By Aviad Cohen
Founder, Comeet

I’ve been a fan of AV-over-IP ever since I first worked with the technology — but the number of vendors and different solutions out in the market make it very hard for customers to choose. How could an AV investment be protected if there is no standard? You can be 100% sure that one technology (not in an alliance) will not interop with another, meaning you’re bound to gamble, one way or another. That could be the reason HDBaseT sells 1:6 compared to AV-over-IP.

Then Audinate decided to expand into video. Seemingly we could shrug this off and say, “oh, another one into the mix.” Dante stands a very good chance of becoming the reference for AVoIP standard and here is why:
It wasn’t so long ago that the audio-over-IP market had several players — none was widely adopted among manufacturers, then Audinate came along with Dante and changed the view. In 2017, about 1,000 audio products had Dante integrated into them, that number has doubled since then and it’s expected to grow significantly this year.
This is mainly because of the reliant echo system that is Dante, the simplicity and the customers’ freedom to ‘mix and match’ the best of breed that best suits their needs — one Dante amp from Kramer, a DSP from Yamaha, speakers from Bose. You know they will all interop as they are implemented around one standard, which is Dante. 
Add the increasing number of licensed manufacturers, which stands at over 250, the Dante virtual sound card and you get an impressive audio network echo system that checks all the boxes.

Dante has become the de-facto standard for audio-over-IP, and now it’s adding video to its arsenal. How’s that for disruptive?

The standard now has a proven track of record with critical audio applications and is trusted with music at live events, stadiums and pretty much every place that relies on quality, low-latency audio. Common sense would be that Dante can be trusted with video applications as well.

Manufacturers that have yet to enter the AVoIP market but have adopted Dante into their audio products could save go-to-market time and simply expand their partnership with Audinate. They will enjoy an expansion to the same ecosystem they’ve known so far.

One AV network, with multiple manufacturers, routed and managed from one virtual matrix, no proprietary protocol.
It is built for the same 1-gigabit network that many leading manufacturers use today.

If you follow this logic, you can see why Dante just might become a de-facto standard for not just audio-over-IP, but AV-over-IP as well.