The movement toward high-tech solutions to engage guests and customers has greatly increased in the hospitality industry and has especially accelerated over the past year as hospitality enterprises implemented health safety protocols to address distancing guidelines. As a result, the implementation of property-wide technologies using personal identifiable information (PII) has presented a challenge to hospitality organizations, who must make sure the data is carefully controlled so it can be used to meaningfully improve guest services but remain safe from malicious cyber activity.

Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals (HFTP) has organized the Global Hospitality PII Management (GHPM) Task Force, whose members, all prominent hospitality technology experts, are tasked with thoughtfully examining and developing guidelines for hospitality companies to follow as best practice. The information presented will have an international perspective, with participants representing countries across the globe. This is especially important as data privacy regulations vary internationally and will be an essential consideration in the development of the resource.

[Related: Disney World Tests Facial Recognition]

“By the nature of today’s technologies, companies now collect vast amounts of personal data to assist in providing seamless and personalized services to their customers. Artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and other future technologies will change the way the entire world operates,” said HFTP global president Mark Pate Sr., assistant controller and IT director for Highpointe Hotel Corp. Noting that the guidelines are “developed by experts specifically knowledgeable about the hospitality space,” Pate added that their goal for the guidelines and directives “is to stay focused on the data issue and assist with solutions to challenges the industry is facing today and into the future.”

The GHPM Task Force includes a wide variety of prominent hospitality professionals from around the globe and is chaired by Michael Levie, co-founder of CitizenM Hotels.

Because the panel of experts will represent the global hospitality industry and the resulting resource will be published as guidance for the global hospitality industry, HFTP has left positions open for additional volunteers. The selection of individuals to fill these spots will be done by the entire task force. To submit your interest in volunteering, visit the task force web page.

Soon after AV equipment and hardware became IP-addressable, manufactures and solution providers added monitoring capabilities to measure everything from projector lamp usage, to room occupancy, and device usage. But it is only in the past few years that some have developed relationships with companies such as Microsoft to analyze information gathered to provide actionable data. 

If anyone had been doubting the value of monitoring and analyzing enterprise AV/IT data, the argument in its favor could not be more germane to shaping the health and sustainability of businesses in 2021 and beyond. 

Dependent on several variables such as market vertical, vaccine completion, and the economy, reports of the amount of the remote workforce vary widely. One does not need to look much further than what is going on in the commercial real estate (CRE) industry to understand the current volatility. 

CRE Barometer

In December 2020, the Deloitte U.S. Center for Financial Services published results of its 2021 Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Outlook. More than 200 industry leaders weighed in on how their companies are recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The following are excerpts from Deloitte’s analysis that most closely align to how AV/IT can impact the future of its businesses through analyzing data.

Leveraging Tenant Data and Analytics: Companies could use different analytical tools to generate insights and facilitate decision making. Now more than ever, CRE companies need to capture and analyze high-frequency data to create a meaningful tenant experience. This could include data around how tenants use different amenities, and/or engagement and performance levels. Companies can analyze tenant engagement levels and behavior to understand preferences and provide a more customized experience. For instance, owners/operators can combine and analyze the occupancy, movement, and temperature sensor data and assist tenants in creating COVID-19-safe seating and space utilization decisions. They can also use tenant data to predict lease renewals and devise appropriate strategies for tenant retention.

Operations: More and more companies are rethinking how and when they use office spaces. Increasingly, offices will be reserved for face-to-face interactions and team-based activities, and enhancing collaboration and innovation, while employees would continue to work remotely for more individualized tasks and assignments. In a 9,100-respondent pulse survey published in The Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2020, more than 60 percent of respondents say they want the option to work remotely more frequently, even after the pandemic fades. Nearly as many say they would prefer to use videoconferencing instead of traveling for work. 

Using Technology to Reposition CRE Space and Facilities Management: With tenants and end users likely to leverage different CRE properties to make emotional in-person connections, spaces are likely to be valued based on the experiential value rather than just traditional metrics such as cost per square foot or sales per square foot. Our survey responses also suggest that unlike the prior emphasis on location, health and safety-related smart building features and occupation density may play a more important role in leasing decisions going forward. Only 38 percent of respondents say their organization has increased collaboration with tenants to understand end-user preferences.

Organizations should use sensing tools, alternative data sets, and analytics to evaluate and predict the impact of changing investor and tenant/end-user preferences on CRE usage and demand. In some instances, companies may have to be creative and adapt spaces for complementary or new purposes. 

In most other instances, companies could increase the value of their properties by deploying smart building design and maintenance capabilities and offering more relevant services to tenants and end users. These services include using sensor technologies and predictive analytics to monitor facilities remotely and offer preemptive or usage-driven maintenance activities; or using smart building technologies and 3D visualizations to help landlords assess operational readiness of physical spaces in real time, implement more rigorous cleaning systems, and monitor HVAC systems.

Creating an Enabling Culture: Companies that fall into either the progressive or visionary profiles may have to make higher investments in technologies, tools, and processes to install the appropriate infrastructure for long-term hybrid work. These investments may include productivity and performance measurement tools, training leaders to manage virtual teams, and redesigning spaces to facilitate collaboration and make employees feel safe.

In Their Own Words

We asked experts from leading AV/IT companies to share insights on what challenges can be expected in monitoring a hybrid campus and how the data can help make future decisions about real estate, office planning, employee staffing, and enrollment at universities.

Barco

Lieven Bertier, Workplace Marketing Director 

Lots of systems today capture workplace data and provide good insights on meeting room and/or meeting room technology usage. In this way, workplace managers are provided with actionable insights and analytics, and know, for instance, when to expand the number of rooms, or when users are struggling with technology adoption. But in a hybrid environment, the home user is the complicating factor. How do you measure their contribution? How do you make them join the meeting? That’s a key challenge to solve moving forward.

The big challenge for the hybrid workplace will be to find the balance between the in-room participants and remote participants. The keyword here will be engagement. There’s a lot of technology enablement in the workplace, such as whiteboards, whiteboard cameras, UC&C platforms, et cetera, but as shown in our Future of Meetings research, the key question is how to make people engage, and how to make people realize a company’s purpose in their day-to-day hybrid interactions. Giving employees a sense of purpose and belonging will differentiate the winning from losing technologies.

Intel

Brian Cockrell, Intel Unite Solution Product Owner and Co-founder

There are challenges and risks associated with monitoring a hybrid workforce. As it turns out, however, productivity isn’t one of them. The current pandemic forced employers into a grand experiment that has allowed them to see firsthand what many have known for some time: Employees working remotely are at least as productive as those at the office.

Some of the bigger issues with remote work are not related to lack of productivity, but burnout, isolation, and “Zoom fatigue.” Given the growing understanding of these psychosocial costs of 100-percent remote work, and the benefits of in-person collaboration, the need for collaboration spaces will likely increase—not decrease. Workers won’t return to the office building for day-to-day tasks—which can be just as easily tackled remotely—but for the opportunity to come together to engage, interact, and share thoughts and concepts in an environment more suited to social animals.

What this means for businesses is a reorganization of floor plans to provide the spaces for collaboration. This is where usage data from the collaboration platform is invaluable. Knowing which rooms are used, when they are used, the frequency of use, meeting duration, and occupancy can all help optimize occupancy, scaling, and configuration of collaboration spaces. Just as important is monitoring the activities and the use of the various technologies during sessions. This applies to both onsite and remote participants. Collaboration technology is a crucial tool, and usage data could point to underuse of collaboration-enhancing features, or suggest new features and use cases. 

Another somewhat novel, but arguably more critical, application of usage information, at least in the near-term, is data-directed hygiene. With a platform like the Intel Unite solution, a combination of sensor data and space management tools can create “heat maps”—helping to guide infection-reduction strategies such as limiting contact in hallways, targeting rooms for cleaning, and monitoring adherence to occupancy restrictions. 

Of course, cameras, microphones, digital whiteboards, and other peripherals must be ready to support collaboration. The ability to monitor their health is crucial. The challenge is finding a solution that can manage and self-heal all these varied devices. 

Looping back to productivity, collaboration isn’t about maximizing throughput; it’s about generating new ideas and getting unstuck from problems that require more than one mind and perspective. The objectives of monitoring should be to ensure the right mix of collaboration tools and that these tools are ready for use.

Kramer

Matt Kopin, Product Manager

Hybrid environments present new challenges compared to traditional workspaces. Traditionally, there were confirmed numbers of employees or students that would be attending meetings and classes. Today, those numbers are not only reduced, but tend to fluctuate from day to day, or week to week. Data and analytics will be key to determining the trends of in-person meetings and the number of people on campus. This information can be used for scheduling and allocation of the meeting spaces that are available—ensuring that spaces are not overpopulated. Virtual attendees will also need to be a consideration, as there is a cost associated with licenses for videoconferencing software and the necessary network bandwidth required for virtual meetings.

When it comes to data collected from AV equipment on-site, it should be generic and not specific to the user or the user's content. Connection information can be used to determine the number of users in a space and for how long they are using the space. The data does not need to include unique usernames or the content that is presented, but can still provide insight into how the space is being utilized. Automation can also be used to help increase productivity. Meeting rooms can be ready to go before a meeting has started and meeting room calendars can automatically be freed up when meetings end early. For the remote worker, again, data should be generic and not specific to the user. Generic data can still be used to determine how much time users are spending in meetings versus working on their own.

Nureva 

Nancy Knowlton, CEO

For some time, manufacturers/developers and managers/users have been considering how data collection from various AV devices and other sensors in meeting spaces can be used. With a return to office seeming like a very real possibility by mid-2021, there are some concrete and valuable uses to which data can be put, such as device availability, device performance, occupancy, and proximity.

All of this data can be delivered to centralized device management systems and alerts triggered by detected out-of-bounds states. Action can be taken from there. But, it’s also important to understand how data can support teams in the room with real-time messages about out-of-bounds conditions so that changes can be made dynamically.

Beyond these obvious needs, there are other concerns for IT managers such as integration of device information. Many systems now provide device monitoring, but it will be less than optimal to manage the data through disparate systems. Aggregating and integrating this data into a single system will be key. While subjective, integrating user feedback input is nonetheless important.

Utelogy

Nicole Corbin, Director of Product and User Experience

The challenge of hybrid campuses is being able to monitor and manage the diverse range of technologies deployed across legacy and new environments, both on site and remotely. These can be mitigated by increasing estate awareness. Deeply understanding your AV estate will allow for the most informed decision making when it comes to future planning for offices as well as employee and student engagement.

One of the largest challenges I see from a hybrid campus is creating a first-class user experience for staff and students alike. People are becoming more accustomed to working and learning from remote platforms. If you have a better user experience at home, why would you want to step foot on a campus? The technology deployed on-site, as well as the facilitators of this technology, need to create a seamless transition from remote to in-person. This seamless transition ensures a consistent first-class user experience—keeping staff and students engaged.

A wide range of helpful data can be captured from monitoring AV and UC devices without compromising privacy. Deploying management platforms such as Utelogy will provide a company with actionable, intelligent data, without storing any private or personal information.

Actionable, intelligent data will help you gain estate awareness—learn which hardware and software gets utilized, see what workspaces get booked most often, and gain a better understanding of meeting attendance and participation via occupancy sensors and audio/video call metrics. Utelogy will also help you gain insights into which devices and at which location(s) trigger the most alerts, so your company can transform from reactive to proactive support. 

Being a proactive company will drastically improve productivity as well as employee satisfaction and engagement. Employees will opt to utilize collaboration spaces if they have the confidence that it will be well-equipped, as well as functioning and running smoothly. That first-class user experience should transcend the office to remote workers. Utelogy doesn’t care whether a device lives at home or at the campus; so long as it is connected to the network, data and insights can be gathered and acted upon. 

The What: InReality has launched new suite of Safe Space Solutions powered by its integration and analytics platform. The Thermal Mirror, an Enterprise-focused turnkey fever-scanning solution displays almost immediate temperature results, either anonymously for visitors or via facial recognition for employees. The Occupancy Monitor automates in-venue traffic counts in real-time sensed via mobile devices and/or camera-based technology options.

The What Else: For each of the Safe Space products InReality offers, businesses can easily customize and configure metrics and KPI reports. The system allows for flexibility and customization to support CX, process compliance, and reporting needs. Data management can be planned to meet IT and legal requirements, and installation points can be remotely managed and updated—all from one simple platform.

