IPMX Training Is Open

At NAB 2026, AIMS did something the IPMX community had not done before. It set aside a 1,600-square-foot room off the West Hall and ran classes. In the past, members of the community have given educational presentations, but never a sit-down training with an instructor and a curriculum. More than 40 people came through the first sessions, and for a format that had never been tried, in a market still forming its opinion of IPMX, that room was worth paying attention to.

A standard tends to become real in three stages. First it gets written. Then it gets built. And then people learn to use it. IPMX has cleared the first two. The core specifications are published, IPMX certification is in place, and certified products are shipping and running in real installations, from legislatures and universities to enterprise and government facilities. What the room at NAB showed is that the third stage had arrived. There is now a body of people who need to know how to design, deploy, and support these systems, and until recently there was no dedicated place to learn.

The timing is not incidental. AV over IP is no longer an emerging idea. AVIXA now describes it as a mainstream aspect of AV installations, and the wider Pro AV market it belongs to is forecast to grow from $332 billion in 2025 to $402 billion by 2030 in the association's Industry Outlook and Trends Analysis. Broadcast AV, the discipline closest to IPMX's roots, has climbed to become the second largest solution area in the industry, behind only conferencing and collaboration. The broadcast and Pro AV worlds that IPMX was built to bridge are converging in real spending, not just in theory. And the constraint on all of it has shifted. For years, the open question was whether the technology would be ready. Now it is ready, and the harder question is whether there are enough people who know how to work with it. Industry surveys consistently put skilled-labor shortages at or near the top of integrators' operational concerns, and the gap is increasingly about the right skills rather than raw headcount. A standard with no on-ramp is a standard that adoption outruns.

IPMX Training is Live

That place now exists. The IPMX training program is live at training.ipmx.io. It is free, it is module-based, and it is hosted on a learning management system open for sign-ups today. The first modules went live on June 15, 2026. Five are available now, with more scheduled to arrive around IBC. AIMS developed the program through its Education Working Group in partnership with AV Community, the AV education firm led by Patrick Killianey, and the material is delivered as professionally produced, self-paced video that a student can work through on their own schedule.

The model behind it is one the industry has watched work before. Dante did not earn its place in professional audio on technical merit alone. It earned it by becoming easy to learn, through free, tiered, online certification that produced a large pool of people who could confidently specify and deploy it. That pool became its own kind of advantage, because a technology many people already know how to use is a technology that gets chosen. IPMX is following the same playbook, with one important difference: it is doing so for an open, multi-vendor standard rather than a single company's ecosystem. That difference shows up in what the training teaches.

Most credentials in AV are either product certifications tied to one manufacturer's gear or general industry certifications that stay above the protocol layer. IPMX training sits in a different place. It goes deep on the transport itself, and on the networking fundamentals beneath it: multicast, PTP timing, and how media flows are described and carried over IP. What a student learns is the standard, not any one vendor's implementation of it, and those fundamentals carry well beyond IPMX. The skill is portable across every product that carries the IPMX mark.

The content is organized into three levels, each building on the one before. Level 1, Foundations, is the accessible on-ramp, written for the consultant or salesperson who needs to speak the language and specify a system correctly without necessarily configuring it. Level 2, Systems, moves into building a working system: media profiles, device capabilities, and how the pieces fit together into something that runs. Level 3, Networks, goes deeper into the layer underneath, the switching, timing, and traffic engineering that keep a live media system reliable at scale. Throughout, the courses address the standards IPMX is built on, AES67, SMPTE ST 2110, and NMOS, directly rather than only as background. Because IPMX is effectively a superset of ST 2110 and AES67, learning it well means picking up those standards and specifications along the way. A student who works through the program comes away understanding not just IPMX, but a good deal of the broader IP media family it belongs to.

One design choice runs through all of it: the program starts at the ground floor. It is built to be approachable to anyone with no background in networking or video, whether a junior engineer, a salesperson, or a consultant. That accessibility matters more than it might have a few years ago. As AI reshapes which careers feel secure, a generation is moving toward hands-on, hard-to-automate work, the so-called toolbelt generation that has been steadily filling vocational and trade programs. Skilled AV engineering belongs in that durable category. It is on-site, cross-vendor, and judgment-heavy, the kind of work that does not automate away, and IPMX training is a low-cost, standards-based way into it. The Education Working Group set out to lower the barrier to entry and grow the base of qualified professionals as fast as the demand is growing, and free, self-paced modules are how that scales.

This is a starting point, not a finished program. More modules arrive around IBC, and AIMS plans to organize additional training opportunities beyond the online modules, including on-site training. The longer arc points toward a recognized way for the industry to identify people who genuinely know IPMX, so that the skill carries weight in the market. The room at NAB was the first proof that the appetite is real. The site is the answer to it, and it is open to anyone. If you design, install, or operate AV and broadcast systems, or you simply want to understand where IP media is heading, the modules are free and signing up takes a minute.

Start at training.ipmx.io.