USB Joins Video And Audio On The AV Network

For years the network carried video, audio and control while USB stayed on a copper tether to one computer. That assumption is being dismantled from two directions at once. On the AV-over-IP side, HARMAN Professional Solutions used InfoComm India 2026 to introduce the BSS OMNI 600 Series, a family of encoders and decoders that places 4K60 4:4:4 video, audio, control and USB 2.0 on Gigabit Ethernet. The platform relies on Motion Wavelet Compression for visually lossless quality at low latency, and routes USB over IP through virtual network USB hub technology so that cameras, microphones, touch panels and interface devices can be reached from anywhere on the network. It also supports Dante audio and Dante AV-A interoperability, which means the same infrastructure carries the USB peripheral layer, the audio layer and the video layer without separate cabling.

On the control room side the same idea has advanced further. ATEN's KX9980 is a 5K DisplayPort dual display KVM over IP extender that the company describes as the industry's first KVM over IP platform with USB 3.2 support, allowing operators to work with high bandwidth peripherals such as solid state storage, capture devices and specialised industrial equipment at close to local speed. It carries 5K at 60 Hz with 4:4:4 colour and 12 bit depth, offers network and power redundancy, and adds virtual machine support through a KVM based IT and operational technology separation architecture, in which a dedicated local console can reach virtualised systems while OT infrastructure stays physically isolated from the IT network. For broadcast, utilities, transport and medical imaging environments that is a security architecture as much as a performance claim.

The management layer is catching up as well. Adder's AIM 6 software for ADDERLink INFINITY IP KVM environments took a TVBEurope IBC 2026 Best of Show award after shipping on new manager servers from June 2026, with an ARDx upgrade in May adding multi-head operation, per-source frame rate control and an SDK that lets integrators embed remote access into their own platforms. The security model is explicit: AES 256 link encryption, RSA 2048 authentication, audit logging, two factor authentication and directory integration. When USB travels over IP, the questions in a specification change accordingly. Buyers should ask which USB generation is supported and at what bandwidth, how devices are isolated between networks and tenants, whether USB traffic is encrypted in transit, and how licensing scales as peripheral counts grow.

Amtune builds the transport layer that makes that converged traffic manageable. The range covers AV-over-IP codecs and decoders for endpoint distribution, HD video seamless hybrid matrices and AV switchers for deterministic local routing, AV extenders for long single-cable runs to displays, and Dante and AES67 networked audio modules where audio joins the same network. All units are manufactured under an ISO 9001 quality system and tested to CE, FCC and RoHS standards. Integrators can request interoperability notes and sample units at sales@amtune.com.