Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: 3, 2, rev.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: 1.
Hello everyone. Welcome back to broadcast to post. I'm still Michael Kammes, and today's episode is going to hit especially close to home for a lot of AV professionals, campus tech planners and IT managers. We're talking about the great AV over IP shift. And trust me, this isn't just another buzzword bingo session.
From classrooms and signage walls to huddle rooms and corporate boardrooms, the AV landscape is changing extraordinarily fast. At the heart of that transformation is AV over ip. It's flexible, scalable and deeply IT centric. But the move just isn't about swapping out HDMI for Cat 6. It's about rethinking how we design spaces, how we manage gear, and how we collaborate across departments. And if you've ever tried to explain multicast to your IT team or tried to budget for an IDF retrofit, you already know the transition can be painful. There's a knowledge gap between AV and it, not to mention challenges with training, switch topology, bandwidth and device support.
So here's what's coming up in today's episode. First, we're checking in with Mike Cavanaugh, president at Keycode Media, to get his always hot take on how AV over IP is influencing decisions at the integrator level.
Then we've got a quick spotlight on Jodan Belafato at UC Merced, a forward thinking tech leader doing some incredible work designing AV into the next gen campus experience.
And finally, we go deep with Laurent Masia from Netgear, one of the most influential voices in AV over ip as well as the co founder of the sdvoe Alliance. If you're navigating this transition, this this is the guy you want to hear from.
Okay, let's start things off with a quick check in with someone who's got their hands in the wiring closets and budget spreadsheets every single day. Mike Cavanaugh, President of Key Code Media See, we wanted to know how is AV over IP impacting his work as a systems integrator?
[00:02:15] Speaker C: From my perspective, AV over IP has completely changed the way we work as a systems integrator, we've moved from a fixed hardware centric design over to flexible scalable network systems using standard off the shelf technology.
So where we were when we first got into this AV over IP back in 2016, as we got involved in audio visual networks, Extron and Crestron were primary vendors. They were AV only. They were closed, they were not converged with it.
Distribution was very much a hardware based matrix frame rather than a software configurable. System over a network that really limited the expansion where if you needed to expand, you needed more physical I O from Crestron, from Extron. And it was not just adding endpoints to a switch, which was very foreign to us where we were working with av, but not in a world where the standardization of network was there and troubleshooting literally was cable by cable with no VLANs, no QoS, no multicast management to worry about. So what we've transitioned over to was really a flexible, scalable network system.
That shift means our engineers spend a lot more time architecting robust network infrastructures, working hand in hand with our clients, specifying displays and endpoints. And it raised the technical bar. But it's also given our clients a lot more room to grow without replacing their entire backbone.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: What's shifting in the way AV products are being specked, sold and even supported?
[00:03:52] Speaker C: Well, I think the first way to look at now is project specifications are now driven by workflow and integration, not just equipmentless.
So it's more a matter of getting pulled into the conversations earlier, often with, you know, the chief Network Officer, the cio, to ensure that the AV can fit seamlessly into the overall enterprise IT strategies. You know, sales are a lot less about one time transactions and more about long term service models. Creating remote monitoring, firmware management and proactive support has really become the norm.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: All right, next up, we've got a really insightful conversation with Jodan Belafado, the technology experience architect over at UC Merced. I spoke with Jodan recently about the AV vision behind their brand new medical education building. And what I love about this conversation is how practical it gets. We're talking real world decisions, not just concepts or theory.
If you're in higher ed or working on a multi year facility planning, this is the kind of thinking you'll want to bring to the table.
A common technology that we're talking to clients about quite a bit is AV over ip. And I know your, your new medical education building is fully AV over ip.
What do you think is what pushed UC Merced kind of over the over the edge to adopt AV over ip? And, and I'd love to hear what kind of technical challenges you faced downwind of that.
