If you are in IT/AV as either a system integrator, support technician, or managed service provider you have experienced “The Truck Roll”, “The Stair Climb”, “The Campus Run”, or “The Two AM Panic”. That time when your end user screams at you that “The sound isn’t working”, “The screen is blank”, or “I don’t know what to do, I have 100 people on this call and no one can hear me.” Sound familiar?

In the days of baseband and analog AV systems, we had to go to the location in question, diagnose the problem, and then fix it on-site. Remote support was not even in the realm of possibility for most organizations. Network enablement was going to fix that.

Or so we thought.

The promise of remote network diagnosis, control, mixing and switching was so great. We were willing to trade some complexity for the potential that networked audio and video offered. But this potential was not realizeduntil recently.

IT and AV lived in two separate ecosystems. AV was dependent on the IT infrastructure and security on top of which it existed. AV was delegated its own subnets, VLANs, or even physical cable plants. But full stack management and control required collaboration, usually under the direction of the IT department who were chartered with controlling security and costs. Multicast be damned!

AV lived within the constraints imposed on them by IT, leavingsome end users unhappy. Often the transport to application layers in which AV lived were only partially under the AV teams control.

“Yes, I hear that your audio is clipping and your see that your video is tearing, and I have adjusted the best I can, but…”

Network manufacturers started to build solutions for diagnosing and troubleshooting the network. Audio and video equipment manufacturers did the same for their products. And then there was Dante, straddling the middle ground between network and the media applications running on top of it. Audinate was to become the bridge between networks and AV applications.

Dante has the application knowledge of device performance (audio sample rate, clock accuracy, sample loss, video frame rate, chroma, color depth, resolution, etc.) for both each device and the entire network, providing the detailed meta data necessary for the AV technician to know, without having to be in the room, how everything looks and sounds for his or her customers.

More than that, Dante, through soon-to-be available APIs, exposes this data so that it can be combined with network health monitoring and control for comprehensive full stack application AND network remote support. Equipment manufacturers have used low level Dante APIs from Audinate for years to build device management solutions, and the new APIs will only serve to give them as well as support teams, better capabilities in the future.

The model for ProAV support going forward might look more like how IT looks today, where technicians have the tools available to effectively diagnose and solve complex problems from a remote location far away from the end user. In the short term, using network management solutions with APIs to create bespoke solutions will be possible. In the longer term you can expect these solutions be become turn-key from a variety of sources.

The key to future success will be meta data.

Having more data about the network, applications and user behavior will allow for machine learning models and artificial intelligence to preemptively anticipate network problems and prevent them from ever occurring. Dante provides a roadmap to this future by gathering data about AV applications and the networks on which they run. Save this data because it will have future value well beyond what we can imagine today. This is the greatest value of Dante Domain Manager: long term, detailed system performance logging. Imagine when this data is unleashed for combined analysis with other sources like Network Management Systems.

With better data, new APIs and integration between today’s IT and AV applications, we can eliminate, or at least substantially reduce truck rolls. Your techs will need to find new ways to get exercise.