Reference glossary of video-wall, control-room, and ProAV terminology — what each term means, how it relates to a software video wall, and where to read more.
- Video wall — A coordinated array of displays driven by a single processor so that any source can occupy any region of the combined canvas.
- NDI (Network Device Interface) — An IP-based protocol from NewTek/Vizrt for transporting low-latency, frame-accurate video and audio between devices on a standard Ethernet network.
- KVM (Keyboard, Video, Mouse) over IP — A switching technology that lets one operator console reach the keyboard, video, and mouse of remote machines over an IP network — central to modern control rooms.
- Multiviewer — A device or software that combines many video sources into a single composite output for monitoring on one screen — historically a broadcast tool, now common in NOCs and AV.
- NOC (Network Operations Center) — A facility where operators monitor and manage telecom networks, IT infrastructure, and connected services 24/7.
- SOC (Security Operations Center) — A facility focused on detecting, investigating, and responding to cybersecurity threats across an organisation in real time.
- Situation room (situation centre) — A purpose-built facility for cross-functional decision-making during emergencies or large-scale operations — the operational descendant of military command rooms.
- SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) — An industrial control architecture for monitoring and remotely commanding physical equipment — power grids, pipelines, water systems, manufacturing lines.
- AV over IP — The general practice of carrying audio and video signals over IP networks instead of dedicated cabling — the foundation of every modern control room and broadcast facility.
- Video wall controller — The hardware appliance or software platform that drives a video wall — composing sources, managing layouts, and surviving failures.
- IPMX — Open AV-over-IP standard built on SMPTE ST 2110 but adapted for ProAV: JPEG-XS compression, optional PTP, native HDCP, NMOS management.
- NMOS — Open suite of specifications for discovering and managing networked media devices: IS-04 for discovery, IS-05 for connection control.
- SMPTE ST 2110 — Broadcast-grade family of standards for carrying uncompressed video, audio and ancillary data over IP networks, with PTP-locked timing.
- SDVoE — Software Defined Video over Ethernet — uncompressed AV-over-IP standard built around 10 GbE and the Aquantia / Marvell AQrate chipset.
- IP-KVM — Keyboard, video and mouse signals carried over an IP network instead of dedicated KVM cabling, letting any operator desk reach any source PC.
- Edge AI for video walls — On-prem machine-learning inference inside the video wall pipeline: anomaly detection, automatic source promotion, face / plate counting — without sending feeds to the cloud.
- WebGPU — Browser-native GPU API that replaces WebGL with Vulkan/Metal-class semantics: compute shaders, multi-threaded command encoding, two-orders-of-magnitude performance gain.
- MicroLED — Direct-view LED display technology with sub-millimetre pixel pitch, 96% BT.2020 colour gamut, ~100,000 hour lifetime — the successor to fine-pitch LCD for control-room walls.
- dvLED (direct-view LED) — Display technology where each pixel is a directly visible LED diode — no LCD layer, no projection. Encompasses fine-pitch LED video walls used in control rooms, broadcast studios, and high-end signage.
- NDI HX — High-efficiency NDI variant. Uses H.264 or H.265 compression instead of full NDI's lightly-compressed visually-lossless format — fits NDI signals onto low-bandwidth networks like Wi-Fi at the cost of slightly higher latency and CPU/GPU decode overhead.
- Dante AV — Audinate's AV-over-IP transport. Started as Dante audio (the dominant pro-audio networked-audio standard), extended to networked video. Competes with SDVoE for low-latency AV-over-IP at the operator-control tier.
- SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) — Open-source streaming protocol developed by Haivision. Delivers low-latency video over unpredictable public-internet links with packet-loss recovery and AES encryption — the standard for contribution feeds and remote-production backhaul.