This month I talked to Richard Jonker, VP Commercial Business Development at NETGEAR AV about his IPMX training session at NAB.
SVC: What was your IPMX training session at NAB called and what was it about?
Richard Jonker: Rather than a standards overview, it looked at what actually goes wrong when ST 2110 and IPMX deployments move from bench test into live production. The argument running through the session was that these deployments don’t fail because the hardware isn’t capable, but because broadcast-specific requirements get applied through generic IT configuration logic. We worked through three concrete failure modes (timing, multicast, QoS), then showed how a profile-based approach, codifying switch behavior for specific roles like ST 2110 core, IPMX edge, or hybrid PTP environments, turns bespoke deployments into repeatable, auditable ones
Why did you choose to speak on IPMX?
Because IPMX is what extends ST 2110 beyond the studio core. Not every source feeding a broadcast production today is a studio-grade ST 2110 device. Remote contribution, houses of worship, universities, corporate media operations,… All of these now feed into broadcast workflows, and they’re not arriving with full ST 2110 compliance. IPMX is what lets that content share the same network, rather than requiring a parallel one.
For broadcasters, that also means more endpoint choice and more price competition on the same infrastructure. But the moment ST 2110 and IPMX devices share a fabric, the PTP, multicast, and QoS decisions get harder, not easier. That’s the 25-minute conversation worth having with this audience.
What were you surprised by, if anything, that people already know?
Audience fluency with PTP concepts was higher than I expected. Five years ago, “boundary clock vs. transparent clock” was still a vocabulary moment in rooms like this. Now, integrators coming in through the IPMX track are asking specific questions about grandmaster election behavior and boundary clock handoff between segments. The AV side has absorbed broadcast timing language faster than the broadcast side has absorbed IT networking conventions.
Where do you think education is lagging, or where may there be misunderstandings?
A few specific gaps come up consistently.
The industry still doesn’t have a cross-vendor credentialing structure for IP broadcast engineering. Commercial AV has AVIXA CTS as a vendor-neutral foundation. Broadcast doesn’t have an equivalent. What exists is largely manufacturer-specific: certifications built around individual product lines, training that covers one piece of the chain and leaves engineers to figure out the rest. That model worked in the SDI era, when expertise in one vendor’s router was largely self-contained. It doesn’t work for a live production environment that might combine NDI camera feeds, Dante audio, AES67 bridging, ST 2110 infrastructure, and IPMX contribution paths on the same network.
That’s the gap NETGEAR Academy was rebuilt to address. Sixteen manufacturers — including Dante, NDI, SDVoE, Panasonic, Allen & Heath, Genelec, and PTZOptics — have now contributed training content to the platform. Not because any of them lack the resources to run standalone training, but because the market needs cross-vendor, workflow-based education that no single manufacturer can credibly provide on its own. For major broadcasters with deep benches and peer networks, the skills gap gets closed through experience. For smaller operations running broadcast-level production on tighter teams, it’s a harder problem and it’s the one the Academy is trying to solve.
How does NETGEAR see its role with IPMX?
Our role is infrastructure. We offer the network under the deployment, not the endpoints on it. That’s a deliberate position. NETGEAR doesn’t make cameras, microphones, switchers, or production systems, so we’re not competing with the manufacturers whose products sit on our switches. Always your platform, never your competitor.
Practically, that shows up in three places. First, validated interoperability: over 580 AV and broadcast manufacturers have certified their products against NETGEAR AV switches, with profile-based configurations tested against real endpoints rather than theoretical specs. Second, workflow-specific engineering: preset profiles for ST 2110 core and edge, IPMX, AES67, and hybrid PTP environments, plus integrated grandmaster and boundary clock support on select M4350 models. The point is to shrink the configuration surface area where most real-world failures actually happen. Third, practitioner enablement through NETGEAR Academy: free, cross-vendor training that covers everything from AV networking fundamentals through to SMPTE 2110 and IPMX-specific deployment content.
IPMX is a standards-body effort that only reaches scale if there’s an installed base of trained engineers who can deploy it correctly. Our job is to make sure the infrastructure layer isn’t the reason it stalls, and to contribute to the education layer that stops the skills gap from becoming a production problem.
