Build up DMF: AMWA’s new specification NMOS simplifies monitoring and trouble-shooting
By Shirish Nadkarni
A fair share of the attention of visitors to the recently concluded IBC2026 in Amsterdam was hogged by AMWA (Advanced Media Workflow Association), working with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to host demonstrations of NMOS (Networked Media Open Specifications) BCP-008 Minimum Status Reporting (MSR) for Multi-Vendor IP Device Status Reporting (DSR).
As broadcasters transition to IP infrastructures, operations teams can be overwhelmed by hundreds of vendor-specific alarms, many of which offer little help in identifying what needs immediate attention.
The AMWA-EBU partnership brought together leading broadcast technology suppliers to demonstrate interoperable implementations of NMOS BCP-008 MSR, a specification designed to give operators a consistent view of device health across multi-vendor IP environments and help them identify the problems that matter most — across equipment from various manufacturers, cutting down on confusing, vendor-specific alarms.
As media facilities become increasingly software-defined, distributed, and IP-based, the future depends on manufacturers, broadcasters, systems integrators, and standards organisations, working together to create solutions that are practical, interoperable, and ready for real-world deployment.
AMWA and the EBU set up a full-size traffic light display on the EBU stand to demonstrate simplified, multi-vendor IP device status reporting. The demonstrations successfully showed products from multiple vendors reporting status consistently across a multi-vendor IP environment, by giving operators a common view of device health.
In the “Ask Me Anything” sessions with members of the JT-DMF (Joint Task Force on Dynamic Media Facilities) community, visitors could observe how systems responded to packet loss, link disconnects, packet jitter, PTP grandmaster changes, stream validation errors, and other common operational errors.
“These demonstrations weren’t simply about showing technology,” said Stefan Ledergerber, NMOS Control project lead & CEO of Simplexity. “They were about demonstrating that multi-vendor interoperability is real, practical, and ready for deployment.”
Participating companies included such impressive industry names as Sony, Riedel, Simplexity, Arkona, DirectOut, EVS, Leader, Nevion, Pebble and Providius. The companies had spent months preparing their BCP-008 implementations to work together.
“To have products from each of these participating companies implementing BCP-008 at once was the largest commitment to NMOS since the introduction of IS-04 and IS-05,” said Ledergerber.
“It showed the necessity of status reporting within our industry. We should applaud these manufacturers for having a vision for an interoperable, open and flexible future of IP, and for bringing that vision to reality. The industry hasn’t yet mastered the complexity of ST 2110, much less DMF (Dynamic Media Facility). Training broadcast engineers to become IT experts doesn’t scale. BCP-008 is an important ingredient to scale.”
Brad Gilmer, executive director of AMWA, added, “The broadcast industry has always made its greatest progress through collaboration. These demonstrations showed what’s possible when vendors, end users, and integrators come together around open specifications to solve real operational challenges.
“BCP-008 gives broadcasters a practical, standardised way to understand what’s happening across multi-vendor IP facilities, helping them operate those facilities with greater confidence. Leading manufacturers demonstrating interoperable implementations together at IBC is an important milestone for our industry.”
Gilmer explained the concept with an example: “If I were still working as a station engineer in Albuquerque, NM, and I heard people talking about Dynamic Media Facilities, I’d probably think: ‘Okay, what problem is this actually solving for me?’
“Because from where I’d be standing, the facility might look fine at first glance. It’s doing what it was designed to do. I’ve built a workflow that supports the evening news, some local programming, and maybe production of a few commercial spots every now and then.
“But when you really look at it, you start to notice the limitations. A lot of that expensive equipment is sitting idle most of the day. It’s there for the morning and evening newscast, but not much else. Or maybe there is a colour corrector that only gets used every once in a while for commercial production.
“And if you want to use the space for other purposes — let’s say to launch a high-end podcast, produce digital content, or reconfigure the space for a different kind of production — it may not make sense to go through the trouble of reconfiguration just to support a few extra production hours. Even though the facility has a lot of capability, it’s not optimised for what you need, or it is sitting idle. This is really the key point.
“Even as more processing moves into software and servers, many of us are still thinking about it the old way, like we’re just replacing one box with another. But what broadcasters need now is something more flexible.
“You want to be able to chain together resources for different types of productions at different times, and you don’t want to pay for capabilities you don’t need.
“That’s the pressure a lot of facilities are under right now. And that’s where Dynamic Media Facilities (DMF) comes in. Broadcast engineers are starting to ask: are our facilities actually working as efficiently as they could be?”
