Simplifying Complex Systems With Vendor Agnostic Control

Right now, the broadcast industry is undergoing a perfect storm, and weathering this storm is putting the whole broadcast ecosystem under pressure it has never experienced before.

Technologies that were once cutting-edge are becoming increasingly commoditized and the rise of streaming and on-demand content means that everyone, from tier one broadcasters to the creator economy, is competing for the same screen time. It means everyone is looking for more efficient ways to work.

This has led to a significant shift in capital infrastructure budgets; investments in hardware that used to serve for seven to ten years are far less feasible now. Broadcasters are either building iteratively as they adopt more IP workflows or they need to know the full scale of a facility from day one, because extending beyond router capacity later is very expensive.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen a normalization of remote and distributed production, and that too has fundamentally changed how people interact with technology. People are no longer in the same building as the equipment they are operating – often they can be in a different country or even a different continent. These workflows can change depending on the customer and the content that they are producing, and it can vary considerably even within the same organization. Some things can be highly centralized, others completely decentralized.

These evolutions have driven an explosion of new workflows and contribution technologies. We've seen AV technologies cross into broadcast, and consumer platforms like Zoom and Teams become commonplace in broadcast applications, each introducing new protocols, tactility, and technical requirements to be dealt with.

All of this has dismantled the traditional model of a single core vendor with peripheral integrations built around it. An OB truck may be built around one vendor and a main facility built around another – both need to work together operationally as well as from a signal flow perspective. That's very difficult to achieve within vendor-locked ecosystems, because every vendor builds a system optimized for their own products, and third-party integration is always secondary in that it always sits on top of the primary workflow rather than being part of it.

The Human Element

As a company that also manufactures hardware, Riedel totally understands that approach, but problems arise when you have two vendors contributing to the same component of a production because users have to interact with them in completely different ways depending on whether they are working with vendor A or vendor B. They end up in a situation where to do something in vendor A's system they go into one platform and navigate one way, while in vendor B's, it's entirely different. It creates unnecessary complexity for the people who actually have to operate these systems day to day.

Keeping across all this is a constant challenge, but it also creates fractured workflows. Ultimately, these workflows can compromise a production because even though functionally everyone is working with similar technologies to achieve the same thing, they are all doing it in different ways.

We don’t think this is necessary. Over the last 25 years the way we interact with technology as individuals has completely transformed and in many respects the broadcast industry has been playing catch-up. We've seen that play out very tangibly, with static routing panels moving to digital displays, to the adoption of touch interfaces across hardware panels and web-based UIs where people can interact with their systems from wherever they are.

This way of working has been a long time coming, and modern expectations are that technology should be intuitive, responsive, and accessible from any device – those aren't niche demands anymore. They're the baseline.

A User-First Approach

This is what hi is all about.

hi stands for “human interface” and is a control layer that enables operators to manage a wide range of devices and controllers. It consists of two distinct elements. Fundamentally, it addresses the tactility of how people physically interact with technology through its intuitive and customizable interface; but there is also an operational workflow element, which is how work actually gets done.

Unlike a traditional vendor approach, it tackles these challenges from the opposite end of the chain; the perspective of the user. By ascertaining what is trying to be achieved first, and abstracting the technology behind it second, it delivers a standardized and vendor-agnostic experience regardless of the underlying vendor technology.

This operator-first approach is not limited to hi. Even before hi became part of Riedel, it had already been integrated into the Riedel ecosystem via the 1200 Series SmartPanel Control Panel App (CPA), which enables control of third-party systems directly from the panel. Both approaches are grounded in the same core principle: putting the operator first through standardized, intuitive workflows. This shared philosophy made hi and Riedel a natural fit from the outset, with early integrations reflecting a common goal of simplifying control across increasingly complex environments.

The whole premise of hi is to give operators something standardized and familiar which just feels natural. Whether they're walking into a vendor A truck, a vendor B truck, or working for a different company entirely, the experience should feel familiar and consistent because it's about the act of control and not the mechanism by which it is achieved.

It feels intuitive because it's built around the interaction patterns people already use with technology. If you want to access a device's settings, the natural instinct is to go to the device and look for its settings. hi works that way. It leverages the common, consistent patterns that people already understand, so the upfront burden of learning the system is removed.

And because hi responds dynamically to any changes, if a device is replaced then that change is automatically reflected everywhere across the system. All this means that users don't have to manually update every instance and can instead focus on a single, simplified experience where technological complexity is abstracted away from the operator entirely.

In Use With CS live

One company already taking advantage of hi’s vendor-agnostic control is the Czech Republic’s CS live. The company has installed hi into its latest OB truck to manage routing, production switchers, audio consoles, and other systems from its unified interface, standardizing a set of workflows to control what each position sees and knowing that everything updates automatically.

OB trucks like CS live are constantly changing and evolving; devices get swapped, productions shift, and sometimes the truck itself needs to be redeployed entirely. Traditionally, that kind of reconfiguration can take days to rig, and with many vendor-specific technologies it may even require drafting in support from the actual vendor. With hi, CS live can achieve the same result in single-digit hours.

That's a tangible saving in cost and time, and not just at initial deployment, but across the total lifetime of the system. It saves on integration costs, training, and reconfiguration time, while changeovers are quicker and you can draw from a broader pool of staff.

On the day, it should feel like a system that CS live’s operators already know. Whether they're used to a VSM system, a Cerebrum system, or something else, there are familiar patterns and elements that behave as expected, every time. hi’s dynamic nature aims to remove the administrative burden so that live changes push instantly to all positions, so if an EVS server goes offline or gets reassigned, that change is propagated everywhere immediately and nothing needs to be manually rebuilt.

With a range of user interfaces spanning hardware, standalone panels, or a dynamic web UI, hi supports whatever workflow suits the operator on any given day. Options include tactile hardware panels in various formats as well as a desktop option, and operators can also work from Riedel 1200 Series panels, with an intercom on one layer and routing or parameter control on another. For flypacks or trucks like CS live, where space is at a premium and you don't need constant access to all sources, that can provide a useful workflow, but for more dynamic work where you need primary control to access all sources and destinations, the more traditional rack-mount hardware panels are available.

All these options sit on top of the primary interface, which is the web UI and is available on any browser-capable device.

That's exactly what CS live needed: a flexible system that could handle live changes under pressure, and trust that the system will handle them. They wanted it to be dynamic and just work. That's what hi gave them.

Expect The Unexpected

The reality of live production is that however well you plan and however well you anticipate what might happen, real life will always intervene and force you to adapt. hi is an enabler in that you can take any supported device, plug it in, and it works. If you're running a router from vendor A and you need to cascade in vendor B for extra capacity, you can do that and the operator's experience will be exactly the same.

The real challenge is with the pace of change. The IP world is constantly evolving, and the move to IP is rarely a clean transition. In practice, most production environments are hybrid and these will persist for a long time; facilities will replace only what it makes sense to replace, so the move to IP is really a journey through a sustained hybrid period.

Staying at the center of that as a control system has always been a challenge because you have to maintain consistent support for legacy protocols alongside everything new and deliver a coherent workflow across all of them simultaneously.

But regardless of the technology that people implement, they're all trying to solve the same problem: creating content faster, more efficiently, and in a way that works for their operation. Riedel’s goal with hi is to demonstrate the value of standardizing these changing workflows. Because the best way to produce content more effectively is to simplify how we interact with the technology that makes it possible.