A single live event must often serve both in-venue and streaming audiences. “Ideally, both outputs should come from the same integrated system,” says Blackmagic Design's Darren Gosney. “This can mean driving LED wall content, streaming a global feed and producing on-demand clips, all from a unified workflow. “At the 2025 Starlite Festival in Marbella, a three-month series of events in a Spanish quarry, the production team built a system that could handle 4K multicamera coverage for the venue’s LED walls while also capturing material for daily TV-style programmes. “Multiple cameras, a live production switcher, fibre camera links, network-attached storage and remote control protocols all worked together to deliver the in-venue show and package content for more than 100 countries. Cloud-enabled post-production meant editors could work off-site, turning around concert highlights and interviews within hours, so that the finished programmes could be distributed internationally the next day.” Serving two masters
has some fundamental differences in approach. Adopting some of these could be to AV’s advantage. “What broadcast suppliers offer that many traditional AV suppliers don’t is a systems-based mindset,” says Joyce Bente, president and CEO North America at Riedel Communications. “It’s not about offering one-off products. It’s about building an integrated and scalable workflow that AV users can trust to work every day – at any scale – with minimal friction.” Standards provide a firm foundation. “The broadcast industry has spent years integrating solutions to achieve connectivity, control and standardised interfacing,” says Costa Nikols, strategy advisor on media and entertainment at Telos Alliance.
“These standards have continuously evolved, encompassing APIs, router control protocols and comprehensive standards such as Livewire+, NMOS and Dante Ember+. This degree of interoperability is exceptional within industries where numerous competitors target the same customer base.” Catherine Koutsaris, product marketing manager at Matrox Video, believes that the biggest benefit broadcast/film media-over-IP is bringing to the AV world is SMPTE 2110. “IPMX added to ST 2110 things such as USB, digital rights management, privacy encryption, digital key exchange, more media types and networking condition options, etc. But broadcast did the heavy lifting of building a proper, de jure standard for media-over-IP. And
in turn, the IPMX enhancements will bring benefits back to broadcast/film, by reintroducing the near universal compatibility previously enjoyed with the mini converter economy.” Broadcast is also much more software-based than traditional AV. “The migration from dedicated processing hardware to software apps running on generic servers is taking hold in the pro AV space,” says Scheck. “Given that our mc² audio mixing consoles are essentially sophisticated remote controllers that transmit commands to a DSP processor, a growing number of theatres and event spaces are realising that it doesn’t really matter whether the processing is performed by a hardware device that only does
Powered by FlippingBook