[00:05:26] Speaker D: I don't know if this is a unique story to UC Merced, but as instructional spaces have had an increasing demand to be more technically robust, it introduces a liability that you eventually have to kind of replace this technology and upgrade this technology. And so what we have learned a lesson learned from previous capital projects and certainly the 2020 project was kind of get as far ahead of that as you can in those capital project moments because, you know, a good example that I can go backwards in time to is the analog sunset. And there was this really awkward part in capital projects where like, am I going to put HDMI in this building or am I going to stick with vga? Because it's tried and true. And what a lot of people found was because they didn't just take that leap of faith, they suddenly basically had buildings that were obsolete in three years. And that's really problematic. And so a big reason why is, you know, AV over IP was very much a bleeding edge, cutting edge technology, but it's now kind of like drifting into the meaty part of that bell curve as the platform becomes more mature. In fact, the industry is now trying to sort of come up with an industry standard, which would be great because, you know, the differentiation between the manufacturers is always a struggle. So that was the big reason. It's a capital project. We kind of forecast ahead. What is the emerging technology, what is the technology that we're likely to install when this building comes online? And AV over ip, this was the building that finally was like, this is the one, this is what we're going to have to do.
I think the technological challenge goes without saying. It's network people really underestimate the bandwidth requirements, I think of video and audio because we don't tend to measure them that way as an industry or as a body. We talk about resolution, we talk about color, depth, we talk about refresh rate, and all of those things drive you towards a, you know, a megabit or gigabit per second measurement. But we don't, we don't talk about it in those terms.
And so I think even some AV people are get a little wide eyed and like, oh my God, Every endpoint is 1 gigabit per second.
[00:07:31] Speaker C: What?
[00:07:32] Speaker D: Like how do you support that?
And that's, you know, that is a challenge that we face with this building and we hope we've addressed it.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: You bring up a great point. As we've seen over the past few decades, the melding of media and the melding of IT have become almost one.
You can't do one without the other. So you mentioned the throughput issues or throughput concerns, but how did you work with your IT stakeholders to make sure that this was being deployed and everyone was aware of how this would benefit them and, and how you'd have to kind of engineer with that in mind.
[00:08:10] Speaker D: So here's the dirty little secret I Guess about UC Merced. The AV team reports to the cio.
So conveniently, all of the stuff that I unfortunately hear about from my peers or other higher education institutions, I don't struggle with as much. When I need something from the network team or to collaborate with them on something, they're just across need, you know, metaphorical hall.
And if there are struggles in reconciling the audiovisual or those types of needs with what the network can support, the reporting structure kind of funnels up all the same way.
And I think that that is a serious consideration. A lot of institutions are going to have to make now, like a lot of AV departments will sometimes report to the undergrad ed division or the provost of their school. A lot of academic driven decision making and that's important. I don't want people to lose sight of that. And I think UC Merced has found a bit of a swee spot. It finds a way to nicely integrate with the academic and learning apparatuses in our institution, which gives some level of confidence that it can manage that. Because ultimately the end of the day is a technology to be managed. So I just approached my network architect and was like, okay, let's start doing some napkin work. Like we gotta figure out this many endpoints, this many da DA does. And you know, we took all that information and went back to our construction and design and architects and we're like, this is what the building is going to need to do to successfully support this technology modality. And I think they learned some interesting lessons along the way too.
I think this architect wasn't as familiar with the idea.
I'm kind of talking around it, but we are basically building AV IDFs.
The AV racks and stuff will be completely out of the room and they will be built almost like a classic network closet, centralizing and consolidating all of that.
So it's going to be a real technological shift and a real cultural shift, honestly. And we're kind of excited about it in a lot of ways.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: So what Jodan said there really resonates. He talked about the past transition from VGA to hdmi. Facilities that stuck with VGA for too long found their classrooms obsolete in under three years. Now that's a major problem when capital investment cycles stretch out eight to 10 years. He also nailed something we're hearing everywhere. Network infrastructure is the bottleneck IT teams often don't anticipate the scale and throughput that audio and video demand. AV over IP requires one gig endpoints at a minimum. More in other cases, that means you're not just planning av, you're building out structured cabling, negotiating switch capacities, rethinking rack space, and most importantly, you're working really close with it.
So Jodan's advice? Don't just partner with it, merge with them. Talk about centralized AV IDFs, shared closets, standardized topologies. Because in the end, AV and IT aren't separate worlds anymore. They're just departments waiting to be unified.
All right, for our final segment today, we're diving deep with someone who's been instrumental in reshaping how networking companies think about professional av.