The JT-DMF, another AMWA-EBU collaboration, hosted informal AMA sessions to discuss moving toward pure IT-based, Kubernetes-ready production architectures.
Sessions featured prominent architects and engineers from organisations like Paramount, SVT, CBC, Lawo, Arista, and Grass Valley discussing software-defined media transition and ST 2110 alignment.
When asked whether Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) was a concept or a product, Willem Vermost, Senior Media Technology Architect at the EBU, where he guides members through their transition to live IP, said, “DMF is a vision to allow companies, media organisations and vendors to build a software-based infrastructure that is dynamic, scalable to meet the needs of broadcasters today.
“So you cannot buy DMF, but you can build a product in an organised fashion that will help to do a migration from hardware to software. I believe our industry can learn a lot from the IT industry.
“Many people have heard about the TCP stack or the OSI model where you build a complex architecture by layering much simpler technologies on top of one another.”
Basically, DMF explains how complex media applications can be built using a layered architecture that starts from the hardware, and goes all the way up to the actual application with which content is created.
“When the industry comes together around open specifications and shared architectures, everyone benefits,” Vermost added. “Broadcasters gain greater flexibility and interoperability. Manufacturers can innovate on a common foundation. Systems integrators can build more predictable, interoperable solutions. And the entire industry moves forward together.”
It is interesting to observe what a Dynamic Media Facility looks like. Instead of fixed, hardware-defined workflows, DMF introduces a fundamentally different model. Workflows are built from modular, autonomous functions. They perform one and only one function. These atomic functions can be chained together to create different workflows.
“Because resources are shared, not dedicated, facilities can be reconfigured on demand,” said Gilmer. “That means the same space can produce a commercial in the morning, switch to a podcast in the afternoon, and run the evening news at night, drawing the appropriate resources from a pool, and then orchestrating the workflow you need, when you need it. No more expensive equipment sitting idle most of the day.
“Once you move into a world of software-based processing, shared compute, IP-connected devices, and dynamic workflows, the challenge isn’t just having the resources. It’s knowing what’s available, where it is, what it does, whether it’s in use or can be scheduled, and how it connects to the rest of the signal chain.
“You need a common way to discover resources, call up the right function, connect workflow components dynamically, and do it all in a way that works across systems and vendors. You need to be sure you don’t spin up functions that consume more compute resources than you have available, and you also need a way to keep things synchronised across the workflows you create. These are exactly the problems the JT-DMF is tackling.”
Several broadcast equipment manufacturers like Arkona Technologies are heavily integrated with the AMWA, primarily through the development, testing, and adoption of open IP broadcast standards. The German company serves as a major technology provider that brings AMWA’s software-driven frameworks to life in real-world live broadcast environments.
Their relationship centres on several key pillars, viz. core adoption of NMOS specifications, industry interoperability and demos. Arkona is a frequent participant in AMWA-hosted interoperability events and joint task forces.
Arkona collaborated directly with AMWA, EBU, and other major manufacturers like Sony, Riedel, and EVS to implement and demonstrate BCP-008 Minimum Status Reporting. This standard helps operators manage massive IP routing facilities by giving multi-vendor devices a unified way to report critical health data — such as packet loss or link disconnects — without overwhelming broadcast engineers with minor alarms.
Arkona contributes to the roadmap of the JT-DMF, to advance cloud-based, software-defined media infrastructure. Through this tight alignment with AMWA, Arkona helps ensure that the future of television production remains vendor-neutral, highly scalable, and anchored in open-source IP standards
Similarly, Riedel Communications integrates with AMWA by supporting its open (NMOS) standards to ensure seamless hardware and software interoperability in IP-based broadcast environments. Riedel products support AMWA NMOS IS-04 (Discovery and Registration) and AMWA NMOS IS-05 (Device Connection Management) for automated device recognition and signal routing.
Riedel offers solutions like the hiNMOS registry service and developer troubleshooting apps like the NMOS Explorer to manage IP media streams. It also actively participates JT-NM tested events, and has hosted them at its Wuppertal, Germany headquarters — to validate compliance with AMWA NMOS and SMPTE ST 2110 standards
As Gilmer observes, “You only use what you actually need. Instead of investing in dedicated CAPEX hardware, DMF uses resources mostly on a SaaS basis:
- Available on demand
- Invisible when not in use
- Scalable up or down
- Scheduled as needed
“The missing pieces: interoperability and orchestration. And that is where NMOS BCP-008 Minimum Status Reporting (MSR) for Multi-Vendor IP Device Status Reporting (DSR) comes in.”
