What If the Kitchen Was Already Set?

Introducing a new model for live media workflows — one that embraces MXL and takes it global.

In the last two posts (Live Production: The Creative Cook’s Dilemma, and Live Media’s Mise en Place Problem), I shared how much I enjoy cooking — and how deeply frustrating it is when I can’t find what I need. Whether it’s the cumin or my favorite spatula, those little moments of rummaging break the creative flow. They turn what should be joyful into something brittle.

It turns out that this same pattern exists in live production.

We’ve made huge strides in infrastructure automation. Tools like Terraform and CloudFormation can provision live production environments in minutes. But the hard part — the slow, friction-filled part — begins after boot. That’s where we’re still wiring, staging, configuring, and troubleshooting. And where creativity comes to a halt.

In response, the industry is buzzing about something simple and powerful: shared memory. And for good reason. The idea that media can be accessed, not explicitly routed, is a game-changer. It’s like reaching for an ingredient in a kitchen where everything is already in place — every time.

And now it’s time to share what we’ve been working on to extend that promise even further.

The Kitchen That’s Ready — Everywhere

Imagine this:

You’re a live production team based in Los Angeles. You need an ultra-low latency feed from Tokyo, an archived clip from Frankfurt, and a real-time caption service running in São Paulo. Normally, you’d be setting up cross-region connections, mapping ports, managing brittle handoffs and struggling with time alignment.

But what if you didn’t need to orchestrate any of that complexity yourself?

What if each of those assets — each signal, service, and transformation — could be accessed anywhere, with just a pointer?

What if your entire production system behaved like everything was in shared memory?

That’s the vision behind TVU MediaMesh^®.

Introducing TVU MediaMesh^®

MediaMesh is a live media platform designed to make access to the signals you need as easy as opening a file — while maintaining the video quality, timing precision, and reliability professional broadcasters demand.

At its core, MediaMesh provides global shared memory for live media — allowing any container, service, or virtual machine anywhere in the world to access any media stream through a reference pointer. The heavy lifting of media movement between machines still happens under the hood, similar to established shared memory models such as AWS EFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter) or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) based solutions — but from the application’s perspective, there’s no routing, no hand-tuned config files. Just a pointer.

And unlike current shared memory implementations, MediaMesh works across:

• VPC, LAN and account boundaries
  
• Cloud and on-prem environments
  
• Compressed and uncompressed formats
  

You don’t need to rework your formats. You don’t need specialized network hardware. And you don’t need to sacrifice reach for performance.

A Platform in Alignment with MXL

The vision of shared memory as a foundation for interoperability is something we deeply support. That’s why we’re enthusiastic about the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) being developed as a Linux Foundation open source project under the leadership of the EBU, still in a pre-release phase but actively being demonstrated by multiple vendors, including TVU Networks, at IBC this year.

MXL brings clarity and momentum to the space by proposing an open, collaborative approach to shared memory media access. It defines a lightweight, powerful layer that promotes interoperability across systems and vendors — something the industry has needed for a long time.

MediaMesh is fully aligned with this direction.

Our goal is to build on the principles MXL is championing by adding the connectivity orchestration, global scale, and format flexibility required to support full-production workflows. MXL focuses on the media exchange interface — MediaMesh focuses on delivering the right media to the right place, automatically, at the right time.

If MXL is the chef’s station—a perfectly organized counter for the task at hand—then MediaMesh is the global commissary. It ensures that the exact specialty ingredients, tools, and prepped items arrive at your chef’s station, identical and ready to go, whether your kitchen is in New York, São Paulo, or Singapore.”

Mise en Place, Made Real

Back to the kitchen metaphor.

Mise en place is a culinary term which means “putting in place, setting up”. It’s not just about having good tools. It’s about having every tool in the right place at the right time, without delay or confusion. Every feed. Everyone. Connected.

That’s the vision behind MediaMesh — and it’s one we’re actively making real with our partners.

• Want to move remote venue audio into your SSL console, time-aligned and with low latency? We’re working to make this simpler and more reliable than ever.
  
• Want to access signals of any format directly within your Grass Valley AMPP production tools — without spinning up extra computers in order to fan out feeds to operators? That’s the future we’re building together.
  
• And want to control all of this from familiar EVS Cerebrum panels? You can — today.
  
• Want your director in the U.S. to call camera shots for a soccer match in Europe? MediaMesh keeps latency low enough to make that vision real.
  

We’re actively advancing this vision with our partners ; these, plus MRL and Mediatest, Chyron, Eluvio, Pixelstorm, In-Sync, Telos Alliance, Junger Audio, Vizrt, On-Hertz, Spectatr.ai, Vela, Kinetiq and Camb.ai  — all building on the solid foundation of MediaMesh global shared memory.

Ready to Create

In the end, creativity thrives when friction disappears.

We don’t just want to automate provisioning. We want to unlock experimentation in live media — so teams can produce more shows, adapt faster, and try new tools without a half-day of signal stitching every time. 

MediaMesh makes this possible. And we’re excited to share it with you.

Let’s Talk

We’ll be showing MediaMesh at IBC from September 12-15, 2025 — including how it complements MXL and enables scalable, low-latency global workflows.

If you’re attending, let’s connect.

Because the kitchen’s set. The knives are sharp. The ingredients are prepped. It’s time to cook.

About the Author:

Mike Cronk

Mike Cronk is Vice President of Strategy at TVU Networks, where he helps scale the company’s award-winning cloud and IP-based live video services. With over two decades of experience at AWS, Grass Valley, and as founding Chairman of AIMS, he has been a driving force in media workflow innovation and cloud transformation.

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