Laurent Masia is the director of Product Management for Managed Switches at Netgear and he's also a co founder of the sdvoe Alliance.
Now, if you're wondering why a company like Netgear is suddenly at the center of every major AV over IP install, it's because they bet big on Pro Avoid and it's paying off. In this interview, Lorenz shares why Netgear doubled down on the AV industry. How AV over IP reshapes, facility design plus what AV over IP really means when it comes to scale, control and cost and how to phase your transition and how to avoid common pitfalls. This is essential listening for anyone in the audio video industry. All right, Lauren, let's start at the beginning.
Netgear is a well known name in networking, but pivoting into av, you know, isn't something you see every day from a company of Netgear size. Can you kind of walk us through the story of how Netgear AV was born out of Netgear?
What was the spark and what's come from it? Also, I kind of want to know how you personally fit into this story.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Thank you, Michael. Oh, let me tell you. You know, it started with customers as it usually start. So it was in the old years, like 2013, 2014. We got at Netgear by then a range of gigabit and 10 gigabit switchers that some EV manufacturers like Christie Digital, like Zivi, like Aurora Multimedia, plenty of North American, nice AV shops if you wish. They were like saying, you know, Cisco's are, you know, kind of expensive. We are experimenting. We want to do some kind of video for ip. And yes, they were using the Netgears because the netgears were substantial. You know, they were like less expensive. But let me tell you, it was really hard. Fast forward.
We discovered that this AV industry was going to transition to video over ip. That was the spark. I as a product manager totally missed the audio over IP transition, but the video Over IP was the spark and we understood that we didn't have the right switchers, that this industry was needing something more in terms of hardware, software, service and support.
Fast forward.
Yeah, we can say that almost 15 years later now Netgear is almost a navy company on some sort.
[00:14:06] Speaker B: What's really interesting about that is not only was there a business shift, but that requires kind of a cultural shift as well.
So for Netgear to make that move.
What did it take for Netgear to not just serve out, but become a real stakeholder in the pro AV world? Was there a mindset shift? Was there any folks who wanted to go a different direction? Kind of. How was that changed internally at Netgear?
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, Netgear is a great company, it's a public company, so we are governed with a lot of rules. And so I must tell you that at the beginning, you know, it was really much a personal venture because I wanted to help.
But very rapidly, to answer your question, we had to invest a lot of efforts into some new port counts. Platforms, switchers, Ethernet switches are not the same in fact between IT and av.
Because in AV you need a lot of peewee power. That's a good example.
The peewee, the power ethernet. In the IT world you need a little bit because the access points, yeah, you do have access points, but it's not much. And it's maybe the 6 or the 10 first ports in the switch. With AV you can have full blown power ethernet and now with lighting, can you imagine? So the fiber uplinks also needs to be more because you need to be line weight, non blocking.
So a variety of reasons. So we discovered that the learning curve for the AV community was too deep, you know, too steep because igmp, quality of service, you have so much things to do to make it work. You know, the AV fabric on the network.
And then we, so we said, okay, well, I mean the software is probably not appropriate right now. I mean, you know, the cli, tennet, ssh, snmp, it, GUI and all that. So we had to reinvent ourselves a lot on the UX user experience standpoint.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Thank you for that. I think what most people don't realize is that if we go back 10 years, sometimes even less. Netgear wasn't even a name that was even spoken in some engineering circles. So what you've been able to do over the past decade to bring it to the forefront to be used these AV over IP scenarios has just been fantastic. So hats off.
But let's Move a little bit more to buildings.
[00:16:42] Speaker A: Right?
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Whether we have classrooms or corporate headquarters, often these buildings are expected to have hybrid conference rooms, right? Huddle spaces, schedulers. They even have video walls and light studio spaces. So to you, how is AV over IP fundamentally changing how we're designing these facility spaces from the ground up?
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah, so that's a very good question because you have some controversy, I should say it used to be some controversy in the old days and these past 10 years were actually useful for all of us in this AV world because you are professional AV corporate headquarters, or it's one thing, but you have many other types of verticals. Education, medical.
