As we head toward NAB this year, one theme is becoming increasingly clear in conversations with broadcasters, OTT operators, and service providers: infrastructure is changing faster than operational models.
Over the past few years, many organisations have moved parts of their workflow to the cloud. Others have invested heavily in on-prem infrastructure. Increasingly, the reality is somewhere in between. Hybrid architectures, automation, and IP-based production are no longer experimental ideas, they’re becoming the practical foundation for modern media operations.
At Capella, our focus has always been straightforward: build encoding and processing tools that fit naturally into real-world workflows rather than forcing customers to redesign their infrastructure around them.
The new capabilities we’re introducing at NAB 2026 continue that approach.
They extend the Cambria platform in four important areas: live encoding flexibility, operational resilience, modern broadcast infrastructure, and workflow automation.
All of it built in response to what customers told us they needed.
Cambria Stream Solo: A Flexible On-Prem Live Encoder
One of the biggest additions to the Cambria family is Cambria Stream Solo, a new on-premise live encoding solution designed for professional streaming workflows.
Stream Solo is built on the same encoding technology that powers the broader Cambria family, including Cambria FTC and Cambria Stream Pro, but packaged as a lightweight and flexible live encoder that can run across a wide range of hardware platforms.
For broadcasters, production companies, and live event operators, this provides a simple way to deploy reliable live encoding without committing to proprietary appliances or rigid hardware configurations.
Stream Solo can operate either as a full stream origin, generating all required profile variants for delivery, or as a high-quality contribution encoder feeding downstream Cambria Stream engines in the cloud.
The system supports a wide range of professional inputs, including SRT, UDP, RTMP, Zixi, SDI, HLS-TS, NDI, and media files, and can generate outputs for modern streaming workflows including CMAF, HLS, SRT, RTP, MP4/TS, RTMP/RTMPS, and Zixi — with SCTE-35 support throughout.
The product scales with you. Stream Solo supports one live channel. Stream Duo handles two. Stream Quad, you guessed it, handles four. Same product, same engine, the same operational simplicity regardless of channel count.
For organisations that need professional live encoding quality without cloud dependency, or who want an on-premise foundation for a hybrid workflow — Stream Solo is the answer.
Dynamic Swap: Maintaining Live Channels During Maintenance
Another major enhancement arriving this year is a new capability within Cambria Stream Pro called Dynamic Swap.
Anyone running live channels understands the operational challenge of maintenance. Software updates, hardware changes, and system restarts all carry the same risk: interrupting live services.
Dynamic Swap addresses this by running additional encoder capacity in the background. Channels can be seamlessly switched between primary and standby encoders without interrupting the live stream.
This allows operators to perform tasks such as software updates, machine restarts, or infrastructure maintenance while channels remain on air. It also provides an additional layer of resilience. If a machine fails, the system can dynamically switch to the standby encoder without disrupting the stream.
For operations teams running continuous services, the value is immediate and practical. Maintenance stops being a scheduled risk. Hardware failure stops being a crisis. It's one of those features that, once it's part of your workflow, you wonder how you ever managed live channels without it.
Native SMPTE ST 2110 Support
IP-based production continues to gain momentum, and many modern broadcast facilities are now built around ST 2110 infrastructure rather than traditional SDI routing.
ST 2110 is the professional media-over-IP standard that defines modern broadcast infrastructure. Major broadcasters and production facilities worldwide have built their IP- native workflows around it, and for good reason — it delivers the precision, reliability, and interoperability that professional broadcast demands.
To support these environments, Cambria Stream Solo and Cambria Stream Pro are adding ST 2110 support, allowing them to integrate directly into IP-based broadcast facilities. This means Cambria encoding engines can sit naturally within ST 2110 production environments, working alongside modern IP routing, switching, and processing systems.
For facilities transitioning from SDI to IP — or already operating fully IP-based production — this removes another barrier between live production infrastructure and streaming delivery.
