InfoComm 2026 is the largest professional AV trade show in North America, and for the first time the show has a dedicated Broadcast AV presence in North Hall. If you’re an enterprise AV decision maker evaluating production infrastructure, this is your opportunity to see what’s available, compare approaches, and have direct conversations with the companies building the platforms you’ll depend on.
But trade shows can be overwhelming. Hundreds of exhibitors, thousands of products, and a lot of marketing noise competing for your attention. Knowing what to evaluate, and what questions to ask, makes the difference between a productive visit and an exhausting one.
Here’s what to look for if you’re evaluating broadcast grade production solutions for an enterprise environment.
Ask About Scalability, Not Just Capability
Every vendor on the show floor will demonstrate impressive capabilities. Multi camera switching, real time graphics, streaming output: these are table stakes. The question that matters for an enterprise buyer isn’t what the system can do in a demo. It’s how the system behaves when your requirements change.
Can the platform handle a two-camera internal briefing and a twelve-camera global event using the same operator interface? Can it scale without requiring a different system architecture? Can your team learn one workflow and apply it across every production scenario they encounter?
If the answer involves a different product for a different scale, that’s a red flag. You’re buying complexity, not scalability.
Evaluate Operator Experience, Not Just Feature Sets
The people operating your production system are rarely full-time broadcast engineers. They’re AV technicians, communications specialists, IT adjacent team members, or in some cases volunteers and students. The operator experience needs to match the people who will use it.
At InfoComm, ask vendors to show you what day two looks like. Not the keynote demo, but the Tuesday morning briefing where one person needs to get a clean, professional feed out to four platforms in 15 minutes. That’s the workflow that matters.
Interrogate the Security Model
For any organisation handling sensitive content, whether that’s corporate earnings data, government communications, or student records, the security architecture of the production platform is non-negotiable. Ask vendors specifically: where does the production data sit? What leaves your network? What’s the authentication model? How does the platform integrate with your existing IT security framework?
If the answer is vague, or if the security model requires trusting a third-party cloud with your production data, that’s worth knowing before you invest.
Look for Integration, Not Isolation
A production platform doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It needs to work with your existing AV infrastructure, your network environment, your content management systems, and your distribution channels. The most capable production switcher in the world is a liability if it can’t interoperate with the systems, it sits alongside.
Ask about open standards. Ask about API integration. Ask how the platform handles mixed vendor environments, because every enterprise AV environment is a mixed vendor environment.
Demand a Business Case, Not Just a Technology Case
The best production technology in the world is irrelevant if you can’t build a business case for it. Ask vendors to articulate the operational savings, the risk reduction, the staffing efficiency, and the content value that their platform delivers. If the conversation stays in specifications and features without connecting to business outcomes, it’s not ready for an enterprise procurement process.
Where to Start at InfoComm
Grass Valley’s meeting room is in the North Hall Broadcast AV zone. We’ve structured our InfoComm presence around 15-minute conversations designed to help you evaluate whether broadcast grade production infrastructure fits your operational environment and budget.
No product demo reel. No hard sell. A conversation with someone who’s spent the last 60 years building production systems that hold up under pressure, and who understands that enterprise buyers need business cases, not brochures.
Walk ins are welcome. But with limited slots, booking ahead guarantees your time.
Nobody plans for their AV infrastructure to become a bottleneck. It happens gradually, one workaround at a time, one “we’ll fix it after the next event” at a time, until the gap between what the organisation needs and what the system can deliver becomes impossible to ignore.
For organisations producing live video at any meaningful scale, the signs are remarkably consistent across verticals. Whether you’re running corporate communications, government media services, university broadcasting, venue production, or esports operations, the friction points tend to look the same.
Here are five indicators that your production environment has outgrown its current foundations.
1. Your biggest events require a completely different setup to your everyday production
If your CEO townhall, annual conference, or flagship event requires an external production crew, a temporary control room, or a fundamentally different technical setup to your daily operations, that’s a scalability problem.
In a broadcast grade production environment, the same platform handles both. The operator interface, the signal routing, the graphics, and the distribution path remain consistent whether the production is a simple two camera internal update or a twelve camera, multi-site, globally streamed event. Scale changes. The system doesn’t.
When your biggest moments require a parallel infrastructure, you’re paying twice: in cost, in complexity, and in risk.
2. Your team’s expertise doesn’t transfer between events or locations
An AV operator who is highly competent in Boardroom A shouldn’t need retraining for Auditorium B. A video engineer who manages signal flow at your headquarters shouldn’t face a completely different architecture at your regional office.
When workflows vary across rooms, sites, or event types, operational consistency disappears. Knowledge becomes personal rather than institutional. And the organisation becomes dependent on specific individuals rather than a reliable system.
