Perhaps the clearest signal came from the exhibitors. EVS Broadcast and Lawo, both broadcast infrastructure companies with deep roots in live production and media, had a booth at InfoComm for the first time. Alongside established crossover names like Ross Video, Riedel, VIZRT/NDI, Audinate, and Providius, that alone tells you where enterprise broadcast is headed.

Enterprise meeting rooms are no longer just a place for video calls. The town hall is no longer just an internal stream. The boardroom is no longer just screens, cameras, and codecs. Increasingly, enterprise AV environments are expected to deliver broadcast-grade production values, IT-grade manageability, and commercial AV-grade simplicity simultaneously.

This convergence is often misunderstood. It does not mean forcing all workloads onto a single generic network and hoping the architecture holds. Hope is not a strategy! It does not mean treating video, audio, control, security, collaboration, and production workflows as “just packets.” And it certainly does not mean pretending that enterprise broadcast is already as simple as mature commercial AV-over-IP.

How we got here, and what comes next

Video over IP has become far more predictable because the industry, including NETGEAR, has spent years solving the real-world challenges that matter most, from multicast behavior and switch profiles to IGMP, QoS, VLAN design, endpoint validation, rack-friendly hardware, and repeatable deployment models.. In many cases, an integrator can now design, preconfigure, and commission an AV-over-IP network with a level of confidence that simply did not exist half a decade ago.

Enterprise broadcast is moving in the same direction, but it brings five hurdles to overcome.

Five hurdles

Timing

Broadcast workflows depend on synchronization. Standards like SMPTE ST 2110 and production environments built around PTP are far less forgiving than conferencing or signage deployments. If timing is inconsistent, the problem may not look like “the network is down.” It may look like audio drift, lip-sync errors, frame slips, or intermittent production faults that are difficult to reproduce.

Bandwidth and burst behavior

Enterprise broadcast can involve many simultaneous feeds, contribution sources, multiviewers, encoders, decoders, recorders, replay systems, and distribution paths. The network has to handle sustained media flows, not just peak data throughput. Oversubscription that looks acceptable on a traditional IT spreadsheet may fail under real media load.

Multicast

Enterprise IT networks were historically optimized for unicast traffic. Broadcast and AV-over-IP often depend on predictable multicast behavior at scale. IGMP snooping, querier placement, PIM boundaries, fast leave behavior, and multicast containment are not optional details. They determine whether the system feels deterministic or fragile.

Security

Enterprise security teams want Zero Trust, identity-based access, segmentation, logging, and policy enforcement. Broadcast and AV teams want low-latency media, stable device discovery, and production workflows that do not collapse during a live event. The future is not “security versus performance.” The whole idea that this is a slider is just wrong. The future is security designed into the architecture early enough that it does not become a last-minute firewall exception.

Operational ownership

Currently, IT owns the network, and AV owns the experience. Broadcast owns the production outcome. When something fails, the executive audience does not care which domain caused the issue. They only know the stream glitched, the town hall failed, or the CEO could not be heard. Converged environments require converged accountability, shared language, and tools that both IT and AV teams can use and understand.

That is why the next phase of enterprise AV is about deterministic design, validated interoperability, repeatable configuration, and support models that recognize how high-pressure these environments have become.

The industry responded

We also launched the Align Controller at InfoComm 2026, NETGEAR’s first AV-platform. By the time the show closed, it had picked up Best of Show awards from rAVe, Installation, AV Technology, Sound & Video Contractor, and The Tech Effect award for Best Enterprise Solution, alongside with the CTI Spotlight Award and the PSNI Future Ready Award that NETGEAR AV received.

The response reinforced what we heard throughout the week: the industry is looking for simpler ways to design, deploy, manage, and scale increasingly complex AV environments.

What we mean when we say it

At NETGEAR AV, we come from networking, and we live in AV. Our teams understand multicast, latency, determinism, uptime, and the realities of racks, rooms, and live events. We have spent years working with 600+ AV-over-IP manufacturers, building profiles, validating solutions, simplifying deployment, and helping integrators reduce human error and the lack of education that often cause the most painful failures.

The market has moved; hybrid work made video mission-critical. LED walls, immersive audio, multi-stream environments, and executive broadcast workflows are now part of the enterprise landscape. What used to be peripheral is now infrastructure.

That is why convergence matters.

AV, IT, and broadcast are not becoming the same thing, but they increasingly depend on the same network, the same operational standards, and the same expectation for reliability.

The future of enterprise media will not be defined by AV, IT, or broadcast alone. It will be defined by how seamlessly they work together. That requires validated solutions, operational simplicity, shared standards, and partners willing to take responsibility for the outcome.

For years, the industry has worked to make AV-over-IP predictable. Enterprise broadcast is now following the same path. The organizations that succeed will be those that build environments that are reliable, secure, scalable, and repeatable, not just innovative.

The secret

The secret is: there is no secret. Consistency over intensity and big words. Hard work and daily progress beat talent, titles, or overengineered perfectionism. That is how commercial AV-over-IP became dependable. We believe enterprise broadcast will get there, too.

At NETGEAR AV, we intend to help lead that journey.

The market has moved. The expectations have changed. The convergence is already here.