The Hidden Cost of “Good Enough” AV: What Downtime, Friction, and Rework Really Cost Organizations

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  • VIcom

“Good enough” AV is rarely a total failure.

It’s worse than that.

Good enough AV is the system that technically works, but steals minutes from every meeting, creates low-grade frustration, and turns support teams into full-time firefighters.

It’s the room where:

  • The meeting starts late, but only by 6 minutes

  • The wireless sharing works, but only after two tries

  • The mic cuts out, but only when the CEO is speaking

  • The camera frames everyone, except the person presenting

That kind of friction is easy to ignore in a single moment. Over a year, it becomes expensive.

Let’s break down where the cost really comes from, and how to model it inside your organization.

Cost bucket #1: Lost meeting time (the most obvious, and the most ignored)

Start with the simplest math:

Cost of a disrupted meeting = number of attendees x minutes lost x loaded hourly rate

A practical example:

  • 10 people in a meeting

  • 8 minutes lost to “Can you hear me?” and cable swapping

  • $75/hour loaded cost per person (salary plus benefits and overhead)

Step by step:

  • 8 minutes is 8/60 hours = 0.1333 hours

  • 0.1333 hours x $75 = $10 per person

  • $10 x 10 people = $100

That meeting just cost $100 in wasted time.

If that happens twice a day across a few rooms, you are not dealing with “minor issues.” You are dealing with a budget line you never created, but you are paying anyway.

And meeting time is only the first layer.

Cost bucket #2: The IT ticket treadmill

Good enough AV is ticket volume.

Not always big incidents. Just constant “small” ones:

  • “The room didn’t show up on the calendar panel.”

  • “The camera is on, but it’s stuck.”

  • “The HDMI input doesn’t work unless you wiggle it.”

  • “Teams Rooms logged out again.”

Each ticket has a real cost:

  • Triage and back-and-forth messages

  • A tech walking to the room

  • A meeting that is delayed while support arrives

  • The context switching tax that kills productivity

Even if a ticket is “only 20 minutes,” it rarely stays 20 minutes once you include interruptions and follow-up.

Cost bucket #3: Leadership confidence (the cost you feel but can’t easily spreadsheet)

When leaders lose trust in meeting spaces, behaviors change:

  • Board meetings stop using the boardroom

  • Execs demand a tech in the room “just in case”

  • People default to joining from laptops even when they are physically together

  • Teams avoid hybrid meetings because they are tiring

That shift has downstream costs: more travel, more time, less participation, and slower decisions.

You may not have a clean line item for “leadership frustration,” but you will see it in meeting quality and user behavior.

Cost bucket #4: Rework and shadow AV

Good enough AV pushes smart people into dumb workarounds.

Examples:

  • Teams buy their own speakerphones and leave them in drawers

  • Departments purchase random adapters and table hubs

  • Users bring personal webcams and USB mics to “fix” the room

  • Someone mounts an extra TV because the display “isn’t reliable”

You end up paying twice:

  1. For the room you built

  2. For the patchwork people create to survive

Shadow AV also destroys standardization, which drives support costs even higher.

Cost bucket #5: Training, town halls, and high-impact meetings

The cost of disruption is not equal across meetings.

If a weekly team huddle starts 5 minutes late, people shrug.

If a training session for 40 staff starts 12 minutes late and the remote group can’t hear, that is real waste:

  • Larger audience

  • Longer time

  • Higher stakes

  • Greater reputational damage internally

Good enough AV usually fails at the worst moments because high-impact meetings stress the system more: more participants, more microphones, more content switching, more pressure.

A simple “hidden cost” estimator you can use this week

You do not need perfect data to get a useful estimate. You just need honest assumptions.

  1. Estimate disrupted meetings per day (across your rooms)

  2. Estimate average minutes lost per disrupted meeting

  3. Estimate average attendees per meeting

  4. Choose a conservative loaded hourly rate

Then calculate:

Annual cost = disrupted meetings/day x attendees x (minutes lost/60) x hourly rate x workdays/year

If you want a conservative number, use 220 workdays.

Even if your estimate is off by 30%, it will still be directionally true, and it will give you something you can bring to budgeting conversations.

Why “good enough” feels cheaper (until you operate it)

Good enough AV often wins procurement because the upfront cost is lower.

But it loses operations because:

  • You pay for downtime in payroll, not invoices

  • You pay for rework in scattered departmental spending

  • You pay for support in ticket volume and staff burnout

  • You pay for failure in slower decisions and worse collaboration

In 2026, the smartest buyers are asking a different question:

What does it cost us to operate this room environment for the next 3 to 5 years?

That is total cost of ownership, and it is where good decisions get made.

How to reduce the real cost without overbuilding every room

You do not need to gold-plate every space. You need to remove the repeat offenders.

A few high-impact moves:

  • Standardize room tiers so support is repeatable

  • Prioritize audio design and commissioning

  • Add monitoring so you find issues before users do

  • Define ownership, patching, and escalation

  • Keep spares for common failure points (cables, remotes, touch panels)

Good enough AV is expensive because it produces endless small failures.

Reliable AV is cheaper because it produces fewer surprises.

We have AV experts waiting to speak with your organization about how we can introduce reliability in the way you communicate! Fill out the form below today to get started!

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