Related: BrightSign Unveils Touchless Engagement Solutions

“We’ve spent almost a decade focused on evolving and supporting our venue analytics platform,” said Ron Levac, InReality co-founder and CEO. “It solves how to correlate disparate IoT sensors and external data points into simple metrics and KPIs, then uses the information for predictive and responsive purposes. When COVID-19 hit, we looked around and found no readily-available solutions with features necessary for enterprise-wide deployment and management, nor did they appear flexible to support yet unknown legal, IT, and HR requirements. We saw the potential of our platform to turn on these kinds of advanced features, and more. We’re engineers and inventors at heart, and the need was obvious. So, we got to work.”

An additional use case currently in the works for the Safe Space suite of solutions is the InReality Pandemic Resiliency Temperature Monitoring Initiative. By aggregating all of the temperature results anonymously, from retail locations, restaurants, and places of work, InReality will provide summary snapshots of trends via real time APIs to government and health officials to track and flag flare ups and anomalies as they occur. The data will include the number of tests (by day) and the results distribution. Provided at no charge to both site owners and approved officials, it will leverage the InReality platform capabilities to learn what a normal pattern is, then highlight anomalies, serving as an extra layer of insight to identify hot spots for taking immediate, proactive action.

The Bottom Line: The integration of the InReality software platform transforms off-the-shelf technologies into smart solutions for managing in-venue health concerns, but with enterprise-level features that make sense for business management.

To stay up to date with the impact of coronavirus on pro AV, subscribe to our enews. 

As the way we work changes, companies are implementing more remote work scenarios, both in response to the changing priorities of workforces and more pressingly, as a result of social distancing requests from health officials and governments during the current COVID-19 outbreak.

While on the surface, this seems to be a fairly easy thing to implement—after all, remote work has been around for decades—there is still a strain placed on IT teams who are already seeing a threefold increase in meeting minutes every two years (before COVID-19) and have faced flat team hiring as well as stagnant and declining budgets.

Related: Getting on Top of Your Facility's Technology Usage

We observe now, more than ever before, the confluence of technology, spaces, and employee engagement. Companies want to make the right decisions about how they build out spaces, and to do that, they want information on how employees are spending their days. The terminology that has emerged from this movement is employee-centered design. As employees make decisions about where to work based on the technology that’s available, companies are turning to methods that help them support their employees moving in and out of the planned workspaces. An informed design requires analytics and metrics, and the insights to apply them. 

The continued evolution of technology creates a critical need for innovation in facilities and workspace management, where there is currently an underinvestment in change management in relation to the accelerated pace of digital workplace transformation.

Some of the elements to consider when planning for the growing remote work trend and the resulting ramifications on your physical space include:

• Readily available mobile technology that seamlessly integrates into workspaces
• Standards and technology for booking spaces that supports just-in-time needs while not creating a false perception of scarcity from unused bookings
• Technology that supports collaboration for meetings with employees in and outside of the office
• Accurate and actionable analytics that express the changing needs of employees and workspaces as remote work ebbs and flows.

With some of these elements in mind, IT leaders in organizations should look at the changing collaboration technology requirements for their organizations as well as the changing needs for space allocations and configurations. More remote work doesn’t necessarily mean that you need less in-office space. However, it changes the way that space should be allocated.

Now, let’s evaluate the kind of data that could help inform your strategy. Sensors—whether through an in-room collaboration device, IoT lighting fixtures, or other endpoints that may already be approved and on your network—provide a key piece of data: occupancy. 

Is that five-person room fully occupied or is one person using it as a personal office 72 percent of the time? Your largest conference room appears booked on the calendar continuously, but it’s actually empty 2.4 hours a day. There is a difference between perception and reality in that 40-50 percent of time that a room is scheduled it is actually sitting empty.

If we go beyond occupancy, we can evaluate if the room is being used for what it was intended. You’ve invested heavily in upgrading the technology in a video immersive room. Is that technology actually being used, or is that space being used for in-person one-on-ones with no technology utilization?

In addition to helping you define how to leverage your spaces, data can help you identify systemic issues within your network that can turn IT from a cost center into a major area of increasing efficiencies across the business.

Some areas technology can help you influence are:

• Systemic issues affecting collaboration quality
• Change management
• Collaboration adoption and growth
• Technology transitions
• Informed design
• Employee efficiency in spaces
• Employee engagement and reduced turnover
• Sales engagement and efficiency

When companies have these data points at their fingertips, they can readily make the decisions necessary to increase efficiency and save money. As an example, a consumer products company wanted to better understand how their meeting spaces were used. After tracking occupancy, capacity, and scheduling, they were able to uncover a perception that “all of the rooms are always booked” when in reality, actual room usage was ~50 percent. This allowed the company to create data-driven spaces that resulted in an $80M reduction in real estate spend.

In another example, a $25B entertainment company wanted to better understand room activity in and out of calls. As a result of the data and insights obtained, they redesigned their global headquarters after learning that greater than 60 percent of their room activity was outside of video calls.

We expect to continue to see stories like this as technology, spaces, and people continue to converge. The path to workspace optimization lies in the insights you are able to glean from data and analytics on how people interact with spaces and one another—whether that’s from a remote location or across the hall.

Nick Wiik is a Product Manager at Vyopta. He writes about collaboration monitoring and analytics and workspace insights to empower data-driven companies.

Bannister Lake will be presenting a series of casual, 30-minute Chameleon product education webinars over a three-week period beginning on Tuesday, May 5, 2020. Each Tuesday at 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific, Bannister Lake will showcase Chameleon's feature set directed at broadcast, web, and digital signage professionals.

Chameleon is a multi-module, web-based, real-time data management solution used in the broadcast, OTT, and signage sectors. It is used to create custom news tickers, launch automated information channels, track and visualize election results, manage snipes and branding elements, and much more.

Related: Bannister Lake to Provide COVID-19 Data Through Community Aggregation Service

The product also includes Chameleon Designer, a template design and data connection tool. Chameleon Designer serves as a unique, single solution to build projects that can be simultaneously used on NDI, SDI, or web platforms.

The first webinar, kicking off on May 5, will focus on tickers and introduce Chameleon's data ingestion workflow, content management features, and integration of sponsorships. The session is designed for news producers, station management, as well as engineers looking to integrate more timely news content into their programming while generating new revenue opportunities.

The second webinar, on Tuesday May 12, will center on Chameleon's enhanced election production capabilities. The webinar will discuss the product's ability to ingest real-time election results and provide election producers with the ability to track and filter results, make race calls, and quickly create graphic playlists for air. There will also be a look at the product's RESTful API, where users can distribute customized election data to various devices and endpoints, including mobile devices, websites, augmented reality systems, and social media.

The third webinar, being held on Tuesday May 19, will feature Chameleon's on-air branding capabilities. This session will explore how the product is used for managing and scheduling promotional snipes, bugs, and full-frame "coming up" billboards. The webinar will also include information about automation, asset management, and advertising campaigns.

"With the cancellation of NAB and the public, now more than ever, depending on news and information that is constantly being updated, we felt that reaching out directly through these focused webinars was important," said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. "This is a great opportunity to learn more about Chameleon and how it can best serve audiences."

To register for any or all of these webinars, click here. 

As the current situation caused by COVID-19 remains fluid, managing the overflow of information has become a complex challenge. VuWall is looking to partner with those who are on the front lines working to keep communities safe and healthy by offering its VuWall2 visualization tool as a free download, allowing organizations to create a temporary video wall solution. 

[VuWall Enhances VuScape Video Wall Controller With Collaboration, KVM Features at ISE 2020]

“In this time of crisis, coordination teams within municipalities, newsrooms, and healthcare facilities are actively monitoring the COVID-19 pandemic and managing response efforts. These decision-makers need to access all kinds of information in order to make fast decisions and share information with their colleagues and in some cases, the public,” said Paul Vander Plaetse, CEO at VuWall. “We hope that by offering our VuWall2 for no cost as a way to create a temporary emergency video wall control center, we can aid key organizations in managing this influx of data and help keep people informed. We want to assist as many organizations as possible, which is why we will be offering first-come, first-served setup and support.”

By downloading VuWall2, any screen—whether a personal computer or a flat-panel display in a temporary emergency control center or a waiting room—can become a command center. The software grants access to and integrates visual information from many different sources on one screen, including web pages, computers on the network, IP cameras, local applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), as well as collaboration and videoconferencing tools (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, etc.). It can be set up on a PC or as a makeshift video wall with up to four displays. Operators can arrange the content sources in any configuration they need for better visualization and run a ticker for emergency messaging. In addition, they can quickly create various layouts, save them, and recall them as the situation changes. 

To set up a video wall, VuWall2 software only needs to be installed on the PC driving the display(s) and can then be controlled from any computer on the network. Setup time is about an hour.

To download and setup VuWall2 as a temporary emergency video wall control center, click here. Organizations needing setup support should contact VuWall’s technical support team here. 

Bannister Lake announced today that as a public service offering, it is making authoritative COVID-19 data available to its customers via its built-in Community data aggregation service. Community collects data from credible public sources such as the World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins and ingests it directly into Bannister Lake’s Chameleon data aggregation and management solution. 

[Bannister Lake Chameleon Drives Data Aggregation at the US Open]

In addition, the company has developed a world map-based web widget populated with the same COVID-19 data illustrating the extent of the outbreak. Recognizing that as the virus spreads, reliable data is essential for audiences to understand the rapidly changing situation and to respond accordingly, Bannister Lake is making the data and widget available as a public service.

“At a time like this, real-time data from trustworthy sources is the only way audiences can keep up with news about the global pandemic,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “We understand the vital role media organizations play at this time. We want to do our part by supporting their communications efforts with immediate availability of our data and widgets free of charge.”

[Tackling the Uncertainty: The AV Industry Faces COVID-19]

Within Chameleon, users can manage and integrate local, national, and international news; closings; alerts; financial data; and other topical content to create a complete view of the COVID-19 situation. This content can then be outputted as tickers, L-Bars, data-populated graphics, or fully automated information channels. Chameleon’s RESTful API can be used to strategically distribute data to different broadcast graphic engines, digital signage systems, or as HTML5 for online and mobile distribution.

Media organizations can further query and edit COVID-19 related data to create a variety of custom visualizations including geographically focused datasets, charts, tables, and indicators. Users can schedule the playback of specific data to target particular markets or platforms with data content that may be especially important to that audience. Bannister Lake will continue to develop data parsers incorporating data from reliable sources to ensure that media organizations and their audiences have access to the most up-to-date and accurate content. 

To stay up to date with the impact of coronavirus on pro AV, subscribe to our enews. 

At the 2020 NAB Show (Booth SL4711), Canadian real-time data solutions provider Bannister Lake will showcase its data aggregation and management solution Chameleon and demonstrate how the product can add value to a wide variety of broadcast, OTT, and digital signage applications. 

[Bannister Lake Partners With Mobility Data Provider Roadify Transit]

Bannister Lake will highlight Chameleon’s enhanced election module ready for the 2020 U.S. election cycle. Media companies can take advantage of Chameleon’s new election features to produce real-time election coverage on any screen. Chameleon reads election results from both the Associated Press and Decision Desk HQ, allowing media to report on up ballot and down ballot races as well as the primaries and caucuses. 

Bannister Lake will also highlight Chameleon’s ability to fully manage and visualize both live data feeds and on-air branding content for enhancing news productions, sponsorships, and promotions. Broadcasters in any market, using any output device, can integrate, moderate, and customize multiple live data feeds into graphic templates and provide their audiences with real-time news, weather, sports, social media, financial, and fully customized data. In addition, the product’s branding module can fully control sponsor’s snipes, bugs, and other promotional graphic content triggered by the broadcaster’s traffic system.

[Bannister Lake Chameleon Drives Data Aggregation at the US Open]

Automated infochannels will also be in the spotlight at the 2020 NAB Show. Chameleon serves as the foundation to ingest, manage, and visualize an unlimited number of data feeds that can be rendered to any graphics engine, HTML 5, or NDI. Broadcasters can quickly launch infochannels made up of real-time news, weather, sports, financial, event calendars, and other relevant content. To enhance the offering, Bannister Lake has recently added transit and car sharing data to make the channels especially important to local audiences.

