AVT Question: Please share insights on the ongoing transition to networked AV and the role the cloud and AI play.
Thought Leader: Bob Bonniol, Chief Innovation Officer at ACT Entertainment
Many productions—global broadcasts, opening ceremonies, launches watched by billions in real time—don’t get a second take. In those instances, the KPI that matters isn’t brightness or resolution; it’s uptime under nation-state-grade observation. At ACT, we call this “Tier Zero.”
When you’ve got one shot, the conversation about networked AV changes completely. Things we call barriers to entry, security, entrenched infrastructure, and equipment costs aren’t reasons to delay the transition; they are specifications the transition must meet.
Take security, for example: A networked AV system is an IT system, and it should be secured like one. That’s not a burden; it’s an upgrade. The moment video, audio, and control enter ordinary network infrastructure—ST 2110 and IPMX for video, Dante for audio, sACN for lighting—they inherit 30 years of hardened IT discipline: segmentation, authentication, and observability.
This is where AI and the cloud stop being buzzwords and start being load-bearing. The cloud takes everything, including rendering, previsualization, and fleet monitoring, out of the building and makes a thousand-node network operable by fewer people.
Bob Bonniol, Chief Innovation Officer at ACT Entertainment
The real barrier is AV people learning to think like network engineers and network engineers learning that packet loss happens in front of an audience.
Existing infrastructure is the same story, inverted. Abandoning a working pipeline isn’t trivial, and the standards don’t ask you to do so. Open transport migrates one signal at a time. Solutions like tvONE CALICO video processors and Green Hippo Estuary media controllers already operate natively in ST 2110 environments, forming a fabric that integrates the past rather than replacing it outright.
This is where AI and the cloud stop being buzzwords and start being load-bearing. The cloud takes everything, including rendering, previsualization, and fleet monitoring, out of the building and makes a thousand-node network operable by fewer people. That isn’t a gimmick; it’s how you earn the confidence to trust a network with a one-shot event.
For decades, each discipline had its own infrastructure. Now, everything is data on a shared network. The question is no longer when to migrate; it’s which signal moves first.
