AVT Question: Please share insight into the current state of networked AV and control; what you see as barriers to entry; and what advice can you offer on how AV/IT managers can overcome limited resources or a lack of buy-in.
Thought Leader: Andrew Starks, Director of Product Management at Macnica and Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) Board Member, and Marketing Working Group Chair
Today, the biggest obstacle to the adoption of AV-over-IP technology is a lack of interoperable, open standards. With so many proprietary solutions out in the field, the obvious downside is not being able to send or receive video flows from the disparate systems that customers end up owning, either due to legacy or to the need to accommodate use cases that aren’t covered by one solution, such as live production and meeting room presentations.
Today, the biggest obstacle to the adoption of AV-over-IP technology is a lack of interoperable, open standards." — Andrew Starks, Director of Product Management at Macnica and AIMS Board Member and Marketing Working Group Chair
The lack of interoperability exasperates this situation, resulting in the duplication of networks and exploding complexity at the control layer. For example, a multi-site organization that upgrades their systems over the course of years is likely to have multiple islands of AV-over-IP ecosystems with no clear path to creating a unified, manageable system from a user experience or maintenance perspective. As a result, everything becomes a special case for the IT department and the support desk gets swamped.
Thankfully, there is hope on the horizon. The group of companies supporting IPMX, (Internet Protocol Media Experience) through the non-profit AIMS (Alliance for IP Media Solutions) is rapidly expanding, with companies such as Panduit, Barco, Lumens, Sencore, and AV Pro Global recently announcing their support. As this set of standards moves towards ratification and adoption, we can begin to see a world where video on the network is “just video” and the transport technology quietly fades into the background as it supports an incomprehensible number of use cases, many of which have yet to be dreamed.
Just as it should be.
AV Technology's Thought Leader Series on AVoX
Check out what other industry thought leaders have to say about the state of networked AV. A full list with links can be found at the bottom of the On AVoX, the Intro Article