As legal sports wagering continues to grow across the U.S., Bannister Lake will be featuring wagering channels covering horse racing, fantasy sports, and other events. Chameleon has become an essential tool to aggregate, manage, and display both sports statistics and betting data. Bannister Lake works with media companies that require a robust solution that can read data from a wide variety of sources and can integrate that data into the on-air presentation.    

The 2020 NAB Show will also spotlight in-venue, real-time data solutions for arenas and stadiums. More and more venues are realizing that real-time data plays an integral role in delivering content that adds a deeper and more entertaining fan experience. Venues appreciate that advertising- and sponsor-related content has more impact if real-time, game-relevant, insightful data could be tied to the presentation. Chameleon is used to ingest real-time statistical data from the leagues, allowing fans to view carefully parsed live game and league statistics combined with game action. Venues are also turning to Chameleon to develop innovative use cases for real-time data and sponsorships, including graphically visualizing wait times at exit gates and concessions, charity lotteries, and corporate communications solutions.

Bannister Lake has entered into a partnership with Brooklyn-based data aggregator and distributor, Roadify Transit. Roadify specializes in capturing live multimode transit and mobility data from transit authorities, bike share programs, and car and ride share services from around the world. Bannister Lake has developed and implemented a data parser for Roadify data that ingests schedule and real-time transit data directly into its Chameleon data aggregation and management solution. 

Within Chameleon, users will be able to customize Roadify location-based data with other real-time data feeds, and use BLADE, the product’s RESTful API, to distribute data to specific endpoints for visualization. By targeting and extending transit and mobility data to online, mobile, OTT, and web widgets, Chameleon users will be able to create new data products that reach more viewers and generate new revenue.

[Bannister Lake Chameleon Drives Data Aggregation at the US Open]

The addition of Roadify data will allow Chameleon clients to be able to create location-specific live transit displays for arenas, public events, and corporate campuses. The data can also be used by broadcast users to provide viewers with up-to-the-second mass transit information informing commuters of service alerts and on-time status. The combination of Roadify data and Chameleon software will provide a complete view of multiple area transit and mobility system conditions while supporting sponsorships, advertising, and other supplementary editorial content such as school closings, events calendars, local news, and traffic.

“Reliable, consistent transit information that includes car and bike sharing is critical to commuters,” said Georg Hentsch, president, Bannister Lake. “Managing that data through Chameleon and making it readily available to any screen, anywhere, is an important public service, and we are thrilled to be working with Roadify to fulfill this mandate.” 

“As transit and mobility options proliferate, Bannister Lake will make it easy for riders to find out what’s going on around them right now, simply by looking up at a display,” said Scott Kolber, CEO, Roadify. “We’re especially excited that Bannister Lake will be making RoadifyTV, our new integrated data selection and deployment tool, available through Chameleon. RoadifyTV is specifically focused on digital signage services, and Bannister Lake will be among the first wave of our partners to use it.” 

Esports events are becoming more and more sophisticated. Both the in-venue experience and the broadcast/streaming presentation are taking on more professional production values and editorial enhancements and utilizing the finest production talent and gear. This is in direct response to the growing international popularity of esports. Around the world, spectacular venues such as Red Bull’s Hanger 7 in Salzburg, the legendary Nürburgring motorsports track in Germany, and Shanghai’s Mercedes Benz arena are hosting esports tournaments. As an industry, esports has exploded and is reaching fans on every continent. It is not unusual for events to have millions of dollars in prize pools, sell out major arenas, or have millions of fans watching on Twitch and YouTube.

On the surface esports production resembles other sports broadcasts: various mobile trucks, multiple cameras on jibs, slick video clips, impressive sets, and lighting. However, what distinguishes esports is the innovative use of graphics and the real-time data that populates those graphics. Esports are data-intensive and the need to organize and display data is required not only to make the events more visually compelling, but also to communicate fast-moving, complex information to fans. 

Conveying and enhancing the excitement of esports to fans at the arena and to fans watching on their devices requires graphics that add important information about the players and teams and fully leverages the real-time aspect of these fast-moving games. Unlike conventional sports coverage that follows the action of a single game with two teams competing against each other, an esports event will involve several games being played over a two- or three-day period with multiple teams competing simultaneously against one another. The sheer complexity of esports and the fans’ demand for as much performance-related information as possible requires a new approach to data and graphics. 

Bannister Lake, a Canadian software development company serving the broadcast and digital signage industries, has become a popular vendor serving the real-time data and visualization needs of esports productions. The company’s Chameleon data aggregation and management solution ingests multiple real-time data feeds, and allows producers to organize, edit, and moderate data content, and then populate graphics with customized data for display. Producers use Chameleon to simultaneously manage and display diverse sets of editorial content that enhance the fan experience. Virtually any data source can be incorporated into the production. In addition to XML or RSS feeds, topical event news generated by the tournament’s editorial teams, such as player profiles, standings, game schedules, and outstanding achievements, can be ingested through Google Sheets. This content may populate an L-Bar surrounding the game, providing additional editorial content that complements the action. Moderated social media content can be included to provide an interactive fan experience. Third-party feeds such as esports industry news, weather, and events calendars can also be included. 

Chameleon can also manage advertising and sponsorship-related content, providing revenue opportunities for event producers. Sponsor logos can be triggered at appropriate times or branded content may appear within the L-Bar. The addition of game-related data pulled directly from the game’s API creates an entirely new level of excitement. Fans can view specific game-related data content aggregated, visualized, and displayed alongside the actual game. For serious fans looking for key stats, the visualization of API data adds a strong sense of engagement. Furthermore, game data can be coordinated to trigger other content when thresholds are met or when specific events occur. For example, if a team or player reaches a specific milestone, a special promotional ad may run automatically.

Bannister Lake brings a new approach to data management that enables a variety of production and editorial possibilities. The methodology revolves around the use of attaching key value pairs around a standard relational database. A typical sports database is made up of a series of standardized fields that corresponds to that particular sport and very rarely changes. Esports are dramatically different with datasets that vary from game to game and may or may not be used in production. Bannister Lake’s approach allows new tables to be added as a companion to the core data. The underlying methodology is to take these incoming diverse datasets and organize them in databases that allow for exceptionally fast recall. This creates a production solution that is more flexible and allows producers to editorially add or delete datasets on the fly, depending on the game, the audience, and the production’s editorial needs. 

The solution’s API and Query functionality allows producers to take this further and distribute data content to specific end points. For example, fans who are following a team from Brazil could receive data only relevant to that team and receive customized ads and sponsorships centered on that market. Beyond in-venue signage and the broadcast streams, custom data can be distributed to web pages or mobile devices, enhancing the esports experience while opening up new market opportunities. It can also drive entirely new ways of conveying esports data such as augmented reality and virtual reality. Having more control over data, its management, and where it is ultimately distributed ushers in a new paradigm for engaging esports audiences.   

As the broadcast and AV communities continue to experiment with big data, the challenge remains in how to strategically harness data and present it in ways that enhance storytelling and drive new revenue opportunities. The need for web-based solutions that can be implemented quickly in complex data-rich production environments, such as esports, is critical. It is only by taking full control of fast-moving data and marrying it with great graphic design that producers, sponsors, and, most importantly, fans, will fully capture the excitement and business potential of esports.   

Vern Freedlander manages Bannister Lake’s strategic partnerships.

What kind of work were you doing when you were 19 years old? While many teenagers are content to slack off, Connor Bright was leading the design and integration of AV systems for the new headquarters of a 185-employee company—and doing it as a full-time college student. 

“I have always been interested in emerging and leading technologies, and how technology can make a meaningful impact on people’s experiences,” said Bright, systems integration engineer at SentryOne, a Charlotte, NC-based provider of database performance monitoring and data DevOps solutions for the Microsoft Data Platform. “The drive for me has always been to make a difference in the experience of users (our customers), and seeing positive reactions encourages me.”

Currently 21 years old and in his final semester of at Elon University, Bright will take the next step in facilitating these positive outcomes when he joins the SentryOne team full-time in February of 2020, where he’ll continue to oversee all of the AV and collaboration systems for the 35,000-square-foot office.

Act One

Like many in the industry, Bright’s exposure to the possibilities of audiovisual technology began in theatre. “Most of my background has been in theatre with lighting and sound design, production design—the technical elements,” he said. While in high school at Providence Day School in Charlotte, NC, Bright helped lead the overhaul of the theater’s lighting and sound systems, affording him experience in the dynamics of networked technology. 

“I went with a networked Dante system with 24 channels of Shure wireless and a Yamaha QL5 mixer for sound, and an ETC lighting system—making sure everything was networked with the latest LEDs, moving lights, things like that,” he said. While doing this work, he happened to meet the founder and chief technology officer of SentryOne Greg Gonzalez, who offered him an internship at the company in 2016, the summer after he graduated high school. “I was initially doing help desk and basic systems administration work,” he said. “I spent about a summer doing that type of work as well as a few other IT projects.”

A Blank Slate

By the time the company began planning its move from Huntersville, NC to its current home in Charlotte’s Lower South End neighborhood (LoSo), Gonzalez decided Bright was ready to play a leading role in the process. “I was brought into the project early on by [Gonzalez], who was familiar with my work and background in AV and theatre,” Bright said. “We worked closely together to create the optimal technology experience in the LoSo office, starting from essentially a blank slate.”

That slate was an old fiber mill, an expansive two-building property that the SentryOne team could design from scratch to support the company’s workflows. Working with architectural firm Gensler and the company’s creative director, the duo planned out a technology structure built around versatility. “My role was to specifically focus on the technology, including AV, networking, security, lighting, and how we moved all of our systems over from one office to another,” Bright said. “But AV and collaboration was my biggest focus.”

Like any good tech manager, Bright began by standardizing systems for several different kinds of rooms. “We have room for users to work in all different sorts of ways, to collaborate in all different ways,” Bright said. “We have huddle spaces, conference rooms, booths, the training center, gathering spaces. The technology was designed to be as seamless as it could be in those different spaces.”

According to Bright, there’s a standard setup for huddle rooms, booths, conference rooms, and the training center, and everything is based around the Microsoft Teams Room platform and Crestron technology.

The Right Fit

When formulating the technology scheme, Bright and Gonzalez took care to devise a system that worked well together. “We iterated through a few solutions early on, just some smaller pilots and things to make sure we had a good grasp on what exactly we wanted the tech stack to look like,” Bright said. One key consideration was having one single collaboration ecosystem, as the old office employed a mix of products and solutions that often varied by department. “There wasn’t really a clear standard, so people just sort of scheduled it with one service that they liked or maybe felt the most confident with.”

Since SentryOne has a major business partnership with Microsoft, the Teams platform was the natural choice. Now, “every internal meeting is done with Microsoft Teams, which eliminates the confusion of ‘Oh, I have to dial into this meeting, do I need to call a meeting or dial a bridge? Do I need to open this application or that application?’ It’s removed some of the friction around joining meetings.”

This choice then informed many of the other hardware decisions—for example, the selection of Dell 4K interactive flat panel displays for the office’s eleven conference rooms. “We picked the Dell displays in the conference rooms because they can integrate with the Teams Room systems and with the Crestron Flex, to be able to do interactive whiteboarding through Teams,” Bright said. “When you’re in a Teams call, you can whiteboard with the interactive display and you’re joined just like the remote people are, so you can interact with them.”

In addition to the Dell displays, nine Samsung Flip interactive flat panels are positioned throughout the office in open areas, with the aim of providing each department with an ideation surface that they can casually approach and operate. “We picked those because they’re very easy to use: you just walk up and grab a pen and draw,” he said. “You can email the note to yourself when you’re done.” The Flips are also connected to the Enplug digital signage system, so they can display content like dashboards and announcements when not in use. The S1TV digital signage system also includes various displays throughout the atrium and the rest of the office. 

A System Integrated

Tying everything together is a variety of hardware from Crestron, beginning with Flex UC devices and Crestron Room Scheduling solutions in each space. These platforms integrate natively with Microsoft Teams Rooms, creating a one-touch experience for users. “Whenever a meeting’s been scheduled in Outlook or Teams, users can walk in and hit join, and people who are remote can launch from their computer, tablet, phone—whatever they want,” Bright said.

