In 2009, that something new was Audio-Video Bridging (AVB), an IEEE open standard for transmitting time-synchronized audio and video over Ethernet, using special network switches. I’ve long been a supporter of open standards, and I was a big supporter of AVB. But after the 2013 AES convention, four years after that very public roll out, it seemed to me that AVB had been too slow out of the gate, and that Audinate’s proprietary Dante audio networking technology had already won dominance in the live sound market.

Everything I saw at this year’s Infocomm further supports that conclusion.

There’s actually less on display this year than last year. There was the (very nice) AVB-based Avid S3L console, some interfaces, and switches from Extreme Networks, who, as of now, are the only company to get AVNU-certified switches onto the market. The Extreme switches seem very nice, but when I priced them recently I was surprised to learn that the AVB option costs over $300+ extra per switch. With so little AVB product available for our industry, what does that $300 get me?

Here, there was lots of stuff from popular pro audio manufacturers that you can buy today, all connected together using standard switches and patched with a consistent interface. And in this all-day Dante love fest, they showed real world, completed installations, and lots of new, working stuff. My friend Jamie Anderson from Rational Acoustics presented on a recent SMAART class he taught where he replaced his old analog signal distribution system with Dante, saying it saved him several hours on the class because it “just worked”:’

So, it seems the prediction I made after peering into my crystal ball back in November still holds up: “… Audinate’s Dante has won the race, while AVB is still being tweaked by the mechanics over in the pit lane.”

Almost everything you list in your comment–Cisco’s involvement in AVB (you still can’t buy a Cisco AVB switch, as far as I know), Yamaha with a beta AVB system (never got beyond beta, as far as I know), AVB in Mac’s (still can’t use it), etc etc, was all true last year, when I was more optimistic about AVB’s prospects.