Dante Connect: Cloud Broadcast Audio Guide
What Is Dante Connect?
Dante Connect is Audinate's cloud-hosted broadcast audio transport service. It allows a production team to take audio from Dante-enabled equipment at a venue and route it to cloud-based mixing and production systems anywhere in the world — without coupling the signal to a video stream or relying on a traditional satellite or ISDN link.
The system is built on Dante Domain Manager combined with virtual soundcards and cloud gateways. Higher latency than a local Dante network is accepted deliberately — the advantage is the ability to involve remote commentators, producers, and mixing engineers who are not on-site.
How the Signal Chain Works
Audio from Dante-enabled devices at the venue (microphones, stage boxes, broadcast consoles) flows across the standard local Dante network. Dante Connect gateways pick up those streams and transmit them to a cloud instance — typically hosted on AWS or Google Cloud. At the cloud end, production applications that support Dante natively receive the audio and pass it to DAWs, mixing surfaces, or streaming encoders.
The decoupling from video is a key design decision. The installer routes audio independently from picture, which removes constraints around video codec choices and allows audio to go to multiple destinations simultaneously: a commentary studio, a backup recording, and a streaming CDN — all from the same Dante feed.
Key Installer Considerations
Latency budget: Dante Connect is designed for production workflows where a few hundred milliseconds of latency is acceptable. It is not appropriate for live monitoring over high-latency WAN links unless the remote user has compensating monitoring tools.
Licensing model: Dante Connect uses event-based licensing. The installer or production team purchases a licence for the duration of the event — spin up the cloud instance, run the event, spin it down. Cost scales with usage rather than being a fixed infrastructure cost.
Cloud provider support: AWS and Google Cloud are natively validated. The integration partner ecosystem extends this to other providers and dark fibre networks. The installer should confirm the cloud provider with the production team before the system design is finalised.
Redundancy: Because the transport relies on internet connectivity at the venue, the installer should ensure the WAN connection is on a separate circuit from the general-purpose building internet. Dante Connect inherits the reliability characteristics of the underlying connectivity.
Typical Use Cases
- Live sports broadcast: audio from court-side mics and commentary positions routed to a remote mixing facility for OB truck-free production.
- Interactive attractions: distributed audio from interactive exhibit hardware delivered to a central production environment for mixing and synchronisation.
- Multi-language broadcast: a single Dante audio feed distributed to multiple cloud instances simultaneously, each feeding a different language mix.
Source: paraphrased from Dante Connect. © Audinate Pty Ltd.