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

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

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

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

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

Then vs. Cloud

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

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

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

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

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

Scalable and Flexible

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

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

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

Leveraging a Known Quantity

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

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

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

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

Networked AV is More Than a Disruptor

Not All Digital AV Needs to be On the Network

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

When AV Actually Meets IT Needs

Directing Time and Money Savings on Day Two, Three…

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

In our last blog we discussed the benefits of Crestron’s DM NVX, which runs on a standard 1-Gig Ethernet. Multiple HDMI outputs and native USB 2.0 routing are built into one box that supports stringent network security requirements.

To continue our conversation, we caught up with the Crestron team at InfoComm 2018, June 6 – 8 in Las Vegas.

Nic Milani, Director, Commercial Product Marketing at Crestron, recounted a conversation with a large automotive client. They stated, “Guys, one SKU—put one box on the shelf and that’s it.” Crestron’s traditional DigitalMedia infrastructure has more than 250 SKUs and proprietary cable that adds complexity. “In service to our customers and especially IT folks that understand scale, if you tell them you have one box that handles audio, video, control, and USB 2.0, it makes it much less expensive, while being easier to manage and maintain.” Crestron can now lead the capital expenditure discussion, similar in the way laptops and IT equipment are purchased. “The hardware is the day-one expense, now all of the sudden we start talking about day two, three, four, five, six,” adds Milani. “As an industry, I don’t think we do a good job about thinking of the soft cost.”

Day 2, 3, …

Imagine a scenario where a facility was built-out with an AV infrastructure reaching a hundred rooms, and the CEO decides the Town Hall meeting should be presented elsewhere, such as the lobby or outside. With a traditional system, it’s a no-go. Furthermore, even if you chose a networked AV system, if the supporting tools don’t exist, you’re in trouble. “You've taken what should be a flexible architecture, and because you don’t have the tools to manage those end points, it's fixed,” says Milani.

Enter the DM NVX Director, a single management appliance that as part of the Crestron platform allows users to configure, monitor, and manage all DM NVX’s on the network. “Director is the real-time management appliance for the NVX on the network and XiO Cloud,” says Alex Peras, Product Manager of DigitalMedia at Crestron. “All three of them offer significant savings in time, installation, programming, and ultimately cost.”

Think of DM NVX Director as a virtual matrix. “It allows you to provision all the devices on the network and allows you to group them into virtual matrixes,” says Peras. “You can separate transmitters and receivers, and from a single web-based interface you can see which inputs are connected, where the stream goes across the network, and which outputs those streams go to.” From the interface, support staff can see the resolution of each display. “If you’re managing a solution with hundreds of devices, you can see if the HDMI input or output is disconnected, or if the stream isn’t routed correctly.” Director provides the tools to manage routings directly from the page. “Anything can be done at the management level,” notes Peras.

Sea of Endpoints

An important feature of Director is its endpoint map. “It allows you to see all the groups of devices and their associated multicast addresses, if they are in transmit mode, and allows you to see the names and numbers associated with the device if they’re in receiver mode,” says Peras. “These numbers allow you to control the device from a Crestron 3-Series control system.”

While this endpoint map is traditionally static, Director allows endpoints to be dynamically changed. “Think about every input in a DM NVX as an input on this sea of endpoints,” says Milani. “Every output can subscribe to any one of those.” Say a company is doing a fundraiser and every display in the building needs to share the same digital signage feed. With a few clicks within Director, a user could broadcast their content to every device in the facility. “This gives you the ability to change things and make the system evolve and work for you,” says Milani.

In the end, it’s important that you think beyond the initial deployment and know how your evolving business needs will impact the infrastructure. Can your networked AV system adapt to your new reality?

Next week watch for the last of six installments of the InfoComm Networked AV Series, where we discuss Networked AV via The Cloud with the Crestron team.

Don’t miss a social beat – follow #MyInfoComm2018 and make sure you visit Crestron located in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at booth C2562.

Truly Converged AV over IP

Since we’ve been reporting on AV over IP, there’s been an asterisk. Or more like a hammer from IT directors declaring “not on my network!” Enterprise networks are carefully guarded, as they should be.

The AV industry has spent a lot of time discussing latency and compatibly issues of networked AV, then preaching how AV folks need to become IT experts. Yet you could say we’ve only pontificated about AV/IT convergence.

