NETGEAR used IBC 2026 to show its role beneath a range of broadcast and professional-AV IP systems. Its switches supported demonstrations using established SMPTE ST 2110 workflows and the emerging IPMX standard for wider interoperable media transport.
The more experimental element concerns MXL, the Media eXchange Layer. MXL is intended to move real-time media between software applications in a software-defined facility. NETGEAR is exploring whether some of that work can be handled by the switch fabric itself, potentially bringing selected timing, movement or resource functions closer to the network.
The idea matters because software-defined production still depends on deterministic movement of large media flows. A fabric that exposes media-aware capabilities could reduce duplicated processing or improve scale, but it could also create new dependencies between application behaviour and network implementation.
The report describes exploration rather than a shipping specification. It does not identify which MXL functions were moved, performance results, supported switch models, APIs, interoperability partners or how the approach aligns with an open standard. Until those details are published, this is a technical direction rather than a deployable architecture.