Crestron’s DM NVX is employed to distribute streaming video, live TV, and digital signage throughout the facility and between buildings, using a 40Gb Cisco Meraki network. “In the main office we have the MDF and the IDF with fiber between them, then we have fiber from the main building to the annex building to connect everything,” he said. “And the reason we did that is to support not only user traffic and general data, but to also support the NVX streaming video traffic over the same backbone.”

Bright and Gonzalez worked with Audio & Light, an AV dealer and consulting firm based in Greensboro, NC, for design feedback, but handled the integration work in-house. “The integration was just me: handling the actual programming, configuration, and setup of the equipment as far as AV goes,” he said. “Our team has eight people on it, and our whole team was responsible for network, servers, AV, security, and communications.” 

User Focus

Of course, the best measure of success for AV and collaboration technology is the amount of use it gets. After rolling out the systems in the new office, the IT team began getting employees up to speed on how to utilize it. “We had a number of training sessions and one-on-one sessions, then bigger sessions where we could just walk people through how to do various tasks that they might need to do: joining a meeting, inviting someone to a meeting, dialing a phone call, whatever it might be, to make sure the users were up to speed and felt confident using the spaces,” Bright said.

To keep tabs on utilization and to streamline management of the company’s AV systems, SentryOne operates a large deployment of Crestron XiO Cloud. “We have probably about 90 devices in XiO Cloud that is overseeing basically every connected Crestron device we have,” Bright said. “It’s the Teams Room systems, NVX, Crestron Room Scheduling, the main processor, the DSPs, and the amps. Basically, if it’s Crestron and it’s on the network, it’s in XiO Cloud.”

Beyond its capabilities for remote monitoring of devices and the ability to push firmware updates and change network settings for endpoints, XiO Cloud provides Bright and his team with a wealth of data on how the facility is used. “We look at utilization, how room usage changes over the time of the day, and what the percentage of free time is,” Bright said. “So if we have one room that’s booked all the time and one room that’s never booked, we’ll look at ‘OK, what’s the difference? Is one bigger, does one have better tech, does one have different tech? A different layout?’ Then we try to balance out everything so that people have rooms to go into when they need to. But we have plenty of spaces, so it’s just a matter of looking at how things are used and balancing everything out to make sure people have a place to go.”

As an example of adapting based on the data, Bright found that a few months ago, there was a need for more conferencing rooms. So he and his team converted two underutilized shared offices into full videoconferencing spaces, an alteration that was well received. 

Lessons Learned

SentryOne completed the first phase of its move-in last October, and has been fully operational with both buildings at its new location since March. And so far, Bright says the reception from the company has been excellent. “My favorite piece of feedback was one of my teammates in marketing came up to me a few months after we’d been in the new space and remarked to me how easy it was,” he said. “She was like, ‘We can actually just walk in and hit one button to join a meeting.’”

As well as things have gone, there were some aspects that Bright feels could be improved. For one, he would have done more training with employees early on, rather than waiting until the rollout was completed. “We would probably say ‘Here’s what’s coming, here’s how it’s going to work, here’s how you’ll benefit,’” he said. “Just to kind of make sure users were better equipped going into it, so there wasn’t any downtime before we got to the trainings.

“I’d also say that we could work to make sure users understand the limitations of some tech, just to make sure they know exactly what’s possible and help them make the most of what we have and what’s out there.”

Overall, though, Bright is happy with the work he and his team have accomplished. “Over the past few years, I can definitely tell that I have earned the trust of my colleagues and leaders at the company,” he said. “While I recognize it is a pretty unusual circumstance for someone so young and still in school to take on such a meaningful role, I know that the projects I’ve been a part of (such as the LoSo office) have benefitted both myself and the company.”

Late each August, a 46.5-acre section of Flushing Meadows park in Queens, NY comes alive with a rally of athletic activity. For two weeks, the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis becomes a veritable city of sport, a hotbed of perpetual action that is the US Open.  

Contested at the current location since 1978, the tournament draws 632 of the world’s best tennis players to compete in some 800 matches on 22 courts over the course of 14 days. Fans trying to keep tabs on all of the action certainly have their work cut out for them. 

Enter big data and AV. Since 2018, Van Wagner Sports and Entertainment, the live events company in charge of the technical production at the tournament, has called upon Bannister Lake to handle data aggregation and moderation for the US Open. From a control room in Louis Armstrong Stadium—the second-largest and newest venue on the campus—Bannister Lake’s creative and technical director Al Savoie operates the systems that fill the dozens of LED displays around the tennis center with all manner of stats and content.

“I’m handling most of the signage from around the grounds,” he said. “All of this stuff is driven by data coming in from SMT, an IBM service that basically collects data from all the stadiums, all the courts and practices, and then we take in all their feeds and organize it into a central database. And from there, we pick and choose on which screens we want to see what, and scheduled at what time. And this includes everything from social media, to practice schedules—whatever you want.”

Some of the displays are inside the stadiums, including a brand-new LED walls at court level in Arthur Ashe Stadium, where the biggest matches and championship rounds are played. Other diplays are positioned around the grounds of the facility and show live video feeds of the matches produced by the Van Wagner team, as well as match info that Savoie programs.

The IBM data is processed by Chameleon, Bannister Lake’s all-in-one solution for branding, tickers, data aggregation, scheduling, and graphics. “At any given time we can say, ‘Oh we want to see Women’s Singles 128,’ so I can type in ‘Women’s Singles 128’ and it’ll find that match and it’ll include everything from the status, the winner, the sets, headshots, and match stats for that particular game,” Savoie said. “So at any given time we can just into the software, find the match, and get everything we need, and then call it up and put it on the screens.”

This is done using Ross Video XPression, the rendering engine used to produce the graphics. Savoie creates the templates for the scoring graphics ahead of time, then the Chameleon software automatically populates it. “I built most of the templates that you’re seeing, and it’s all intelligent in a sense that if it’s men’s singles or women’s singles or doubles, the name stats change in width and size [men’s matches are best of five sets, while women’s are best of three] and showcases the proper names and challenges remaining, the flags—all that stuff,” he said.

Most of this content gets set automatically, according to Savoie. “At midnight or sometime overnight, SMT sends out the next day’s schedules,” he said. “So I walk in for the day and all of the scheduled matches are already populated.” From there, the team just needs someone to moderate the social media feeds and select pictures to display during breaks in the action. And, of course, Savoie is always at the ready in the event that intervention is required. “There was a storm a couple days ago, where they did want to put up immediate custom messaging ‘Take shelter: lightning striking,’” he said. “In that scenario, someone might have to enter text.”

The system also pulls data from other sources in addition to the tennis feeds. “The data we take in is pretty much any data,” Savoie said. “We’re pulling weather from our weather readers, so it’s populating that automatically. We can take in MTA information, so subway and bus information, and showcase subway or train delays.”

While the Chameleon software runs locally on a server in the Armstrong control room, the network is on a cloud instance, according to Savoie. This enables other teams involved with the event to create messaging and have it appear throughout the facility. “The US Open’s marketing people can enter custom messages remotely,” he said. “They build them, they create an expiration time for them, or even a scheduled time for them. So if there’s an autograph session happening somewhere, they can schedule that message to appear at say, 3 p.m. and it’ll go up then.”

Now in his second year operating Chameleon at the tournament, Savoie said that most of the production work is the same as last year. “It’s mostly polishing some stuff, making some of the scenes more efficient,” he said. “But it’s mostly on the backend, the graphics side of things—not so much the workflow or data side.”

The biggest change this year, he said, is the addition of the new LED panels in Arthur Ashe Stadium. Installed before this year’s tournament, the displays cover the entire back wall on either end of the court and display sponsorship logos, serve speeds, and the match clock. “That screen is a major add-on,” Savoie said. “Being able to quickly call up elements on that screen was a huge bonus.”

According to Nathan McCoart, director of technical operations at Van Wagner Sports and Entertainment, the Bannister Lake data aggregation has been a welcome enhancement to the production team’s workflows. “It’s made things easier for sure,” he said. “From the executive production side of things, I understand the large amount of information that we’re working with, and having a way that organizes it so that someone like Al can quickly turn different scenes around [has been helpful]. It’s really trying to bring that depth and breadth of information from scores, to messaging, to social, into one format that fans are kind of used to seeing from watching ESPN at home.”

And ultimately, the data helps fulfill one of the primary goals of the production team: fan engagement. “We’re trying to keep everyone informed, and stay engaged with all the things happening around the campus,” McCoart said. “Not just [Roger] Federer and [Rafael] Nadal playing in Ashe, but you may also have another great match on court six or court five. So we’re really trying to disperse that collection of information to people all over the place.”

Cybercrime has consistently outpaced violent crimes as the number-one threat Americans fear in the past decade by a large margin, according to an annual Gallup study. It’s no wonder why. The threats persist as security breaches seem to increase in frequency and severity. 

Networked audio and video systems provide a legitimate vulnerability, and AV pros need to brush up on their information security standards. The issue is even more complex for education institutions as they are subject to regulations like FERPA, the Family Education and Rights and Privacy Act, established to protect the privacy of student education records. Photos and videos of students are considered part of their education records, as well as any other part of their digital footprint on campus.

Education technology managers are challenged by the demand to enable easy collaboration while ensuring the security of student data. But it’s certainly not just collaboration devices to be concerned with. “Almost any software that’s out there in the cloud, there’s going to be a security risk,” said John O’Brien, assistant director of academic technology, technical support services at Montclair State University in New Jersey. 

While FERPA certainly gets the most attention, there are myriad other regulations with which education institutions must comply, according to Bill Britton, vice president of information technology, CIO and director of Cal Poly’s Cybersecurity Center. Any college or university that maintains health records on student athletes fall under HIPAA regulations. Research working with corporate partners may be handling intellectual property data, thus subject to IP law privacy standards. For those postsecondary schools working with government entities, there’s the ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), which regulates defense and military-related technologies in the interest of national security. 

Then there are state regulations. California, for example, has some of the strictest privacy laws in the country. The California Consumer Privacy Act is known as GDPR Light, a nod to Europe’s sweeping data privacy law. The Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA), which took effect in 2016, prohibits sharing K-12 student data for targeted advertising.

When it comes to complying with regulations, there are just so many different rules with each one. They all report to different offices, and often, IT people aren’t even drawn into the conversation—until, of course, there’s a breach. “Organization and structure are really important in this conversation,” Britton said. “Smart organizations have coworking groups,” which function across departments. 

The issue presents a sense of urgency behind the move to converge AV and IT departments.

Cal Poly is fortunate to have a much larger IT department than most universities, comprising three sub-groups: policy and governance, which works with the rest of the university; tech support; and forensics, which responds to incidents and proactively seeks vulnerabilities. The audiovisual team resides under the governance group’s Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI), a policy making IT resources and services accessible to all, as well as guiding proper implementation of technology. “ATI and cybersecurity are tied at the hip now,” which is very rare, Britton noted. 

At Montclair State, the AV department was absorbed into IT back in 1998. When the AV team seeks to onboard a new device, they have a detailed system in place. They’re required to provide a host of information to their IT colleagues. “We have a security checklist that new [vendors] have to fill out,” he said. “They have to meet the Montclair State University standards.”

The process covers the methods a device uses to get on the network, how it functions, MAC address, SSL, and all other security protocols. This is all in addition to automated network monitoring software, Cisco’s ISE (Identity Services Engine), which simplifies identity management across diverse network devices. Additionally, if an IP device hasn’t been used in a while, say, for two or three months, it gets knocked off the network. 

Policy is Fundamental

Internal policies play an important role after devices are onboarded. The policy at Montclair State is to share content on the learning management platform, Canvas, which is private and protected by internal servers. Content posted to Canvas is only available to students and faculty who have access to that specific course. Despite clear rules being in place, there is still potential risk of violation with some adjuncts or others if they were to obliviously post videos or photos on a social media platform without written permission. That’s a clear violation of the policy putting the university at risk of FERPA violation. 

“People who use Canvas all should know that videos you’re going to share with your students should be in Canvas—not on Facebook, not YouTube,” O’Brien said. “It all has to be behind some type of authentication. This goes to all student work.”

Two teams are involved in reviewing new networked devices at Cal Poly, so they can check accessibility and security at the same time, adding a layer of redundancy to the process—a rare and important safeguard. Automated tools also monitor network usage at all stages. “Student devices are more of the Wild West,” Britton noted. Cal Poly scanners pick up those devices without reading any packets or information, but there’s still an inherent risk. “Say a student pokes a hole in the firewall, and we find out, but it’s a series of violations of university policy.”