Broadcast environments solved this decades ago. Operators work within a consistent production framework regardless of scale or location. That consistency is what allows broadcast teams to deliver thousands of hours of live output per year without the wheels falling off.
3. Post event content repurposing is manual, slow, or non-existent
A CEO’s townhall address contains messages relevant to external comms, investor relations, recruitment marketing, and internal training. A government press conference produces footage needed across multiple departments. A university lecture has value as on demand content for years.
But if extracting that value requires manual downloading, re encoding, and redistribution through disconnected systems, most of it never happens. The live event ends, and the content dies with it.
Production systems designed for professional use treat content management as part of the workflow, not an afterthought. Ingest, cataloguing, clipping, and multi-platform distribution are built into the production chain, so the content your organisation invests in producing continues to deliver value long after the live feed ends.
4. Security and compliance are afterthoughts, not architecture
For corporate enterprises handling market sensitive information, government agencies dealing with classified or sensitive content, and educational institutions subject to accessibility mandates, the security posture of the production environment matters.
Many enterprise AV setups rely on consumer or prosumer grade tools that route content through third party cloud services with limited visibility into data handling. For a departmental meeting, that may be acceptable. For an earnings call, a cabinet briefing, or a broadcast carrying sensitive institutional communications, it often isn’t.
Broadcast AV architectures are designed with data sovereignty in mind. The production data plane stays on your network. The control plane provides modern cloud managed flexibility. Security isn’t a configuration, it’s the architecture.
5. Every live production feels like the first one
This is the clearest sign. If your team approaches each live event with a fresh wave of anxiety, retesting connections, rebuilding configurations, checking that last week’s workaround still holds, the system isn’t supporting them. It’s testing them.
In organisations that have invested in broadcast grade production infrastructure, live events are routine operations. Not because the stakes are lower, but because the system is engineered for exactly this kind of sustained, repeatable, high-pressure use. That’s what broadcast equipment is designed to do. That’s why it exists.
What Comes Next
Recognising these signs is the first step. Addressing them doesn’t require building a broadcast station. It requires rethinking the production model, moving from a collection of AV tools to an integrated production platform that scales with the organisation.
Grass Valley is at InfoComm 2026 in Las Vegas (June 17 to 19) specifically to have these conversations. If any of the five signs above sound familiar, a 15-minute meeting on the show floor could change how you think about what’s possible.
There was a time when broadcast quality video production belonged exclusively to media companies. The cameras, the switching infrastructure, the signal routing, the production workflows: all of it was designed for organisations whose entire business model was built around putting content on air.
That time is over.
Today, a Fortune 500 company produces more hours of live video content per year than many regional television stations. A government agency’s daily press briefing reaches more viewers than most cable news programmes. A university’s graduation livestream attracts an audience that would be the envy of a mid-market broadcaster.
The scale has changed. The expectations have changed. But in most organisations, the underlying production infrastructure hasn’t kept pace.
The Gap Between Expectation and Infrastructure
The challenge isn’t ambition. Enterprise organisations understand the value of professional live video. Internal communications teams know that a polished CEO townhall builds more trust than a shaky webcam feed. Government agencies recognise that the quality of a public briefing shapes public confidence. Universities see that production grade streaming of campus events strengthens enrolment and alumni engagement.
The challenge is operational. Most enterprise AV environments were designed for conferencing and presentation: a projector, a microphone, a screen share. They weren’t engineered for multi camera live production, real time graphics, multi-platform distribution, and the kind of reliability that means the system works under pressure, not just under ideal conditions.
When these organisations need to step up, for a global all hands, an investor day, a high-profile public hearing, they typically do one of two things. They hire an external production crew at significant cost and with limited repeatability. Or they stretch their existing AV systems beyond what they were designed to do, relying on workarounds, manual processes, and individual expertise to get through the day.
Neither approach scales. Neither builds institutional capability. And both carry risks that become more visible every time a live feed matters.
What “Broadcast AV” Actually Means
The industry has a name for this convergence: Broadcast AV. It’s the term adopted by AVIXA, IABM, and the wider professional AV industry to describe the application of broadcast quality equipment, workflows, and standards in markets outside traditional media and entertainment.
Broadcast AV isn’t about turning a corporate office into a television studio. It’s about bringing the engineering rigour, operational reliability, and production flexibility that broadcast systems are built around into environments where live video has become operationally critical, but the infrastructure hasn’t caught up.
This is the fastest growing segment in professional AV. AVIXA’s IOTA research identifies Broadcast AV as the second largest solution area in ProAV globally, growing at a rate that outpaces most traditional AV categories. The demand is being driven by every vertical: corporate enterprises, government agencies, educational institutions, event venues, and esports organisations are all investing in production infrastructure that goes beyond conferencing.