We actually figured what was the right way because remember the convergence, the ev IT convergence was meaning at the beginning that the EV was going into the IT corporate network. Right? But the problem is that the network became the real EV fabric. And before it was very robust for video, you got this huge metric switches that were unbreakable, you know, unstoppable.
And same for audio, analog, digital.
And all of a sudden you have a very fragile network fabric which can create tremendous issues with timing, time sensitive networking, with quality of service. So the dramatic change actually has been that from the AVIT convergence, we understood that the design all of a sudden is to consider the headquarters, the IT corporate network, as an ocean and design islands to have a good proper AV fabric and just connect those islands to the ocean. So now the second part of the answer is that you can figure that it's actually simpler now because if you compare a hybrid room or a boardroom or any kind of auditorium installation before the transition, after everything has been streamlined quite a lot.
Just talking about video, you needed the scalers and the splitters and multi viewers and, and picture, and picture. But now everything has been reduced, you know, to the TX encoder, RX receiver. Everything else is software. So the design, all the designs have been streamlined quite a lot. But yes, it takes a lot on the fabric and probably we're going to discuss that more. But if you figure a good network fabric for your av, then you can design very nice islands into those rooms and have a strategy with the IT organization at that customer, at that client. Because it's a wrong assessment to say that those IT people, they want to do AV because you know, it's network related. It's not true. They are scared because multicast and quality of service, they don't know that very well. And AV is a threat. AV is dangerous. AV can actually destroy an entire network with those multicast streams. So they will Be extremely happy to get educated and happy to learn how to have a proper connection between the corporate network and the EV installation for the Internet, but also for the control.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: Because you brought it up now, I'll just add, I was going to ask this later, but I'll ask it now.
You said it's a threat, AV is a threat to traditional IT networks and that you need to become educated in how AV and IT kind of coalesce and work together. So what does it look like in terms of furthering education to get folks who know AV to learn it, or vice versa? Folks who've been doing it but now want to learn AV to further integrate that into their facility.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Yeah, so I mean, it takes a lot. I mean, it took me personally more than 10 years. So, you know, I cannot tell you better than that. But let's, let's be serious. Let's be serious. I'm going to give you an example, but of course I cannot, I cannot quote, okay? I cannot disclose who, where, even when, but you know, universities in North America and the U.S. it's a very good example. Okay? So you have in every state, state universities, and as you know, those are very large networks, okay? And they are going through that. They reinvent themselves, okay? The education, the wombs, they must be hybrid. Everything you said, it's happening.
And the network admins are scientists, right? Because they are professors. They are IEE scientists and teachers. And professors.
So they know more than the average. You agree?
So those networks are impressive to say the least. Okay, what does it take for them? Well, it takes the very simple fact that how many in the typical project of yours, Michael, how many different AV endpoints and technologies you are going to mix and match in a project, in a sizable project?
Tell me. Dozens.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Well, normally, you know, normally you want to try and homogenize into to one manufacturer just for support issues and whatnot, but that rarely is, is the case. Rarely. We're deploying multiple different manufacturers which all have their own QoS that all have their own requirements. And we, as you know, folks who deploy things like this have to kind of know what each manufacturer and what technology needs so we can deploy it properly. So, so it's never as few manufacturers as we want. It's always a multitude of manufacturers.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Right? And see, now you can see the problem yourself if you try to be in their shoes.
They need to all of a sudden be specialist on a number of very complicated notions. Because, you know, we talked about multicast, we talked about quality of service, but you have so many other Things in order to sustain this codec or this other control system or this.
You know.
The best example I can give you is the discovery, I mean the discovery protocols, the MDNs, the Bonjour, the LLDP, the SSDP, the QDP, you have a number of discovery protocols that don't play fair with each other and how to support. So they will have to all of a sudden understand how to tailor a typical IT configuration for, you know, very unknown and diverse AV technologies. But universities, usually they try to do things by themselves. Remember they are professors, teachers, but in Most other Fortune 500s or corporate headquarters it's going to be the system integrator, the AV system integrator U that will have to make your AV work on these third party its. And when you will try to get support from those large enterprise networking vendors, you will get none because they will say oh, doesn't work. Probably because your AVN point is not standard. It's not following the standard we do agmp, it should follow.
[00:24:50] Speaker B: If we look towards the future. In Utopia.