The Responsible Use Policy defines access to Cal Poly’s IT resources as a privilege for faculty, staff, and students to support studies and official duties, further outlining rules for use. “But technology is changing so fast, you don’t realize you’re breaking the rules,” Britton said. The key is communications and open discussions. “In the academic world, you have to be more flexible, but you have to be reactive.”

Indeed, the education risks are much different than those of a commercial business or government for these reasons. As MSU’s O’Brien stated, “You can’t lock everything down and be a public institution.”

Applying Best Practices

When it comes to evaluating and deploying networked AV devices, there are a number of best practices to follow. First and foremost, “Ensure you have good governance in place,” Britton advised. “Without the ruleset, [people] can do anything they want. The governance should be to review before accessing.”

Secondly, have a review group in place, so the entire university is aware of those capabilities. Thirdly, “Audit, audit, audit, audit,” Britton said. “Manually, technically, physically, ensure devices are doing what they’re supposed to be doing and not being misused.” 

For vendors, the onus is on them to communicate what connections their devices or software make. Having great relationships with vendors is hugely beneficial. Britton cites an exceptional relationship Cal Poly has with Oblong. They directly collaborated on R&D, physically testing solutions in the university’s cyber lab, and further validating use cases in advance of deployment. 

O’Brien points to vendors like Biamp and Crestron that send equipment out for testing prior to any purchase. He also extolled the exceptional service support from Zoom, which has helped authenticate security protocols, among many other supporting efforts. 

Continuous Education 

With a technical subject as dynamic as cybersecurity, ongoing education is invaluable. Trade journals and online resources are great places to start. Britton recommends ISACA, a nonprofit global association serving information systems, as well as leading conventions and media sources like DEF CON and RSA as his top-three resources. 

O’Brien relies on a wide range of resources available to the education technology community, including NJ Edge, a local nonprofit technology partner; Internet2, a member-driven technology community founded by leading higher education institutions; and the Consortium of College and University Media Centers (CCUMC). For AV industry-specific resources, he strongly encourages every young person coming into the industry to join AVIXA, the AV User Group, and the IMCCA. O’Brien said that he has benefited greatly by participating in all of these organizations.

While the networked AV world opens up endless opportunities for advanced communications, the benefits carry a host of additional responsibilities. AV technology managers in education must continue to upgrade their skills, knowledge, and policies to meet the ever-evolving demands for data privacy.

Lindsey M. Adler is a writer, editor and journalist who produces a wide range of content about the audiovisual industry.

The What: Qligent has updated its Vision Analytics solution with an improved open-platform that harnesses the power of data mining, machine learning, and predictive data analytics. Vision Analytics exists to address three main concerns: user engagement, silent sufferers, and audience churn. Qligent will exclusively showcase Vision Analytics at a special stand (14.C19) from September 13-17 in the RAI Exhibition and Conference Center; Qligent will also retain its usual location at Stand 8.E47.

The What Else: Qligent has added several important new features to Vision Analytics for IBC2019. Key Quality Indicators (KQIs) to show specific performance parameters for broadband and internet delivery; service-independent correlation engines to identify and reconcile problems over any delivery network; an intuitive Reports Builder application that allows users to create actionable reports, customizable to each service; a new Dashboard Constructor for web and mobile devices that allows users more flexibility in adding widgets, graphs, and other customized reporting elements meaningful to their operations; and a refined predictive analytics model to more effectively combat buffering issues for IPTV, OTT, and mobile delivery services.

[Big Data: Analytics Shape the Business of AV Integration]

“Vision Analytics not only monitors network performance in real-time, but leverages machine learning and other data science technologies to predict conditions that, left unchecked, could sour viewers on the media brand,” said Ted Korte, CTO, Qligent. “Users will know which events cause viewers to become disengaged, and how to keep track of subscribers by merging Quality of Experience with Qligent’s true end-to-end technology. This gives service providers a powerful prevention-oriented toolset, as well as cloud-based quality assurance across every distribution network out to each viewer’s home and mobile device.”

Qligent’s unique deployment of networked and virtual probes creates an end-to-end, controlled data mining environment to produce trusted and secondary opinion datasets within Vision Analytics. The analytics engines are immune to variables, such as operator error, viewer disinterest, or user hardware malfunction, assuring that the integrity and variety of the data is maintained. All findings are presented on a user-friendly dashboard and reports that summarizes key performance indicators (KPIs), key quality indicators (KQIs), and other vital criteria pertaining to multiplatform content distribution across creation, delivery, and consumption.

The Bottom Line: Vision Analytics addresses the “4 Vs” of big data: velocity, volume, variety, and veracity. Its engines leverage scalable cloud processing to manage a nearly limitless number of static, dynamic, or event-based datasets to help broadcasters, MVPDs, and OTT service providers quickly address issues and take corrective and preventative action. The software samples video content and aggregates data from a variety of systems and components throughout the ecosystem to understand and correlate the factors that contribute to higher engagement. With a reliable data set, users can develop a host of analysis results, visualizations, and automated reports to suit unique business needs.

For the second year in a row, Bannister Lake partnered with Montreal's Boombox Group to provide live data management and populate graphics for the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2019 Series. The June 21-22 event took place at the renowned Nürburgring Track in Germany, home of the world's most challenging 24-hour motorsports endurance race.

Bannister Lake software and expertise in live data management were used extensively throughout the event to read Google Sheets, ingest, and moderate real-time social media feeds, and consolidate data for the competition's various races. The solution's data was used to drive graphics both in-venue and on the various broadcast streams.

Bannister Lake's Chameleon software has quickly become a popular data management solution for international esports events. Producers and event organizers use the product to add engaging content such as player and team profiles, event schedules, standings, and sponsorship information without taking away from the excitement of the game.

"It's great to bring Chameleon on location at the Nürburgring,” said Al Savoie, Bannister Lake's technical and creative director. “The track has an illustrious history in racing, and we're thrilled to be part of the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships. Throughout the series we will be finding new and exciting ways to integrate data into the production and leverage live data content to allow producers to tell more compelling Gran Turismo stories."

The Nürburgring event featured 55 of the world's best Gran Turismo drivers from 20 countries competing in the Manufacturer Series, the Nations Cup, and GR Supra GT Cup. Winners moved on to participate in racing events that will be held in New York, Salzburg, and the finals scheduled for October in Tokyo. Chameleon will be used throughout the FIA-Certified Gran Turismo Championships 2019 racing series to enhance editorial content and fuel new revenue opportunities for event organizers.

You probably know by now that one of the chief benefits of bringing AV devices onto the network is the data and analytics you can glean from them—and that when it comes to streamlining your real estate costs, this data can be invaluable. Knowing precisely how your space and the technology within it are used offers the potential for tremendous cost savings. But where do you start?

“Room scheduling systems are quickly becoming the way to efficiently manage the modern workspace and meeting culture of the enterprise customer,” said Joe da Silva, director of product marketing at Extron. The company’s TLS - TouchLink Scheduling panels display room availability and schedules, while providing the information needed to closely analyze room usage, activity patterns, and occupancy trends across the organization. “Each Extron scheduling panel stores information about room usage and the meeting data, which may be retrieved from all panels for analysis,” da Silva said. “It is easy to measure and visualize activity patterns by using analytics tools like Microsoft PowerBI to generate interactive reports and insights.”

In addition, Extron GVE (GlobalViewerEnterprise) software gives users the ability to manage AV devices across an organization. “Every Extron product generates a lot of date and the reporting tools inside of GVE allow informed decisions about inventory and maintenance plans,” da Silva continued. “Tech support personnel can view live information about the devices installed in every space. GVE allows organizations to identify usage trends, maximize system uptime, calculate energy usage, and maintain inventory lists for all spaces. Technicians may also manage their GVE environment by using the iGVE mobile App, available for the Apple iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch devices.

As an industry leader, Crestron has been providing businesses with data analytics tools for more than a decade, according to Nic Milani, the company’s executive director of commercial product marketing. Its web-based tools like Crestron Fusion and XiO Cloud are designed to collect data and generate reports to help organizations optimize investments in people, spaces, and technology.

“Having access to information such as room utilization, occupancy, and device usage enables better decision making and guarantees the technology supports how people work within the organization,” Milani said. “Beyond the data, it is critical for the system to also have intelligence. Crestron Room Scheduling integrates seamlessly with these data tools to provide employees with a more intuitive and efficient workspace. With the ability to recognize when employees do not show up to their meetings and instantly return the space back into inventory provides everyone in the office access to an updated list of meeting spaces at any time.”

Better utilization of space, more productivity, and less frustration. That’s a win-win-win.

We live in an increasing data-rich world, where forward-thinking organizations are harnessing the power of analysis to make better decisions.

To make this happen, the people who collect and crunch data have to present their conclusions to decision-makers in a clear, concise way. Otherwise, the meaning can get lost in the message. All the numbers and associated facts can end up inundating managers, rather than informing them.

Nowhere is this truer than in AV presentations, where too many pie charts in PowerPoint can bore audiences to tears, rather than energizing them into action. This is why visualizing data effectively and meaningfully must be an organizational priority. Here’s how to do it.

DISTILL THE MESSAGE

The old computer programming adage, “garbage in, garbage out” applies to planning effective data analysis presentations. The presenter needs to decide right from the start what fundamental conclusion(s) they want the audience to draw from their presentation. They then need to tailor their spoken word content and graphics to deliver this message clearly and obviously, without excessively resorting to simple-minded repetition.

A useful rule of thumb can be found in the news media, where the approach to writing a clear story is: 1) Briefly prime the reader what you’re going to tell them. 2) Tell them the information, clearly and sequentially; 3) Conclude with a brief recap.

CHOOSE GRAPHICS THAT COMMUNICATE

It’s a time-worn cliché: A data presentation that combines a droning speaker reading from a boring script while endless pie charts march across a projected PowerPoint screen. The only audio competing with the cricket noises emanating from the audience is the sounds of their snores.

To keep this from happening to you, it is vital to a) choose graphics that communicate your message clearly and b) offer something new and different to visually engage your viewers.

Utelogy co-founder and CEO Frank Pellkofer achieves both goals by using third-party programs to create unique and informative graphics. (The Utelogy software platform delivers non-proprietary AV control, management, analytics, support and document storage on any network and any server, virtual or otherwise.) “If you really want your datarelated graphics to stand out, then avoid using the canned graphs and charts in PowerPoint or Excel that are run of the mill, mundane, and often leave us not really making the point we were intending to make,” he said.

BE INTERACTIVE

The cliché of the droning data presenter with pie charts points to another problem with traditional data presentations: They rely on experts speaking at the audience, rather than facilitators interacting with them.

When presenters act as facilitators, actively soliciting their ideas and input while guiding them toward the message that they’re trying to get across, something magical happens: the audience gets engaged. No longer are they grade-two students stuck in class having to listen to the teacher. They are now adult participants in a joint discovery process; one in which data analysis is the road to knowledge and action.

“The idea of one person presenting and a bunch of people listening is dated,” said Robert Abbot, vice president of products with Nureva—a technology company focused on developing advanced solutions, like Span Workspace and Nureva Wall, to support collaborative teams and processes. “The right mindset to have is that you’re in a discussion—and if you’re in a discussion, you need to have the right tools so that people can share their points of view.” (Nureva’s solutions allow audience members to submit electronic “sticky notes” to a cloud-based Span canvas during presentations. This ensures that all participants, whether in the room or dispersed, can offer input when they think of it, without distracting the presenter during their talk.)

“If you can change the context from a presentation to a conversation, then you’re in good shape,” noted David Kung, VP of product strategy for Oblong Industries. (Oblong makes Mezzanine, a visual collaboration solution that lets teams see, share, and work with all the content they need, all at the same time.) “When your viewers can contribute their own data and see it side by side with yours, then you’re experiencing true knowledge sharing.”

BREAK FREE OF THE SINGLE SCREEN

The final element of the droning data presenter cliché is the fact that they use one big screen. There is no variety and no innovation: The text, pie charts, and other canned graphics flash up on this single screen in a monotonous progression, like a boring parade that everyone hopes will pass soon.

