The broadcastification of ProAV…and the problems hat come with it

By Helen Matthews Futuresource Consulting

If you haven't been living under a rock these past eighteen months, you'll have noticed that ProAV is changing. The language of broadcast, cloud switching, IP routing, AI driven production, SMPTE ST 2110, has colonised the ProAV world, first at ISE and now at InfoComm. It's a convergence that's been building for years, but what's striking is how rapidly it's gone from a niche conversation to the dominant one on the show floor. ProAV and broadcast spent decades as separate industries with different vendors, customer bases and operating models. That's no longer the case.

The catalyst, predictably, was COVID. The pandemic didn't simply accelerate remote working; it permanently restructured how organisations think about video. Education, healthcare, government, corporate communications, houses of worship, all suddenly needed livestreaming infrastructure, remote contribution, hybrid event platforms and on demand content pipelines. Video stopped being a facilities line item and became a strategic communications priority. Social media kept the pressure on: marketing teams that once outsourced production now operate in house, at pace, with the bar for quality rising alongside the volume.

As a result, whether they planned for it or not, many enterprises have become media companies.

The physical spaces are catching up. Boardrooms are being retrofitted with multi camera capability, universities are running internal broadcast studios, and houses of worship are operating workflows that rival regional television. These are not AV rooms; they are compact content production environments. The technology has accelerated this: broadcast grade PTZs, cloud-based switching, AI assisted framing and tracking, AVoverIP, (NDI, Dante AV, the emerging IPMX standard that bridges into ST 2110), have all dramatically lowered the barrier to scalable production outside dedicated broadcast facilities, with AI absorbing some of the operational complexity that once required a broadcast engineer.

What's still being worked through is what comes after the kit goes in. Broadcast grade capability has moved into ProAV environments faster than the operating models around it have evolved. Four areas in particular show the gap most clearly, one inherited from broadcast, the others created by the convergence itself.

The first is media asset management. Most enterprises have no MAM strategy because, until recently, they had no media to manage at scale. They are now quietly building up the same content sprawl problem broadcasters deal with on the daily. Vendors have noticed: at NAB Show 2026 (National Association of Broadcasters), EditShare and farmerswife, both broadcast rooted companies, positioned products around ProAV centric workflows. We'll likely see similar activities at InfoComm. The implication for end users is straightforward: asset management is best designed in early, because the DropBox is going to fill up fast.

Adding MAM to the workflow piles complexity onto an already complex system, and the staffing question that follows is one of the more operationally significant ones in the market right now. Broadcast and ProAV teams have historically been built around different problems: broadcast engineering around continuous, signal-critical operations; ProAV around commissioning, room support and event delivery. Both are highly skilled, but optimised for different jobs. As broadcast grade workflows arrive in enterprise environments, the operating model around them needs to evolve, and AI is helpful but only goes so far. Whoever solves training and certification, vendor, integrator or third party, has a defensible position. Those that have already built that capability in house have a moat.

Compliance is another issue, and the legal team is usually the last to know. Once an organisation produces video at scale, broadcast style obligations attach themselves whether the AV brief mentioned them or not: captioning and accessibility (the European Accessibility Act took effect on 28 June 2025), participant consent and data residency under GDPR (or its international equivalents), music and rights licensing, retention rules in regulated sectors. None of this lives in the AV requirements document. It tends to surface when something goes wrong, a complaint, a rights claim, a regulator. Broadcasters have whole teams for this. Enterprise teams now running production capability are working out what their equivalent needs to look like.

And the commercial squeeze lands hardest on the channel. The integrator margin model has historically lived on hardware: specify it, sell it, install it, support it. Cloud production, SaaS switching and AI services route enterprise spend through a different door, and the customer relationship has a habit of going with it. Some vendors are already testing more direct routes to market, putting pressure on the channel from another direction. Integrators who genuinely understand broadcast signal chains, IP standards and production architecture occupy a fundamentally different advisory position, and will be hard to disintermediate. The opportunity for the channel is to lead the conversation about the operating model, not just the hardware spec.

The convergence of broadcast and ProAV is the easy thesis. The market worth watching is the operational layer underneath: the asset management, the skills pathway, the compliance, the commercial model. This is where the value gets built next.

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