This release builds on the momentum of BirdDog Connect’s rapid evolution throughout 2025. As remote production, hybrid events, enterprise AV, education, and live broadcasting continue to converge, Connect is becoming the universal transport layer that brings these worlds together. Every update this year has pushed the platform closer toward seamless, low-latency, format-agnostic, workflow-aware media routing — and this release continues that trajectory.

December’s update focuses on enhancing visual confidence in your workflows, reducing end-to-end latency even further, and unlocking deeper integration with Blackmagic ATEM switchers. These improvements make Connect more powerful, more predictable, and more integrated than ever before.

NDI HX Passthrough now automatically generates thumbnails for all passing HX sources.

This provides instant visual confirmation that a remote source is active and contains video, even before establishing a full connection. This dramatically speeds up diagnostic workflows, reduces accidental routing errors, and gives operators immediate confidence when working across large or distributed systems. Thumbnails appear instantly and update dynamically, making HX Passthrough feel more responsive and transparent.

You can now select GPU-accelerated encoder profiles on the sending side of a BirdDog Connect SRT connection. These profiles (H.264 and HEVC only) can then be passed directly as NDI HX on the receiving side — completely eliminating the need for decode/re-encode conversion.

The result:

This enhancement opens the door to ultra-low-latency cross-platform routing, particularly useful for remote production teams, multi-site AV deployments, and workstation-to-workstation connections where every millisecond matters.

Connect now integrates directly with Blackmagic ATEM Tally.

A receiving endpoint can output NDI or SDI via supported Blackmagic DeckLink cards and map this output to a specific ATEM channel. When that channel enters Preview or Program, the corresponding remote source automatically displays a tally indicator.

This creates a fully integrated remote tally system:

Connect, the ATEM, and your remote BirdDog endpoints work together as a unified tally workflow — ideal for studios, education facilities, houses of worship, and remote event production.