Making matters worse is the fact that “we often need to compare, contrast, and cross-reference multiple sets of data at the same time,” Kung said. “In addition, the data often comes from different sources, even different locations. Since most presentation spaces only let us see one set of data at time (often via a PowerPoint slide), we’re forced to constantly switch back and forth between slides or devices. This process is both inefficient and mentally taxing.”

The solution to the single screen straitjacket is to move to digital working walls and multiple screens, either physically or virtually (e.g. visualizing and interacting with all team content on one large visual canvas). This is the model supported by Nureva’s Span Workspace (which creates a digital visual canvas up to 200 feet wide, and Nureva Wall (from 7.5 feet to 60 feet wide), and Oblong Mezzanine (which creates an interactive digital canvas of flexible size with multiple displays spanning multiple wall surfaces). Using multiple screens, the presenter can move between graphical ideas, dragging and dropping items visually as they interact with the audience to keep things lively.

“[With multiple screens] you have greater choice and the problem shifts from thinking of the most effective presentation to selecting the most salient data,” Kung said. “You also have greater freedom: You can bring in an actual application and work with live data instead of a representation of the data on a slide.”

Presenting data using multiple screens and a large, flexible visual canvas allows “presenters to determine the best techniques for presentations based on the specific details of each audience, facilities, and objectives,” said Rick Kennedy, Nureva’s director of customer engagement. Doing so “can optimize their results of any session,” he said. In contrast, “constraining presenters to a single method will make it easier for presenters, but less effective for the audience.”

GET OUT OF THE RUT

Clearly, data presenters can do a lot to make their content compelling and engaging for their audiences. Doing so will certainly up the entertainment value of their presentations, but the primary reason for doing so is far more important: Delivering interesting, interactive presentations improves the odds that their audiences will absorb and utilize the data analysis that the presenter is working so hard to get across.

In a data-driven business world, this kind of effective AV presentation matters. Increasingly, top managers in business, education, government, and military organizations need timely data analysis that is pertinent, to the point, and easy to digest to make the right decisions. Bore them to death, and the data intelligence that researchers have worked so hard to compile will go unused—and the organization will suffer.

This is why effective, meaningful data analysis presentations are truly important. Using the right AV tools, messaging, and interactivity, today’s data presenters can succeed in getting their content across to their organization’s benefit—but only if they reject the worn-out droning lecturer/PowerPoint/single screen approach.

James Careless is a regular contributor to AV Technology, and a long-time reporter on the AV/broadcasting scene.

Digital Nirvana, a provider of media solutions and services, will showcase its new Metadator application at IBC 2018 in Amsterdam, running from Sept. 14-18 at the RAI Amsterdam. First introduced at NAB in April, IBC marks the international debut of Metadator — a software application that makes the editing process more efficient for broadcasters and content creators. Digital Nirvana will exhibit in Hall 14, Stand D05 during IBC.

Metadator is a software application that makes the content-based metadata creation process more efficient for broadcasters and content owners who are using the AVID media platform. The application has the ability to export media from AVID, create metadata automatically over the cloud and generate locators. The metadata, along with the locators will be automatically ingested and attach itself to the video asset present in AVID Interplay.

Creation of high-quality transcripts as metadata for pre-edit footages helps to streamline the editing process as well as simplifies closed captioning/subtitling processes. Content editors do not have to manually comb through huge amounts of video footage to create scene summaries. While editing footages down to a show, editors can easily find out the desired clips using the metadata that is available in the infrastructure.

A high-quality transcript generated through this service also aids in script writing and creating closed captions. Use cases also include video description wherein the application directly sends proxy videos to cloud service. Content owners will now be able to create transcripts easily for their media archives and create a searchable database within their AVID MAM infrastructure.

The Metadator application, installed at client’s premises, communicates with the user’s internal AVID InterPlay/ISIS infrastructure to extract media and securely transfer it to Digital Nirvana’s cloud-based platform over HTTPS. Metadator allows its users to choose whether to transfer the video assets or to extract audio-only from the video assets and send it outside the customer premises. The audio/video received at the cloud center is processed for auto-generation of metadata, which includes keywords, auto-transcripts, high-quality transcripts, and video descriptions. Once the metadata is created, Metadator can fetch it and post them on the user’s internal infrastructure. The application is also integrated with a continuous monitoring and alerting system that monitors each job and notifies all stakeholders on the status of the jobs.

Digital Nirvana has been providing knowledge solutions and services for customers worldwide. Broadcasters and media companies rely on Digital Nirvana’s innovative solutions to improve operations, ensure compliance, reduce costs and protect revenue streams. DN’s solutions help broadcasters capture content from multiple sources, create content, and publish to various digital platforms while monitoring for quality and compliance. With this rollout, Digital Nirvana is hopeful to scale new heights serving the media & broadcasting industry across the world.

Quick Bio

Name: Sandi Stambaugh

Position: Vice President, Product Management

Company: Synnex

SCN: How long have you been in your role at Synnex, and how has your background prepared you for the role?

Sandi Stambaugh: I’ve been with Synnex for 15 years, 11 in this role. Starting out, I was in sales and migrated into a business development role, and then product management. Being able to build on that experience—and see all aspects of the business—has helped me very much to understand the customers’ perspective, what they’re trying to do in the market, and then helped us to build their perspective and vendor perspectives. It has really helped me approach the market with a different mindset and a different perspective. It’s a relationship business, so seeking customers out and finding mentors is something that is impactful and helps me mold the direction we’re going.

SCN: How do you navigate relationships with such a large number of employees and customers?

SS: There’s so much going on with Synnex—it’s exciting to be able to leverage this big engine in this big company with all the capabilities and all of the operational efficiencies. Value-added distribution is a segment of our business, which allows us to be more individualized. People aren’t just a number to me—it’s not the way we operate. It’s personal to us.

SCN: How do you view the current AV/IT landscape? Is it still AV versus IT, or are integrators and IT professionals playing better together in the proverbial sandbox?

SS: Years ago, we heard IT was going to take over the world and IT felt the same about AV professionals. It’s really fun because I sit in an interesting spot as I’m involved in both and see a lot of cooperation.

We’re matchmakers—we match AV and IT customers for opportunities. We’ve seen some IT integrators hire, acquire, and expand their offering to include some visual tech. And the same goes for AV when it comes to including networking and IT, but it’s limited—a small percentage. The vast majority is partnering and aligning. At first, there was a feeling that everyone had to be experts on everything, and then reality set in and that’s not possible. Integration and IT firms can diversify a bit, but, at the end of the day, the customer expects experts and you can’t be all things to all people.

SCN: What are the major challenges and rewards of mating AV and IT?

SS: It’s vetting them out—making sure the partner you’re aligning with is technology capable with certifications. Beyond that, it’s relationships; you have to make sure your partner’s approach to customers is the same as yours, and they’re going to be treated well—you need someone who will commit to being there and being available for the customer. Your partners are still a representation of you and your technology and they need to be capable. The human element helps to get repeat business—it’s expensive to get new business all the time.

SCN: Big data is a big trend in the AV space. What role does it play in your customers’ integrations?

SS: We’re using it to help our customers; we’re data centric. When customers buy from us, we use our data to help them: this is what your vertical concentration looks like, this is where you’re selling best, etc. Being able to steer business on what our customers are selling helps them acquire new technology in new markets.

We use our RenewSolv Platform to help our customers track their data. If something has a three-year warranty, I’m reaching out to that integrator in two years and nine months to help them sell a new or updated system. I want to help customers be stickier with their customers, the end users. By leveraging data, Synnex is helping integrators obtain repeat business.

SCN: What are your thoughts on AV-as-a-Service (AVaaS)?

SS: AVaaS is an area where Synnex is expanding to help our customers. Moving from capital expenses to operational expenses and being able to manage that through monthly recurring payments is a challenge to our integrators. That’s an issue that we’ve been able to solve for our resellers as a part of our CloudSolv Platform which is designed to help foster collaboration opportunities between those resellers and our vendors. We want to help them drive sustainable profits through market growth and traction.

SCN: What is the biggest challenge you see in the pro AV industry today?

SS: The human element. People are having a hard time finding good people, and it’s an ongoing problem. Training, onboarding, and service are important. Synnex is trying to help with training for customers; we work with integrators to perfect tech and sales practices for their new sales people.

Professional development is so important to selling tech. We don’t do enough training with end customers. When product training with end users accompanies new technology, the chances of expanding to include more rooms are significant because the users understand the technology and it’s a quick process. Teaching them to use it isn’t a competitive thing—it’s an added service.

SCN: How does it feel to be named to CRN's 2018 Women of the Channel list?

SS: There is such an awesome community of lady leaders in the channel, and it’s an honor to be a part of that group, which included nine winners from Synnex. I enjoy networking with the other leaders on the list who are running large businesses and making strategic decisions—I’m pleased a part of that prestigious community.

One of the biggest challenges marketers face today is customer acquisition and retention. The key to both acquiring new customers and retaining current customers is possessing the critical data that can help you, one, communicate effectively with the highest qualified contact possible and, two, further identify the needs of your current customers to foster long-term loyalty.

Unfortunately, today’s data industry is both far too complicated and highly fragmented, offering a confusing glut of choices that are overwhelming marketers, who are in desperate need of this mission-critical information. The existing data marketing ecosystem of data and direct marketing list owners, managers, and brokers is wildly inefficient and often ineffective, costing businesses untold millions in unnecessary time and money, and untold more in opportunity loss.

Even so, given the fundamental truth that data is the backbone of both digital advertising and marketing and traditional direct marketing, marketers have struggled along with what the market has been able to provide, for better or for worse. Global advertising revenue for 2017 was $591 billion with $209 billion of it dedicated to digital advertising. A conundrum as effective data sources are becoming even rarer as the need for—and actual dependency on—data becomes more essential. The escalating demand for big data sources that provide quality and complete data has skyrocketed in today’s digital age.

It’s the fundamental big data sources that have been the very crux of the problem for marketers. Today, an individual, entity, or brand looking to acquire a specific data set will have to spend extensive time and resources locating sources that meet its target audience, negotiate costs, and establish privacy standards for the transferring of the data. This leads to a decrease in quality and data record duplication. These three challenges not only make it extremely cost prohibitive to identify and acquire the various parameters required to compile the exact dataset that is needed but, for small and medium sized businesses, it creates a barrier to enter the data marketplace.

As problematic, attempting to generate revenue today from existing datasets brings its own unique set of challenges. The first is the time and money it takes to create data cards and collateral for the data owner to monetize. At the same time, they need to identify the right organization or marketplace with the widest reach—one that represents the highest demand for their data. The second major challenge is integrity and accountability. Data owners do not trust outside organizations to properly store, manage, and monetize their data. The last major concern surrounds the security of the storage environment. Data abuse and lack of transparency in the revenue share business model are underlying fears that will ultimately prevent a list owner from making his/her unique data set available for purchase.

So with all of the problems running rampant in the big data industry, what is needed to put this key facet on course? Below are five reasons why merging big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technology will revolutionize data-driven marketing worldwide, across all industries:

1. Empowerment. A blockchain-based system empowers data source providers to monetize their data and better capitalize demand, allowing data source providers to access the large global marketplace. In the same way that eBay provides a marketplace for vendors of physical products, a blockchain-based digital marketplace can create growth potential for data source providers of all sizes, while also reducing barriers to entry into the industry.
2. Transparency. A blockchain approach provides data providers with full transparency, traceability, and auditability, overcoming many of the hurdles data providers currently face in the existing marketplace. Anyone who has operated in the big data space knows that duplicate data, false data, and questionable sourcing are unfortunate industry truths. However, a blockchain-based approach provides complete transparency, allowing buyers to see where the data has been and where it came from prior to purchasing.
3. Confidence. A more transparent vetting and grading system for data will improve confidence building between the end user and data sources. Currently, most data purchases are practically blind transactions, whereby buyers won’t really know what kind of data they’re receiving until they actually buy it, because no vendor would ever reveal the data prior to money changing hands. Once you have the data, it’s then up to you to determine its quality but by then the money has been spent. Rather than this archaic process leaving much to be desired, having a three-party scoring system improves quality and increases trust in the marketplace, facilitating more transactions and leading to overall higher levels of confidence in the industry as a whole. Giving businesses and consumers quality and verified data that’s vetted and scored externally allows for the reduction, if not elimination, of false or outdated data—a significant problem currently plaguing the industry.
4. Simplification. By simplifying and aggregating world data transactions into a single point of sale, the result will be an “Amazon” like marketplace, where economies of scale and data aggregation will facilitate a smoother, cleaner, and simply better checkout process, creating more data trade worldwide. Giving end users a simplified, easy-to-use and robust interface with a quick and secure payment system between the business or individual and data sources is a requisite means toward this end.
5. Artificial Intelligence. “Smart Indexing” engines are now utilizing predictive analytics (a type of artificial intelligence using data analysis and machine learning) for “Confidence Scoring” to provide continual real-time accurate data. Based on immediate business conditions, this will allow for record sets that can be a single individual that matches all parameters or millions of records that match desired parameters.

