The Challenge:
Champions: RTE, BBC, BT Media & Broadcast, ITV, VSF, SVT
Participants: Phrame ltd, Zixi, Norsk, Techex, Bitfocus, InSync
Reimagining the master control room for the cloud era
The Master Control Cloud accelerator explored how the essential functions of a broadcast master control room can be achieved natively in the cloud, with full interoperability between multiple vendors.
The challenge:
Master control rooms have always been the operational hub of live broadcasting, where signals are routed, switched, conditioned, and prepared for distribution. As live content increasingly originates and is delivered via IP networks, broadcasters need flexible cloud-based tooling that can replicate these functions while avoiding dependence on a single vendor ecosystem.
POC: Irish National Senior Track and Field Championships in Dublin
In August 2025, the project group staged a proof of concept live at the Irish National Senior Track and Field Championships in Dublin.
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Programme feeds were delivered as SRT over the public internet, with commentary captured via WebRTC.
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The BBC and RTÉ master control rooms worked together as a distributed team to monitor, switch, and process feeds in the cloud.
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Six companies participated: Appear, InSync, Norsk, Phrame, Techex, and Zixi, operating across four different cloud environments.
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The output was delivered both to RTÉ Player for public viewing and to ground based master control rooms in multiple formats.
Kickstart Pitch:
PoC Results:
Key learnings:
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Responsibilities: Outside broadcast teams must retain switching control to ensure low latency and safe for transmission streams.
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Multi-vendor orchestration: Engineers relied on detailed flow diagrams and spreadsheets, highlighting the need for a unified orchestration layer and single operational interface.
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Operational differences: Cloud environments introduced new challenges with latency, synchronisation, and component failure modes, which require new approaches to monitoring and control.
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Sustainability: For the POC Data was gathered and shared with the ECOFLOW II accelerator. This data provided a direct comparison between the traditional operating model involving traditional infrastructure and Satellite contribution to RTÉ, and the Master Control Cloud.
Demonstration at IBC2025:
At the IBC Show in Amsterdam, the demonstration expanded further:
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BT Media and Broadcast’s outside broadcast truck linked directly into the cloud master control room.
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Frame rate conversion from i50 to p50 was carried out in the cloud.
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Switching between unilateral feeds, channel logo insertion, and multiview monitoring were demonstrated.
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The final output was distributed via the BBC’s media services platform.
Looking ahead:
The project concluded that a single universal API for all master control room functions is not practical or desirable. Instead, the team proposed a template-based API model.
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Allowing vendors continue to innovate within their own tools.
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Broadcasters gain interoperability by calling vendor defined templates through a simple and common API method.
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This reduces integration complexity while supporting hybrid workflows that span both ground and cloud environments.
Master Control Cloud has shown that the master control room of the future can be distributed, vendor agnostic, and cloud native, while still meeting the operational demands of live broadcasting.
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