AV, broadcast, live events and immersive experiences are increasingly described as one converging discipline. What is actually driving that shift?
The curious thing about this convergence is that nobody decided it should happen. The expectations converged first – and those who build these environments have been scrambling to meet them with tools, processes and business models designed for a world of separate disciplines. That’s the real urgency at the moment, and the futility too: a converged expectation can’t actually be met with a fractured toolkit.
An executive town hall is now judged like a live broadcast. A hybrid classroom is expected to perform like a production studio. A brand space gets compared – consciously or not – to the last great show its visitors saw. Once audiences stopped distinguishing between those environments, the disciplines that serve them lost their borders too.
Underneath that, three structural shifts are happening at once. AI-assisted workflows – captioning, translation, routing, content generation – have moved from experiment to operational expectation. IP-based standards born in broadcast are appearing on campuses and in corporate buildings, because the requirement is identical: to move trusted signals reliably and at scale. And the old divide between live production and permanent installation is disappearing, because permanent environments are now expected to perform with live-broadcast reliability.
I see it like this: the technologies didn’t converge, the expectations did – and the industry is trying to reorganise itself to answer them.
Why does communications infrastructure matter now – and why should it matter to AV integrators?
Because organisations have begun realising there’s a significant business advantage to unlock when rooms are no longer the focus, and communications is treated like an operating capability – something the business runs on, like the network or power.
For integrators, that means recognising that the room shouldn’t define the equipment stack, and technology shouldn’t limit what that room can do. Communications have to be fluid and move across the organisation as required by the people using it. And that includes supporting its system-wide upkeep and a greater variety of use cases.
The problem is that procurement hasn’t entirely caught up. Broadcast, AV, digital signage, collaboration platforms and learning environments are still often contracted separately, by different departments, on different cycles – despite serving the same operational goal. The result is all too familiar, too often: disconnected systems, duplicated spend, inconsistent experiences and environments impossible to scale.
The organisations moving fastest treat communications as infrastructure rather than equipment – and that changes the questions leadership asks. Not “what hardware should we buy?” or “which platform do we standardise on?”, but: which moments can never fail? How does communication move across the organisation? Where does operational ownership sit? Can this evolve alongside AI, hybrid work and immersive experiences?
Ask those four questions and the technology choices largely answer themselves. Ignore them, and no amount of hardware will save you!
What can the AV industry learn from broadcast and live production environments?
One thing above all: a culture where failure is not an option – because it was never allowed to be.
Broadcast never asks whether the show will go on; it engineers the question away. Redundant paths, monitoring, rehearsal, and a clear chain of command the moment something drifts. Live events add a second discipline: the show is rebuilt every night, so repeatability is designed in – documented, cased and crewed so it works the hundredth time like the first.
Contrast that with how much of AV has historically operated: install, commission, hand over the remote, hope and pray. The gear was rarely the problem. The absent operating discipline was.
As these worlds converge, the standard travels with them. A CEO’s town hall or a professor’s hybrid lecture is now judged like live television – there is no retake. The real lesson from broadcast isn’t a product or a protocol. It’s that reliability is designed, staffed and rehearsed. It is never simply installed.
How are IP-based standards such as SMPTE ST 2110, IPMX and NMOS changing the way projects are designed and delivered ?
They change the unit of design. For decades the unit was the room; with IP-based infrastructure, it’s the network – and that reorders everything downstream.
Design now starts with architecture rather than equipment lists: how signal moves, how it’s governed and secured, how the system scales and evolves. Commissioning also changes. You’re no longer simply proving that individual pieces of equipment work; you’re proving that the whole system works together. Different skills are needed around the table – the best project teams now speak software, networks and signal in the same meeting.
That changes a project before a single piece of AV equipment is specified. It means different infrastructure decisions, different commissioning requirements and, importantly, a system that is easier to expand and support later.
One really important note to call out, though –- because datasheets can be selectively interpreted. A standard is a common language, not a complete conversation. “IPMX-ready” on the box does not mean you’ll automatically achieve interoperability – that still has to be engineered, tested and proven end-to-end.
The standards are genuinely changing how projects are designed. There is no less of a need for people who know how to make things actually work.
What challenges do organisations face when bringing together different technologies and disciplines – and who owns the system after handover?
The uncomfortable truth is that the hardest problems aren’t generally technical. They’re organisational. Budgets sit in silos that mirror “incumbent” categories. AV reports one way, IT another, events a third, facilities a fourth – and each speaks a different dialect of risk. Broadcast engineers assume redundancy; IT assumes patch cycles; event crews assume a rehearsal. Put them on one project and each will be right, in incompatible ways.