Ultimately, democratizing big data levels the data playing field by providing the most comprehensive marketing data solution to all businesses and individuals. It will provide a robust interface between the business or individual and the data sources. The backend systems will ensure full confidence in data quality for the end user as well as transactional finality for the data providers.

We may never feel as vulnerable as we do in a hospital bed. Amidst the chaos of hospital staff, the fear and confusion of trying to comprehend the medical issue at hand, and the flurry of friends and relatives who are struggling to find ways to be useful, it’s understandable then that we can feel overwhelmed by the simplest of needs—like knowing when we might get a meal.

“I can’t tell you the number of times a day I see a patient limp out of a room to ask what time lunch is coming,” said Dr. Judd Hollander, an emergency physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, PA in a video explaining their partnership with the IBM Watson Internet of Things. “If we can get them the answer without them having to come out and search for someone to answer the question, it’s a win-win for everybody.”

The hospital’s use of artificial intelligence has shown one of the many compelling ways the technology can improve people’s lives in meaningful ways. In voice enabled rooms from IBM and Harman Professional Solutions, systems may use Watson AI with Harman AKG microphones, JBL speakers, and AMX AV control and switching systems, allowing users to interact with cognitive technologies that are embedded in devices, which then access the Watson cloud and Watson IoT services, which in turn provide answers and can even interact with in-room subsystems. The results at a place like Jefferson Hospital include not just patients and families who are more at ease, but the ability of doctors and nurses to focus on medical needs, and not, for instance, room temperature.

“If we can help the patient in Room 20 without leaving Room 18 while that person’s having a heart attack?” Dr. Hollander said. “That’s why I went into medicine.”

And that’s just the beginning. The potential for AI includes things we haven’t even dreamed of yet, in verticals across the industry.

“The enterprise and entertainment market possibilities are massive, as IBM and Harman seek to connect people more intimately with their environments through cognition and natural language processing,” said Harriet Green, general manager, Watson Internet of Things, customer engagement and education, IBM. “We are leveraging Watson and AI to bring connected environments to a multitude of locations, from hotels to hospitals and offices, where they are transforming everyday experiences.”

That potential is only growing for the commercial AV industry, which is just gaining strides with the residential industry’s use of AI, says Richard Lewis, senior vice president, research and technology, at LG Electronics USA Business Solutions.

“As we see its growing popularity and incredible usefulness in the consumer market, businesses have begun to consider AI’s role beyond the home,” he said. “If I had to sum up the state of AI in the hospitality industry right now, it would be ‘exploration.’ With exploration comes both excitement and challenges. Commercial AI is still very much in its infancy as the industry continues to tap into and unveil the many exciting ways this technology can be harnessed for a more seamless experience in B2B applications.”

For its part, LG has been exploring the potential of AI through ThinQ, the umbrella name for its AI technology, which includes voice control and “basically learns and adapts over time,” Lewis said. Their approach with ThinQ, he explains, is for “open platforms, open partnerships, open connectivity,” which encompasses LG’s consumer smart home appliances and consumer electronics, as well as other consumer products outside the LG portfolio that utilize artificial intelligence.

“ThinQ provides convenience, control, and seamless connectivity at home and on the go, which we’re dedicated to providing through LG commercial display technologies as well,” Lewis said. “There’s been a big emphasis on simplifying and commercializing natural interfaces seen in the home, and as LG continues to drive innovation in the commercial display industry, we’ll also continue to consider the ways that our products enhance the end user experience and streamline the installation process for system integrators across diverse technological ecosystems.”

Defining Commercial AI

Despite the excitement about the possibilities, the commercial industry is at a crossroads. As businesses develop cool, innovative AI technologies, they should also make time to consider how those technologies fit into the overall picture of commercial AI, both now and into the future.

“The biggest challenge facing the commercial sector lies in defining AI outside the home, whether it’s natural language processing, hands-free display control, connectivity, or a combination of all of these,” Lewis said. “System integrators and manufacturers face the interesting and critical challenge of not only defining commercial AI, but also mastering the newly added layer of complexity that it adds to cloud-based processing solutions.”

When it comes to defining commercial AI, it comes down to the same question as in building any other technology: Is the user going to get any value from it? For Ricoh, which has also leveraged IBM Watson IoT, the approach to creating its Intelligent Workplace Solution, a cognitive-enabled interactive whiteboard, was to figure out ways for meeting participants to streamline discussions by using real-time analytics, language translations, the ability to capture side conversations, and more.

“Our goal is to provide employees and businesses with effective and smart tools that automate administrative office processes and empower people to focus on tasks and ideas that drive business value,” said Hidetsugu Nonaka, corporate senior vice president, Ricoh, in a statement. “Instead of being a screen, the cognitive-enabled, interactive whiteboard powered by Watson [is] an active participant, capturing meeting notes and action items, and building bridges between employees at different locations.”

Another example of creating value for the user comes from AdMobilize, which has developed a range of touchless technology products that provide real-time analytics by capturing information from the physical world, from the number of motorcycles that pass a given roadside billboard to the types of emotional responses from people who stop for information at a digital sign in a mall.

“Integrators are really embracing this for three main reasons,” said AdMobilize CEO Rodolfo Saccoman. “One is they’re able to generate additional recurring revenues by utilizing the technology as software-as-a-service, which sometimes can become generous for them. Two is they’re really giving their clients a cutting-edge, actionable technology. Third, those end users love it because they have an advantage over their competitors. The integrators look like superstars because they’re enabling their clients to really be on the cutting edge.”

Privacy Concerns

Eliminating tedious tasks, increasing productivity and revenue, and generally making the user’s experience a little more pleasant, has all been, of course, the overarching goal of technology since its inception. The added complication of AI—and what’s at the top of mind for those who’ve been following the news in the past year—is keeping personal data secure. For instance, as it considers more commercial applications based on success in the residential market, LG’s approach to privacy concerns involve expectations of users—the privacy of the home versus a public space versus a hotel room.

“Users—as they should—expect privacy protections,” Lewis said. “LG takes individual privacy in the consumer and commercial spaces very seriously. Our consumer TV firmware, for example, has been encrypted with a digital signature attached to each partition and integrity verified during the TV booting process. This process has been extensively tested and certified by UL’s cybersecurity assurance program. Furthermore, LG’s end user agreements are among the most consumer-friendly in the industry because they are written in a natural language, require opt-in, and LG has separated the functions and features, which allows consumers to control the information being utilized by the TV. In the B2B space, LG intends to uphold the same commitment to end user security, and we’re keenly aware of the need for secure AI solutions both now and in future technological developments.”

Another example is when AdMobilize employs technology to distinguish between men and women or delighted and frustrated responses. Users may have concerns about their faces being captured and used in other ways, by other people or companies. So, ensuring people’s privacy is paramount to developing AI technologies, Saccoman says.

“With our analytics technology, everything we do there is anonymous,” he said. “The data the moment is captured, it’s converted into binary numbers, which is aggregated, and from that aggregation everything is anonymous. You have to always protect that, create mechanisms to allow people to have control.”

The recognition of technology’s impact on humans is now perhaps greater than it’s ever been, concluded Saccoman. “One has to be cognizant of 15 years from now—what will the power of this technology be? You want to use it in ways that help humankind.”

AV Pros have taken over Greenville, SC, for the 2018 Synnex Strategic Partner Summit. The Summit, held annually, is a gathering of Synnex employees, partners, and customers mixing business and pleasure. Over the three-day event, attendees learn the about Synnex’s VisualSolv business, best practices for going to market with new technologies, and get to network at the BMW Charity Pro-AM presented by Synnex.

“This is a fun event for our customers, vendor partners, and the Synnex team,” said Sandi Stambaugh, vice president, product management, Synnex. “It’s important for us to come together at events where networking and collaboration are the primary focus—and where we can discuss creative ideas to help propel the industry forward.”

At the Summit, SCN asked a variety of industry experts where they see a “hole” in the industry, and, just like the BMW Charity Pro-AM, we’re going for 18. Here’s what they had to say about upcoming opportunities in the pro AV industry:

Hole 1: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

“We need to start talking about AI and how that comes together with the pro AV industry. Machine learning and knowledge-based learning will be the next wave for us.”

—Gary Palenbaum, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Synnex

Hole 2: Talent

“Our industry is struggling with having an available resource when we want to grow. Right now, the average NSCA member has seven open positions, and more people are retiring than coming into the industry. We need to actively recruit young people out of STEM colleges and IT programs, and welcome them into the fold.”

—Chuck Wilson, Executive Director, NSCA

Hole 3: Meeting Room Space

“One of the biggest holes is meeting room spaces. If you look at the number in the country and the tech in those rooms, it’s a huge opportunity for the industry to update because the way we work has changed. The total number of possibilities is very large and LG is participating with that space with many solutions. We’ve partnered with companies like Cisco and Zoom. LG has created unique form sizes to fit the meeting space with video and data at the same time—like the LG UH5C and Cisco Room Kit—it’s like hitting the easy button.”

—Clark Brown, Vice President of Sales, LG

Hole 4: Speed to Market

“We tend to take our time in this industry, whether it’s engineering or movement into new tech. We’re a process-driven industry, and we make things complicated because they’re cool and we can make them do interesting things. But that doesn’t always match what the client wants. Sometimes, we need to make things that are simple, easy to use, and get them on the market quickly.”

—Michael Boettcher, CEO—New Era PA, New Era Technology

Hole 5: Partnerships

“We need to create more sustainable partnerships. We’re encouraging our members to team up with companies like Synnex and the customers they represent.”

—Thomas Roberts, Executive Director, PSNI

Hole 6: AV-as-a-Service (AVaaS)

“Not a lot of people are grasping the concept of AVaaS, but, once people figure it out, it’s going to be huge. We have to get out of the mindset of traditional thinking in terms of line items.”

—Brad T. Kirby, Vice President of Operations, Interactive Solutions

Hole 7: Going Global

“More and more enterprise customers need global support. As the world shrinks, we need to grow our footprint as an industry, and have a more global presence. We also need performance products and partners to rely on.”

—Tommy Plumer, Vice President of Sales, Synnex

Hole 8: Selling Styles

“We need people that can capably sell monitoring and service contracts. Most of the integration sales professionals and designers aren’t comfortable with that yet—it’s a different style of selling.”

—Mark Gottwig, President, Delta Systems Integration, Inc.

Hole 9: Lack of Standards

“The current lack of standards makes it a challenge for uniformity with employees and training. We need more training so we can produce defined career pathways and train talent up.”

—Dale Gayman, President, CCS Presentation Systems—Indiana and Kentucky

Hole 10: Whiteboarding and Software

“There is tremendous potential with software and whiteboarding, and ViewSonic wants to own the whiteboarding space. We created myViewBoard platform, which addresses the gap of casting data—which we do through the internet to get around complex networks. We also introduced a feature called “throw” which allows mobile content to go directly to the whiteboard for better collaboration.

—Jason Websiter, Director of Sales, Education, ViewSonic

Hole 11: Mass Notifications

“We need to make more people aware of mass notification systems and putting displays in public. Right now, if there’s a fire, you see a flashing light. Imagine how much the experience would be improved if everyone was using displays to communicate critical emergency information.”

—Doug Crossland, Distribution Sales Manager, Leyard and Planar

Hole 12: Adopting Change

“With technology changing so much, we have an opportunity to approach things in a different fashion. We don’t need to stay old school and do things the way we’ve always done them. Now is the perfect opportunity to change things up a bit.”

