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.