Broadcast and AV converged their infrastructure. The market story never did.
Technology almost always moves faster than the stories markets tell about themselves.
Engineering teams solve problems, develop new capabilities, and create entirely new possibilities long before customers have a framework for understanding what has changed. The technology may exist, but the market still evaluates it through the assumptions, language, and categories that existed before that technology arrived.
That gap between technological progress and market understanding is where many innovations lose momentum.
When a market lacks a new narrative, it has no choice but to evaluate change through old frameworks. Instead of asking what new possibilities a technology creates, buyers compare specifications. Instead of discussing new business models or workflows, the conversation remains focused on features, standards, and technical trade-offs.
Broadcast and AV are experiencing exactly this challenge today.
The infrastructure has converged. The story has not.
A standards debate that reveals a bigger problem
Every major industry event brings the same conversation back to the surface. One group argues that SMPTE ST 2110 represents the only serious approach for professional media workflows. Another points to NDI as the technology that’s actually being deployed at scale because many organizations don’t have the budget, infrastructure, or operational requirements for uncompressed video. Others point to IPMX as the path toward bringing these worlds closer together.
The debate is often framed as a question of which technology will win.
But that framing misses the larger issue.
The industry is debating standards because it hasn’t yet fully articulated what the convergence of broadcast and AV actually means for buyers.
ST 2110, NDI, and IPMX aren’t simply competing technologies. They represent different responses to different market needs. Broadcast developed around environments where reliability, precision, and performance are critical. AV developed around environments where sophisticated experiences needed to become easier to deploy, manage, and scale using the infrastructure organizations already had.
Neither approach is wrong. They were designed for different audiences.
The challenge now is that those audiences increasingly overlap.
The technical foundation has changed. The market narrative has not caught up.
When the story lags, the market gets stuck comparing technology
Markets need more than innovation to move forward. They need an explanation of why the innovation matters.
Without that explanation, buyers naturally default to the information they understand best. In technical industries, that often means comparing products, standards, specifications, and architectures.
That’s exactly what happens when the conversation around broadcast and AV convergence becomes a debate about ST 2110 versus NDI versus IPMX.
Those discussions have value. Standards decisions matter, and technical differences have real implications. But they aren’t the entire market conversation.
The more important question is what this convergence enables.
What happens when broadcast-quality production capabilities become accessible to organizations that were never broadcast facilities? What happens when AV environments can support workflows that previously required specialized broadcast infrastructure? What new categories of solutions become possible when these worlds are no longer separated by technology, expertise, and terminology?
Those are the questions that define a market transition. But they require a narrative that explains the change. And without that narrative, the market remains focused on the technology itself.
The market is often not waiting for technology. It’s waiting for understanding.
One of the most common explanations companies give when a new technology struggles to gain adoption is that “the market isn’t ready.”
Sometimes that’s true. Some technologies genuinely arrive before the conditions exist for adoption.
But in many cases, the market isn’t waiting for better technology. It’s waiting for a clearer explanation of why that technology matters.
Markets don’t automatically understand category changes. Someone has to define them.
That requires more than product launches, announcements, and industry visibility. Public relations can create awareness, but awareness isn’t the same as understanding. A company can generate significant attention for a new solution while leaving buyers unsure about what problem it solves, why the old approach is no longer sufficient, or how they should evaluate the change.
Changing a market narrative requires a different kind of work. It means identifying the assumptions that are holding the market back, creating language that helps buyers understand the shift, and consistently reinforcing that perspective across marketing, sales, partnerships, and industry conversations.
The companies that successfully introduce new categories rarely wait until the market has already decided it’s ready. They help create that readiness.
The cost of narrative lag
The consequences of failing to shape the narrative are often difficult to see in the short term.
A company launches innovative technology. The market response is slower than expected. Sales cycles extend. Buyers ask for more education. Competitors begin introducing similar solutions.
The company concludes that adoption will take time.
But while everyone is waiting for the market to catch up, the market continues evolving. New technologies appear. Customer expectations change. The original innovation becomes less differentiated.
By the time the market fully understands the opportunity, the company that introduced the technology may no longer be the company best positioned to benefit from it.
This is the hidden cost of narrative lag.
Companies often have a window of opportunity between creating a new capability and the market fully understanding its value. That window is where category leadership is built.
But many organizations spend that time focusing almost exclusively on product development and promotional activity. They assume that once the technology proves itself, the market will naturally follow.
It often does not.
Broadcast and AV’s convergence gap
The broadcast and AV industries provide a clear example of this challenge.
The underlying technology has already changed. Broadcast facilities are built on IP infrastructure. AV integrators are increasingly working with networked media workflows. The boundaries between the two environments continue to blur.
Yet the way the market talks about these solutions often remains divided.
Many manufacturers still organize their messaging around separate broadcast and AV audiences, even when their technology platforms increasingly overlap. Buyers are left to translate between different vocabularies depending on whether they approach the problem from a broadcast, corporate, education, or commercial perspective.
This creates friction.
A corporate communications team may need broadcast-quality production capabilities but lack broadcast terminology. A broadcast professional may encounter AV workflows that solve problems their traditional tools were not designed to address. Both groups are navigating the same convergence, but they don’t yet share a common language for understanding it.
Even the category terminology reflects this uncertainty. The industry continues to debate whether this space should be called Broadcast AV, AV Broadcast, or something else entirely.
That uncertainty isn’t simply a naming issue. It’s evidence that the market is still working through what this convergence means.
The companies that shape the story shape the market
The future of broadcast and AV won’t be determined only by which standard becomes dominant. Technical decisions will continue to matter, and engineering excellence will remain essential.
But technology alone doesn’t create market leadership.
The companies that succeed will be the ones that help customers understand the significance of the change taking place. They’ll move the conversation beyond technical comparisons and explain the broader transformation: why these worlds are converging, what opportunities that creates, and why previous assumptions no longer apply.
The companies that do this won’t simply sell products into an existing market. They’ll help define the market itself.
The infrastructure has already converged.
Now the industry needs a story that catches up.