The Operational Shift
What makes Broadcast AV different from simply buying better cameras or upgrading a video wall isn’t the hardware. It’s the production model.
In a broadcast environment, the production system is designed as an integrated workflow. Cameras, switching, graphics, audio, routing, recording, and distribution all operate within a unified architecture. Operators work within a consistent interface regardless of whether the production is a simple two camera interview or a twelve-camera live event. The system scales without being rebuilt.
That production model, integrated, scalable, operator consistent, is exactly what enterprise organisations need as their live video demands grow beyond what conferencing tools can deliver. The technology exists. The platforms exist. The question for most organisations is whether they recognise that the gap between their expectations and their infrastructure is a solvable problem, not an inevitable compromise.
Where This Is Heading
InfoComm 2026 has added a dedicated Broadcast AV zone in North Hall for the first time: a clear signal from the industry’s largest trade body that this market is no longer emerging. It has arrived.
Grass Valley will be at InfoComm with a focused presence in this space. We’ve spent over sixty years engineering the production systems that the world’s leading broadcasters depend on. Now we’re bringing that same engineering rigour to every organisation where live video production carries real business stakes.
If you’re responsible for production infrastructure in a corporate, government, education, venue, or esports environment, and you’re feeling the gap between what your organisation expects and what your current systems can reliably deliver, this is a conversation worth having.
We’ll be sharing more in the weeks ahead. For now, the question is simple: is your production infrastructure built for where your organisation is going, or for where it was?
Last year, Grass Valley made its ISE Show debut and approached it very deliberately as a listening exercise. You learn quickly how teams are building within real constraints, as well as the pressures they are working around and what they expect and need from the systems that support them.
12 months later, returning to Barcelona really confirmed how broadcast, AV, enterprise IT and live production are now overlapping and informing the same projects. That overlap was visible in the kinds of environments people described throughout the week. Corporate studios producing weekly output as part of internal operations, government spaces designed for permanent capture, archive and oversight, venue control rooms supporting both in-room and distributed audiences as standard.
Convergence is now expected in the design
As video becomes more embedded, the questions teams bring to the table change. Teams want workflows they can return to without rebuilding from scratch, and they want to know that when expectations change, the system will move at the same pace. Most organizations discover over time that requirements are rarely fixed and what looks sufficient during installation can feel restrictive a year later.
Enterprise environments bring additional layers of responsibility. Governance frameworks are often in place before production technology is introduced, while security review is routine. In finance environments, policy dictates where media can exist and how it can move, while in government settings, continuity and oversight are seen as core expectations.
Software-defined production has gained attention in that context because it allows a separation in the way the architecture is structured. With AMPP, media processing can remain within the customer’s controlled environment when required, while orchestration and workflow management operate independently. That flexibility provides room to adapt over time and it means teams can reconfigure workflows without dismantling the entire deployment.
When permanence changes the conversation
Another key observation from the show was the longevity of enterprise installations. They are environments expected to remain operational in the long-term and integrators play a key role because they understand how production fits into the building, the network or the governance model. Their perspective often determines whether a system becomes part of the organization’s standard operating approach.
Whether it’s integration surfaces, APIs, long-term supportability or the ability to connect production into a broader system, they are all part of what determines whether a platform can be standardized over time. These considerations influence long-term viability more than a single product specification. Channel enablement, therefore, is directly tied to product relevance. If partners cannot extend and adapt the platform confidently, then the system’s lifespan shortens.
Developing for real-world lifecycles
Looking at the upcoming roadmap, several themes are emerging. IPMX support is planned for later in 2026, building on the existing ST 2110 foundations. Interoperability continues to shape deployment decisions, particularly in environments where infrastructure must coexist with broader network strategies. Product development is also moving through steady iteration, with feature additions increasingly shaped by customer feedback from deployed environments.
But while 2026 priorities are concentrated in corporate, finance, government, and venue markets, it was interesting to see how other sectors, including esports, education, house of worship and health are already active and likely to become more structured areas of attention. The ambition for enterprise media is straightforward, building a revenue base that can grow and sit alongside broadcast over time, a reflection of just how deeply embedded video has become, especially in organizations that would not have described themselves as media operations even a few years ago.
What ISE reveals about where this is all heading
ISE 2026 reinforced that convergence between broadcast AV and enterprise media is now influencing everything from system design through to integration and procurement. Teams are approaching video as infrastructure, with longevity and adaptability now part of the evaluation criteria from the outset. For Grass Valley, it simply reinforces the direction we are already focused on. We are here to support teams with platforms and partner ecosystems that fit this enterprise reality, where convergence shapes how systems are expected to operate and evolve over time.