AVT Question: Please address pain points faced by AV/IT departments today and share insight into how your company supports AV/IT end users in creating a successful installation.
Thought Leader: Richard Jonker, Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at NETGEAR Enterprise
The most significant pain point in AV/IT today is the growing skills gap created by the shift to IP-based media. AV teams who have long mastered signal flow and system tuning are suddenly responsible for VLANs, multicast boundaries, and IGMP snooping. IT teams, meanwhile, are asked to deliver flawless real-time video and audio, where a small amount of packet loss or a misconfigured querier can derail a high-stakes meeting. Neither side is fully equipped, and the result is finger-pointing when a 4K stream freezes or Dante audio drops. The answer lies in cross-training. Both teams need a shared understanding of how real-time media behaves on a network and how to design for it.
Article continues belowConvergence isn’t the problem. The problem is expecting legacy skills and legacy architectures to support modern media." —Richard Jonker, Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at NETGEAR Enterprise
The second challenge is architectural. Too many AV deployments ride on networks never built for multicast or scale. A non-blocking switch fabric, proper IGMP configuration, and design that anticipates growth and redundancy are no longer luxuries; they are table stakes. When organizations treat AV traffic like any other data workload, they run into bottlenecks and unpredictable behavior. But when they design intentionally for high-bandwidth, real-time flows, the systems become dramatically more stable and easier for both AV and IT to manage.
In short, convergence isn’t the problem. The problem is expecting legacy skills and legacy architectures to support modern media. With the proper training and the right network foundation, AV over IP becomes reliably scalable.
