Apple and Major League Baseball deployed professional SMPTE ST 2110 infrastructure, ProRes, and 100GbE connections for four Friday Night Baseball broadcasts in Apple Immersive Video on the Apple Vision Pro headset, MonitoR magazine reported.
The 2026 baseball season tests explored immersive sports production through stereoscopic 8K video with a 180-degree field of view and spatial audio, delivering a viewing experience distinct from standard television broadcasts.
The schedule opened with the Boston Red Sox hosting the New York Yankees, followed by matchups featuring the Los Angeles Angels against the Pittsburgh Pirates, the San Diego Padres against the San Francisco Giants, and the San Francisco Giants against the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Cameras positioned near team dugouts and outfield walls captured perspectives unavailable in traditional setups, accompanied by dedicated commentary, replays, and three-dimensional graphics displaying lineups and statistics within the viewer’s space.
Infrastructure Built on SMPTE ST 2110
Apple engineered its live immersive format directly on top of SMPTE ST 2110, utilizing separate yet synchronized streams for video, audio, and metadata. Stereoscopic ProRes video moves across ST 2110-22, while high-resolution PCM audio relies on ST 2110-30. Metadata linked to every individual frame—covering lens calibration, spatial data, and creative events—travels via ST 2110-41, with Precision Time Protocol maintaining alignment across all elements.
Engineering teams chose to bundle images destined for the left and right eyes as two essences inside a single ST 2110-22 stream, avoiding the operational complexity of managing two independent IP signals.
Macnica MEP100 SmartNIC Role
A Macnica MEP100 PCIe Gen4 SmartNIC equipped with two 100GbE ports anchored the signal path. The hardware transferred feeds from the mobile production unit directly to processing and streaming servers, executing packetization, ST 2059 PTP timing, ST 2110-21 traffic shaping, and ST 2022-7 redundancy at the hardware level.
The setup achieved output exceeding 100 megapixels per frame at 90 frames per second, producing a ProRes stream running at approximately 85 gigabits per second. The MEP100 delivered video, audio, and metadata straight to Mac Studio hardware, preserving CPU capacity for demanding application tasks.
Expanding Broadcast Capabilities
The production marked the initial implementation of ProRes operating over ST 2110-22. Major League Baseball's deployment shows that ST 2110 architecture can scale beyond conventional Ultra High Definition television production to support stereoscopic events, immersive reality, and alternative distribution formats, if 100GbE network capacity and processing power are available.
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