The bigger question is what happens once the project is finished. Who monitors the system? Who maintains the content? Who manages changes? Who is responsible when the environment underperforms?
The single biggest failure point is that nobody owns day two. Projects are structured to end at handover, so systems get installed but never operationalised. Inside of six months the environment underperforms, and everyone blames the technology – which is usually the only innocent party in the room.
That’s where I think the integrator’s definition of success is changing. Taking responsibility for keeping the environment working, monitored and maintained after handover is the new metric.
The fix is unglamorous. Decide where operational ownership sits before you design. Fund the operating model the way you fund the install. And measure success when things work – not when they’re delivered.
“Immersive” has become one of the most-used words in the industry. What separates the immersive experiences that endure from those that don’t? Can you give a real-world example?
The test we use is fairly brutal: would the experience still make sense if you stripped the technology out? If the story only exists because the gear exists, visitors feel the gimmick. If the technology serves a truth about the brand or the place, they feel the magic – and usually can’t tell you what made it.
We saw that play out with LifeWave’s permanent Welcome Center in Draper, Utah, where we designed a four-zone immersive experience around the content architecture before selecting the hardware. The system uses pre-rendered playback and a single-screen show-control approach via Pixera, with an extensive Megapixel Ventana LED deployment integrated across the space. But the important part for us wasn’t simply creating something impressive for opening day. It was designing an experience that could actually be operated and kept current.
LifeWave’s on-site team was trained to update the content themselves, while OGS provides ongoing remote technical support under a 24/5 service agreement. That means the people who own the space day to day can actually manage it, without having to call the original integrator every time something needs to change.
That’s the difference between building an immersive installation and building an immersive experience that lasts. The technology needs to be reliable, the content needs an owner, and the operational model needs to be designed from the beginning – not bolted on after opening day.
A well-designed space photographs beautifully on day one; a memorable one still performs on day four hundred, when the ribbon is long gone and the regular crowd shuffles in. That difference is almost never the design. It’s operations.
Where do you see the biggest opportunities for collaboration between AV, broadcast and immersive experience specialists?
Wherever there’s a moment that absolutely cannot fail – and those occasions stack-up more and more every year.
Corporate headquarters are becoming broadcast centers. University campuses are becoming content networks. Venues, museums and brand spaces are becoming persistent productions. Every one of them needs all the crafts at once: broadcast brings signal discipline and a reliability culture; live production brings show-craft, rehearsal and human orchestration; AV brings permanence – integration into architecture, enterprise IT and daily operations; immersive design brings the narrative and emotional intelligence that makes any of it worth doing.
The opportunity isn’t politely lending each other staff. It’s forming teams around outcomes rather than trades – starting from what the environment must do and who will run it, then engineering backwards. The industry’s traditional split between the people who think about the business and the people who install the systems is exactly what convergence breaks. The teams that can do both – and stay to operate what they’ve built – will define the next decade.
What does the AV industry’s business model look like over the next five to ten years?
Predictions are tough, but there are trends that point us in a relatively certain direction. There’s a structural direction we see as pretty clear.
Value is likely to migrate from installation to operation – from the twenty per cent of the work that happens before the ribbon is cut to the eighty per cent that happens after it. And the industry’s old roles – consultant, integrator, producer, operator – are likely to blur (and fast), because clients increasingly need one accountable party across strategy, engineering and operations.
That changes the commercial opportunity for the industry. Those that can combine technical delivery with lifecycle support – and demonstrate the value of keeping an environment performing – will be well placed for that shift.
The wildcard is AI, which will be simultaneously overhyped in the demos and underestimated in the infrastructure. The winners will be the ones who keep that gap honest and accounted for: sceptical about the hype, serious about the infrastructural impact.
What does “AV” actually mean as a discipline in that future?
As a craft, AV has never mattered more. Audio, video, control, image, acoustics. Those disciplines are the difference between an environment that moves people and one that merely functions. Craft doesn’t disappear, it compounds.
But as a boundary, “AV” is dissolving in front of us. Clients don’t buy AV, or at least they shouldn’t. They should buy communication that works, learning that lands, moments an audience remembers. Look at how the demand side organises itself and the category lines are already gone – the same infrastructure now carries a broadcast, a graduate-level lecture, a product launch and a brand experience.
There’s a version of this that sounds like an ending, and it’s the opposite. AV began as a support function – a projector and a screen wheeled in for the meeting. It is ending up as the nervous system of how organisations communicate. When the technology finally becomes invisible and only the effect remains, that isn’t the end of AV. That’s a powerful AV system that’s grown into its bigtime job.