Until now, AV over IP products were designed as digital iterations of analog products with matrix switchers and other devices requiring customized programming to communicate on a network. Because many AV over IP products are complex and bring with them too many variables such as bandwidth-choking video—as well as potential security holes—the easier and safer route has been to create an ‘AV network.’

Is it really networked AV when it can’t live on the enterprise network? Most would say no. Many IT directors would say they don’t care, as long as it wasn’t on their network.

If …

What if AV solutions were developed so they needed to live on a standard 1-Gig Ethernet enterprise network, and that they needed to connect as easily as printers, and that security concerns were addressed?

Then …

Think of a world where AV integration expertise is directed to the areas that matter most. IT departments don’t need to run duplicate infrastructure of cable and switches. Extra routers and extenders aren’t needed, capital expenses are potentially cut in half, and everything becomes simpler. Sounds like truly converged networked AV.

AV Meets IT Needs

“IT folks who own the infrastructure want to minimize the number of things they need to manage and monitor,” says Daniel Jackson, Director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron. “To do that, AV needs to truly converge with IT.”

This is where Crestron’s DM NVX enters the picture. “Running on a standard 1-Gig Ethernet, the DM NVX has multiple HDMI outputs and native USB 2.0 routing already built into the one box,” says Alex Peras, Product Manager of DigitalMedia at Crestron. “The benefits that were already part of DigitalMedia, such as EDID, HDCP management, DSP downmixing and a lot more, are part of the new DM NVX.”

With DM NVX, all AV can run on the building’s existing Ethernet infrastructure, which saves an enormous amount of money by not needing to purchase and install new specialized cable such as CAT-6a, CAT-7, or fiber. “Not only is there a huge cost savings in labor, think of one box [DM NVX] replacing large, fixed matrix switchers, USB extenders, HDMI switchers, and extra encoders,” says Peras.

Two reasons AV had been relegated to its own network were security concerns and that AV needed a proprietary infrastructure. With advanced compression technologies such as enabling 4K60 4:4:4 HDR on 1-Gig Ethernet and working with companies such as Intel (see “What’s Inside” below), these concerns have been addressed with DM NVX.

“The DM NVX runs on the same Crestron control platform everyone is used to,” says Peras. “And network-grade security is built in, including 802.1X, Network Access Control, SSH, TLS, HTTPS, and AES-128.”

Configuration and deployment are easy using DM NVX Director, an enterprise-grade network appliance that provides a single point to monitor, manage, and control the entire DM NVX system from a web browser. NVX Director automatically discovers up to 1,000 endpoints, creates groups or domains, maps network addresses to user-friendly names, troubleshoots, and more.

AV Meets IoT

Device configuration, firmware upgrades, and monitoring via the cloud are in the IT wheelhouse. “DM NVX will have native support for Crestron’s XiO Cloud,” says Jackson. Crestron has confirmed the firmware upgrade for DM NVX will be available mid-June.

“The cloud is hugely important to our industry and will be critical to a deployment on shared infrastructure,” says Jackson. “I think this will blow people's mind with the ability to do what we call ‘plug-in and provision.’ You can remotely configure the device ahead of time and without ever physically touching it. Once the device is plugged in and can reach the service, it will pull down its complete configuration.

Anybody doing a deployment for scale can set all this stuff up ahead of time, and then it just plugs in, and you get the configuration.” One of the biggest challenges of deployment is going through and verifying that everything actually works. “If management consultants came into our industry, it would blow their mind how much labor and effort has to go into deploying every single system. That's because as an industry we were forced to build things like the auto industry did before the Model T came along with the advanced production line. We as manufacturers needed to build better tools to enable the industry to grow. The ability to deploy, manage and monitor via the cloud is a game-changer,” says Jackson.

IT Meets AV Industry Giant

With nearly 50 years experience, Crestron has risen as the leader in enterprise AV control, automation, and solutions. Although it’s a privately held company, Crestron is no small firm. According to a January 2017 interview with Bloomberg, CTO Fred Bargetzi shared that Crestron was a $1.5 billion company. Most of that growth has come in the last six years; a 2012 Forbes article stated the company had $500 million in annual revenue.

“It wasn’t that long ago we had a hard time getting the best companies to talk to us, because we just weren't to that scale,” says Peras. “Now, it's radically changed. We have chip vendors and technology providers coming to us to help them with their roadmaps and guide them to build better solutions.”

