When I started in the ProAV industry around 15 years ago, moving AV signals from one place to another was largely a cabling problem. You ran HDMI, you connected your source to your destination, and that was mostly it. The systems worked, but they were fixed. If an organisation needed to reach more displays, add rooms, or connect buildings, the physical infrastructure became the constraint pretty quickly.
AV-over-IP changes that, though not always in the way people expect.
For corporate and education environments, this matters more than it might first appear. AV isn't just a collection of hardware installations anymore. It's part of how an organisation communicates, teaches, and collaborates, and those needs don't stay static. Campuses grow. Hybrid working changes how meeting spaces are used. Venues need to support different forms of content distribution at different times. If the AV infrastructure can't adapt, it becomes a bottleneck.
The part that often gets glossed over, though, is that most organisations aren't starting from scratch. They've already invested in displays, in cabling, in workflows that their teams know how to use. The practical question isn't whether to adopt IP, it's how to do it without dismantling what already works.
That's where the real value of encoding and decoding devices comes in. An encoder can take an HDMI or SDI signal and put it onto the network as an IP stream. A decoder at the other end reconstructs it for a display or software application. The signals become data packets in transit, and those packets can be routed, replicated and managed in ways that physical cables can't support. You can extend an existing system into IP without ripping it out.
A project at Melbourne Cricket Ground illustrates this reasonably well. The Great Southern Stand function spaces were being upgraded with new Samsung displays, and the original plan may have involved a centralised AV switching platform. Supply chain constraints made that approach harder to execute, so the integrator looked at AV-over-IP instead. HDMI feeds were encoded and distributed across the network to multiple displays; audio was separated from the HDMI signal and routed through the venue's networked audio system. The result was a more adaptable architecture that extended the existing installation rather than replacing it.
Different IP technologies approach the encoding and transport side in different ways. Some protocols are optimised for low latency, which matters a great deal in live production. Others prioritise compression efficiency or compatibility with internet streaming workflows. NDI, SRT, IPMX and SMPTE standards all exist in this space, but they're not interchangeable; they were built for different priorities. Understanding what a particular deployment actually needs, in terms of latency, image quality, bandwidth, and interoperability, is what determines whether an AV-over-IP system performs well in practice.
The technology itself isn't new. The industry has been discussing and deploying it for well over a decade. What has genuinely changed is the maturity of the ecosystem around it. The early conversations were largely about proving that audio and video could be transported reliably over standard networks. That's settled now. More recent developments, better device discovery, centralised configuration tools, improved compression, open standards work like IPMX, are about making these systems manageable at scale and compatible across different environments.
That last point is becoming more significant as deployments grow. A system with a handful of encoders and decoders is manageable. A system with hundreds of endpoints spread across multiple locations is a different kind of operational challenge. How you discover, configure, monitor and update those devices starts to matter as much as the encoding performance itself.
Broadcast has spent years working through the problems of moving media over networks reliably, and commercial AV now draws heavily from that experience. IT infrastructure keeps improving too. The organisations deploying AV-over-IP today are increasingly expecting broadcast-grade reliability alongside the kind of flexible, software-manageable infrastructure that IT teams are used to delivering. Closing that gap is where the more interesting problems still lie.
By Amy Zhou, Sales Director, Magewell