There's a phrase I love and I use it almost every day, it's you don't know what you don't know.
And I wanted to ask you what are some of the top maybe overlooked benefits that folks may not know of going to AV over IP when they're designing a new AV facility?
What does the kind of future proof argument really look like?
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Oh yeah, no, that's a great question. And you need to keep me honest because even if you can see my studio and we try to do a lot of AV and we consider ourselves sometimes as an AV company, I'm an IT person, you know, I do switchers and so keep me honest. But what I can bring as a testimony is that if you really compare after, before, after you, the end, because the user, I mean this is the user experience, you know, so the end user, so the people like you and I that will use that new facility or the students in the education verticals, the users have greater, greater expectations now because you can do things with ip, with AV over IP that were extremely complicated, if not impossible to do before.
Why?
Because before the transition to IP everything was made of hardware, very expensive and cumbersome hardware.
And when I was giving you those examples for scaling, for the switching, the routing, but the scaling when you have different resolutions, different frame rates, the color, then all the, on the delivery, all the picture in picture and the video walling, I mean all these were so cumbersome that first it was quite hard and expensive to design and implement Those advanced technologies in the past. But with The EV over IP, everything has been so much streamlined and handled 100% in software that this is opening a world of new possibilities.
And it is extremely clear to all of us that, yeah, probably the end users are not going to say we need EV over ip, but at least they can tell what they need in terms of experience.
And this experience has been made more possible, I would say, with EV over ip, because the world, the software has no limit. And now you think about AI. I mean, can you imagine the future? It's going to be awesome. Maybe one day I will push a button on my keyboard here and I'm going to look different, I'm going to sound different. I mean, all that is awesome.
So AV over IP is to me is enhancing AV more than av.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: So if we shift gears a little bit often, key code gets called into situations where something may already be in place. On the AV side, right? Maybe it's an HDMI matrix, right? That's very common.
And changing from that can be difficult. Especially as you said, a lot of folks aren't educated on that side of the business. So what is the real benefit if someone already has an HDMI matrix? Let's say, what's the real benefit in making the AV over IP leap?
[00:28:29] Speaker A: So I really believe this is the scale and the possible expansion.
I'm going to tell you after all these years, because personally I'm in netgear for like 20 years. So half my career I was very active on the IT side of things and I could shift, you know, and I'm happy because this organization let me shift and some other people now can do it. And so I'm glad. But I can compare, you know, I'm lucky on that side, I can compare. And on the it, in the IT world, there is one obsession. This is the single point of failure. You want to eliminate the single point of failure, you know, and this is.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: All about redundancy at every step. Of course, right?
[00:29:19] Speaker A: But in the AV world, of course, I'm not talking about live streaming or CNN or BBC because they also want to eliminate the single point of failure, right? But for the other applications, for the vast majority, back to your hybrid, new hybrid rooms. It's not the main obsession. The main obsession is tomorrow and next summertime and next year because the EV systems are growing. The EV is proliferating. You will have more screens, more displays, more microphones, more speakers, more.
You will have more.
And before, with a typical matrix switcher, when you were full, because your 12x12 or your 20x20 or your 60x60 was fully utilized, you got to rip and replace the whole damn switcher. When with AV over ip you just add a few switches because the network is by definition expandable.
So I think this is the greatest, above all, this is the greatest benefit. This is a no limit design that you can very much achieve by choosing small pieces that can be assembled. So I don't want to be too technical, but you need to differentiate audio and video. So audio, the bandwidth is very small. So you can actually go from 1 to 1,000 or 5,000 endpoints, like a big concert venue or a gigantic stadium with a fairly small bandwidth, you know, because every channel is going to be tiny, tiny, tiny. But with video, compressed video, it's already one gigabit, you know, it's a lot of data. And if you go uncompressed, it's 10 gigabit or 25 gigabit, so that becomes cumbersome. But if you start with switches with the right uplinks capacity, if you do one gigabit video, then you need to have 10 gigabit capacity out of your switches. If you always pay attention to the fact that you want to be line weight between the in and the out, between the egress and the ingress, or the TX and rx, if I can speak this language, then your network can be expanded.
