The seven-level Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, IN, has embraced AV and digital signage technology since opening in 2008 as the home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts. This state-of-the-art, multipurpose facility seats over 67,000 fans. Its flexible design can also accommodate NCAA basketball, corporate events, concerts, and similar purposes.

Just north of Lucas Oil Stadium lies Lucas Oil Plaza, a public congregation area for events and concessions that features a multitude of performance motor vehicle exhibits. 

The plaza’s original digital signage network included 13 single displays and a 16-screen, 4x4 video wall, blending Lucas Oil promotional content with entertainment. Following a recent technical upgrade, the plaza now boasts an AV over IP architecture that supports a digital signage network that leverages Atlona for networked switching, distribution and control.

The Challenge

In operation for 10 years, the original AV system was archaic and dated. The operation was manual and decentralized, using a rack-mounted touch panel to power systems on and off, switch video sources, and manage other control elements. Users had to walk to DVD players and certain displays to turn them on. A cluster of noisy, power-hungry, and heat-producing 4RU servers that fed digital content increasingly began to fail.

[Download the 2020 Digital Signage Best Practices Guide]

The 4x4 video wall was also problematic. As years progressed, displays began to fail, and it became increasingly more difficult to source identical replacements. The original 52-inch displays had a ¾-inch bezels, which equated to a 1-1/2-inch gap between displays. Increasingly, the wall resembled a checkerboard. As display technology has matured, bezels have grown much less noticeable, drawing negative attention to the existing wall.

With centralized control, system reliability, and the fan experience all lacking, the executive team decided to substantially update the Lucas Oil Stadium network in two phases. First, there would be a comprehensive new digital signage network deployment. Second, an engaging video wall would breathe new life into overall AV operation. In both cases, the new network would be more automated, visible, energy-efficient, scalable, flexible, and pleasing to the eye.

The Solution: Migration to a Centralized Network

While the Lucas Oil Plaza signage network has had a broad footprint, the content has been fairly simple, with basic PowerPoint slides and content from DVD players and laptops fed to the various endpoints. The expense of maintaining the original system, coupled with its fading reliability, clearly pointed to a new strategy.

The plaza’s existing wired infrastructure was repurposed and provided plenty of bandwidth to distribute and control content over IP. This steered the customer toward an AV over IP architecture to support this second-generation digital signage network, one that leveraged an Atlona platform for networked switching, distribution and control.

Improving digital signage installations with AV over IP technology

“As IT technicians, we were at home managing systems over IP networks,” said Cory Poore, IT and network technician, Lucas Oil Plaza. “They are far more dynamic and flexible than working with legacy circuit-based systems. Moving to IP made sense as a common infrastructure that could scale easily, and support new applications and technologies as our AV vision evolves.”

The adoption of AV over IP overcame potential signal and distance limitations inherent in legacy systems. As large as Lucas Oil Plaza is, they wanted a system that could achieve greater signal distribution distances, and easily add PoE network repeaters when and where necessary. The team selected Atlona’s OmniStream AV over IP platform as the ideal choice for switching and distribution over the network. 

The promise of AV over IP for the pro AV market

“There was an immediate benefit from the integration perspective,” said Poore. “OmniStream worked with our existing wired infrastructure since we had twisted pair wiring from our central rack to the various displays. Furthermore, OmniStream could operate with multicast transmission applied to each switch. This would avoid sending AV traffic to network devices that did not require it, saving bandwidth and eliminating device potential lockups due to related network traffic.”

In addition to the single displays, the OmniStream rack feeds the Plaza’s 4x4 video wall. The video wall’s location prevented any feasible option to install 16 separate twisted-pair runs to the decoders behind each display. Instead, they leveraged a single high-bandwidth infrastructure. 

[The Integration Guide to Video Walls]

“We opted for a 10Gb copper Cat 6a backbone from the core switch to all other switches, which further preserves network bandwidth,” said Poore. “Having a detailed static IP address allocation for all devices also proved essential to ensure system stability and reliability, avoiding any potential shifting IP addresses, or IP conflicts.”

Advantages of a 10Gb Ethernet network backbone

Reimagined Signage

Integration of the exhibit displays and video wall first required a significant teardown phase. Eight 16-foot sections of horizontal channel strut were added to attach the new display mounts. New Cat 6a UTP cabling was also pulled to the video wall to provide plenty of bandwidth for multiple simultaneous video sources to be displayed.

