Cisco is making a play for the live production market by touting shared infrastructure solutions for broadcasters as a means to infuse AI with traditional media workloads.
The networking giant has raced to support the Linux Foundation's Media eXchange Layer (MXL), a concept that only emerged last year and is designed to enable real-time in-memory exchange of video, audio, and timed metadata between media functions in distributed media production environments.
With broadcasters looking to move to virtualized production environments as well as infusing AI to power things like captioning and graphics, the need for software-defined solutions presented vendors like Cisco with a lucrative opportunity.
Detailed in a blog post ahead of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2026 in Las Vegas, the vendor outlined its Cisco IP Fabric for Media (IPFM), which sees it claiming to be among the first to offer the means for broadcasters to run MXL workloads alongside traditional media transport standards like ST 2110 on a single fabric.
Built on Cisco’s recently unveiled N9000 series switches, the media fabric allows AI and containerized media workloads to coexist alongside ST 2110 flows simultaneously without needing separate networks. This allows broadcasters to run both IP media and compute or AI workloads on the same fabric would, which can reduce latency as media flows would be accessible in real-time and can bring down broadcast costs as media firms wouldn’t need separate systems.
Cisco’s implementation of remote direct memory access (RDMA) also allows broadcasters to integrate AI into live broadcasts more efficiently.
“This standard interoperable bridge allows multiple AI applications to simultaneously access and process live streams, empowering automated production and instant AI analysis," Cisco explained in the blog.
Broadcasters touted as using the IPFM platform include Imagine Communication, which supports Italy's public broadcaster Rai; Sony's Nevion, which is working with TvTel on live coverage of the Chilean football league; and Panasonic.
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