The relationship with Intel culminated in DM NVX. It is an iterative build (a significant one) upon DigitalMedia that has been widely deployed, and technology features evolving since its release in 2008. “Every piece of technology that was in previous DigitalMedia products are present in DM NVX network video solutions,” says Peras.

What’s Inside

In a statement in February 2017, Intel announced that the company was providing its Arria 10 FPGA devices for Crestron’s DigitalMedia NVX (DM NVX) technology architecture, which was demonstrated at Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) later that month.

What’s inside Intel’s Arria 10 FPGA device helped catapult DM NVX to the forefront and changed Crestron’s networked AV story.

Nanometers, TFLOPS, and FPGAs

The AV industry may already have too many speeds, feeds and acronyms to remember—but the IT world wrote the book.

The field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer after manufacturing. The FPGA enables in-field firmware upgrades, eliminating the need for hardware upgrades and minimizing truck rolls.

“When programmable, customizable Intel FPGAs are built into these systems, they enable designers to re-architect enterprise networks to support collaboration for 4K, and ultimately [create] even higher-performance 8K networks,” wrote Erhaan Shaikh, vice president and general manager of the Intel Programmable Solutions Group, in an article discussing the DM NVX launch.

The Arria 10 FPGA spec sheet is a veritable what’s what of AV performance: 4K60 4:4:4 10-bit high-resolution video scaler, visually lossless encoding/decoding, HDMI 2.0a connectivity, ultra-low-latency Ethernet, and TFLOPS of digital signal processing (DSP) performance.

Scale and Reliability

Crestron’s growth has allowed the company to manufacture products at scale. “A lot of what we do today is automated manufacturing,” explains Peras. “We have 3D X-ray machines to examine solder joints underneath chips where they aren't visible. These are complex manufacturing processes, and between that and our industry connections we're able to manufacture something that frankly is a lot more reliable than we would have been able to do five to 10 years ago.”

DM NVX may be a new product, but its 10-years of development has paid off. “Our RMA rate is so low that I can't put a number on it,” says Peras. “That’s in large part due to the fact that we've been designing products for so many years, we take the things we've learned and put it into the NVX. It gave us that ability to perform.”

It’s a global world, and with scale comes a global supply chain. “We effectively control all the factories that make our products, and that gives us tighter control over the entire supply chain.” Crestron has 90 regional offices around the globe and three distribution warehouses located in the United States, Belgium, and Australia. “Smaller companies have to go through distribution, making it more difficult to ensure quality,” adds Peras.

With rapid growth comes large-scale challenges. “We're at the stage now where we've sold so many NVXs that Intel is running out of supply of the particular chips we need. With the scale we're at now, and with our relationships, we're able to solve it with our supply chain,” concludes Peras.

AV/IT

Intel and Microsoft have booths at InfoComm, and it’s clear these IT giants have more than taken notice of the AV industry. It’s an exciting time.

Make sure you visit Crestron during InfoComm at booth C2562 to discuss these topics and learn how AV now runs on the enterprise network.

During the two weeks following InfoComm, watch for the last two of six installments of the InfoComm Networked AV Series, in which Jackson and Peras discuss Successful Web Collaboration, and Networked AV via The Cloud.

InfoComm18 Networked AV Series:

One of Six: Networked AV — More Than a Disrupter

Two of Six: Not All Digital AV Needs to be On the Network

Three of Six: 4K Networked Video Image Quality, 1-Gig, and the Latency Discussion

Don’t miss a social beat – follow #MyInfoComm2018 and make sure you visit Crestron located in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at booth C2562.

Last year justifying 4K video product purchases was a stretch.

According to interviews we’ve done with end users this year, when it comes time to purchase projectors or flat panel displays many are opting for 4K as the price-point is coming down and the higher-resolution provides future-proofing. Depending on the application, 4K camcorders and PTZ cameras are beginning to make their way into more corporate, medical, and higher education classroom environments. Finally, the “no 4K content” argument is disappearing.

In addition, mission critical video content viewed on 4K displays in applications such as simulation training, medical procedure streams, and in command and control centers demands the highest quality and the least latency possible.

