Investing in contribution hardware is a necessary-yet-risky task for most production studios. While the cloud has increased the flexibility of hardware, many are now doubting whether this is worth the spiralling costs of instances, and therefore on-prem hardware with pre-determined functionality is making a comeback. The trade-off here, naturally, is that with increased efficiency and cost, studios risk being locked out of emerging codecs and transport protocols when buying long-life hardware. Media Links is one company looking to offer software-like flexibility for its range of heavy-duty media gateways. Headquartered in Japan, Media Links provides hardware and software to prepare media for long-haul, high-end contribution over IP. While this is often production-quality live video feeds, the company’s offerings can be used…