Dante Turns 20 at NAB 2026: Iris Cloud PTZ Control, Director Pro, and ST 2110-30 Integration Push Audinate's Platform into Unified Broadcast-AV Territory
Twenty years after its founding, Audinate is demonstrating at NAB 2026 that Dante has evolved far beyond an audio networking protocol. Now encompassing audio, video, and control on a single platform, the Dante ecosystem — with more than 4,500 Dante-enabled products from over 700 manufacturers — is being positioned as the convergence infrastructure for both commercial AV and broadcast production environments.
At the heart of Audinate's NAB 2026 showcase is Iris, a cloud-based PTZ camera control platform making its trade show debut. Iris replaces traditional hardware controllers with a browser-accessible interface, allowing cameras to be orchestrated remotely across boardrooms, houses of worship, sports productions, and distributed live events — from any connected location, without additional infrastructure. Critically, Iris incorporates AI-powered automation for tracking, framing, and preset management, enabling lean production teams to manage multi-camera workflows without dedicated camera operators on-site.
Dante Director Pro and Facility-Wide Management
For enterprise and campus AV deployments, Audinate is spotlighting Dante Director Professional, a SaaS solution for centrally monitoring and managing networked AV devices across global facilities. As AV systems grow into multi-building, multi-campus footprints, the ability to audit, secure, and troubleshoot Dante networks from a single cloud interface becomes a key differentiator in service contract offerings for integrators.
ST 2110-30: Closing the Broadcast-AV Gap
Audinate's enhanced ST 2110-30 capabilities — announced last fall and now in full demonstration — bring 96kHz sample rate support, additional RTP flow configuration options, PTPv2 clocking updates, and expanded multicast address ranges to the broader Dante ecosystem. These updates allow Dante-enabled products to slot natively into broadcast studio and mobile production workflows, enabling hybrid environments where corporate AV installations and broadcast infrastructure share the same networked backbone.
Demonstrations also highlight Dante's integration with Grass Valley's AMPP cloud production platform and the Dante AV video-over-1G workflow, which extends familiar Dante audio simplicity into video signal routing — reducing the operational complexity of maintaining separate audio and video networks in live events and multi-room broadcast setups.
What This Means for AV Integrators
Dante's evolution into a unified AV-and-control platform with cloud management and AI camera automation means integrators can pitch a single converged infrastructure across audio, video, and PTZ control — reducing system complexity and strengthening the case for Dante-certified installations over proprietary alternatives. Iris, in particular, creates a recurring revenue opportunity: cloud-based camera management subscriptions that extend integrator value beyond the initial install into long-term managed services.