Delivering innovative solutions

Lawo enables world-class content production by leading innovation in media infrastructure, cloud, and workflow solutions.

About Lawo

Lawo is a global technology partner with a long history of delivering innovative solutions for live media production workflows. With a unified approach that combines workflow management and control, physical I/O, processing, and human interfaces, Lawo creates optimized solutions for productions including television broadcast and on-air radio, performing arts, houses of worship, and professional AV. Customer value is driven through simplicity, agility, technical and commercial flexibility, and through its team of experts who are passionate about enabling the creation of world-class content. Lawo products are manufactured to highest quality standards in Rastatt, Germany.

Business

In 2020, Lawo celebrated 50 years of engineering the future. Founded initially as an engineering office with a focus on audio and broadcast, the privately-owned corporation grew into an industry-wide accepted innovator who continues to actively shape the future of broadcast and media production.

IP BROADCAST TECHNOLOGY

Early on, Lawo realized that the future of all broadcast systems had to be IP-based—just as other industries similarly fragmented by proprietary technologies prior to shifting to IP. CEO Philipp Lawo envisioned an IP future with a single digital infrastructure transporting audio, video, metadata and control, and defined a corporate strategy aimed at fully covering next-generation Broadcast Core Infrastructure. Lawo continues to invest strongly in IP broadcast control (VSM Virtual Studio Manager) and video (HOME Apps).

Lawo presented its first native Video-over-IP product, the V__link4 remote video contribution system, at IBC 2013. Since the release of HOME Apps in H2/2023, Lawo has supported SMPTE ST2110, JPEG XS (already for the V__matrix platform), NDI^®, SRT, Dante AV and other relevant transport protocols.

ADVOCATING OPEN IP STANDARDS

Lawo has been a pioneer in IP development for broadcast and pro AV, and continues to believe strongly in the importance of interoperability. In 2007, Lawo initiated the development of RAVENNA as an open Media-over-IP standard introduced by ALC NetworX. In 2011, Lawo became part of the AES X.192 Task Group charged with defining the AES67 networking standard, and their commitment to interoperability was the driver behind open standards such as RAVENNA, AES67, and the Ember+ open-source control protocol.

Lawo was also a founding member of MNA, the Media Networking Alliance, which later merged with AIMS, the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (co-founded by Lawo). AIMS is a non-profit trade alliance that fosters the adoption of a single set of common, ubiquitous, standards-based protocols for IP interoperability in the media, entertainment, and professional audio/video industries.

The announcement of HOME Apps in 2023 coincided with the release of an influential white paper by the European Broadcast Union (EBU). In this paper, the EBU contemplated a future of server-based processing apps that no longer require bespoke hardware and can be used in any combination at any time—the Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) concept was born. And Lawo discovered that it was in complete alignment with, and immediately able to provide the tools to make the DMF a reality for its customers.

In 2024, the EBU and a few close partners like CBC Radio-Canada floated the idea of running processing apps from different vendors on the same generic servers. To avoid unnecessary delays regarding data throughput between one app and the next, the Media eXchange Layer (MXL) concept was developed so as to base data exchanges on a shared memory layer that does away with encapsulation and de-encapsulation routines, which are the main cause for latency that can be avoided. In 2025, Lawo was asked to co-chair the MXL Requirements Council at DMF – Media Exchange Layer, and to contribute to MXL’s implementation.

Partnership with Skyline Communications

Lawo and Skyline have joined forces to build a solution that manages the lifecycle of Lawo HOME apps with DataMiner, fully aligned with the concept of EBU's Dynamic Media Facility initiative. DataMiner starts, stops, and optionally configures the apps and pre-routes signals automatically right before a scheduled event starts. In addition, DataMiner ensures that HOME apps can only be scheduled when sufficient HOME credits will be available in the future.