What an Hour of Broken Boardroom AV Actually Costs
- Chris Gore
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
What does an hour of broken boardroom AV actually cost your business? Here is the maths most companies never do, and why it matters.
Chris Gore | Updated 2026
An hour of AV downtime costs more than most businesses realise, and almost nobody actually calculates it.
What an Hour of AV Downtime Actually Costs
Take a boardroom with eight people in it, on an average UK salary of roughly £40,000 a year. Once you account for the working year, that works out at close to £20 an hour per person. Eight people, sitting in a room that is not working, for one hour, is roughly £160 in salary cost before anyone has done a single minute of useful work.
That is the conservative version. It assumes the meeting simply starts late once the fault is fixed. In practice, the meeting is often abandoned altogether, rebooked for another day, and the eight diaries that had to align once now have to align again.
The Maths Nobody Does
Multiply that £160 by the number of meetings a business runs each week across every meeting room it owns, and the number stops being trivial very quickly. A business running twenty meetings a week, losing even one to a technology fault, is losing more in wasted time than it would cost to monitor every room properly.
Why the Real Cost Is Higher Than the Maths Suggests
Salary cost is the easiest part to calculate and the smallest part of the real cost. A client presentation that stalls because the display will not connect costs more than the room time, it costs credibility. A board decision delayed by a week because the call kept dropping costs more than the hour lost, it costs momentum on whatever was being decided. None of that shows up on a spreadsheet, but all of it is real.
Why Most Businesses Only Notice the Cost After It Happens
Most organisations manage their meeting room estate reactively. Nobody knows a room has a problem until someone tries to use it and it fails. By that point, the cost has already been paid, the meeting has already been disrupted, and the only thing left to do is fix the fault and hope it does not happen again next week.
The pattern repeats because there is no visibility into the estate between one failure and the next. Firmware drifts out of date. Warranties expire unnoticed. A microphone that was fine for six people struggles once the room fills to ten. None of it becomes visible until it becomes a complaint.
How to Stop Paying This Cost Every Month
The only way to stop paying for AV downtime is to catch faults before they reach the room. That means every device in every room being watched in real time, warranty and firmware status tracked automatically, and problems fixed out of hours rather than in front of the people who were meant to be in the meeting.
That is what SPORTrack does across every SPOR Group deployment. A fault caught overnight costs nothing. A fault discovered when someone presses start on Monday morning costs exactly what we have just calculated above, every single time it happens.
Want to Know What AV Downtime Is Actually Costing You?
Frequently Asked Questions
What does AV downtime actually cost a business?
It varies by room size and salary levels, but a simple calculation of attendee salaries multiplied by hours lost usually produces a figure in the hundreds of pounds per incident, before accounting for delayed decisions or damaged client relationships.
How is the cost of a broken meeting room calculated?
Multiply the average hourly salary cost of everyone in the room by the number of people and the number of hours lost. Add the cost of rescheduling if the meeting cannot simply resume once the fault is fixed.
Why do meeting rooms fail without anyone noticing?
Most organisations only find out a room has a fault when someone tries to use it. Firmware, warranty status and device health are rarely monitored proactively, so faults sit unnoticed until they become visible as a failed meeting.
How can businesses reduce AV downtime?
Real time monitoring across every device in every room catches faults before they reach a live meeting. Proactive firmware updates and warranty tracking prevent the two most common causes of unexpected failure.
What is SPORTrack?
SPORTrack is SPOR Group's monitoring platform, tracking every device across a meeting room estate in real time and flagging issues before they affect a live meeting.
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