Lift All Ships
Now let’s think about manufacturers for a moment. I work for one, and I want to sell equipment. I want that equipment to be valuable and desirable, and I want to run a profitable business.
Our industry is made up of a lot of entities, applications and needs. Innovation and competition are important to drive both the products that are available to the market as well as the methods, techniques and solutions that we provide to end users. So let’s take a look at a couple of challenges that may exist for manufactures and purchasers alike.
Creating and industrializing a great product isn’t free. If a company’s only option is to develop all technology from the ground up, it may be cost prohibitive (particularly for smaller companies), or the final version of the product may have been diluted to hit a certain development cost.
Alternately, to recover those development costs, the product might be priced out of its market. By being able to implement and adopt an open public standard for some of this development, the cost of entry is lower, and we can expect to see new and innovative ideas flourish in the market.
To illustrate another challenge, let’s say a new company has developed the coolest controller for a DSP that you’ve ever seen, but in today’s environment, connecting that device to other manufacturers’ equipment can require some pretty complex and time consuming methods and programming. Further, this can still lead to limitations or compromises in actual functionality.
All of it increases the real cost of the product for everybody – the system professional must spend more time programming and configuring, the end-user must pay for those additional billable hours, and the manufacturer might have a higher support load. But if that product could hit the market ready to talk to anybody’s hardware, it suddenly becomes much easier, more attractive and more economical for all parties.
Open Ecosystem
So now, let’s come back around to my original question posed last time: Why are we doing this? Simple – it’s good for the AV industry. Manufacturers benefit from lower development costs, new sales channels and happier customers, while customers benefit from more competition, new innovation, greater flexibility and reduced integration time.
The time is right for open public media networking standards. There is simply too much potential to continue ignoring them. Open public standards will provide a way to make our entire industry more agile and more profitable.
This conversation will continue for years to come, but for the first time, we can begin to see some of the fruits of our labor. I believe in a matter of years, we will look back and the question will not be “Why?” but rather, “What took us so long?”
Ethan Wetzell has worked in audio for over 20 years, in positions ranging from front of house and studio engineer to global product manager for Electro-Voice DSP. He currently works as platform strategist for Bosch Communications Systems and works with the OCA Alliance.