News & Trends

Pre-ISE announcements are already dropping, and the headline products are the usual temptations: shinier endpoints, higher numbers, another “pro” badge. The smarter story sits lower down the stack. Your next IP deployment will stand or fall on AV-over-IP monitoring and management. That is the tooling that tells you what’s broken, what changed, and what to do next while the client is still in the meeting.

ISE has leaned into that reality in its ISE Insights piece on AV over IP and software orchestration, which frames ISE 2026 as a fight over software that makes IP visible and controllable at scale.

That framing fits Europe right now. Transport still matters. Ops decides whether you keep your margin.

The ops layer that decides your uptime

Most AV-over-IP systems do not fail with fireworks. They fail with doubt. A room works “most of the time”.

Audio drops when the building is busy. A stream looks fine until a network change tweaks IGMP and multicast starts acting strange. Someone swaps a unit at 07:00, and the room never comes back the same way.

Then you pay in the only currency that counts: time. Time to test. Time to argue about “the network”. Time to drive out for a fix that should have taken ten minutes from a laptop.

Good monitoring and management reduces that pain by doing four things well. It measures health in a way that matches user impact. “Online” is not health. Health means stable streams, sane timing, and early warning when loss or jitter starts to show.

1. It records change history you can trust. You need time-stamped proof of firmware pushes, setup edits, and policy updates. Without that, you debug by guesswork.
2. It supports roles that match real teams. The service desk needs a clear view and easy evidence capture. Site techs need fast swap-and-restore. Engineers need routing, policy control, and safe change windows.
3. It makes recovery boring. A device dies, you replace it, the system adopts it, applies the right profile, restores routes, and logs the event in plain words.

If a vendor cannot show those basics, you are not buying a platform. You are buying future downtime.

Photo by Petr Magera on Unsplash 

What to demand from vendors at ISE

Booth demos are built to never fail. Push them into failure anyway.

Ask for a live “break and fix” run-through. Pull a link, drop a port, or disable a stream and watch what the management layer does. A useful platform shows the fault, points to the likely cause, and keeps the evidence tidy for escalation. A weak platform gives you a red light and a shrug.

Ask for live replacement. Unplug an endpoint, plug in a fresh one, and see whether the system adopts it, applies the right setup, restores routes, and records the change. If replacement needs a manual rebuild, your service plan collapses when you scale beyond a handful of rooms.

Ask for the audit trail. Not a slide. A real log you can export. When a client says, “This started after your update,” logs stop the argument.

This is where the serious money is going now. Across ISE previews, more vendors are pushing the ops layer: remote monitoring, fleet health views, staged updates, and evidence trails that let support teams diagnose faults without a site visit.

Why RBAC matters in distributed AV estates

Role-based access control (RBAC) is not enterprise theatre. It is the difference between clean handovers and panic calls.

A proper AV-over-IP management platform needs RBAC that matches how support teams actually work. Your service desk does not need routing control. They need read-only views, evidence capture, and the ability to restart a stream or reboot a device safely. Site techs need device swap authority and config restore. Engineers need policy control, firmware staging, and routing decisions.

Without that structure, you either lock everyone out or give everyone full admin. The first option means every fault needs escalation. The second option means someone will eventually push a change that breaks 40 rooms at once because nothing stopped them.

RBAC also feeds compliance. European tenders now ask who can access what and when. You need audit logs that show role-based actions, not just "admin did something". If a client asks, "Who changed this multicast route?", your logs should point to a named engineer with the right role, not a shared service account.

Vendors who treat RBAC as an afterthought will hand you a platform with two or three permission tiers and vague boundaries. That does not scale. Demand granular roles, activity logs tied to user identity, and the ability to delegate safely without handing over the keys to the whole estate.

The network is no longer “someone else’s problem”

AV-over-IP has turned the network into part of your AV system, whether you like that or not. If the network team owns the switches and you own the user experience, you still carry the blame when a building change breaks a room.

