When I sat on the Trend Forecast: Broadcast AV panel at InfoComm 2025, we all hit the same realization at roughly the same moment: "broadcast" doesn't mean what it used to. It's not a network with a satellite truck and a control room full of union engineers anymore. Broadcast is anyone with a cell phone and something to say.
That sounds obvious now. On the floor in 2025 it still felt like a forecast. A year later, at InfoComm 2026, it isn't a forecast. It's a build spec. The thing I watched happen between the two shows is worth talking about, because it's quietly reshaping what installers are being asked to deliver.
New Media Stopped Being a Buzzword and Started Being a Room
The cultural signal is everywhere right now. OpenAI bought TBPN, a daily, live, three-hour tech show, for a reported nine figures. And here's the part our industry should pay attention to: TBPN wasn't built like a podcast. It was built like a broadcast. Multiple cameras, cinematic lighting, a set designed to look like a sports network desk. Two guys with opinions, packaged with network production values. a16z, meanwhile, spun up a whole "New Media" practice around a single idea: to win, you go direct. You don't ask permission to be on someone else's show; you build your own.
Translate that out of Silicon Valley and into our world and it means one thing: every company now wants to own its content, and owning your content means owning a studio.
You could see it on the show floor. AVIXA built its own TV studio on site, with a podcast studio inside it. Walk the aisles and exhibitors weren't just demoing cameras and switchers; they were demoing podcast setups at their booths, because that's what their customers are walking up and asking about. The buyer who used to want a boardroom now wants a content room. The conference room AV refresh has a "and can we shoot a podcast in here" attached to it.
This is broadcast AV in the most literal sense. Broadcast-grade production has migrated into the corporate HQ, and the "broadcaster" is now a marketing coordinator, not a network.
The Problem Nobody Specs For
Here's where I want to push on something, because I think the industry is getting the build right and the handoff wrong.
I keep seeing installs that are overbuilt. Beautiful rooms. Real broadcast standards, the kind of signal chain and camera package you'd be proud to put behind a national show. And then the install team packs up, drives away, and leaves all of that capability with a single person at the company who is, 99% of the time, not technical at all.
That person doesn't know what a sub-mix is. They're not going to troubleshoot an NDI source that dropped, or figure out why the key looks wrong, or rebuild a scene in the switcher software. They were handed the keys to a broadcast facility and told "you've got this," and they very much do not. So the room that was capable of anything ends up doing nothing. It sits dark, or it gets used at 10% of what it cost, because the gap between what the room can do and what the operator can do is a canyon.
This is the same blind spot I talk about constantly in live production: every livestream is actually two productions, the room and the stream, and most teams only plan for one. An install is the exact same trap. The room is the build. The stream is the operation. You can nail the build and still fail the production if you never designed for the person who has to run it on a Tuesday morning with nobody there to help.
Build The Room to Run Two Ways
The fix isn't smaller budgets or dumbed-down gear. It's building every studio to run two ways from the day you hand it over.
Lane one is the easy button. Jane from accounting should be able to walk in, hit a single control, and be live: lights up, cameras framed, audio set, scene loaded. No sub-mixes, no source routing, no decisions. The complexity is still in the rack; it's just tucked behind one labeled button she can't get wrong. That covers the weekly update and the meetings that need a pro feel. It's the 80% of usage that doesn't need a producer and shouldn't have to wait for one.
Lane two is the pro lane, and this is the part the install world is sleeping on: build the room so a professional can take it over remotely. When there's a real show, the kind with stakes, outside talent, and a live audience that matters, like an all-hands or town hall, the producer doesn't need to book a flight. They log in. They take the cameras, the switching, the audio, the graphics, and they run a full broadcast from wherever they are. Same room, same gear, completely different ceiling.
That's the whole game. You stop choosing between "capable enough for a pro" and "simple enough for Jane," because you build both into the same space. Routine content runs itself locally. High-end production runs remotely, driven by someone who does this for a living and never had to leave their own control room to do it.
The economics follow. Remote production means one producer can run rooms in four cities in a week instead of one. It means clients aren't paying travel days and per diems just to get broadcast quality. It means the expensive expertise is shared across every studio you've built instead of stranded in whichever one someone could physically reach. And the signal chain to make this work is mature now: NDI and SRT across the network, control running cloud or on-prem, and remote hands on the things that used to need someone in the room. The gap isn't the technology. It's that we're still specifying these rooms as if a body has to be standing in them.
Come back to the two-productions idea: the room and the stream. Build it right and the room runs itself for the everyday, while the stream gets run by a pro who never had to show up. Jane handles Tuesday. The producer handles the moments that count, from anywhere.
Broadcast is everyone now. The phone proved that. But "everyone" also means the pro who can finally cover ten rooms without leaving their seat, and the marketing manager who just needs the thing to turn on. Build for both, in the same room, and you don't just sell a studio. You sell one that earns its place every week, and a client who comes back to build the next one.