The importance of Layer 1 infrastructure in AV over IP networks

Once the exhibits were prepared, the installation team began the process of installing the new screens. The new video wall is composed of 16 LG 55VX1D landscape screens, with Chief ConnexSys mounts supporting the displays. These are precision mounts offering six points of adjustment across height, tilt, depth, and lateral movement, providing great flexibility according the event needs. 

The digital signage displays are fashioned as creative kiosks, with positioning in key traffic areas. Seven additional displays, ranging in size from 86-inch LG landscape displays on down, were added to various locations throughout with messaging that included oil-related topics for continuity. Some of these are part of the Lucas Oil entertainment content in the plaza area.

The new OmniStream platform will support 4K content, an improvement from the analog-only video support of the previous architecture. Additionally, the platform can accommodate live feeds from various sources for the first time, and will upconvert the content where necessary.

Upping the Control Game

The move to centralized control over the network has perhaps been the greatest operational efficiency boost, according to Poore.

“In addition to eliminating our manual and siloed approach to control on site, the Atlona Velocity has liberated the staff through its remote control operation,” he said. “We can remotely connect to control the system, troubleshoot issues, and update system configuration. We can control the system from smartphones and tablets, and we find the UI intuitive and easy to use.”

Poore says the remote management features of the new system deliver the greatest operational value. And while there are no immediate plans to further expand the system, he emphasizes that Lucas Oil Plaza now has the IT network and AV system infrastructure well-prepared to accommodate future changes. 

Visionary Solutions, has announced that Tim Murray has joined the company as national sales manager. A 30-year veteran of the professional audio industry, Murray most recently served as western region sales manager at Symetrix, where he consistently exceeded yearly sales goals, showing double-digit growth year-over-year for more than 10 years. Murray previously worked in sales management positions at such companies as Xantech Corporation, Otari USA, Sennheiser, and HHB.

"Visionary Solutions is the perfect next step in my career, especially given my background in pro audio and network product sales" said Murray. "Visionary Solutions is a future-looking company that is delivering amazing and innovative AV-over-IP solutions, with a strong emphasis on customer satisfaction and strong dealer relationships. I share those values and am excited about this opportunity to drive U.S. sales for a growing, vibrant company with leading-edge technology."

"We're delighted to add Tim Murray to our team," said Visionary Solutions Chief Operating Officer Scott Freshman. "He's a proven winner who strengthens us in so many ways. His extensive sales management experience and deep knowledge of AV and networking make him perfectly suited to lead our U.S. sales effort. And of course we love Tim's emphasis on providing the best possible care and support for dealers, integrators, end users, and consultants."

At Integrate 2018 in Sydney Aug. 22-24, the SDVoE Alliance will offer a series of training sessions focusing on ethernet as the transport for AV signals in professional AV environments and the ecosystem around the SDVoE platform, which allows software to define AV applications.

The sessions will be presented by Victor Vettorello of Christie, Domenic Torre of NetGear and Gerry Wilkins of Semtech. Christie, NetGear and Semtech are SDVoE founding member companies.

“Education is a primary mission of the SDVoE Alliance and we are proud to be able to rely on industry experts from member companies to offer such an extensive array of opportunities at Integrate,” said Justin Kennington, president of the SDVoE Alliance. “Integrators and end users will discover how they can enjoy the flexibility and scalability of Ethernet while benefitting from the performance of a matrix switch – 4K video without compromise, without latency, and without image artifacts.”

Attendees to the SDVoE Alliance sessions will learn what they need to know to leverage the SDVoE standard for high performance AV network deployments in education, healthcare, enterprise, entertainment, hospitality, retail, houses of worship, government, military, industry, and security.

Day 1, Aug. 22

What is the SDVoE Alliance?

Gerry Wilkins, Semtech

12:00-12:30, AVIXA FlashTrack on the show floor

AV over IP panel discussion

Gerry Wilkins, Semtech, and other industry experts participating

12:30-13:30, Integrate Speaker Series, Room 5.4

New architectures for simplified video system design

Victor Vettorello, Christie

13:30-14:00, AVIXA FlashTrack on the show floor

Day 2, Aug. 23

Networking fast track: what is a modular Ethernet switch and what does it mean to AV?

