Media Stack, Ownership, and the New Rules of Media

System Alerts: AI Infrastructure, Incentives & the Shape of What’s Next

While most coverage still focuses on shiny AI features or end-user apps, this week’s signals are coming from deeper in the stack. What’s emerging is a noticeable shift toward AI-compatible media infrastructure, alongside efforts to protect its economics and reset who holds the power.

This edition covers four key developments: a new control layer, a TV-native AI stack, a commercial firewall, and a remapped view of the media business itself.

SMPTE Introduces Catena: An AI-Ready Control Layer for Media

SMPTE, the standards body behind foundational specs like ST 2110 and MXF, has just introduced the draft suite for Catena. It’s a control plane built for modern media workflows and it’s designed to replace the tangled mess of proprietary protocols currently used to connect media systems, offering an open, vendor-neutral standard that works across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.

Catena is built to support AI-driven coordination: it allows systems to issue commands, manage state, and com…