All 9 articles in this series are now available in our free eBook ‘Cloud Compute Infrastructure – The Book 2026’ – download it HERE.

All articles are also available individually:

The EBU (in collaboration with other organizations and broadcasters) is developing the Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) concept to augment the existing technologies for IP based production.

DMF replaces hardware with virtualized software processes running on cloud services. The supporting Media Functions share content via the Media eXchange Layer (MXL). Kubernetes orchestration of the containers brings resources online as needed. Scalability is easier with DMF than it ever was with hardware.

What Is DMF?

DMF and other standards are designed by industry experts and international bodies. This brings the best ideas to the table. The latest standards to emerge are:

• DMF - Dynamic Media Facility.
• MXL - Media eXchange Layer.
• MCMA - Media Cloud Microservice Architecture.
• C2PA - Coalition for Content. Provenance and Authenticity.
• ST 2138 - Catena Control Plane.

DMF redefines media production using a flexible ecosystem of compatible components that can be dynamically connected together as needed. The fundamental principles are:

• Everything is done in software to avoid hardwired configurations.
• The architecture is layered using cloud infrastructure concepts.
• Interoperability between nodes and entities is facilitated.
• A universal Media eXchange Layer (MXL) provides low-latency connections.
• Deployments are infinitely flexible due to the software-based design.
• Workflows are created on demand and customized as needed.
• Scalability is based on software wrapped API integrations bringing additional resources online as needed.
• Monitoring and analysis improve operational efficiency.
• The shared SDK for media exchange is used by all of the components.
• Interoperability tests required by ST 2110 are eliminated.

DMF optimizes the use of containerized services across the whole environment. From the outset, the EBU has been at the forefront of this initiative in collaboration with AMWA and other organizations.

What Is MXL?

The Media eXchange Layer shares data between the Media Functions. It is designed for ease of integration and incorporates low latency as a key feature. This is a work in progress with standards to be released in due course.

Other Related Technologies

DMF integrates many old and new technologies to support the infrastructure. Older documents inform the provenance of later work:

The Layered Reference Architecture

The EBU publishes a white paper describing the reference architecture that broadcasters can use as a starting point for building their DMF implementations.

The top four layers are generic behaviors provided by the platform vendors. The bottom three items are specific to the media business.

Let’s examine the layers, working up from the lowest level:

Infrastructure Foundation
Physical computing resources, networking, storage and timing reference. This is managed by the IT support team who are responsible for keeping the network running securely and reliably.

Host Platform
Operating system and support software running as virtual hosts. This can be implemented on local hardware servers or virtualized in public or private cloud services. This is also administered by the IT support team.

Container Platform
Various different container types can be used and orchestrated with Kubernetes (or similar). The IT support team provides this for you. The media engineers build the higher layers onto this foundation.

Media eXchange Layer (MXL)
The MXL standard is important here.  It facilitates transport between Media Functions using RDMA. This uses shared memory techniques and delivers a low latency connection between each media function within a single host CPU. RDMA is also a protocol defined by RFC 5040 when the synchronization is between multiple hosts whose physical memory cannot be shared.

Media Functions Layer
This layer describes various file formats, codec conversions and metadata. Software services provide functionality equivalent to classic hardware devices. This could be implemented as NMOS nodes. Here are some example media functions:

• Receive and ingest incoming contribution streams.
• Format conversion.
• Extraction of embedded audio tracks.
• Video and audio mixing.
• Metadata extraction.
• Logging key points with AI based transient detectors.
• OCR text extraction.
• Speech to text extraction.
• Speaker identification.
• Facial recognition.
• Color correction.
• Audio processing.
• Graphics rendering.

Application Layer
Applications calling the media functions to action live here. This layer implements node discovery (perhaps with NMOS), monitoring and overall security management. ST 2138 might facilitate the control plane in this layer as well.

User Experience
EBU combines the application and UI layers. If the user experience is separated from the application, a variety of interfacing techniques can connect them. Applications and web systems deliver different user experiences. This is a classical Object-Oriented approach described as Model-View-Controller (MVC).

Common Requirements For All Layers

All layers require management of their operational characteristics:

• Provisioning - Provides resources in a timely manner when requested.
• Control - Allows deployed resources to be configured, started and stopped.
• Monitoring - Gathers metrics for analysis to suggest improvements and optimizations to the support team.
• Security - Provides authentication, authorization, validation and other protective countermeasures to fend off intrusions.

Where To Find Out More

EBU published a white paper in 2023 describing the reference architecture in detail with example case studies. A companion document describes the Media Functions and another addresses MCMA.

The September 2024 edition is the latest version of the reference architecture. These white paper documents are not numbered. Search for them in the EBU document repository by their title or keywords:

• The Dynamic Media Facility Reference Architecture.
• EBU Media Factory Software - Media Functions.
• Media Cloud Microservice Architecture.

The JT-DMF

AMWA and EBU have created a joint task force (JT-DMF) to facilitate the industry-wide adoption of DMF.

At the moment, JT-DMF is developing timing models to support the open source MXL SDK.

NMOS is already widely used and greatly enhances the way ST 2110 is used. Work is underway to examine whether NMOS needs extensions to interact with DMF.

Related Standards & Other Documents

The Tech standards series are published by the EBU. The ST standards are SMPTE documents.

Conclusion

Draft DMF and MXL standards are available from the EBU. They are expected to be ratified early in 2026 (subject to feedback).

It will be much easier to build software defined production systems with this technology. Implementing DMF in virtualized containers running in cloud services provides scalability which enables resources to be brought online when needed. Cloud technologies work equally well when they are implemented in your own premises although scalability might then be limited. A hybrid approach allows external cloud services to be called up when needed.

All 9 articles in this series are now available in our free eBook ‘Cloud Compute Infrastructure – The Book 2026’ – download it HERE.