Domenic Torre, NetGear

11:00-11:30, AVIXA FlashTrack on the show floor

How to design software-defined video over Ethernet systems

Victor Vettorello, Christie

15:30-17:00, AVIXA Education session

Networking fast track: what is multicast?

Domenic Torre, NetGear

16:00-16:30, AVIXA FlashTrack on the show floor –

Day 3, Aug. 24

Networking fast track: what is multicast?

Domenic Torre, NetGear

11:30-12:00, AVIXA FlashTrack on the show floor

More information on the Integrate Education Program is available on the Integrate website.

All AV distribution and processing applications that demand zero-latency, uncompromised video can benefit from SDVoE technology, which provides an end-to-end hardware and software platform for AV extension, switching, processing, and control through advanced chipset technology, common control APIs, and interoperability. SDVoE network architectures are based on off-the-shelf ethernet switches thus offering substantial cost savings and greater system flexibility and scalability over traditional approaches such as point-to-point extension and circuit-based AV matrix switching.

Atlona announced that D&H Distributing Company, a technology distributor of IT and electronics, has become its first manufacturer’s representative to focus exclusively on IT professionals tasked with managing AV systems over the network. Based in Harrisburg, PA, D&H Distributing Company will represent Atlona on a national basis, with an emphasis on marketing Atlona’s AV-over-IP solutions to its Small-to-Medium-Size Business (SMB) customers.

Since its founding in 1918, D&H has evolved to focus on vertical markets such as cyber security, data center and cloud infrastructures. More recently, the company has aggressively targeted the commercial AV, digital signage space, and collaboration through its SMB division, with an emphasis on corporate, government, education and houses of worship.

Pete Hurley, sales director for D&H Distributing Company’s SMB PROAV Division, notes that Atlona products are a seamless complement to the bill of material requests from our reseller community. “Atlona’s inclusion in the projects calling for Cisco, Intel, commercial displays, integration projectors, screens and mounts provide an important differentiator from competitive IT distributors that lack a strong AV-over-IP partner,” said Hurley.

“Cat6 cable drives virtually everything today across the AV ecosystem, and IT resellers are the first professionals working behind the walls in any project,” he said. “It’s pertinent that we speak directly to the professionals that will ultimately play a defining role in how IP-based technology will drive collaborative and multimedia spaces in tomorrow’s AV landscape. Atlona’s strength and innovation across its AV-over-IP product line will position us a strong, valuable and relevant partner to IT professionals faced with the challenges of managing AV systems over IP networks.”

D&H will focus on marketing three Atlona AV-over-IP product lines to IT resellers:

• OmniStream, a comprehensive AV-over-IP platform for the switching and distribution of video, audio and USB over the network
• Velocity, an IP- and cloud-enabled AV control platform that offers unprecedented scalability for up to 5,000 controlled devices within an IT infrastructure
• AMS, a powerful, easy-to-use IP management system to configure, monitor and service multiple Atlona products from a web browser

D&H and Atlona will work closely on training and education initiatives for IT resellers still learning their way with AV-over-IP technologies. The two companies will also demonstrate Atlona AV-over-IP products at the upcoming ChannelCon 2018 (CC18) show (Booth 1227), taking place at the Marriott Wardman Park, in Washington, D.C., from July 31 to Aug. 2, 2018. Atlona and D&H are both corporate members of the Computer Technology Industry Association, better known as CompTIA, a leading trade organization serving the IT industry.

“We share the D&H vision of empowering, educating, and supporting technology users across the SMB customers they serve,” said Amelia Vrabel, director of sales, central and commercial distribution, Atlona. “Through our combined proactive sales and field operations, we plan to show IT resellers and certified integrators (CIs) how to design and implement Atlona AV-over-IP workflows that help their clients increase their efficiency, productivity and output. And as a result of our new partnership, D&H’s Certified Technology Specialists and sales force can put together customized, end-to-end solutions that truly address the unique needs of schools, churches, government agencies, corporations and other SMB settings.”

The music fell faint; I inched forward in my seat and strained to discern the source of the melody. Then, with a brandish of his baton, the conductor wrenched the orchestra up from the sonic abyss and set it aloft in resplendent fortissimo. Storming onward to the rousing finale, a sea of bow tips billowed feverishly in time with the conductor’s bobbing coattails.

