For most of my career, broadcast, Pro AV, and IT operated as separate worlds—different standards, different workflows, different assumptions about quality. Broadcast was the benchmark and the rest was something else. That perception is outdated, and holding onto it means missing where the industry is actually heading.
A visit to ISE in Barcelona put the scale of that shift into perspective for me, as the Pro AV market is many times the size of the broadcast market. For years, the assumption was: How do we scale down for Pro AV? How do we redesign for lower spec and lower cost?
But that's not what's actually happening in the marketplace. Corporate AV users aren't settling for less; they're raising their demands.
The reason is straightforward. A huge amount of what large corporations produce is internal content—corporate training, town halls, and internal communications—and most of it never reaches the outside world. But it still needs to land.
If you're used to viewing content that's well produced, with crisp visuals, clean audio, and a well-put-together message, a PowerPoint on Teams doesn't compare. Corporations have realized that to reach thousands of employees effectively, they have to up their communication game. Corporate AV users will continue to raise their production standards, and that should be shaping client conversations now.
Control Systems Are Key
The overarching story here for both standard broadcast markets and Pro AV markets isn't about technology. It's the control systems—how everything works together for the people who actually have to use it. As broadcast, AV, and IT converge into the same production environment, that question only gets harder.
Today, pieced-together systems from multiple vendors coexist to produce the end result. But relying on specialists to assemble pieces of the puzzle at every step isn't always practical.
Corporate AV users will continue to raise their production standards, and that should be shaping client conversations now.
Nobody wants esoteric, specialized requirements that only trained operators can navigate. What the end user actually wants is an intuitive way to achieve the end goal: to communicate by delivering or capturing a message. The production system itself—the thing in the middle—is just a necessary evil. End users don't want to understand it. They just want it to work intuitively.
That is the direction the industry is heading, and the challenge many are working to solve. How important is that work? I'd argue it's more important than almost anything else, including any individual product. System integrators are in the ideal position to help drive the requirement for APIs and consistent communication across multiple vendors of equipment and help deliver that unified experience.
New Business Models
A lot of production equipment in this industry is unused most of the time. That's always been the reality. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
For a long time, my goal has been the elimination of very specific product groups that are fixed location and locked down to certain tasks. Instead, I'd prefer the industry to create the ability for any user to have a pool of production resources that is configurable and can be orchestrated for their job, wherever it sits physically.
A user in one department, for example, can go to an orchestration tool and say: This is what I need to do this afternoon. The system then creates the links and connections to the various pieces, wherever they are in the world, and brings them together into a simple interface. When the job is done, those resources are released, so someone else in another part of the company can use them.
The business case is simple. If you can use your equipment twice as often, you've halved the cost of running your business. It's worth considering how that shapes system design from the start. It's not a simple thing to do, but the direction is clear.
The industry is reaching the point (quite rapidly) where highly specialized equipment may not be necessary for much longer. Instead, it may be that we can do everything with the right kind of compute system. AI is only accelerating that shift. That signals even more change, and the people designing and integrating these systems will be at the center of it.
