The ST 2138 suite was built for broadcast, but its security baseline and transport-agnostic design make it a credible answer to a Pro AV problem the industry has mostly avoided.
At NAB 2026 in Las Vegas, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) used the show to push for vendor adoption of Catena, its new open control standard for media devices and services. The standard, formally the ST 2138 suite, has been working its way through SMPTE’s process since its initial introduction in June 2025, and Chris Lennon, senior director of standards strategy at Ross Video and a SMPTE Fellow, told AVNation that the implementation-ready documents are now publicly posted on SMPTE’s site and on GitHub.
For AVNation’s readers, the question is not whether broadcasters need this. They almost certainly do. The question is whether Pro AV needs it. Lennon’s argument is that the answer is yes, perhaps more urgently than broadcast.
What Catena is and what it replaces
Catena is a control protocol. It does not carry video or audio; it tells devices and services what to do. In a broadcast facility, that means everything from a master switcher to a small format converter that flips video between portrait and landscape. In a corporate AV environment, the equivalent is everything from a Q-SYS core to a video-conferencing room system to a digital-signage player.
Today, every one of those devices speaks its own dialect. Lennon said Ross Video alone has to support more than 200 proprietary control protocols to make its products work alongside everyone else’s. He could not estimate the industry-wide total. “Every facility has that guy who knows how to make this stuff work,” he said. Most of those protocols, he added, are unencrypted plain text on the network.
That last point is the security argument. Control traffic that was harmless when facilities were islanded becomes an attack surface as soon as those facilities touch the public internet, the cloud, or anything resembling a converged enterprise network. The threat model is no longer “someone turns off the projector”; it is, in Lennon’s framing, someone inserting unwanted content into a live feed, redirecting a camera, or replacing on-screen graphics with something the broadcaster did not approve.
Catena is built on widely accepted IT-industry security primitives rather than anything bespoke. That is deliberate: SMPTE’s working group chose not to invent new cryptography, and to rely on what enterprise IT already audits, patches, and trusts.
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The agentic-AI piece
The second design tenet is self-description. Each Catena-compliant device announces what it is and what it can do. A video server advertises that it can play, pause, skip, and adjust audio levels; a switcher advertises its inputs and outputs. That description layer is what allows a large language model or other AI agent to control the device intelligibly, without per-vendor custom integration.
Lennon said Ross has already deployed an early version of the pattern in a high-stakes live production: a U.S. presidential election broadcast roughly 18 months ago, with an audience he put at more than 100 million viewers, in which on-air talent voice-triggered graphics and map drill-downs that had previously required a producer pressing buttons. He declined to name the network. The system was trained on the talent’s vocal patterns over several weeks, and according to the customer, performed more accurately than the human operators it replaced. That deployment predates Catena. The point Lennon is making is that any vendor who implements ST 2138 inherits AI-readiness automatically.
Why this matters for Pro AV
Pro AV’s control landscape is, if anything, more fragmented than broadcast’s. Crestron, Q-SYS, Extron, and the major video-conferencing platforms each operate something close to a walled garden, with interoperability at the edges and a great deal of system-integrator labor in the middle. Lennon’s pitch (and it is a pitch, however well grounded) is that Catena is transport-agnostic, not tied to SMPTE ST 2110, NMOS, or any other broadcast-specific framework, and just as applicable to a corporate town hall, a stadium video board, or a higher-education classroom as to a network operations center.
The security framing is what is likely to get IT leaders’ attention. AVNation’s audience has spent the last several years inheriting AV systems as those systems migrated onto the corporate network, and the standard objection from IT is some version of “I’m not putting that on my network.” A SMPTE-blessed control protocol with a credible security story is exactly the kind of thing that helps those conversations end differently.
There is also a lineage worth flagging for AV readers who recognize the name. Catena is built on the foundation of OpenGear, Ross’s 16-year-old proprietary control protocol used by an installed base Lennon estimated at 150-plus partners. OpenGear is not being deprecated, and the two can coexist; Catena is what OpenGear would have been if it were starting today, with security and AI control built in and SMPTE rather than a single vendor stewarding the standard.
Adoption mechanics
Standards live or die on uptake, and Lennon was candid that Catena’s success is not yet assured. SMPTE, the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), and IABM co-hosted a vendor meeting on the Monday of NAB to make the case directly to manufacturers. A multi-vendor plug fest is targeted for summer 2026, virtual, in person, or both.
Adoption ultimately depends on whether end-user RFPs start requiring it. “We do things because we can make money based on them, and that’s driven by customers saying, ‘You’ve got to do this,'” Lennon said. The bet is that the security argument will get there. First in broadcast, where the consequences of a compromised feed are most visible, and over time in Pro AV, where the same vulnerabilities exist with less institutional urgency to address them.
For now, the documents are public, the SDKs are free, and Lennon said one vendor told Ross last year it had a working implementation up in two hours. Whether the AV side of the house is paying attention will be the more interesting question over the next several NAB and ISE cycles than whether broadcast is.
Tim Albright is the founder of AVNation and is the driving force behind the AVNation network. He carries the InfoComm CTS, a B.S. from Greenville College and is pursuing an M.S. in Mass Communications from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. When not steering the AVNation ship, Tim has spent his career designing systems for churches both large and small, Fortune 500 companies, and education facilities.
- Tim Albright
- Tim Albright
- Tim Albright
- Tim Albright
