IP networking is a relatively new technology in the broadcast space. While some broadcasters have been active for almost 100 years, the networking world arrived on the scene only fifteen years ago. The turning point came with SMPTE ST 2022 (standardized in the years 2012–2015), which defined professional media over managed IP networks.
Then, SMPTE ST 2110 (ratified in 2017) formalized the transport of uncompressed audio, video, and metadata over IP, using standard Ethernet and TCP/IP infrastructure. Around this period, major broadcasters (BBC, ESPN, NBC, Discovery, etc.) began migrating their production studios to IP-based routing and switching using standard network gear — especially 10/25/40/100 GbE Ethernet.
Ten years ago, broadcasters would ask network engineers at trade shows like IBC or NAB, “Why are you here?” They would answer, “We’re doing networking.” Their job was the plumbing under everything. They would transport “water” from left to right, and they didn’t really care what kind of water it was; they would transport all of it.
In the IT networking space, most of these companies have been around for 30 years, doing exactly that. In commercial AV, it only was 10 years ago that networking started to emerge. Today, it is accelerating everywhere, thanks to the industry’s acceptance of AV-over-IP.
Megatrend: The IP Transition in Broadcasting is Accelerating
There is a specific need that companies in the broadcast space have, that is different to IT and commercial AV, which is reliability — their number one priority. Quality and reliability go hand in hand. This translates into a secure and predictable outcomes. Redundancy is therefore essential. Apart from those requirements, other trends in broadcasting make IP networking the logical next step.
Three technology planets: IT, pro AV, and broadcast, have already collided. We’re in the middle.
The Operational Needs Become Increasingly Urgent
If you listen to the CTOs of the big media companies, they’re all complaining about budget stress because, for example, advertising revenue may go down. They don’t fully monetise social media yet, but viewers are shifting from linear broadcast to social media.
That creates downward pressure on their operational expenses. How do we solve that? Should we stop buying million-dollar boxes, or give up maintaining expensive legacy technology? It is time to consider switching to scalable technologies or brands that do the job for a little less but still provide what’s needed without sacrificing reliability, but with a more attractive OPEX rather than a huge capital expense upfront.
From Cloud to Hybrid Cloud, Back to On-Premises – Should We Buy or Build?
You can see recent trends in broadcasting following what happened in Big IT. We tend to all run to one side of the boat at the same time. For example, 10 years ago, it was all about Big Data.
So, the industry spent millions on it. And we didn’t reap all the benefits from it; we did not receive our money back in operational outcomes. A few years ago, the industry all decided to be in the cloud. And now we’re locked in. And there’s cloud fatigue and cost explosions. Today, many broadcasters say, we should escape from cloud lock-ins and do some of this on-premises. And the conversation now centers on whether it is all “Buy” or “Build”? Well, it’s going to be a mix. It’s going to be hybrid.
The Pain of Data Management
Broadcasters ask the industry: “Who can help us with this hybrid piece?” Because you still need to move things around the building, to different departments, and to the various clouds you have, as well as servers, storage, archives, OB vans, or production sites. There’s a lot of data moving through the company, and that’s where the plumbing becomes increasingly essential, as all of this data is IP-based and highly fragmented.
The buzz phrase of the day is that the data is in a “data mesh.” That means data can be everywhere, not just in one central data lake, as we believed 10 years ago. This puts more pressure on media company CTOs. Now, if you’re the largest media company in the world, that’s not unbearable, because if you are Disney, ABC, or Netflix, you have the budget to solve all these problems. It’s different when you’re a regional broadcaster, or perhaps you’re in a vertical market or niche, in which case you may not have the cash to deal with all this complexity.
While the big cloud providers made it easy for broadcasters to ingest data into their clouds, the on-premises storage vendors did not significantly improve usability. Looks like they left the streaming media handling to the broadcast ecosystem players like Grass Valley, Ross Video or EVS. For a solution to send ST 2110 streams to your local storage, you would need to duct-tape a decoder board, some software, a Mac, a switch, and a NAS together, and get it all to work. Not precisely an easy-to-use over-the-counter appliance. Luckily, innovation is happening in this space, particularly in the start-up scene in Belgium.
Network and Security Design Expertise
CTOs still need to address core issues, such as performance, cybersecurity, data sovereignty, or compliance. How do you do that on a network? That’s really a hot topic in 2026. Dealing with that combination of new trends and old trends. Networking engineers provide a bit of handholding with these types of smaller and mid-sized customers to help them navigate from A to B.
Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know. Large broadcast organisations often hire a consultant to explain the process to them, which typically contains, “Yes, we can do that, but it is going to cost you.”
However, those who don’t have the budget to hire a big consultant will try to figure it out themselves. Therefore, we observe that across all these layers, from the largest broadcasters to the smaller ones, there is a need for education on IP networking, as modern workflows are now entirely run over SMPTE 2110 networks.
Compliance – Internal and External
There’s increasing pressure from the public, through various government bodies, to address security, compliance, and data sovereignty issues. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) promotes standards for media exchange that help with security, compliance, and interoperability.
The industry is embracing MXL, which refers to the Media eXchange Layer of the Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) reference architecture. Even if you are a small broadcasting outfit, you need to deal with that. There is a significant need for education on these topics. We provide our part in that, particularly when it comes to the lower layers of networking and zero-trust network security.
The industry has made some things unnecessarily complex.
Some things are a reality for everyone. For example, you can give your employees access to ChatGPT, allowing them to work more efficiently. However, they may then upload some of the content they create into an AI for translation or summarisation, which causes the spread of your intellectual property worldwide.
Those issues must be addressed, and that’s where a technology solution comes in, aside from training, which is a complementary educational solution. They need both the technology to make security easy and the education to prevent mistakes in network design, enabling them to deploy these solutions quickly.
Evolving Network Innovation – It Doesn’t Stop
It is also exciting to see that the audio component of the broadcast IP transition has taken off. It’s catching up with the IP part of video. We see that a couple of acquisitions were announced in mid-2025. Audinate acquired Iris, while Ross Video acquired Lean and Mean Audio. And we also see investments from VizRT and NDI in the audio space. With adjacent applications like live events and enterprise studios, there is a lot of drive (and money) behind these innovations.
Fighting Complexity Makes for Better Economics
The industry has made some things unnecessarily complex. For example, can I perform video transport with or without genlock or PTP clocking? “The answer is a clock! What was the question?”
Now that all broadcasting is moving to networks, it’s a bit more subtle. Some parts of a network, such as the intercom nodes in a broadcast studio or at a racing event, don’t need to be on a PTP clocked network. We developed a solution that combines clocked networking and non-PTP networking within a single network, managed through a single hybrid profile. During the Olympic Games in Paris, the team took one week to configure a network for a couple of hundred operators.
Learning from that, we automated the entire configuration process, and now it takes only 10 minutes. And the CFOs of the media companies can smell that from a mile. This saves them a lot of money.
Operational efficiency is therefore a key theme. It’s the number one theme for many operational managers in broadcast. Simplification and automation help them. If it’s quicker and they don’t need a PhD on site to fix all of that, but rather a more junior employee who plugs in a cable. If it just works, they love that. And of course, the outcome is predictable and reliable; and more affordable.
Trickle-Down Virtualization
When you speak with manufacturers and high-end users, you’ll see they’re already going to fully adopt software-defined networking. Much of this is very high-end, but it will eventually trickle down, as it always does. It starts at the top of the pyramid and then comes down at a different price point. As a technology company with 30 years of experience, we typically wait until that mass inflection point is reached.
SMPTE ST 2110, which scientists and well-suited professionals once primarily drove, is now being adopted by a wider audience. The same will happen with concepts like data-loss prevention or zero-trust security. This is becoming a mainstream reality because no one wants their content to end up on the dark web or on a dodgy peer-to-peer site.
All the components that make for a successful networking business growth spurt are in place. Innovation, such as software-defined networking, is definitely needed. There’s a problem we can solve together by making this easier. The fact that it is challenging to move audio everywhere, just as you already had to move SDI video, suggests that the industry may be a little late with this.
However, from all of the alliances we’re in, we hear that the trend is the same. Make deploying audio over IP in broadcast easier, and standardise it somewhat, so it’s easier for broadcasters to deploy multibrand, hybrid cloud-based solutions.
Six years ago, broadcast technicians asked network engineers, “Why are you here”? Now they ask them: “Wow, how do you do this?” To qualify that as a noticeable shift is an understatement. Networking engineers enable powerful, beautiful experiences—by doing the plumbing right.
This article originally appeared on TV Tech sister brand TVBEurope.
