Where are we really with convergence between broadcast and pro AV – what’s genuinely working today, and what still isn’t?
In the broadcast space, end-user demand has evolved faster than the vendor response. Corporate clients now expect broadcast-quality production and studio-grade infrastructure, but broadcast vendors have been slow on two simultaneous fronts: simplifying their products for non-specialist buyers, and adapting their go-to-market to reach them.
Broadcast technology is engineered for specialist operators, and that expertise is baked into the product design, assumed, not removed. When the buyer becomes a corporate IT manager or AV integrator, the product doesn’t change automatically. NAB 2026 suggests the vendor community is only now catching up: Kiloview’s AVX24-4 MediaHub, designed explicitly for users without deep IP expertise, and AJA’s BRIDGE LIVE IP, framed around removing “common IP and infrastructure pain points,” are acknowledgements that complexity has been a barrier. But these are early moves, after years of demand already building.
The pro AV side faces the mirror problem: products have scaled toward broadcast quality, but most end users are still on 1G networks with legacy cabling. The capability gap is just as wide, even if the nature of it differs.
The sharper framing: demand has converged faster than either the products or the channels.
Which technologies are actually driving that convergence in practice – IP, cloud, software, AI – and which are being overhyped?
IP networking is the genuine engine of convergence, but the bandwidth tier matters enormously. The story is largely a 1G one right now, one key brand (I have to keep them anonymous) confirmed 1G dominates because it works on existing infrastructure without cabling upgrades. 10G is where broadcast-grade workflows become truly viable, but remains a cost barrier outside Tier 1.
NDI is the de facto convergence protocol in practice, but adoption is outrunning actual use. Our distributor research found only around 20 per cent of end users actually use NDI features in products they purchase, and in broadcast, it remains a Tier 2 and Tier 3 story, synchronisation limitations rule it out for mission-critical workflows.
Cloud is directionally correct but persistently overestimated on timeline, software encoding likely won’t displace hardware for critical applications until 2027 at the earliest. And AI, while genuinely useful in narrow applications like camera auto-switching and noise cancellation, is table stakes at this point rather than a meaningful convergence driver.
The most underrated driver is PTZ cameras, the product category where broadcast engineering and pro AV purchasing behaviour have most visibly collided. Corporate, education and house of worship now sit alongside broadcast as dominant end user segments. But the competitive tension is telling: broadcast-heritage vendors like Sony and Panasonic bring their colour science and protocol credibility, while pro AV-native players like Lumens, BzBGear and OBSBOT are winning on accessibility and channel fit.
Where is convergence delivering the most value right now – enterprise, live events, virtual production, control rooms – and why?
The enterprise and corporate segment is the clearest near-term convergence success story. NAB 2026 made this structural rather than aspirational; more than 13,000 attendees identified as corporate media professionals, almost double the previous year, and NAB introduced a dedicated Enterprise Video Strategies track for the first time. Corporate and finance environments are now actively deploying broadcast-grade kit: the brief says conference room, the expectation is broadcast studio.
Education is high-volume and mature, H.264 and NDI are the practical standard, less commercially glamorous but genuine convergence at scale. Live events and sports represent the premium opportunity, where remote production, low-latency contribution and AI-assisted multi-camera workflows are live use cases, not pilots.
Control rooms and Tier 1 broadcast studios remain the slowest segment. SDI legacy runs deepest here, and convergence is measured in infrastructure refresh cycles rather than product launch cycles.
What are the biggest barriers for pro AV companies adopting broadcast workflows – and are those technical, cultural or commercial?
The barriers are layered, technical, commercial and cultural, and all three are active simultaneously.
The most acute technical barrier is not the technology itself but the standards fragmentation sitting on top of it. Across our vendor interview programme, H.264, H.265, JPEG XS, JPEG 2000 and AV1 were each described as “the most common” AVoIP codec by different sources. From a professional AV integrator’s perspective, this is genuinely disorienting; you cannot build a reliable, repeatable broadcast-grade practice on a technology stack where the dominant codec depends entirely on who
you ask.
Blackmagic’s proprietary ST 2110 implementation, which doesn’t interoperate cleanly with other vendors’ 2110, is a specific example of how vendor lock-in compounds the problem. There was significant documentation of end-user frustration with limited cross-vendor integration.
