon and the panel were aligned on one thing: invest in the fiber backbone now, regardless of your current technology decision. The labor cost of the pull is the significant cost. The incremental cost of pulling 512 strands instead of 96 is comparatively small, and fiber is future-proof in a way that no endpoint device is. The Monumental team pulled 512 strands to each redundant rack. They needed 96 on day one.

THE ENTERPRISE NETWORKING PROBLEM: BROADCAST AND IT STILL DON’T SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE

An attendee from a federal agency raised a challenge that clearly resonated with most of the room: their broadcast and networking teams are siloed, they’re operating on enterprise networks not designed for video, and getting approval for the specific switches needed for a media production environment, even for NDI, is an uphill battle.

Jason Pepino was direct: broadcast media networks and enterprise IT networks have to be physically separated. Not VLANs; separate switches. The bandwidth profiles differ, the multicast requirements differ, and the update cadence for broadcast systems (where an OS may be intentionally frozen to maintain certification and stability) conflicts directly with enterprise IT’s security patching cycles.

“Corporate IT guys are going to ask why you’re passing so much bandwidth. And you still have to keep up on security, but some of these systems can only get to a certain point because the provider only brought the OS up so far.”

Jon added a practical tool for navigating internal budget conversations: engage Cisco and Arista directly. Both companies have media-specific technical teams with documentation that explicitly explains why a general-purpose enterprise switch won’t work on a broadcast media network, and why the media-optimized variant is required. That documentation can be decisive when you’re trying to make the case to an IT procurement team or an agency budget officer.

Roger Sherman reframed the underlying problem: it’s a trust and language issue as much as a technical one. If a broadcast engineer can walk into a conversation with enterprise IT and demonstrate security fluency, speak to how the media network is segmented, how threats are mitigated, what the exposure surface actually looks like, they have a much better chance of getting the hardware and support they need.

“Once you can speak the language, you can get them to trust you. Work with them together.” He also noted the challenge that many in the room nodded at: just when you build that trust with someone on the IT side, they get promoted or leave.

CYBERSECURITY: THE CONVERSATION THE BROADCAST INDUSTRY CANNOT IGNORE

Perhaps the most sobering thread of the evening was cybersecurity. As broadcast infrastructure migrates to IP, the attack surface expands, and bad actors are already active.

“Do you guys witness bad actors frequently?” someone asked.

“Frequently,” Jon replied. “Every facility I’ve ever worked at, there are metrics where it was 10,000 hits a day on the external firewall.”

This isn’t theoretical. A 2110 plant is not a closed SDI environment with copper everywhere. The orchestration platform that used to be a massive, dedicated piece of hardware is now a virtual machine. A single compromised VM could take down an entire broadcast infrastructure — audio, control, tally, routing, everything. If the facility generates revenue through live events or chargebacks, the business impact of a successful breach is severe.

Roger Sherman outlined a pragmatic approach to segmentation: certain assets, particularly ingest encoders taking feeds via SDI, can be placed in a DMZ outside the inner firewall. If someone compromises that encoder, the incoming signal is already SDI. The blast radius is limited. “I don’t care if you hack that encoder,” he said. “Put it outside the firewall. I’ve got fewer ports to worry about. You have fewer ports to worry about. And we can proceed.”

The architecture Jon used at Monumental started with the broadcast network as a complete island. Third-party signal delivery (like connectivity to Encompass in Atlanta) went over dedicated dark fiber with no shared firewall exposure — a direct line, touching nothing else. As operational needs grew and facility-to-facility connectivity became necessary, proper dual-firewall segmentation was added. Today, anything that crosses the public internet, Zixi feeds, and similar, passes through two firewalls. Monumental also hired dedicated cybersecurity staff specifically for broadcast and 2110 security.

Jason Paquin connected the cybersecurity conversation to a historical pattern: when facilities moved from SD to HD, broadcast engineering and IT had to merge for the first time, and the friction was real. He recalled being a young engineer watching a broadcast, and IT teams fighting across a conference table at WABC New York during a SAN installation, neither willing to acknowledge the other’s expertise. The current transition is the same collision, but at a higher level of complexity, with cybersecurity now in the mix.

His framing for the discovery conversation resonated throughout the room: if a client’s plan is to have their general IT team manage the broadcast network switches, someone needs to stop and calculate the cost of being down, and the cost of chasing issues with people who don’t have the right expertise. When that number starts approaching the cost of the proper solution, the conversation changes.