I recently spent an evening at Lincoln Center for a New York Philharmonic performance of works of Elgar and Tchaikovsky. As a devotee of classical music and a former orchestral musician (my first instrument was the cello), there are few things I find more beautiful to behold than a hundred musicians locked in perfect synchronization, each playing a small part in the unfurling of a symphony. But such coordination wasn’t always possible.

From Pythagoras’ discovery of musical intervals in the sixth century BC to the creation of early forms of modern notation by monks in the Middle Ages, musicians and composers had sought out ways of better recording their ideas and communicating them with others. Ultimately standardized in the Baroque period with the help of the printing press, the system of staff notation that has come to be employed all around the world is truly a wonder of human communication.

The technological landscape of today’s enterprise is increasingly shifting into a kind of concert hall where multiple players must share the stage. But here’s the problem: while the IT ensemble has a tightly defined system of sheet music, the AV section has many different ways of transcribing its notes, and they don’t always mesh neatly. We have to get by the best we can.

At AV Technology, we strive to facilitate better collaboration between the performers of information technology and audio-video. Last issue, as in many others, we provided a selection of material to help those in traditional AV circles continue their process of familiarization with the concepts of networking. In this edition, we take the opposite approach, offering IT managers insight into the current state of networked AV and its many unique attributes.

As pointed out in the July/August guide, AV Essentials for IT Managers, the benefits to bringing AV onto the network extend beyond the merits of performance, scalability, and cost effectiveness. As “operational technology,” many of today’s AV devices double as vital sources of data and analytics for business intelligence platforms. Simply put, organizations are better off when AV and IT play together.

But, we’re still very early on in this collaboration, and it’s going to take some time. Both sides just need to keep up their discourse, learn as much as they can about the other, and maintain a creative spirit. Then, one day, CIOs and CTOs will be able to conduct their AV and IT departments from a unified musical score, and it will be a thing of beauty.

When it comes to delivering AV signals from multiple sources over long distances to multiple video displays, the traditional matrix switcher has evolved to accommodate 4K HDR, HDMI, and HDCP 2.2 content protection. Manufacturers in this category are finding new ways to enhance the traditional capabilities of the matrix switcher, while also offering alternatives in the form of AV-over-IP solutions, and even blended technologies that allow for a gradual transition from one technology to another.

While RGB Spectrum still provides traditional, rack-based matrix switcher solutions, director of product marketing John Henkel said that customers across all verticals have been looking for ways to bring together a variety of distributed sources and then switch them to single or multiple different outputs that could also be distributed far away from the switch. So, to complement its HDBaseT and fiber solutions, the company introduced the Zio AV-over-IP ecosystem—a network-based matrix switcher “and then some,” according to Henkel.

The encoders in the Zio system can be placed at each source, wherever they are located, while decoders or multiviewers can be placed directly at the display. The user interface can be accessed via any web browser, allowing the operator to be located anywhere and have full access to the entire Zio system.

To meet the needs of today’s geographically dispersed AV networks, Zio products can be scaled up by adding encoders or decoders to the network, as needed.

“Zio products are based on a peer-to-peer architecture that provides near infinite scalability,” Henkel said. “And, unlike other networked AV systems that require the additional expense of a dedicated server, Zio’s peer-to-peer architecture is server-less, saving money, and reducing points of failure.”

The Zio user interface is web-based so any web browser can log in, and depending on their assigned access privileges, administer the system from anywhere. “We provide thumbnails of all the Zio-encoded sources so the operator knows right away what source they want to route and what is currently routed to a destination,” Henkel explained.

For those who are apprehensive about switching over their entire system to a new AV-over-IP solution, RGB Spectrum also offers a complete line of networked AV products that can be added to any system as needed to bring in distant sources or switch to a display that is across the network. These can be used with existing matrix switchers and other equipment or can operate as a wholly contained matrix switching solution.

Extron Electronics has released the DXP HD 4K PLUS Series to meet the ever-increasing demand for a matrix switcher with 4K/60 video distribution capability and support for the latest HDCP 2.2 content protection standard. Another main driving factor for the development of this new lineup was the HDMI 2.0b specification, which includes data rates up to 18Gbps, HDR, and Deep Color up to 12-bit.

Extron Electronics director of product marketing Joe da Silva explains that an audio de-embedding feature in the switcher also assures that system designers won’t need to add “another box” to the system and that the hurdles of onsite setup and commissioning have been significantly minimized by Extron’s Product Configuration Software.