“If you think about these larger spaces where you have more complex AV, those are typically the customers that have higher requirements, because they not only have more sources, they have a higher demand for media in general,” says Daniel Jackson, Director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron. These customers are already investing in 4K because no one builds a room with a two-year lifecycle in mind. “You're trying to build rooms for a minimum of five-years, usually 7 to 10 years or longer, and 4K is expected.”

Customer demand for 4K has increased steadily in the past six to 12 months. Alex Peras, Manager of DigitalMedia, cites key drivers as the release of the Apple TV 4K and MacBook Pro and other 4K-capable laptops. “4K has become ubiquitous,” says Peras. “If you actually want to make full use of the computer that you carry around, you want to support 4K in all your spaces.”

The jury is no longer out: Whether in large or smaller spaces, a 4K ecosystem is a must. The important part is how to put this 4K ecosystem on the network.

91 Times to the Moon and Back

Give or take a few trips to the moon and back, there are more than 70 billion meters of CAT5e and CAT6 deployed throughout the world. Unless an installation is part of a major renovation or a new build, Jackson says, “that’s an absolutely staggering amount of installed cable in buildings that support 1-Gig and soon, 2.5-Gig and 5-Gig Ethernet.” Stepping up to Cat6a or Cat7 to support a 10-Gig infrastructure to every endpoint is a rip-and-replace when it’s not necessary—especially when all of that bandwidth is taken up by a single application—video.

New advanced video compression technologies are enabling the transport of 4K signals over standard 1-Gig Ethernet. The question has to be asked, why wouldn’t you use the existing 1-Gig infrastructure? If you don’t ask it, your CFO surely will.

There’s more than one way to transmit 4K60 4:4:4 HDR signals over a network. No matter how you slice it, the 4K signal that comes across HDMI or DisplayPort connections is a whopping 18 Gigabits per second. “You either say I'm going to compress it a little bit and send the 4K signal around on a 10-Gig network,” notes Jackson. “Or, you say I'm going to compress it a little bit more and send it over standard 1-Gig Ethernet.” It all comes down to what the picture looks like on the other side.

Fuzzy Numbers

There’s no shortage of controversial topics in the AV industry. It’s widely accepted that when reading a video display spec sheet, the stated contrast ratio should be taken with a grain of salt and a pinch of skepticism. To a certain extent, these numbers can be gamed, depending on the ambient light when the contrast ratio is measured, as well as other factors.

Some contend that spec sheets mask a multitude of fuzzy math, especially when interpreting networked video quality. Comparing two products from different companies with the same specs such as 20:1 video compression running on a 1-Gig Ethernet doesn’t present the full picture. “There's no spec you can read for the quality of compression,” says Peras. “You'll get vastly different performance results depending on the type of process used to achieve the compression.”

Jackson agrees, “You can't just read it off of a spec sheet anymore because we're in a world of compression. It's all about what the video quality looks like on real-world content.” The best way to determine if a product meets your quality standards is to ask vendors for a demo in your facility using content familiar to you.

The Latency Discussion

In 2014 a team of neuroscientists from MIT found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. The study appears in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. “This ability to identify images seen so briefly may help the brain as it decides where to focus the eyes, which dart from point to point in brief movements called fixations, about three times per second,” says Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the study. “Deciding where to move the eyes can take 100 to 140 milliseconds, so very high-speed understanding must occur before that.”

Anything below 13 milliseconds is considered imperceptible by mere mortals—and numerous terms are used to describe what is nearly imperceptible in the sub-50 milliseconds latency range. Some refer to this as “near-real-time,” while others say “zero latency. Crestron uses “no additional latency.”

Latency is often added because of scaling or compression, thus networked video compression inherently adds latency. “If a manufacturer is not optimizing for it, you could have a ton of latency,” warns Peras. “There are solutions out there that can add anywhere from 50 to 150 milliseconds of latency.”

Acceptable latency matters in many applications. If video is being streamed to an overflow room, then latency hardly matters at all. A couple of seconds of delay might be acceptable. “However, imagine trying to move a mouse around, and it's dragging behind you ever so slowly on the screen,” says Jackson. “It becomes really frustrating.” Acceptable latency in this application is under 50 milliseconds.

Make sure you visit Crestron during InfoComm at booth C2562 to discuss these topics and check out a live demo, so you can learn to judge video quality beyond the spec sheet.

