Audio Video Bridging (AVB, also called ;Ethernet AV;) is an emerging network standard built on IEEE 802 Ethernet, but designed to overcome Ethernet’s traditional drawbacks for real-time streaming media: the absence of clocking and synchronization capabilities, and, most of all, lack of guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS)— the ability to always deliver audio samples and video frames in sync and on time.

AVB remedies these flaws by providing bandwidth reservations (to ensure on-time delivery), a low-jitter master clock, guaranteed low latency (0.25 ms or less per hop with a maximum of 2 ms or less through 7 switches) and a timing mechanism for synchronization. AVB designates enough raw bandwidth to carry up to 200 audio channels through a single Gigabit Ethernet port, though, in practical use, a portion of this may be traded off to achieve advanced features.