For classrooms, training rooms, divisible rooms, and command and control centers, 8x8, 8x4, and 4x4 options provide contractors with more flexibility in designing their systems. “This series also provides automatic input cable equalization, allowing for longer cable runs and even further flexibility in installations,” da Silva said. “Additionally, as many systems turn toward energy-efficient designs, our lineup provides contractors with new power save modes that can prove beneficial and attractive for these special projects.”

Atlona’s three new matrix switchers—the Opus Series of 4K HDR HDMI to HDBaseT Matrix Switchers and the Opus receiver for 4K HDR HDMI over 100-meter HDBaseT transmission—are offered in 4x6, 6x8, and 8x10 configurations, each equipped with a comprehensive host of audio and control system integration features. The compatible OPUS-RX receives HDMI, Ethernet pass-through, and bidirectional IR and RS-232 control signals up to 330 feet (100 meters) over Cat-6a/7 cable.

Atlona’s director of marketing Garth Lobban noted that while HDBaseT is a robust and well-known method for extending HDMI signals over Cat-6a/7 cable, it has a data rate limitation of 10.2Gbps, significantly below the required 18Gbps data rate in the HDMI 2.0 specification. To accommodate the challenge of these higher HDMI data rates, Atlona utilized what it says is visually lossless VESA Display Stream Compression (DSC), enabling HDR and 4K60 4:4:4 signal extension over HDBaseT with zero frames of latency.

Additionally, Lobban pointed out that customers who had installed Atlona’s previous generation of matrix switchers told the company that they needed more audio matrixing capability. That led product designers to build in a full, independent audio matrix with both TOSLINK and balanced audio outputs for these customers.

Arista Corporation president Paul Shu said that the biggest challenge to traditional AV matrix switchers has been the growth limitation of the switcher frame itself and the number of inputs and outputs.

“A commonly encountered challenge arises when the need to add one more device to a maxed-out AV system occurs, since the switcher doesn't have any remaining inputs or outputs,” Shu said.

Arista’s IP Flash Caster Series enables the connection of as many encoders and decoders as a network design requires, with the ability to scale up further as requirements evolve.

“Based on the network configuration, you are also no longer limited to AV signals being confined within the room,” Shu explained. “The decoders can be configured to display any stream from any of the encoders. This provides single endpoint devices for small installations and a rackmount cluster (16 blades per 5U rackmount) for larger installations. These decoders can be added to the switching design as needed.”

The IP Flash Caster Series is designed to deliver 4K60 4:4:4 uncompressed signal over 10Gbps network switches and provides a variety of endpoint device configuration options—from a single endpoint device to a 16-blade rackmount unit. The IP Flash Caster Series also offers a variety of video format input options, as well as splitter output configuration capability to address every possible application requirement.

“With its ability to easily adapt to growing or otherwise evolving environments simply by connecting as many encoders and decoders as required, the IP Flash Caster represents a cost-effective solution for a wide range of AV applications,” Shu added. “With its low latency and high-quality video performance attributes, the IP Flash Caster makes an excellent choice for command centers, hospitals, broadcast, and live event production. It is also well suited for conference facilities, convention centers, and events that demand high video quality.”

For more on AV-over-IP, download the free Integration Guide to AV-over-IP.

The price of AV over IP cameras has become cost-effective, making them the go-to for surveillance. However, some installations comprise hundreds of legacy analog cameras, making it impractical to replace all of them at once. Without an infrastructure or video control system that can accommodate both on the same network, facilities are burdened with ‘ripping and replacing’—or buying old camera technologies.

Control centers are moving to open architectures, enabling some to have phased upgrade paths. It’s critical to ensure the video wall controller can concurrently accept old and new camera sources such as DVI, SDI, DisplayPort, older IP methods as well as the latest IP codex—and with varying resolutions.

“Big installations may have cameras that have been there for years, and if they want to add new ones, some are going to be HDMI or DVI out, others will be IP out,” says Darin Crosby, Global VP Sales at Datapath’s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania headquarters. “Being able to switch instantly between the sources and display them all on the screen, and size them any size you want, is probably the most important point.”

This flexibility comes with the ability to have multiple SQX boards and baseband capture cards in the chassis of the video wall controller. “You need a system that can ingest all of those seamlessly, display them side-by-side, and make it so that the operator doesn’t need to care if it’s the old system or the new,” says Mark Bohs, Director of Sales for the Americas at Datapath’s Philadelphia, Pennsylvania headquarters.