[00:31:49] Speaker B: Let's talk about some tactical advice when you're transitioning. If a building has to phase the AV over IP transition over the course of a couple years, what's the smart order of operations?
Should the building start with a switch backbone? Maybe start with what the endpoints are? Or is it like you said, with the talent hiring someone who really knows about AV over IP and igmp?
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great question.
I would say a little bit of everything.
So I know it's not going to help if I stop there, but let me explain.
What is AV over ip? Well, you know, you have encoders that take your analog or digital AV audio or video, so your coax or your HDMI, your SDI, and it is packetizing it into IP packets. So you have those encoders, those RXs, okay, like we used to say, encoders. And then on the other side you have those receivers or decoders that will take those IP packets and bring your AV back on their output on their HDMI out, SDI out, or audio connectors. So if you want to start the transition, you need to start with both the endpoints, a TX and the RX or encoder and decoder of some sort. And in the middle, well, you can have a network connection between the two, like a straight RJ45. It's possible.
But as soon as you need two, you know, two and two, then you cannot do that. You need to have a switch, right? You need to have your very first AV fabric made of. Of a good, I hope a good enough AV switcher.
I would say instead of considering maybe the network or the endpoints, I would actually consider locations like a floor or like a room, like the boardroom.
But on the other hand, you want to be well trained for the boardroom because the last thing you want is your CEO having problems during an investor meeting. So I would actually rather start with a few conference rooms maybe, and then finish with the most important ones. But to be serious, I would actually consider locations like floors or maybe an auditorium first or some screens alongside the elevators, on the walkways. There's always.
You can find the chronology to transition slowly because if you do everything at once, well, that's a lot of service interruption. And usually this is not really practical nor feasible, especially if it's a corporate headquarter or a public administration.
The show needs to continue.
But you will want to probably have a strategy with floors or rooms gradually.
But the last thing you said.
Do you want to hire an IGMP specialist?
I personally don't believe that, because igmp, you know, it's. I mean, everybody's free. Most of us, we live in the Republic. That's great.
So everybody's free. But trying to configure IGMP on sweet on it switchers that are not really designed for that.
Good luck with that. Good luck with that. It's going to be finishing in tears, most likely, because it is extremely complicated. So instead of hiring an IGMP specialist, I would say go back to your strategy with your first floor and then your second floor, maybe some localization into your building so that you have a plan so that you don't interrupt too much the operations and you can learn and start small and then add and add and add to the system and maybe find a good system integrator that has all the knowledge and all the connections to get a proper support both on the AV side of things and the IT side of things with a good AV switch manufacturer.
And the combination of the three, to me would probably sound better.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Well, when KI Code engages with any client, there's always a period of discovery, right? Finding out the facts, finding what's existing and where the client wants to go in the future. But often this discovery means asking a lot of questions of the people who are on site. So in terms of planning, what new questions do we need to ask? What questions should potential clients be ready with the answer when they engage? Either either Netgear V, pardon me, or an integrator like Key Code Media. Are we talking about the potential client giving us dedicated VLANs, cable spec changes, rack redesigns, cooling plans?
What new questions need to be asked?
[00:37:13] Speaker A: First of all, I really want to tell you that we at Netgear AV will never handle a project or start even a discussion with a client of any sort.
Because, I mean, we are only the 2% of you know of the AV project and it's not how we operate. So we will always, always agree on taking on a conversation with Key Code Media or with Navy System integrator. Okay? Because we are here to support and help. We are not here to develop or implement av. This is not true. That being said, when it pertains to the IP part of the av, over ip, because on the av, you know better the types of audio quality or video quality, the LED size, I mean, this. I don't want to go in there. You know, this is not my specialty. What I know better is really much the AV fabric. Again, the fabric is the AV network. Now. So the questions for that EV fabric are probably of three sorts. Okay, the first one, and this is questions that will help us, you and the Netgear AEV team understand how we should actually design this network. You know, from a port connectivity, port count connectivity, but also bandwidth redundancy and all that. So, three major questions. First, we need to understand the number of pairs between T axis and R axes. So this is a Navy thing. You cannot ask that question this way to the client. But you will say, okay, you're gonna do audio and you're gonna do video.
