Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Don’t Call it “AV Networking,” Call it Networking
www.avnetwork.com: Our business has gone through a change, which accelerated drastically around 2010. We are starting to see system designs that place all devices on networks for control, media transport, and media routing. I used to think that the heart of every AV system was the matrix switcher, the audio processor, or the control system, but these days, it seems like the heart of every AV system we are designing is the network switch. If that is truly the case, regardless of the debate as to who is providing said switch, we all need to accept the fact that our systems are now just networks.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Like I mentioned in a previous comment networking is something that is constantly growing in the entertainment field but I don't entirely understand. This article is successful in explaining how big networking has become and a little bit about what sort of things you can do with networked systems. In my minimal experience with networking systems I have been able to see a lot of really useful applications for networking. For example, with Shure's wireless systems you can connect all of your receivers to a switch and then to your computer. You can then connect to Wireless Workbench and coordinate frequencies and automatically assign them to the receivers. This cuts a lot of time out of building your show when you can do everything from your laptop and then just upload your preferences to the units.
I disagree with almost everything this article has to say.
Let’s start with “Don’t call it AV Networking, Call it Networking.” Let’s talk about how an AV network is much more complex than a standard network. I have a degree in networking, but I don’t think I’d be qualified to set up an AV network. Let’s not short our talents. Being an expert at setting up an AV network is a much different skillset than being an expert at setting up a network at a financial institution.
Let’s move on to the financial institution examply. The article says that financial institutions use networks to handle many billions of dollars of transactions per second, so getting a powerpoint to a screen should be no issue. Wrong. Getting a powerpoint to a screen, maybe, is easy enough. Getting multiple projects to reliably sync together, project on a screen, and sync up with the audio content of the production, all while remaining responsive to input is much more difficult that handling many billions of dollars of transactions a second. Maybe I’m putting too fine a point on this, but financial transactions are number. They are a double integer piece of data, immersive multimedia content is much more complex. Financial institutions also have server rooms that are likely the size of an entire theatre footprint, an AV system likely has a converted broom closet, so let’s not try to make the comparison between a banks transactions and a performances AV content.
The last line says that now is the time to start to absorb IT expertise into our industry. Sure IT expertise is important to the AV networking niche, but lets be careful to say imply that standard commercial IT experts can do the job that a specialized AV professional can do.
Post a Comment