Live Clip: From Live Recording to Delivered Clip, Automatically
Another new capability combines Cambria Stream and Cambria FTC to enable automated clipping from live streams.
In many workflows, particularly sports, news, and social publishing, operators need to quickly extract highlights or segments from ongoing live feeds and typically, has always involved more steps than it should. Record the stream. Find the clip. Extract it. Transcode it. Deliver it. At each stage, there's manual work, latency, and opportunity for something to go wrong.
Cambria Live Clip changes that.
Streams are continuously recorded by Cambria Stream while they are being encoded. When a clip request is triggered via API, the system extracts the relevant segment and sends it directly to Cambria FTC for processing and delivery.
The clipped segment can then be packaged into formats such as HLS or MP4 and delivered to cloud storage, distribution platforms, or publishing systems automatically, no manual intervention required.
Because the system records both primary and backup streams, it can automatically fall back to the backup recording if the main recording fails.
The result is a workflow that connects live streaming infrastructure directly with file-based production and distribution.
Open Workflow Automation with n8n
Perhaps the most significant step forward is the integration of Cambria FTC and Cambria Cluster with n8n, a visual workflow automation platform. (https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n)
For many years, workflow automation in media processing meant one thing: a proprietary workflow engine, evolving only as fast as the vendor behind it chose to move. For some organisations that worked well enough. For many others, it created a ceiling — integrations that required professional services, automation that couldn't keep pace with the rest of their infrastructure, and workflows that were difficult to modify or troubleshoot without going back to the vendor. n8n breaks that ceiling.
With over 177,000 GitHub stars and deployments at organisations including Microsoft, Vodafone, and Meta, n8n is one of the most widely adopted workflow automation platforms in the world. Visual, drag-and-drop workflow building. Over 500 native
integrations. Code available when you need it. AI and LLM support built in. All of it self- hostable, enterprise-ready, and evolving at the pace of a global developer community rather than a single vendor's roadmap.
By integrating Cambria FTC and Cambria Cluster with n8n, encoding and processing tasks become part of that broader automation fabric — connected to any system in your stack, orchestrated visually, without custom engineering every time something changes.
What This Means for Cambria Workflows
While Cambria FTC has built-in scripting, this is designed for intra-job logic, n8n provides inter-system automation on top of that. With n8n acting as the orchestration layer, Cambria FTC jobs can be triggered, controlled, and managed as part of broader workflows that may include storage systems, content management platforms, AI services, cloud infrastructure, and operational tools.
For example,
Automated Multi-Platform Publishing
A single asset can be automatically prepared for multiple destinations the moment it arrives.
Example workflow:
1. Asset arrives in S3, Azure Blob, Oracle Cloud, or on-prem storage.
2. n8n reads metadata (title, language, territory, rights window).
3. Rules determine which deliverables are required.
4. Cambria FTC generates required encodes (OTT, mobile, mezzanine, archive).
5. n8n distributes outputs to:
o CDN origin
o YouTube
o social media platforms
o partner delivery endpoints
6. Notifications are sent to editorial and distribution teams via Slack, email etc.
7. CMS updates automatically
Instead of manually managing delivery packages, the system publishes content everywhere automatically.
In this model, Cambria FTC is no longer just a standalone transcoder. It becomes a high-performance processing node within a fully automated workflow ecosystem.
For anyone familiar with proprietary workflow tools in this space: this is what the next generation looks like.
Looking Ahead
Taken individually, each of these capabilities solves a specific operational problem. Together, they reflect a direction the industry has been moving toward for some time — live infrastructure that is software-driven, broadcast facilities built around IP, and automation constructed from open tools rather than proprietary systems.
Our goal with Cambria has always been the same: give customers the freedom to build workflows that suit their environment, not the other way around. These announcements move that forward in ways that are practical and deployable now, not on a future roadmap.
We'll be demonstrating all of it at NAB 2026. If you'd like to see any of these capabilities in action, or talk through how they fit your specific workflow, come and find us at the show or book a meeting in advance.