The infrastructure cost barrier is structural and often underestimated. Broadcast-grade IP requires 10G switching; most pro AV customers are on 1G. The switch and port cost delta is significant, the cabling upgrade cost in installed environments is often prohibitive, and the ROI case is hard to make to a facilities buyer who approved a “conference room upgrade” budget. This is not a technology problem; it is a capital expenditure problem that the vendor community has not yet solved with pricing or product architecture.
The skills and cultural barrier is the one most often discussed but least often acted on. One interview I had was unambiguous: “older integrators are comfortable with RS-232 and established signal blocks, they’re like anyone, hesitant to learn new skills, and there’s real fear around ‘what if I don’t get it?’”
I’ve had another interviewee make the broader point: broadcast-grade IP is not like plugging in a cable. The transition takes time, training and a genuine organisational commitment to change. Pro AV businesses that have built practices around HDMI extension and matrix switching need to essentially retrain around IT networking fundamentals, and that is an investment with no guarantee of immediate return.
Finally, the commercial model mismatch is under-discussed. Broadcast procurement is long-cycle, specification-driven and often involves specialist consultants. Pro AV procurement is integrator-driven, shorter-cycle and price-sensitive. Broadcast vendors trying to sell into pro AV are frequently presenting the wrong product, through the wrong channel, to the wrong buyer. The reverse is also true. Until the channel model on both sides adapts, broadcast vendors building pro AV reseller relationships, pro AV integrators developing broadcast-certified practices, the commercial friction will persist regardless of how good the technology gets.
What can each side learn from the other – what does broadcast still do better, and where is pro AV ahead?
What broadcast still does better: Standards rigour remains broadcast’s most important asset and its most under-appreciated one. The ST 2110 migration has been painful and slow, but it is creating genuine, multi-vendor interoperability over time. Pro AV’s willingness to settle for NDI as “good enough” has created adoption velocity in the short term but risks long-term fragmentation – as our research consistently shows, the protocols don’t converge cleanly, and the codec confusion is actively slowing the market’s ability to build scalable practices.
Reliability culture is embedded in broadcast in a way that pro AV is still developing. Zero tolerance for on-air failure translates into product architecture decisions, redundant power supplies, deterministic latency, rigorous testing against specification, that pro AV products are increasingly expected to meet but don’t always deliver. As pro AV environments take on more mission-critical production responsibilities, this will matter more.
Where pro AV is ahead: Ease of deployment is pro AV’s clearest competitive advantage, and it is increasingly the deciding factor in converging markets. The products that are actually winning in the overlap territory, NDI-enabled switchers, PTZ cameras with simplified IP setup, all-in-one hubs like Kiloview’s AVX24-4, succeed because they reduce the configuration burden. Broadcast’s tradition of relying on specialist engineers to set up complex infrastructure is a genuine commercial disadvantage in a market where the buyer is a corporate facilities manager.
Commercial agility and IT integration are also genuine pro AV strengths. Pro AV integrators have built natural working relationships with enterprise IT teams that broadcast vendors, who are accustomed to working with specialist broadcast engineers, do not have. As production workflows move onto shared network infrastructure, that IT-native positioning becomes increasingly valuable. The pro AV market’s 10x size advantage over broadcast, which also creates volume dynamics that are driving hardware cost reduction in ways that ultimately benefit the broadcast sector too.
If you’re running an AV or broadcast business today, what’s the one practical step you should take now to stay competitive in a converging market?
The research points to the same answer from both directions: close the discovery gap between what the client says they want and what they actually need to deliver.
For pro AV integrators, the brief increasingly says conference room while the expectation is broadcast studio, and surfacing that gap in discovery, not after the specification is locked, is where integration value is now being tested. The businesses that learn to qualify production ambition early, before they scope and specify, will consistently win in the enterprise segment. Those that don’t will deliver conference rooms to clients who expected broadcast studios and lose the relationship.
For broadcast vendors, the equivalent is qualifying channel fit before investing in pro AV market entry. The enterprise opportunity is clearly huge; if you attended NAB 2026, you’ll know that, but broadcast vendors without established pro AV reseller relationships are selling the right product through the wrong channel to a buyer they don’t understand. Building one or two high-quality pro AV channel partnerships, integrators who can translate broadcast-grade products into enterprise language and manage the IT infrastructure conversation, is a more valuable near-term investment than any product development or marketing spend. The market is converging. The question is whether you can keep up with the technology.
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This thought leadership article is taken from the June edition of Installation, which goes into distribution this coming Friday, May 29th. You can subscribe to the magazine for free here and the daily newsletter here.
