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IPMX@NAB 2026 roundup

More momentum for IPMX at NAB 2026

By Cynthia Wisehart ⋅

The year began with an IPMX certification testing event that certified a reported 48 products for IPMX across multiple product category types. At the 2026 NAB Show, I saw many of those products for myself at booths including  Cobalt Digital, Panasonic, Plexus AV, Evertz AV, Macnica, Bridge (at the OWC booth), Matrox, and at the AIMS Alliance booth.

Panasonic brought the KAIROS Core 200 and the KAIROS Core 2000 for its groundbreaking KAIROS live 4K HDR production platform. Both products are certified for IPMX as well as supporting ST2110. Cobalt Digital already had the SAPPHIRE mini-converters, ARIA audio monitors, an IPMX multiviewer, and the INDIGO gateways. At NAB 2026, the company debuted the blueCORE series of signal processors (also for live production) with several models supporting both ST2110 and IPMX. Plexus AV brought the MX-certified P-AVN-4E encoder and P-AVN-4D decoder with their underlying intoPIX TicoXS FIP and JPEG XS TDC technology.

One standout for me was on the Evertz booth, where the company was showing two IPMX-certified platforms. They position NUCLEUS as an AV over IP distribution and control platform; the MMA gateway family, including the IPMX-certified MMA-10G and MMA-25G solutions, supports media transport, processing, and signal routing across distributed environments under the control of MAGNUM-OS. In a very NAB-relevant pitch, the point was interoperability with SMPTE ST 2110-20 and -22, to enable the movement of broadcast content and signals to and from adjacent environments, like stadiums, live event venues, and corporate campuses. It embodied NAB’s own emphasis on beyond broadcast. I got a show close press release from NAB today claiming “The 2026 NAB Show Wraps with Proof the Future of Media and Entertainment is Expanding Beyond Broadcasting.” So there’s that.

Macnica was doing an IPMX gateway demonstration with their ME10 low-power SoC platform for IPMX product development, which they debuted at ISE. The production-ready compact SoC for embedded devices will no doubt accelerate time-to-market for IPMX products. in a similar vein, Adeas/Nextera has a developer’s kit.

 

New to me was the SipRadius SimMX media orchestration controller. It was described as providing discovery and routing across any network, including navigating firewalls, cellular connections, and cloud and hybrid architectures. As explained by SipRadius, it bridges protocols, so users share streams natively even when using equipment from different manufacturers, different protocols, and different eras. It has security end-to-end, including in the cloud, with a built-in certificate authority, EST server, zero-trust device onboarding, and public key authentication.

Later, I caught up with Pro AV Working Group chair Sam Recine at the AIMS booth. He’d been back and forth from the AIMS booth to the AIMS training sessions to the AIMS member booths, both current, and potential future. He said he was gratified at how much more some of the industry leaders seemed to be aware of IPMX from even just a year ago. Obviously, certifying products contributed to that, but I too found awareness I hadn’t expected, with people having different reasons why IPMX had caught their attention. Enterprise is going to care about security, rental & staging wants easy, some people want the higher color bit depth, just to name a few reasons. The certified products cut across multiple product classes and applications, and systems are now being sold and built for customers, so those factors contribute. And, not surprisingly, IPMX is now successful enough to get the pushback from proprietary players, which also raises awareness.

With everybody’s questions in mind (and some no one had thought of) AIMS designed a two-day series of training courses under this year’s IP Showcase. Monday focused on expert topics, including sessions on the IPMX Certification Event at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU); IPMX Certification Requirements, IPMX Product Registry, and IPMX Profiles and Capabilities; shipping products; PTP timing; Security features of IPMX systems; and Tuesday was positioned as “complete beginners’ day” with a 101 introduction to standards-based media-over-IP, touching on AES67, ST 2110, NMOS, and IPMX, and more. Training presentations will be available on demand shortly, and more training is already in the AVIXA training schedule for InfoComm.

Cynthia Wisehart

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