—Jim Scalise, General Manager, Avidex

Hole 13: Merging AV and IT

“We need to master the execution of merging AV and IT—they’re two unique industries that have to get bundled together to truly serve our industries well. We need to build, support, and supply complete systems and solutions that work well for both sides of the fence.”

—Kent Cawthorne, Vice President of Sales, Vaddio

Hole 14: Emergency Communications

“With the unfortunate growth of mass shootings, schools are implementing shooter detection systems. It’s a niche market, but it is a growth opportunity for AV. All of these detection systems require security cameras, video monitoring, and command and control centers.”

—Jason Staples, Project Administrator, Fisk Electric

Hole 15: Maximizing ROI

“Right now, there is a hole in the industry in terms of maximizing ROI. When you calculate and measure your ROI, you’re setting yourself up for success. NEC has a team of experts and products that can assist with this.”

—Maggie Austin, Account Manager, Channel Sales, NEC Display

Hole 16: Recurring Revenue

“We are quickly moving toward recurring revenue models and I think we’re not really addressing that yet. The shift is coming and we need to prepare ourselves for that.”

—Ned Coleman, President, CEO, Smarter Systems

Hole 17: Professional Sales Education

“We have an opportunity in terms of professional sales. Too often, the people in sales have come up through the technical side of the business, and lack the skills to go wide in an enterprise account. We need more training and education for this side of the business.”

—Jeff Irvin, Principal, Spinitar

Hole 18: Big Data

“We need to start leveraging the data we have. Often companies have a plethora of big data, but don’t know how to use it. The right data needs to be pulled, and then we can leverage it in an individual way.

—Sandi Stambaugh, Vice President, Product Management, Synnex

Coincidentally held around the same time the azaleas are in bloom in Augusta, April 10, 2018 kicked off the 17th year for the annual Crestron Masters.

For the past three years at AV Technology, we’ve been moving the conversation beyond the AV and IT conversion to data. But data is really nothing without the ability to parse and deliver it in a way that can be analyzed and visualized. Without it, a data dump is exactly what it sounds like.

All About the Cloud

Could this be the year that AV firmly plants both feet into the IT world? I think so. The groundbreaking news at Masters 2018 was the official launch of Crestron’s XiO Cloud hosted by Microsoft Azure. When XiO Cloud, Crestron Fusion, and Microsoft Power BI are used together, an incredible visualization of collected data is available.

“If a company already uses O365 (MS Office 365) then they will not have a problem with XiO because it’s hosted in the same data centers,” said Jon Ottesen, enterprise solutions architect at Crestron. “We use the exact same transport mechanisms, queuing, and security that Microsoft uses.”

This is a significant step forward in the evolutionary ecosystem of a 12-year-old product—Crestron Fusion.

“This effort actually started about seven years ago,” Ottesen said at the Designing for Enterprise Management session at Masters 2018. “It required us to reorganize and restructure our entire firmware library from the first variable up. Now if that doesn’t mean anything to you, disassemble your life to the moment of conception and start over. That’s what we did to get to this.”

Ottesen then went on to explain where Crestron XiO Cloud fits into the hierarchy of the company's platforms, beginning with Crestron Fusion, with its primary job of providing proactive monitoring and data collection. With Crestron Fusion Cloud, users can manage and monitor devices. To get devices setup quickly and easily, Crestron XiO Cloud allows the integrators the ability to claim the devices via MAC address and serial number to configure the equipment.

“Crestron Fusion is still needed to manage systems and device status,” said Richard Sasson, global director of technical services. “But the bottom line is that XiO Cloud is a cloud-only configuration and management tool that enables large-scale deployments in warp-speed. Combine XiO Cloud with Crestron Fusion and Power BI, you get real-time analytics.

“We have created dashboards so that we can own the experience without having to own Microsoft Power BI,” Sasson said. “In essence, creating templates and dashboards that our customers can use to have a good experience but were not going to maintain Power BI.” Templates can be customized for a service fee.

An Industry Evolves

Approximately six years ago, Crestron Authorized Independent Programmers became known as Crestron Services Providers. “We’re telling you, you need to offer services beyond programming,” Sasson said. “Will programming exist? Sure. 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.”

Programming of custom-controlled, one-off boardrooms and auditoriums isn’t going away. The paradigm shift is that systems such as XiO Cloud can now enable the configuration of 50, 100, or thousands of rooms at a time.

Power BI was introduced at InfoComm 2017, and at the time, the interest came more from end users. This makes sense given that technology managers, facilities managers, and CIOs need real information for lifecycle and real estate planning. “After we explained the benefits of the MTA program, we had unprecedented spike in people wanting to change their coursework to obtain the MTA certification,” Sasson said.

“We realized we wanted to offer Masters level training to a wider audience,” he said. “By creating the Masters Technology Architect program, we can really help the industry. We must be able to create a great experience for the end client by having the design community and the programming community work together to create the best solution.”

System monitoring, dashboard displays, and data reporting are established topics in the professional AV conversation, but there are new reasons to get excited about these developments. The main idea around identifying device usage, display usage, and room activities has been about enhancing the value of an AV control system. But what does that really mean, and how is the data conversation changing in 2018?

While the information gleaned from a connected AV system can give technology managers and organizational decision makers key metrics and provide insight for future needs, not all data provides value. Also, more data is not necessarily better.

DATA: MORE THAN IT SEEMS

On the surface, the notion of gathering and presenting information on the usage of a device, system, or space, seems to be a feasible and straightforward concept. However, in reality, doing this effectively is more difficult than it seems. The challenge lies in a few key areas:

• Understanding the information that is important to target audience
• Identifying the specific data to collect
• Ensuring that the system and devices can provide the data required
• Defining how to store and retrieve the data
• Confirming the accuracy and relevance of the data
• Correlating the points data to other data or parameters
• Displaying the data is valuable manner

Data not only has to be properly identified, collected, and stored, it also needs to be meaningfully retrieved and processed. For example, knowing that one device is utilized more than another device can be useful, but it is not particularly insightful. However, the ability to drill down and understand more specific detail on the behaviors of a device, system, room, or user becomes a lot more valuable. Details like how a room is used, when a room is used, how many people use the room per session, what activities take place in the room by which users, and what is the room utilization can be easily identified by collection and processing appropriate data.

The power of data collection becomes useful when the data is correlated to other data or specific parameters. A way of demonstrating this concept is by looking at how data is utilized in business and marketing. It is not only important to understand the number leads, proposals, and sales that are generated from website or other marketing vehicle; it is incredibly valuable to understand additional details like where those leads came from, what to the leads have in common, when is the peak time for converting opportunities, what activities create the largest amount of leads, is there something preventing visitors from taking action, and what do proposals that convert have in common. In the end, the data should clearly point to what do more of, what is working, and what to adjust that isn’t working.

When looking at an AV system, the same principles should apply. The data collected needs to be correlated to other data or parameters that make its relevance substantial. These additional parameters can come in the form of time of day, room schedule of usage, or specific users. Correlating these parameters with the understanding of the usage of the room as well as advanced metrics like the “health of the system” and “satisfaction of users” can lead to useful results and conclusions.

When talking about the “health of the system,” indications can come from specific data like dropped calls, ambient noise in the room, equipment and room temperature, network usage, battery levels of microphones or other non-hardwired devices, and verification of device communication and signal presence. The “satisfaction of users” can be found in the number of service tickets, help requests, and by requesting feedback form the users while using the system.

IT’S ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

By analyzing the relationship between the data in real time, alerts can be set based on user-defined thresholds and important trends will arise leading to predictable and actionable behavior. An example is demonstrated by analyzing the usage of that room is experiencing problems. It’s usage will likely decline possibly before the issues are reported. Additionally, if a room demonstrates a trend of being available and unused at a particular time of day although others are in high demand, it may indicate that there is something causing it be uncomfortable like location, noise, temperature, or sun glare. Collecting and processing relevant data should can be an early indicator that a potential issue needs to be explored.

Taking it from another angle, correlating details on the users to the room usage and activity helps to identify if a device, application, room characteristic, or feature resonates with one type of user versus another. This information indicates the needs of specific types of users, departments, and demographics instead of presuming that all users are equal. For example

one type of user may want a simpler, easier to use interface, while others prefer flexibility and full featured functionality. Another group may prefer rooms that are a shorter distance from their office, elevator, or common area while others prefer a quieter, remote location.

ACQUIRING DATA

Now that the relevance of data and value of correlating data and parameters has been demonstrated, the next step is to understand how to acquire the data. First, it is important to understand that data can be collected in many fashions and by many applications. Button presses or actions of a user can be logged, the functions or feedback from a device can be monitored, the room schedule can be interpreted, the environmental conditions can be measured, and even the success or satisfaction of the user experience can surveyed. However, the objective is not to collect as much data as possible, it is more about focusing on the data that is meaningful and this comes down to what goals are trying to be achieved.

GET SPECIFIC

In addition to understanding what data is meaningful, understanding how to measure data in an effective fashion is also critically important. Device usage is a common request, but what defines device usage? Is it defined by how many times the device is selected for display by cumulative total or by frequency? Is it defined by how long the device is displayed or utilized? Is it defined by how the device is utilized? Some specific examples of utilization would be to determine if a computer being used for display vs. a soft codec call? Or, Is a dual display setup used to display two different sources or only one?

The importance of asking specific questions and defining particular parameters for measurement is meant to provide relevance to the data making it meaningful and consistent. Without guidelines regarding how to obtain the data and an understanding of what the data means, the metrics will have very limited value.

Obtaining data not only depends on how it is measured, it is also dependent on the design of system and the capabilities of devices to provide the data requested. This is where sensors, device APIs, connectivity to external systems, and programming functionality to acquire the desired information are critical to achieving the desired outcome. Standard device control modules or drivers do not typically support the specific functionality that would be valuable for monitoring. This is important to understand. In the past, when the focus of device integration has been primarily on “controlling” device and the user interaction, control modules provided only the features and functionality associated with the assertive control functions that would appear on a user interface such as power, source selection, play, stop, dial, hang up, etc. and their feedback states.

KNOW THE NUANCES

When considering data collection and monitoring, the required feature set for a control module or driver can be very different. Some important features may include device connection status, up-time, temperature, energy usage, call speed, call length, number of dropped calls, network speed, network bandwidth, battery life, signal strength, etc. Our industry needs to channel the IT side of AV for reference when defining these metrics, as they are commonly collected and monitored in IT management. This is the type of information that technology managers and clients require to address needs, draw conclusions, and base decisions. Therefore, manufacturers need to work together with programmers to identify what valuable metrics can be drawn from their devices, ensure that the data can be easily obtained via the API, and invest in an expanded set control modules or drivers specifically geared toward supporting monitoring applications and data retrieval.

The last aspect that needs to be considered is presenting the data is a usable fashion that is easy to interpret, clearly demonstrates trends, and can be used to make decisions without much effort. In its best format, it would be an executive summary of the most useful information at a glance. Alternately, having pages of reports that a technology manager or decision maker needs to read through to interpret on their own is not an effective solution. This is where we need to rely on a scope of work and list of objectives that are defined upfront to ensure that we identify what is information is important to the client, define how to acquire the data to support this need, and present the results in a manner that is easy to understand and actionable.

If done well, data collection can provide extremely useful insight and become a valued feature of AV systems. If data is not collected properly or is not meaningful, it can provide a false sense of confidence that will misleading and hinder client satisfaction. As is the case with AV control functionality, it is important to understand what is important to the client, define how to provide an effective solution, and design the system to satisfy the requirements. Control programming or software development plays a critical role in the process, not only for acquiring the desired information, but also in compiling and analyzing the data to produce valuable metrics and trends. What is important to remember is that is that the conclusions drawn from this data should be able to fuel decision-making for purchases, increase system usability, and improve user experience.

Although system monitoring and data collection seem like a daunting effort, if approached similarly to defining the control functionality of a typical project, with processes and procedures in place to establish agreed upon expectations, it will become easy to achieve a successful outcome.

Steve Greenblatt, CTS, is president and founder of Control Concepts, a provider of specialized software and services for the audiovisual industry. Steve is currently a member of the AVIXA Leadership Search Committee and has served on the AVIXA Independent Programmers Council, Audiovisual Systems Energy Management Performance Task Force, and AV Systems Implementation Best Practices Task Force, and co-authored the white paper Modern Approaches to Control Systems Design.

INFO
CONTROL CONCEPTS
controlconcepts.net