The Case for Open AV Standards

If you’ve been in AV for more than a few years, you’ve probably had this moment: you need to look up a cable spec, a mounting requirement, or a signal tolerance. You know the standard exists. You know the number. But when you go to pull it up, you hit a login wall. A membership you don’t have. A PDF behind $800 a year.

So you ask around. Maybe someone on Reddit has a pirated copy. Maybe you guess and over-spec the cable. Maybe you skip the standard entirely and hope it doesn’t bite you during commissioning.

That’s broken. And it’s not a rare edge case — it’s how most AV work gets done.

What we’re actually paying for

Most AV standards come from organizations that charge for access. Not a token fee — real money. A single integrator might need memberships in five or six different bodies just to read the specs for a typical corporate install.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

1. Annual membership dues — $800 to $5,000 per organization, per year. Multiply by however many standard bodies touch your project types.
2. Compliance and certification testing — mandatory if you want the badge, and rarely cheap.
3. Training courses — often required for certification, usually paid, and sometimes location-locked.
4. Revision churn — new version drops, your cert expires, repeat steps 2 and 3.

None of this is evil. Standards work costs money. Someone has to run the process. But when the access itself becomes the business model, the incentives drift. Standards get padded to generate training demand. Updates get scheduled to renew certification revenue. It stops being about the spec and starts being about the subscription.

The rough math

A mid-size commercial integrator with a handful of design engineers might spend $15,000 to $25,000 a year just on standards access and compliance — before they ever buy a piece of gear. A global manufacturer? Easily six figures.

Where does that money end up? In the client’s project budget. A 2-5% premium on AV system costs that doesn’t buy better equipment or better outcomes. It buys permission to read the instructions.

Worse: it makes onboarding painful. Every new hire needs access to reference material. That means more seats, more fees, and a training period where they can’t legally pull up the spec they need. You end up with senior engineers acting as human indexes because it’s simpler than dealing with the paywall.

A different model exists

The IETF builds the standards that run the internet. The W3C builds the standards that run the web. Both are open — specs are free to read, free to implement, developed in public with community input. If this model can handle TCP, HTTP, and TLS, it can handle a video distribution standard.

What “open” actually means:

• No paywalls. Anyone can read the spec, anytime, for free.
• Public development. Discussions, proposals, and decisions happen in the open.
• Built by practitioners. Standards written by the people who install, commission, and troubleshoot the systems they describe.
• Free to share. Licensed under Creative Commons — share it with your team, your client, your subcontractor.

Why it matters

Open standards lower the floor. A new AV tech can pull up the reference without a corporate credit card. A small shop can compete on quality instead of on which memberships their budget covers. Manufacturers can implement specs without negotiating licensing terms. And when something goes wrong on site, you can look up the answer in three minutes instead of three days of email chains.

SANE exists to test whether this model works for AV. The experiment is live — standards are being drafted, commented on, and published right now. If you think the current system is fine, no argument will convince you. But if you’ve ever stared at a login screen while holding a cable you weren’t sure about, you already know why this matters.

Come build it with us

Contribute to the RFC process or join the discussion on GitHub.