John Maxwell Hobbs

As well as being a music producer and composer, John Maxwell Hobbs is CEO of music tech startup Streamline, media consultant and the former Head of Technology at BBC Scotland.

Articles by John Maxwell Hobbs

Catena: Unifying Device Control Across the Media Industry

Catena is a word that means, ‘connected series or chain,’ and is also the appropriate name for the broadcast industry’s answer to a problem that has only grown more acute with the rise of IP, cloud, and hybrid workflows: fragmented, insecure, and proprietary device control. Developed under SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solutions Open Services Alliance (RIS-OSA) and recently introduced into SMPTE’s formal standards process, Catena aims to deliver ‘a single secure protocol for control of media devices and services,’ providing a unified, vendor and platform agnostic control plane.

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Avid: Phrasefind AI laptop

Modern MAM: Manual archives to AI-driven systems

What was once a process of physically storing film reels and manually logging footage has become an intricate dance of digital ingestion, advanced metadata tagging, and cloud-based workflows. With productions now generating thousands of hours of video per show, managing media efficiently is no longer optional; it’s a necessity.

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