ACT Entertainment and NETGEAR have announced a strategic partnership to establish verified interoperability between NETGEAR switches and ACT's product brands, including tvONE and Green Hippo. The collaboration aims to streamline AV-over-IP deployments and reduce complexity for live events, broadcast, and networked live production environments. The integrated workflows and hardware systems will be demonstrated at InfoComm 2026.
This partnership addresses the technical friction slowing the industry's migration from legacy SDI to IP-centric infrastructure. By validating hardware interoperability at the source, ACT and NETGEAR reduce the integration risk for engineers managing high-stakes live broadcasts and event playback. This move strengthens the broader ProAV ecosystem's shift toward standardized COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) networking hardware, effectively lowering the barrier to entry for complex AV-over-IP setups. Industry observers should watch for similar validation agreements between switch manufacturers and high-end media server brands as SMPTE ST 2110 and NDI protocols become the default production backbone.
NETGEAR has been building a broader ecosystem of verified interoperability for live production networking. At InfoComm 2025, NETGEAR debuted four new M4350 Phase 3 switches designed specifically for broadcast and pro AV applications, featuring built-in grandmaster clock and boundary clock functionality for SMPTE ST 2110 deployments. The M4350 line can serve as the primary timing source for a broadcast network, a capability that directly supports the type of validated hardware configurations ACT Entertainment and NETGEAR are now offering through their partnership.
The partnership also reflects NETGEAR's strategy of building a large partner ecosystem around its AV switch portfolio. NETGEAR announced at NAB Show 2025 that it had reached 400 broadcast and ProAV manufacturing partners, with over 120 of those manufacturers exhibiting at the show. The company's managed switch lineup supports SMPTE ST 2110, NDI, Dante, SRT, AES67, and IPMX protocols, positioning it as a multi-protocol platform that media server and processor vendors like ACT's tvONE and Green Hippo brands can validate against without locking into a single transport standard.
From a deployment standpoint, the M4350 Phase 3 switches introduced features aimed at reducing setup errors in live environments. The multicolor LED port identification system displays user-selected colors on each port matching assignments in NETGEAR AV OS, allowing technicians to visually confirm cable connections without tracing individual runs. Combined with secure power cable locking mechanisms, these features address the operational friction that ACT Entertainment's verified interoperability program is designed to eliminate for engineers deploying tvONE CORIOmaster processors and Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers on NETGEAR infrastructure.
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