JT-NM Test Confirms HOME’s AMWA NMOS Compatibility, DirectOut Soon HOME-Native

During the JT-NM (Joint Taskforce on Network Media) sessions in August 2022, Lawo’s HOME management platform for IP infrastructures successfully passed all tests in the Controller and Registry category. As a result, HOME is now officially able to access NMOS registries and, conversely, to act as a registry for NMOS devices.

HOME is designed to connect, manage and secure all aspects and instances of live production environments. It provides the tools and centralized services for swift and effective interaction of engineers with their tools. HOME is cloud-native by design and ready to run anywhere, irrespective of the system’s size. With HOME, the cloud starts on campus, private and locally. It turns an array of devices, setups, sites, hubs and data centers into a powerful, agile network — quickly and in a perfectly secure way.

The JT-NM test results confirm HOME’s compatibility with the NMOS IS-04 specification for discovery and registration of IP-networked devices. Regarding the IS-05 device connection management specification, HOME is furthermore able to monitor and perform NMOS switching operations.

“Confirmed NMOS IS-04/05 compatibility is an important milestone for the HOME management platform,” said Axel Kern, Lawo’s Senior Director Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions. “Broadcast, corporate and AV users now have even more options for outfitting their infrastructure and intuitively connecting and managing all components  through a unified and fully resilient singular interface.”

Phil Myers, Lawo’s Chief Technology Officer, added: “Lawo will announce at IBC 2022 that all of our current video and audio products—including a few that recently reached end of life—are now HOME natives. And thanks to the newly introduced NMOS compatibility, HOME environments become even more attractive for operators who no longer have the leisure to configure their network manually.”

Operators now effectively have three options for leveraging the power, convenience and security features provided by HOME: they can acquire Lawo devices, HOME-native (“lives@HOME”) third-party devices, and connect NMOS-compatible devices to the network.

DirectOut’s Managing Director and CTO, Claudio Becker-Foss, confirmed DirectOut’s decision that selected devices will become HOME natives. “The decision to support HOME natively is based on the benefits this approach offers to our customers who need more than automatic discovery and registration capabilities,” said Becker-Foss. “With this tight integration, audio operators will be able to access our devices‘ comprehensive feature set directly from the convenience of, e.g., an mc² console surface, and can also leverage the advanced management functionality introduced by HOME, such as quarantining, security and convenient parameter tweaking.” The HOME update for the first DirectOut products is expected to be introduced in early 2023.

One final take-away from the JT-NM sessions was that the security features of all submitted devices were also tested. As far as Lawo products are concerned, the company states that no efforts are spared to reach a state of compliance. In light of HOME’s impressive track record so far, this is clearly not an empty promise.