The Case for Open AV Standards

Abstract

This paper argues that the professional audiovisual industry would benefit significantly from a transition to openly published, freely implementable technical standards. We examine the economic incentives that produced the current closed-standards ecosystem, the costs those incentives impose on practitioners and end users, and the precedents from adjacent industries that demonstrate the viability of open-standards models.

1. Background

The professional AV industry currently relies primarily on standards developed and administered by membership-based organizations. Access to the underlying specifications typically requires either organizational membership or per-document purchase fees.

This model was inherited from earlier industrial standards bodies and made sense in a pre-internet era when the cost of distributing physical documents was non-trivial. That constraint no longer exists. The marginal cost of distributing a standards document online is effectively zero.

Despite this, the access model has remained largely unchanged.

2. Economic Analysis

2.1 Direct Costs

The most visible cost is the direct financial burden of membership fees and document purchase prices. For large firms, these are rounding errors in the cost structure. For small independent integrators, they represent meaningful overhead.

This creates a market structure that favors consolidation: larger firms can access and comply with standards at lower marginal cost, providing a structural competitive advantage over smaller operators who provide the same services.

2.2 Education and Training Costs

Vocational training programs face a particular challenge. Teaching students to comply with industry standards requires access to those standards - but educational institutions often lack the budget for full organizational membership.

The result is a classroom-to-industry gap: graduates who have learned about standards in theory but have never read the actual specifications they’re expected to implement.

2.3 Innovation Costs

Closed standards create moats. When the cost of entry to an interoperability ecosystem includes membership fees, smaller innovators are excluded from the conversation that defines the ecosystem.

Open standards lower this barrier, enabling more competitors to build interoperable products. More competition in a well-defined interoperability space tends to drive up quality and drive down prices - outcomes that benefit the end users of AV systems.

3. Precedents

3.1 The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

The IETF has produced the core protocols of the internet - TCP, IP, HTTP, SMTP, DNS - through an open process. All RFCs are freely available. Anyone can participate in the process. The result is a remarkably robust and interoperable global network built by thousands of competing vendors.

3.2 The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

HTML, CSS, and the DOM are W3C standards, developed through an open multi-stakeholder process and freely available. The web would not exist in its current form under a closed-standards model.

3.3 IEEE 802

The IEEE 802 family (Ethernet, WiFi) demonstrates that even hardware-level standards can be open while generating enormous commercial ecosystems. 802.11 WiFi chips are commodities; the open standard enabled rather than prevented the commercial success of hundreds of manufacturers.

4. A Path Forward

We do not argue that existing standards organizations should be disbanded or that their work has no value. Much of it is valuable. What we argue is that the access model should change - and that the industry should additionally develop new standards in the open for areas currently lacking adequate coverage.

The model we propose, and that SANE implements:

1. Open access: All standards freely available online, no membership required
2. Open process: Proposals, discussions, and ratification in public view
3. Version control: Full history of all changes, auditable by anyone
4. No IP encumbrances: All standards freely implementable without patent licensing
5. Community governance: Standards are owned by the community, not a corporation

5. Conclusion

The professional AV industry is a mature technical discipline with a rich body of practical knowledge. That knowledge belongs to the people who built it - the engineers, integrators, and technicians who design and deploy AV systems every day. SANE exists to make that knowledge freely accessible to everyone in the field, and to those who will enter it.

The technology to do this has existed for decades. The question is whether the industry has the will to use it. We believe it does.

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