Pete Putman

All Good Things Must Come To An End...

AV-over-IT, Unplanned Obsolescence, and Unintended Consequences

AV-over-IP is reshaping more than signal routing - it's quietly dismantling the engineering workforce that built broadcast and professional AV from the ground up. As facilities trade dedicated technical staff for IT generalists and swap capital hardware investments for disposable commodity gear, the industry faces a reckoning few are openly discussing. Whether this shift delivers genuine efficiency or simply trades deep expertise for short-term savings remains an open and urgent question.

NAB 2019: Where Does It Go From Here?

Twenty-five years of NAB Show attendance offers a striking vantage point: enormous hardware booths have shrunk, tape has vanished, and software now rules a floor once dominated by six-figure broadcast gear. Attendance dropped 11.6% in two years, and the show's identity feels uncertain. Yet 8K cameras from Sony, Sharp, Ikegami, and others signal where professional video is heading, with the 2020 Olympics poised to accelerate adoption in ways few anticipated.

Selling TV By The Byte

UltraViolet: Gone, And Best Forgotten

UltraViolet's shutdown announcement nearly vanished unnoticed into a spam folder - a fitting metaphor for a service most users had already abandoned. The digital content locker promised seamless access to purchased movies across devices, but its clunky registration process drove customers straight to Netflix and Amazon Prime instead. With major studios already gone and 30 million largely inactive accounts, its quiet death reveals how quickly even well-funded digital ecosystems can become irrelevant. The real question is what that means for today's streaming services.