NETGEAR has spent 30 years in networking and 10 years in AV over IP. That experience has given us a clear view of where the broadcast industry is heading and where the real friction lies between ambition and execution.
IN THIS ARTICLE
The audience took control of the media, and they’re not giving it back. Viewers no longer browse channels. They adopt or abandon platforms in seconds, they expect everything to work instantly, and they switch without hesitation when it doesn’t.
That shift has forced a Digital First mandate across the industry. But most broadcasters are executing that mandate while simultaneously maintaining a full linear operation: two organizations, two cultures, two infrastructure philosophies running in parallel. In the US market, the audience split is roughly 25% linear television, 55% online video, and 20% social media.
Which raises a question worth examining: if 75% of media consumption, and therefore revenue, is now digital, why does the 25% of linear broadcast infrastructure still dictate 100% of the upgrade cycle?
The industry didn’t gradually migrate to distributed infrastructure. It moved into it rapidly because the market demanded speed and omnipresence before anyone had time to deliberately design for it. The result is a patchwork: hybrid processing, global delivery, remote editing, distributed production, and organizational silos that don’t always communicate cleanly.
That the broadcast culture has historically favored over-engineering and detailed supplier specifications has compounded the challenge and slowed the very innovation it’s trying to enable.
This is where NETGEAR’s background becomes relevant. We come from the IT networking world, and we’ve spent a decade applying that discipline to the specific demands of AV over IP. First in Pro AV, now increasingly in broadcast. In the Pro AV space, we’ve worked alongside some of the world’s largest organizations who approach infrastructure collaboratively and iteratively, treating their technology partners as genuine design partners rather than vendors fulfilling a spec. That approach consistently produces better outcomes. It’s how we work, and it’s what we’re bringing to broadcast.
Resilience is not optional. Downtime becomes public within minutes, and a significant cyber event poses existential risk. Redundancy, failover, and network-level security directly protect brand reputation and company valuation. Picking the infrastructure that can support this is a business decision.
Intelligence is moving to the edge. AI will increasingly manage infrastructure, not just content. Routing decisions, traffic optimization, threat detection, and deepfake identification are moving onto the network itself, operating in real time at the edge rather than in centralized data centers. That creates a significant opportunity, but it also adds a new layer of interoperability governance. The network has to be architected to support it.
Simplicity is the real competitive advantage. Every new format, every AI integration, every security requirement adds operational complexity. The organizations that pull ahead will be those who absorb that complexity at the infrastructure level and make it invisible to the people working above it.
That’s where infrastructure strategy and business strategy converge. Invisible infrastructure is a reputational asset.
Invisible infrastructure doesn’t happen by accident. It requires treating the network as a strategic investment instead of a utility refreshed on a fixed cycle. It requires deliberate, iterative building to stay ahead of demand rather than responding to it after the fact.
Storytelling will always be at the heart of this industry. But infrastructure determines who gets to keep telling the story.
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