For most of my career, AV meant displays, signal chains and making sure the network held up. Getting the image right, the system stable, the infrastructure solid.
That’s still a big part of what we do. But somewhere along the way the line between that world and the control room got a lot less clear.
Here’s the thing: AVoIP in a control room isn’t new. It’s been there for years. What’s changed is that it’s now the same manufacturers, the same platforms, the same solutions that show up in your boardroom on Monday and in a utility operations center on Tuesday. You’re not switching technology. You’re switching use case.
My own journey started when we got in contact with a manufacturer specialising in control room solutions. We met. They showed us what they do. Something started to click — but not fully, not yet.
It wasn’t until I visited their experience center that it really landed.
There were racks of equipment. Transmitter cards, receiver cards. Sources being distributed and received across a network — no traditional matrix in sight. That transition happened in our world too, the AV world, not so long ago. Standard IP switches replaced dedicated hardware. The signal still gets where it needs to go, just over infrastructure we already understand.
Video, audio, USB, control signals — all of it running over the network. My feeling was that it wasn’t that different from what we already do in AV and IT.
The differences are real, don’t get me wrong. A control room carries complexity that a conference room rarely sees. Systems that might be thirty years apart in age sitting side by side — VGA next to DisplayPort next to H.264 streams. Closure contacts from a gate intercom feeding into the same infrastructure as a live process feed. Critical systems and non-critical systems sharing the same physical space, and someone has to understand which is which.
But the foundation, the basics? More or less identical.
That realisation changed how I look at what we do. And it’s where this series starts.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be writing about what that shift actually means in practice from my perspective. The operator sitting in front of those screens and what their environment demands. What happens when IT moves into OT territory — and who’s responsible for the lock on that door. And the manufacturers who’ve been building for this intersection for longer than most people realise.
If you work in AV, IT, or operations — I think you’ll recognise more of this than you expect.
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