Good Ideas Travel Fast. That’s a Good Thing.
There was a time not long ago when a genuinely good idea in broadcast technology became a liability. Not because the idea was flawed, but because the industry’s response to it so often was. A company would invest years in developing a smarter way to route video, or a more efficient approach to processing, and the competition would respond not by building something better, but by building something deliberately incompatible. Format wars. Feature checklists. A race to claim superiority not through outcomes, but through exclusion.
That era is ending.
Broadcast is finally recognising what other industries learned years ago: there is no copyright in an idea. There is only the technical expression of that idea. And the best expression is not the one that locks customers in. It is the one that works alongside everything else.
The Idea at the Centre
Manifold technologies was founded on a simple premise: processing should be decoupled from dedicated hardware. Not as a marketing slogan, but as a technical commitment. From day one, the aim was to build software-defined media processing that runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGA accelerator cards. Multiviewers, UDX conversion, graphics insertion – all delivered as services that can be instantiated on demand, on the hardware the user chooses, without forklift upgrades or vendor lock-in.
It is an idea that combines the flexibility of software with the deterministic performance of hardware acceleration. And it works. It has worked on major international sporting events. It has worked in enterprise media facilities. It has worked because it solves a real problem: live production needs to scale, adapt, and integrate without constant rebuilding.
But rather than keeping this idea jealously guarded, hoping that none of our competitors would catch on to the benefits of software-defined, COTS-accelerated production, we did the opposite: we shouted our message from the rooftops. And people started to listen.
Enter NEP Platform
At NAB 2026, the NEP Group launched NEP Platform, a software orchestration system designed to unify the deployment of multi-vendor production applications within a single, secure interface. The goal is straightforward: instead of building fixed, dedicated systems for each function, NEP Platform allocates software capabilities dynamically onto shared COTS compute. A multiviewer here. Monitoring there. Audio processing in between. All from different vendors. Deployed in minutes. Torn down when the production ends.
Manifold CLOUD is a launch partner in that ecosystem. On the NEP Platform, manifold’s services appear as deployable applications alongside offerings from Bridge Technologies, Calrec, Grass Valley, Hawk-Eye, Lawo, Panasonic and Sony. An operator selects manifold from a catalogue. The platform provisions the necessary compute – on-prem, in a data centre, or in a shared environment – and manifold’s FPGA-accelerated processing becomes available as a virtual device within NEP’s orchestration layer.
What matters here is not the technical detail of the integration. What matters is that it happened at all. That rather than locking in and excluding others, each member of the NEP platform group chose to work in a way that doesn’t just benefit the customer, but the market as a whole.
No Gatekeeping. Just Outcomes.
Manifold and technology partner arkona, believed from the beginning that decoupling processing from dedicated hardware was the right way to build production infrastructure. That belief has not changed. But when other companies saw the light and began to replicate that in their own development strategies and architectures, we didn’t see that as a bad thing. It wasn’t a challenge or a threat. It was a benefit.
Firstly, of course, because it validated our approach: software-defined, COTS accelerated approaches work. Not just at the lower levels, but for full-scale, live, global Teir One production.
And secondly, because the more people lean their weight into an idea (even when they’re competitors), the more that idea gains traction, and then momentum. It snowballs and spreads. It encourages shared ecosystems where buy-in to one component generates buy-in to the whole, across a range of vendors and segments. We gain far more in collaborative opportunity than we lose in competitive threat.
NEP Platform is the most visible expression yet of that industry-wide shift. A major global production services provider building an orchestration layer specifically designed to run multi-vendor software on shared COTS compute. That is not a concession. It is an endorsement.
Collaboration Raises Everyone
Make no mistake: competition still matters. Manifold wants to build the best COTS-accelerated processing on the market. We want customers to choose our multiviewers, our UDX conversion, our graphics insertion. But we recognise it isn’t a case of being the only player doing things this way. We just need to be the best. And our inclusion in NEP Platform is testament to that.
Because ultimately, good ideas travel fast. That has always been true. The difference now is that broadcast is finally letting them.
Published by Production 360