You have that many displays and that many microphones and that many speakers. Do you want to interconnect everything with everything? Do you want to have a, any to any distribution, switching, wiring? Or is your AV installation be in some kind of isolated islands? Because there is a profound difference. If you do isolated islands that don't talk with each other, then your AV fabric becomes slightly simpler, right? Because you don't have to think about the bandwidth between the A and the B and the C.
But reversely, it's always, it's to me, the most important question. First, how you want to have that matrix.
Should that be, Is it any to any, you know, because the any2ne has always been the greatest challenge. Even with analog and digital systems. First, before and with the EV over ip, this is also a challenge because it means that you need to have enough capacity to move the EV around, you know, in every direction with any single possible pair between the encoder and the decoder. Because if there's one thing you cannot fold is the bottleneck. Because if your AV cannot go through, this is not like the IT unicast. When you transmit and retransmit and re retransmit, nobody cares in the av. This is only one UDP packet goes through fine, doesn't go through. Well, you have a video artifact or you have an audio distortion. Second, based on the first question you will want to maybe ask to the customer how you know. Often we need to know about the expansion, the possible expansion.
Because if this is already a known information that every six months you are going to double the size of the video walls, that you will multiply by three the number of rooms. And if you have this any to any requirement, what you want to do is to dimension your network core so the AV fabric core so that you plan for enough capacity right at the beginning. Because if not, you will start with too small of a core, you will deploy your 10 switches or 20 switches, and then the next year you will realize the hard way that you have to rip and replace your core for something much bigger. Question number three.
I would always expect to ask the question saying, are you okay if the AV over IP fabric being the network by now, Are you okay if this is going to be made of a different type of ethernet switches than the rest of your infrastructures? Because they are very vocal, those customers. They are going to say, oh, we are A or we are B or we are C, you know, those large, big corporate IT manufacturers. And so we need to very rapidly understand if they have a requirement of some sort, a willing of, you know, doing that by themselves using their infrastructure or not.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: We've mentioned education several times and that's something that's very important to us here at Key Code Media, as we have an education division that focuses on getting folks upskilled in their vocations. We've touched upon a couple things during our conversation, but can you give us maybe some more resources aside from Netgear Academy where folks can learn about AV over ip and are there any certifications that folks can get that would help them work with AV over IP in the future?
[00:43:27] Speaker A: Absolutely. So at Netgear for the education, we try to focus really much on the academy.netgear.com so academy.netgear.com, everything we do for education is in there. But yes, let me tell you, Netgear AV is in every single major AV alliance.
So from SDVOE, because my heart goes to SDVOE, this is where everything started 10, 12 years ago. But you know, from SDVOE to AMS, AMEs to the video from to the Avenue for AVB, we tried to help and contribute. So most of the Avixa, I mean AVIXA for the professional AV and CDR for the residential av, all these organizations and these alliances have a curriculum too in which Netgear AV has participated big time. Okay? So we need to stay hungry for knowledge in this industry, especially when this industry is moving towards a new future. Because again, AV goes to ip and you know, it's a fact. I mean, nothing is going to stop that.
So I would actually tell your readers and listeners that to stay hungry for education they should visit those large alliances. And after that you have all the AV manufacturers. Netgear AV is certified at more than 450 of them.
So I cannot even tell you all of them right now. In a minute it's going to be too cumbersome. So netgear.comav netgear.comav this is partners. This is where you will see the 450. And I'm probably out of debt. Maybe it's already 460 by now. So those mutual certifications, when they take place, then they are public.
But all those AV manufacturers have curriculum too. Okay, so if your heart goes to a Navy manufacturer instead of the other, every single Navy manufacturer, they also have curriculum. So it's fairly easy to get educated. Yes, but I am Netgear, so I need to probably say that if you want to have a very generalist 360 degree overview of AV over IP level one, it's free. And this is for the admin people, the sales people, the project managers, so that they get educated. Level 2, this is for the system installers, the technicians. Level 3 will be more for troubleshooting those certifications. Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 with the adjacent modules for IPMX, for ST2110 are probably providing a fairly good summary. Yeah.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: Outstanding. There's been so much great information, Laurent, in this interview. Thank you so much.
[00:46:42] Speaker A: Three, two, red one.
