Audinate revenue hits $46 million amid Dante ecosystem expansion

The expansion of the Dante ecosystem to 8 million devices solidifies Audinate's position as the de facto standard for professional AV-over-IP networking. By absorbing short-term EBITDA pressure to fund the Iris SaaS platform, the company is pivoting from hardware-centric audio to a unified cloud-based video and control stack. This move directly addresses the streaming industry's demand for interoperable, software-defined production environments. As competitors struggle to match this scale of OEM integration, Audinate's transition to a recurring revenue model via Dante Director will be the key metric to track for long-term margin expansion.

Audinate's Dante protocol continues to dominate professional audio networking, but the company's expansion into video through Dante AV and Iris places it in a fragmented competitive landscape. The 2025 edition of the RH Consulting Networked AV Report, which analyzed 6,942 networked AV products across 676 brands, found that Dante AV recorded the highest year-on-year percentage growth among all video-over-IP protocols, even as NDI maintained the lead in absolute product numbers. Roland Hemming of RH Consulting noted that audio networking adoption for professional products can now be considered complete, with Dante adopted by more products in the past year than all other audio protocols combined. The report also confirmed that video-over-IP remains in what Hemming called the "integrated phase of adoption," with no clear preferred standard yet established.

On the competitive and business side, the fragmentation of video-over-IP standards creates both opportunity and risk for Audinate's Dante AV strategy. RH Consulting warned that product numbers for Dante AV, NDI, and ST 2110 are misleading from an interoperability standpoint because each protocol contains multiple variants for sending video in different formats, and some major market players have not yet adopted any video-over-IP standard at all. The consultancy suggested the market could ultimately consolidate around two networking standards, a dynamic that favors Audinate's scale advantage in audio while leaving the video outcome uncertain. Meanwhile, Crestron completed NDI certification for its 1 Beyond p-Series and i-Series cameras in June 2025, with the company's Connor Bright calling it a step toward flexible, interoperable video technology for enterprise deployments, underscoring that NDI is gaining traction in the same enterprise and unified communications spaces where Audinate's Iris platform aims to compete.

Technically, Dante's position as a unifying control and discovery layer across AV installations strengthens the case for Dante Director as a cloud management platform. AVNetwork reported in October 2025 that Dante's automatic device discovery and broad OEM adoption provide the ecosystem depth necessary for single-pane-of-glass management, with the platform's API connectivity enabling signal transmission, device data aggregation, and control integration into unified workflows. Crestron's own DM NVX AV-over-IP platform already incorporates Dante multicast audio routing alongside its proprietary video transport, requiring dedicated Dante multicast address allocation and network segmentation for proper coexistence, demonstrating that even competing hardware vendors treat Dante as an essential audio layer within their systems. This embedded dependency across the installed base is what gives Audinate leverage as it transitions toward recurring SaaS revenue through Dante Director and Iris.