Recent technological advances are enabling AV designers, integrators, and managers of control centers to rethink lifecycle planning, reduce the amount of video wall controllers, and share content with satellite rooms more easily and securely for their customers. Sharing mission-critical content from a central control room to a crisis room or another secure location was once a desired feature, and is now a trend. Until recently, this has required duplicate AV equipment for each room.This white paper discusses how the role of advanced AV/IT video wall control technologies and content collaboration tools is undergoing a sea change.

A video wall control system should be able to integrate with an open video management system (VMS) platform. “If an incident occurs, the operator can bring up the live camera feed from the IP cameras themselves, and at the same time go back and pull up a recorded feed from a network video recorder (NVR) on the VMS,” says Bohs. At the same time, they can look at the existing live stream and the NVR stream. “The VMS can tell the video wall what streams to display so the operator can then manipulate what they’re looking at on the video wall through the VMS,” he says.

Think beyond camera sources. “During a crisis event, the control center might want to see CNN News on the video wall, or they might want to have the Weather Channel on there as well,” Crosby adds. “Being able to grab all these different sources, regardless of where they come from, various web pages containing maps, media networks, or wherever and being able to throw them on screen is very powerful.”

Click here to read more on the current state of video wall technology.

In the past few years, technology has created a sea change in user expectations affecting many aspects of business. Users expect to instantly share information such as video and data from one device to many, video conference with multiple people, enjoy security features such as facial recognition, and have fingerprint and multi-level user access control. High-resolution displays are a given, and the ability to pinch and zoom has been around for more than a decade. Yes, we’re talking about smartphones.

The smartphone has been pushing technology innovators of large-scale commercial applications to deliver the same or better experience. Intuitive user experiences have become a must in today’s fast-paced control rooms.

Kristian Sigston is the Equipment Services Co-ordinating Engineer at an NHS Foundation Trust, which provides the CCTV system comprising 350 cameras and access control for the public-facing premises of a single site hospital in the county of Kent in southeast England. “All the security staff needs to do, using a mouse or with the swipe of a finger, is flick an image from a camera up to the video wall much in the same way they would with their smartphone,” says Sigston. “The less they see of the backend stuff, the better.”

Control center technologies such as this are quickly evolving, enabling a more agile approach to how video data is used and shared. Teams can act quickly—as operators isolate and share secure mission-critical visual information inside and outside the primary control center.

Related Reading: Recent technological advances are enabling AV designers, integrators, and managers of control centers to rethink lifecycle planning, reduce the amount of video wall controllers, and share content with satellite rooms more easily and securely for their customers. Sharing mission-critical content from a central control room to a crisis room or another secure location was once a desired feature, and is now a trend. Until recently, this has required duplicate AV equipment for each room.This white paper discusses how the role of advanced AV/IT video wall control technologies and content collaboration tools is undergoing a sea change.

Open architectures and IP technologies allow flexibility, modularity, and scale—ultimately changing how AV/IT consultants, integrators, and end users approach the design of today’s control room.

When researching video wall solutions, look for the elements below:

7 Mission-critical Elements of Today’s Control Room

1. Share Secure Content

Encode and share any source securely to authorized users via IP, wherever needed.

2. Source Flexibility

Ensure the video wall controller can concurrently accept old and new camera sources, as well as varying resolutions.

3. Modularity and Scale

Easily expand from small systems with a dozen cameras on a few displays to hundreds of inputs on up to 64 displays.

4. Flexible Layout Creation and Switching

Customize layouts and easily switch sources to make the overall operation more streamlined and efficient.

5. Easy Integration

Integrate multiple external control surfaces to customize each operations room. Ability to integrate with third-party applications.

6. Carousel Inputs

Enable hundreds of sources to be monitored on a rotating basis.

7. User Rights Management

Like an enterprise network, not everyone should have full access to every area.

Read more on the latest developments in video wall technology.

In our previous blog we discussed DM NVX Director, a single management appliance that as part of the Crestron DigitalMedia platform and allows users to configure, monitor, and manage all DM NVXs on the network. The next critical piece of this ecosystem is XiO Cloud.

