Understanding Standards: Catena

Standards drive many technologies that we use in our day-to-day lives, from media, to medicine, to food production—yet, the average person is not aware of the invisible role that they play. As a Standards Development Organization (SDO) with over a century of accomplishments, SMPTE and its members strive to create a more interoperable world. In this series, we explore SMPTE Standards in a way that’s easy to understand. Today’s Standard: SMPTE ST 2138, also known as Catena.

Currently in Public Committee Draft (PCD), Catena is an initiative to define a unified, open, secure, and vendor-agnostic control plane for media systems. Essentially, the aim is to create more efficient, simple methods for controlling everything from very small devices and microservices to the most complex physical devices and services in use by the media industry. Crucially, Catena has zero-trust security and AI capabilities built in from the start.

“Catena represents one of the most ambitious and essential standardization efforts SMPTE has undertaken in recent years,” said Chris Lennon, Director of Standards Strategy for Ross Video and a SMPTE Fellow. “With media workflows now spanning on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments, the need for a unified, secure, and vendor-agnostic control plane is more urgent than ever. By making the PCD versions of the entire Catena suite available for free to the industry, we’re inviting the broader community to help shape a solution that works for everyone, regardless of where their services reside or the platform they use.”

Current Catena PCDs include:

- ST 2138-10 Catena Model: This document specifies schema for plug-and-play communication and control of media services and devices across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid cloud/on-premises platforms.

- ST 2138-11 gRPC Connection Type: This document defines the use of a gRPC connection manager with Catena.

- ST 2138-12 REST Connection Type: This document specifies the use of a REST connection manager with Catena.

- ST 2138-19 Protocol Objects: This document defines the objects that are exchanged between participants using the ST 2138 protocol.

- ST 2138-50 Authenticity - Integrity - Access Control - Confidentiality and Availability: This document specifies how to securely utilize the Catena control protocol with respect to authenticity, integrity, access control, confidentiality and availability.

Hundreds of proprietary protocols are used today to control media devices, creating a control plane challenge across the media industry. In defining and standardizing Catena, SMPTE aims to provide the first and only standardized open-source solution to this challenge.

Catena promises to be one of the most dynamic, game changing Standards SMPTE has ever produced. We helped to shift the landscape of media over IP with ST 2110, and are now poised to do the same for control with ST 2138.

For more information on SMPTE Standards, visit smpte.org. Stay tuned for more simple explanations of SMPTE Standards that make everyone’s lives better! For more information on SMPTE, our standards, education initiatives, and events, please connect with us!