THE WORKFORCE IS CHANGING — AND THAT’S JUST THE TRUTH

Woven through every topic of the evening was a theme that nobody introduced directly, but that kept surfacing: the broadcast engineering workforce is in the middle of a generational shift, and the industry is moving whether people are ready or not.

“Legacy engineers leave, and they’re going to be backfilled by a broadcast IT guy,” Jon said. “A lot of the hires I see now for day-two support, it’s not the broadcast engineer from ABC. It’s a 25-year-old with an IT degree who also streams. That’s the perfect candidate for broadcast IT engineering. They understand enough about video. They understand more about networking. That’s just the blunt truth.”

The job postings already reflect this. Almost universally, broadcast engineering roles now require Cisco, Arista, and Layer 3 networking experience. They don’t ask whether you can troubleshoot an SDI frame.

Jon’s advice to his own teams, going back to when he ran AV integration in Baltimore: conduct 3 interviews a year. Not necessarily to leave, but to read the market. See what skills employers are asking for. The job requirements tell you where the industry is headed more clearly than any conference keynote.

The through line, as Jason Paquin framed it, is that IP migration isn’t just a technology change — it’s an operational, staffing, and cultural change, all at once. Organizations that treat it as a technology procurement project and ignore the people side will find themselves with a world-class system they can’t fully operate or maintain.

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS

This DCMUG event was made possible by the generous support of our sponsors. Here’s a brief introduction to each:

Backlight

Josh Norman (President & CRO) and Alex Burke joined us, representing Backlight, makers of Iconik — one of the leading media asset management platforms in the broadcast industry. Iconik was referenced throughout the evening as a go-to MAM solution for media organizations managing large volumes of content.

EVS

Bevan Gibson (North American Operations) and Will Walz (Northeast) represented EVS. You likely know EVS for sports replay — if you’ve watched any live sport, you’ve seen their technology at work. EVS has a significant installation at Monumental Sports, including the EVS Neuron conversion platform that Jon discussed extensively during the Q&A. They also do control, orchestration infrastructure, and robotics.

LiveU

Mike Mahoney (VP of Growth Markets, US & Canada) and Jared Brody represented LiveU. Best known for broadcast-grade bonded cellular encoding and transmission, LiveU is now pushing into bonded IP over WAN and LEO satellite connectivity, with AI-enhanced workflows in development. If you’re watching a live news report from a field location, there’s a good chance LiveU is how it’s getting back to the studio.

Studio Network Solutions (SNS)

Chance Hayworth (Northeast Territory Manager & DoD Territory Manager) represented SNS, a company specializing in high-performance shared storage and complete workflow solutions. SNS also serves as the OEM manufacturer for Ross Video devices and works closely with the CHESA Federal team on a range of opportunities.

Telestream

Bob Barnshaw and engineer Dave Norman represented Telestream. As Jason Pepino noted to close out the sponsor introductions: “You’d be hard pressed to find a broadcast facility without something Telestream inside.” Their Prism Inspect platform was central to the monitoring discussion all evening. They also offer transcoding, test and measurement tools, and Stanza, their captioning application.

LucidLink

Rich Warren introduced LucidLink — a cloud-based storage collaboration platform that mounts as local, shared storage and is globally accessible. The short version: it puts everyone in the same studio, regardless of where they physically are.

ABOUT DCMUG

The DC Media Users Group holds quarterly events in the DC metro area, bringing together federal and commercial broadcast professionals to share what’s working and what isn’t. The format is deliberately practitioner-focused: not vendor pitches, but real conversations from people in the trenches.

Coming up: DCMUG will have a presence at NAB in Las Vegas, followed by an event alongside the Bits by the Bay Conference, held right on the Chesapeake. If you haven’t been to Bits by the Bay before, it’s worth looking into.

If you work in broadcast, media production, or AV integration in the DC metro area — whether in a federal agency, a commercial facility, or somewhere in between — this is a community worth being part of. The conversations are real, the people have done the work, and you’ll almost certainly walk out with something you can use.

Well, and there’s usually a sports game or concert involved. That doesn’t hurt either.

Diagnosis Before Prescription

At CHESA, we dont bring a pre-packaged answer in search of a question. Our primary mission is to first understand your unique challenges and needs, and then architect the optimal solutions tailored to you.