Ross Video, a founding member of the Open Services Alliance (OSA) and a long-time supporter of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), has announced that Catena, a brand-new OSA initiative, will now reside under SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solution (RIS) program, with the merger of the OSA and SMPTE. The resulting entity will be known as OSA: A SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution.

Catena is intended to provide a simple way to enable control, status reporting and configuration across a wide array of vendors, with devices, complex products, services, or even very small microservices. The need for Catena arose from the shift to cloud computing for live media production, the need for more seamless multi-vendor integration, and the emergence of security as a priority. Catena builds upon Ross Video’s wildly successful openGear platform, which has enabled smooth interoperability of on-premises equipment across vendors for over sixteen years. Catena takes this to the next level as an open standard, taking cloud and hybrid environments into account, as well as security.

The addition of Catena into OSA: A SMPTE Rapid Industry Solution is expected to result in a suite of documents being published by SMPTE that will cover aspects such as registration, status, control, commands/API, security, and orchestration. The OSA/SMPTE merger couldn’t come at a better time for those wishing to participate in the Catena initiative, as it is now part of the wider SMPTE community.