The AV industry's transformation isn't happening in some distant future. It's measurable today in gigabits per second, multicast groups, and PoE budgets. The December issue of SCN captured the moment when IP infrastructure stopped being a technical consideration and became the primary business constraint.
Whether it is stadiums deploying ST 2110 workflows, corporate environments installing 21:9 displays, or signage operators managing thousands of endpoints, every use case now depends on network capacity and intelligence. Yet industry conversation focuses on endpoints while treating the network as someone else's problem. It's not. The network is now the AV system.
Complexity Kills Margins
The SCN Top 50 Systems Integrators coverage reveals an uncomfortable truth: Firms manage larger, more complex projects with teams trained for HDMI matrices, not Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) snooping. Revenue per installation climbs not from profitability but from network-centric demands that most integrators are never trained to handle.
Stadium deployments demonstrate this perfectly. ST 2110 requires understanding PTP synchronization, VLAN segmentation, and QoS policies. These are prerequisites for system operation, not optional features. Meanwhile, digital signage explosions mean managing not dozens but thousands of PoE endpoints, each generating traffic and requiring remote management. The skill set required is fundamentally different from traditional AV expertise.
Integrator Vision Technologies points to tariff impacts tightening margins by 10% or more. When margins shrink, complexity becomes existential. An integrator needing three site visits to troubleshoot multicast or specifying enterprise switches they can't configure is unprofitable, not just inefficient.
Successful firms are not necessarily more sophisticated technically; however, they've systematized their infrastructure approach. Same switching platforms across projects. Configurator scripts. Trained teams. They've accepted that network design is a core competency, not a subcontracted afterthought. The alternative—specifying whatever IT recommends—creates unpredictable outcomes and repeat site visits to fix network misconfigurations disguised as ghost issues.
Managed services sound elegant until you consider infrastructure requirements. You can't cloud-manage what isn't networked, remotely monitor what doesn't report status, or orchestrate what isn't API-accessible.
The corporate-broadcast convergence matters here. Broadcasting has always operated with monitoring, logging, and centralized control because downtime means lost revenue. As corporate AV adopts ST 2110, it inherits broadcast expectations: Everything must be visible, measurable, and recoverable. That's impossible without network infrastructure designed for observability.
What 'AV-Optimized' Actually Means
“AV-optimized networking” has long been limited to proprietary protocols or avoiding standards. The reality is that AV workflows have specific requirements: predictable multicast behavior, adequate PoE budgets, QoS policies that actually prioritize time-sensitive media, and management interfaces that don't require CCNA certification.
Digital signage illustrates this. E-paper endpoints draw 15W, LED cabinets need 60W, and 4K displays with embedded processing require about 90W. Without proper PoE planning, entire deployments fail. Not because displays are wrong, but because infrastructure was underspecified.
Managed services sound elegant until you consider infrastructure requirements. You can't cloud-manage what isn't networked, remotely monitor what doesn't report status, or orchestrate what isn't API-accessible.
Similarly, corporate hybrid workflows depend on multicast, but multicast requires IGMP snooping, querier configuration, and proper management. Get it wrong and you end up with dropouts, excessive latency, or systems that test fine but fail under load. The black screen of death.
The industry's future depends on infrastructure standardization—not on protocols but approach. Integrators need platforms they master once and deploy repeatedly. End users need predictable solutions, not custom engineering per site.
The "IT networks versus AV networks" debate misses the point. The question is not whether to use IT-grade equipment, it is whether that equipment is designed to operate the way AV systems actually do. An enterprise switch optimized for email handles multicast differently than one designed for real-time media. Both are "IT-grade," but only one succeeds in AV without extensive customization.
Infrastructure Accountability
Our industry is at an inflection point. Projects are IP-based. Scale expands. Complexity increases. Margins do not. Something must change.
That change will be infrastructure accountability. Integrators will choose platforms based on operational reality. Does it work consistently? Can our team configure it? Will it scale? Does it support protocols we use? Can we cloud-manage and troubleshoot it?
End users will ask more complicated questions. It's not about whether a product is enterprise grade. Can it support a ST 2110 workflow? Can we monitor it centrally? What happens when scaling from 50 to 500 endpoints?
Manufacturers must decide whether they are building AV reality or IT theory. Stadiums deploying 100 Gbps uncompressed video don't need generic enterprise switching. Signage networks powering 2,000 displays don't benefit from data center features or big AI-fluff. They need purpose-built platforms for their use case.
