For a decade, the broadcast and Pro AV industry has debated which protocol wins: NDI, Dante, AES67, SMPTE ST 2110. That debate is mostly over. All four are mature, well-documented, and increasingly affordable. The protocols are no longer the main reason IP migrations stall. More often, it is the network underneath them, which ultimately determines how reliably the system performs and how difficult it is to deploy.
IN THIS ARTICLE
The expertise gap
For years, configuring a switch for a production environment has required someone who understands multicast routing, IGMP snooping, PTP grandmaster configuration, and VLAN segmentation across mixed protocols. Most integrators do not have that person on staff. Large integrators might have two or three people in the whole organization who can do it correctly. That scarcity can delay deployments, increase project costs, and make IP migration feel too risky for customers. It helps explain why some operations stayed on SDI and others encountered costly configuration errors.
Where the friction lives
Hybrid environments make the problem worse, not better. A single studio might run NDI for remote contributors, Dante for audio, ST 2110 for its core video fabric, and AES67 for interop, all on the same physical network. Each protocol has its own requirements, and keeping them from colliding takes exacting switch-level configuration that’s easy to get wrong. When that configuration fails, the result can be interrupted signals, difficult troubleshooting, and production downtime.
Built for the workflow, not repurposed IT gear
Multicast routing, IGMP snooping, PTP timing, and VLAN segmentation should not depend on the integrator having a dedicated network engineer on the project. Infrastructure specified for this workflow from the start should handle them, not generic IT hardware pressed into service. That gives integrators a more repeatable deployment process and customers a production environment they can rely on.
The stakes go up as production moves toward 25G and 100G transport. A switch that handles 1G NDI traffic without issue may not deliver the same reliability under uncompressed ST 2110 workloads. The physics change, and so do the timing tolerances and the cost of getting them wrong. Choosing infrastructure designed for those demands helps protect customers from avoidable disruption as their production requirements grow.
Why procurement is changing
For most of the last decade, the production system and the network came from separate vendors, specified separately, and reconciled on-site, often when incompatibilities surfaced that pre-sales had missed. When the switching infrastructure is validated and distributed alongside the production system it supports, compatibility is addressed before installation begins. For integrators without a dedicated network engineering resource, that reduces project risk and makes IP viable for more customers, including those who might otherwise remain on SDI.
NETGEAR’s M4350 series was built with exactly this workflow in mind: purpose-built for AV-over-IP and broadcast production, with the multicast, PTP, and VLAN handling that hybrid environments need, validated alongside the NDI, Dante, and ST 2110 ecosystems it runs on. For integrators, that means less time engineering the network from scratch. For customers, it means a more reliable foundation, ready for today’s workflows and future production demands.
The operations succeeding with IP right now are not the ones that picked the best protocol. They are the ones that chose a network foundation that reduces complexity, lowers deployment risk, and keeps production moving.
Read Devan Cress’s full op-ed on TV Tech, “The Network is the Bottleneck Nobody is Talking About.”
Learn more: www.netgear.com/av.