What is it about?
Live production of sports and entertainment shows traditionally required expensive specialized hardware from single vendors. The Media eXchange Layer (MXL) is open-source software that lets different companies' video production tools work together on standard computers. Part of the European Broadcasting Union's Dynamic Media Facility project, it enables flexible, scalable live workflows that reduce costs while improving efficiency, security, and reliability for broadcasters of all sizes.
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Why is it important?
MXL addresses broadcasting's urgent shift from hardware to software as the number of streaming distribution channels expand. Unlike written standards, MXL is an open-source SDK, simplifying multi-vendor interoperability since all implementers use the same code. MXL transports uncompressed video and audio for the highest quality, shared memory and networked direct memory access (RDMA) for efficiency, and supports both on-premises and cloud for platform flexibility.
Perspectives
The MXL project was initiated by the European Broadcasting Union representing its 113 public service broadcasters, and supported by a large group of broadcast software vendors and technology providers. I'm proud to see how fast this project has gone from just an idea in November, 2024 to multi-vendor interoperation demos at the IBC trade show in September, 2025. Having worked in broadcast technology for over 20 years, I've seen the industry struggle to move live production into pure software, and MXL will be a key to this eventual transition. I'm pleased to support this work and grateful to my co-authors for their contributions.
Thomas Edwards
Amazon.com Inc
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: EBU DMF Media eXchange Layer (MXL): Streamlining Multi-Vendor Live Video, February 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3789239.3793280.
You can read the full text:
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