Why Open AV Standards Matter

Open standards are not a radical idea. The entire internet runs on them.

HTTP, TCP/IP, HTML, CSS, WebRTC - these technologies power billions of dollars in economic activity and they’re all built on openly published, freely implementable specifications. Anyone can read them. Anyone can build with them. Anyone can propose improvements.

The professional AV industry has largely gone in the opposite direction.

The Cost of Closed Standards

When standards are paywalled, the costs are distributed unevenly:

Small integrators pay twice. They pay membership fees to access the standards that govern the work they’re already doing. These fees are a rounding error for large firms and a genuine burden for small shops.

Manufacturers optimize for certification, not quality. When the standards body is also the certifier, there’s a structural incentive to make certification achievable over making products genuinely better.

Innovation slows. Open standards enable interoperability. Closed standards create moats. An open ecosystem where Manufacturer A’s DSP talks natively to Manufacturer B’s control system benefits integrators, end users, and ultimately the manufacturers who build the best products.

Education suffers. You can’t teach to a standard your students can’t access. This creates a permanent classroom-to-industry gap for the next generation of AV professionals.

What Open Standards Enable

Look at what open standards did for adjacent industries:

• Networking: 802.11 (WiFi), 802.3 (Ethernet) - open IEEE standards drove an explosion of competing implementations and drove costs to near-zero
• Web: HTML and CSS from the W3C enabled every website you’ve ever visited
• VoIP: SIP and RTP from the IETF enabled an entire industry of open-source telephone systems

The AV industry could have the same thing. DSP configuration formats. Room correction data schemas. Control protocol specifications. Installer certification competency frameworks. All of it could be open, versioned, community-maintained, and free.

SANE’s Approach

We’re not trying to replace every existing standard. Some existing specifications are well- engineered and widely adopted. Where they exist, we’ll reference them.

What we’re building is the layer that’s missing: a community home for the standards that should exist but don’t, and for the standards that exist but shouldn’t be locked behind a paywall.

We operate by rough consensus in the open. Every proposal, every change, every vote is visible on GitHub. If you disagree, fork it. If we’re wrong, tell us in an issue.

That’s how standards should work.