By Andrew Starks, Product Marketing Manager, Broadcast & ProAV Products

When I was in the 9th grade, I had the good fortune of living a few blocks away from a small educational access TV station called BEC-TV. It ran like a startup before startups were a thing and it was held together by a mix of ingenuity, gaffer’s tape, raw teenage ambition, and very little money. At BEC, there were homemade instant replay systems, hacked-together graphics solutions, and at the heart of it a single Mac SE/30 running 4th Dimension. That little beige box became our everything app: scheduling shoots, managing volunteers, tracking tapes, and driving station automation over an RS-232 link to our Leightronix Pro 16. Led by a man I would later name my firstborn after, a group of teenagers transformed that station into something far more capable than anyone had a right to expect. We loved pushing the boundaries of what computers could do for us.

Today, as I was reading Softron’s history, I realized we weren’t alone. While we were hacking Macs to automate our little station, Softron was pushing them into broadcast control rooms with the same spirit, which is something they’ve carried forward since 1982. Over the years Softron has adapted through every platform shift, from Motorola to PowerPC, from PowerPC to Intel, and from Intel to Apple Silicon, never falling behind and always reinventing to match both the Mac’s evolution and the needs of television producers. From early serial-controlled playout to modern ingest, streaming, and graphics tools, Softron has stayed on the edge of what’s possible. Few companies in media tech can point to that kind of four-decade run of reinvention and innovation.

Softron continues to serve broadcasters, post houses, and live event professionals with a suite of tightly integrated Mac-based tools for ingest, playout, graphics, and streaming. Their products are known for being rock-solid, intuitive, and deeply optimized for macOS - something that’s always set them apart. Now, true to form, they’re meeting the shift to AV over IP head-on, partnering with Macnica to bring high-performance ST 2110 capabilities natively to the Mac. At the heart of this effort is Macnica’s MEP100, a 100GbE SmartNIC built for SMPTE ST 2110 transport. The pairing is nothing less than symbiotic. The MEP100 delivers line-rate uncompressed video and audio over IP with minimal CPU load, thanks to its high-performance DMA engine. On the other side, Apple’s unified memory architecture removes the usual latency and overhead found in traditional systems. Together, they make fully uncompressed 8x8 UHD workflows smooth and power-efficient.

Now, Softron is pushing further by adding Apple ProRes support over ST 2110-22. It’s an industry first: compressed ProRes, flowing natively across standards-based IP infrastructure, directly into and out of a Mac. That means live and post production workflows can finally converge on a platform that editors and creators already know and love. While ProRes over ST 2110 is a first, it is also a glimpse of where things are heading. Workflows that once required racks of gear are collapsing into a single workstation, and creative professionals who have always trusted the Mac now have a standards-based path into live IP production. It is a reminder that reinvention is not something in Softron’s past; it is what they are doing right now.