Crestron XiO Cloud was announced at last year’s InfoComm. Perhaps integrators weren’t ready to grasp its ultimate impact, or maybe it didn’t make a big splash because it wasn’t yet shipping. Whatever the reason, XiO Cloud flew below the radar. That is, until this April.

Sometimes you have to be in the midst of energy to feel the impact of a storm brewing. In April, I was invited to attend Crestron Masters, where more than 900 Crestron programmers and designers gathered for 41 unique in-depth training courses of new products and releases.

At Crestron Masters in April, the announcement that XiO Cloud was ready to rumble had many attendees looking for shelter. Will programming still exist? “Sure,” says Richard Sasson, Global Director of Technical Services. “But the bread and butter is going to be mass deployments, configurations, reporting, creating a service that customers want and real value that customers need—a real return on investment. This is about new tools and techniques for new types of spaces. That doesn’t mean the old is going away, it just means we are growing as an industry.”

XiO Cloud is a paradigm shift in the industry to allow AV deployment, management, and monitoring in the cloud. Fortunately, the pump has been primed for this transition as most enterprises have already been migrating to the cloud.

Then vs. Cloud

Previously, devices had to be programmed to communicate to Crestron servers via Fusion. “Often times that was not done consistently and was riddled with opportunity for error because you could only send information one way,” says Nic Milani, Director, Commercial Product Marketing at Crestron. At the end of the day it was heavy lifting to implement. “We’ve taken 15 years of learning and spent the last five years, and tens of millions of dollars developing XiO Cloud so that our devices will inherently report all information up to the Cloud.”

“XiO Cloud provides the ultimate level of management of our devices with no programing, and no touch,” says Milani. Once plugged into the network, devices inherently know how to talk to each other. “This has a huge impact on the ability to deploy solutions. Before you would have to go room-by-room and plug in the devices, configure them, test them and then you could get the room to work,” explains Milani. “Now you can load all of those configurations and settings via spreadsheet and the webpage, and when the device plugs into the network it pulls down its firmware, its configuration, and the program—and now it just works.”

If it is detected that a device doesn’t have the correct firmware, the device is able to pull down the correct version or send an alert requesting permission to update. “When you want to push a program to every DM NVX that you've installed—in a hundred or tens of thousands of rooms—XiO Cloud can push all of those configurations and settings down to each device,” says Milani. “We think you can reduce deployment time by up to 90 percent.”

It's not to say that the old way was wrong; it was very effective. The problem was it didn't scale well. Enterprise customers demand scale, especially as IT practices drive workplace technology deployment and usage behaviors.

Crestron has a built-in path to the Cloud for its customers. “Anybody that is on a 3-Series processor or newer can update the firmware and connect.” There is a fee for XiO Cloud. Companies that have migrated to the Cloud for other systems fully expect cloud services are not free.

Scalable and Flexible

Today, the ability to be agile is critical. “We're at the point where organizations need the flexibility to change every six, nine, or twelve months,” says Milani. XiO Cloud enables the deployment of virtually thousands of devices anywhere in the world and will report back and on whether it was successful.

Every device is constantly being monitored. “Every setting and variable that's being measured in every one of our boxes can be flagged if something goes wrong.

Microsoft’s Power BI analytics visualization tool works with XiO Cloud as data is collected from all the devices, from error reports to room usage. “Now we can see how people are using the technology, what technologies they're using, and where they're using it,” says Milani. XiO Cloud provides tools to dynamically change the system for the most effective use of equipment and spaces, which is critical given today’s high real estate costs.

Leveraging a Known Quantity

“We are talking about the ability to deploy tens of thousands of devices spread across many countries,” says Milani. “With continually changing data laws and security updates, you do not want to go out and build that on your own.” Crestron’s infrastructure is built on the same infrastructure as Microsoft’s.

We've got space in four Microsoft Azure data centers around the world,” says Milani. No matter where a company is located, it can be supported.

“We provide a one-skew solution that can handle all these different technologies, and you've got this beautiful ecosystem and the ability to have an adaptive system that really works in all kinds of different scenarios,” concludes Milani.

Thank you for following these six installments of the InfoComm Networked AV Series, where we explored this and much more:

Networked AV is More Than a Disruptor

Not All Digital AV Needs to be On the Network

4K Networked Video Image Quality, 1Gb and the Latency Discussion

When AV Actually Meets IT Needs

Directing Time and Money Savings on Day Two, Three…

To catch up from the beginning, visit the Resource Center.