That is why vendors now sell network tools as AV tools. The goal is simple. Design correctly, deploy the same way every time, and see what is happening when things start to wobble.

Switch vendors are leaning into this with AV-focused management tools: central setup, clearer topology views, and AV-friendly workflows that let integrators build and validate a configuration before they arrive on site.

Don’t get hung up on brands. You need a clear view of multicast, uplinks, PoE headroom, and topology, because that is where “mystery faults” tend to live. If your monitoring cannot see the network path, diagnosis slows down and costs go up.

“Open” matters when it reduces ops pain

“Open” AV-over-IP gets pitched like a belief system. Treat it as a safety valve.

Large estates mix brands. They inherit rooms. They need replacement stock fast. They need alarms to flow into a wider NOC or ticket system. A closed system can feel tidy until you hit a boundary, then every link to other tools becomes custom work.

Broadcast IP had to solve parts of this years ago. That is why AMWA NMOS exists, with specs such as NMOS IS-04 that define how devices show up and register on a network.

Pro AV does not need to copy broadcast end-to-end. It should copy the idea that shared discovery rules make life easier for ops teams.

So when vendors promise “multi-vendor support”, translate it into day-to-day checks. Can you find devices fast and map them to rooms without manual labour? Can you route with a readable change log? Can you monitor with one ops view, not five dashboards? If the answers are vague, the work lands on you and your project team.

Write ops requirements into your scope, not your wish list

If you want this stuff on day one, write it into the scope. European tenders still get written around endpoints and “it works”. Then teams act surprised when the system ships with thin remote monitoring and no useful evidence trail.

Be specific. Require central monitoring with alerts that mean something, not just “device online”. Require exportable logs and a change history that shows who did what and when. Require a replacement process that a first-line tech can run without a programmer. Require a clear way to feed alerts into your incident workflow, whether that is email, syslog, SNMP, or an API.

Then, fix the handover. A 300-room estate cannot live on PDFs and tribal knowledge. You need naming rules, room mapping, and a monitoring view that matches how the client will run the building. If the platform cannot present that cleanly, you will be called back to rebuild it later, and you will not be paid for the pain.

Photo by dlxmedia.hu on Unsplash 

Cloud management: worth paying for when it cuts labour

Cloud tools earn their keep when they cut labour and cut mistakes. They fail when they add a fee and still leave you blind during an incident.

The better cloud dashboards make a simple promise: one place for deployment, monitoring, firmware control, and asset visibility across an estate. That model fits when you run lots of rooms and need steady policy and steady updates.

Use the same test you would use for any controller. Can it stage changes safely? Can it prove what changed? Can it split access across teams properly? If it cannot, it is a nice screen on top of the same old firefighting.

Zero-touch replacement is the test that shows if ops tooling is real

The device-swap test separates serious platforms from booth demos. A tech should be able to unplug a failed endpoint, plug in a replacement, and walk away.

The management layer should detect the new device, confirm the model, pull the config and routes from the old unit, apply them to the new one, and log the swap with a timestamp. If that process needs manual scripting, a phone call, or a site visit from someone who "knows the system", your ops tooling is not ready for scale.

Zero-touch provisioning and replacement workflows come from telco and enterprise networking, where downtime costs real money and travel time kills margins. AV-over-IP borrowed the transport layer from IT. It is time to borrow the ops discipline too.

Push vendors on this at ISE. Ask for a live replacement run. If they hesitate or say "we can script that for you", the platform will cost you labour every time a device dies. If they show you a clean swap with automatic config restore and proper logging, you have found tooling that will survive contact with a real estate.

My verdict

If you are planning an AV-over-IP rollout in 2026, make AV-over-IP monitoring and management your first filter at ISE. Endpoints are easy to buy. Ops is where projects live or die.

Demand the unhappy-path demo. Make vendors show failure, evidence, and recovery without calling the one engineer who “knows the job”. Then budget for the ops layer and the network visibility that keeps systems stable. That spend saves truck rolls, saves weekends, and saves the relationship that funds your next project.