During InfoComm watch for the fourth of six installments of the InfoComm Networked AV Series where Jackson and Peras discuss, “The Single Point of Failure?” With several pieces of AV hardware, various software applications, multiple user access, and more; identifying a single point of failure might be several points of failure. We discuss how to mitigate failure.

InfoComm18 Networked AV Series:

One of Six: https://www.avnetwork.com/insights-and-blogs/networked-av-more-than-a-disruptor

Two of Six: https://www.avnetwork.com/av-network-blogs/why-not-all-digital-av-needs-to-be-on-the-network

Don’t miss a social beat – follow #MyInfoComm2018 and make sure you visit Crestron located in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at booth C2562.

The confluence of a new mobile workforce and higher real estate costs have pushed facilities managers to create more efficient use of their existing space. This trend also has forced the creation of smaller meeting spaces. The U.S. Workplace Survey conducted by Gensler Research in 2016 stated, “Innovators spend less time at their desks, instead collaborating and socializing from conference rooms, open meeting areas, and café spaces.”

As the networked AV universe continues to expand, the rush to put all digital AV equipment and devices on the network may overshoot what is practical or fiscally responsible for every application. Cost-effective, point-to-point, all-in-one, and standalone solutions are filling the need for small collaboration spaces and huddle rooms.

Traditionally, the AV industry has been focused on high-end conference and meeting rooms with multiple laptop connections at the table, a control panel, a video conferencing codec, a matrix switcher, table microphones, and a speaker. “In the most basic rooms, you might just have a laptop and want to plug it in and get an image on-screen,” says Daniel Jackson, director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron. “There's a lot of growth with these low-cost, simple systems that provide a needed solution.”

Crestron and other control companies are seizing an opportunity once only filled by traditional conferencing manufacturers, by offering stand-alone products that don’t require proprietary AV control systems. This tactic might appear risky when most companies want to ensure ownership of the whole AV ecosystem. It took Porsche almost two decades of watching its customer-base purchase SUVs from Land Rover before offering the Cayenne.

Jackson says that most people tend to think of Crestron as big, complex, and costly. “People don't realize that we have these cost-effective, easy to install, just plug it in, and away you go solutions.”

Flexible and Scalable

For an organization that chooses to install standalone solutions—whether for presentations, digital media switchers, or signal routers—it is essential that the products are “hybrid,” with the capability of connecting to a network when you’re ready.

Although huddle and small collaboration spaces don’t intrinsically need to be connected to a network to make them easy to use, these spaces can benefit from integration with room scheduling software to maximize room usage and employee time. Depending on the vendor, room scheduling can be added as a standalone system.

As you move further into an AV ecosystem, there is greater flexibility and scalability with the ability to deploy hundreds of rooms at a time.

Single Source Benefit

Although always challenging, three years ago, managing multiple vendors with multiple products didn’t have as much of an impact as it does today. The alphabet soup of vendors with networked AV products is of paramount concern for internal information security groups that demand any product be tested before going on the network.

“We’ve seen a ton of demand for consolidation of vendors because when you scale up, people aren't looking to be a product manager or project manager,” says Alex Peras, Product Manager of DigitalMedia at Crestron. “They just want to put something in and have it work, and if it doesn't work, they can go back to one person. What we are trying to do is give people the ability to stick with one vendor to solve all of their digital media needs.”

Exhibitors at InfoComm 2018 will likely position their AV product to be the ideal single platform solution. The question is, will the manufacturer make deployment, management, security and reporting easier?

Be on the lookout for the third of six installments of the InfoComm18 Networked AV Series where Jackson and Peras discuss, “4K Networked Video Image Quality and the Latency Discussion.” There’s more to the story than the spec sheet shows.

InfoComm18 Networked AV Series

One of Six: Networked AV — More Than a Disrupter

Don’t miss a social beat – follow #MyInfoComm2018 and make sure you visit Crestron located in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at booth C2562.

Remember the analog sunset? By all accounts the transition to digital was an industry disrupter. Yet few were fully prepared for the paradigm shift that followed: AV on the network.

Let’s step back a moment. Ten years ago, meeting rooms were called conference rooms, and few were outfitted with more than a star-shaped table microphone and a projector in the middle of the table that doubled as a room heater.

“Typically, you built AV equipment into your board room or a very high-end space,” says Daniel Jackson, the Director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron. For most of these projects, AV consultants worked on the design and the AV was installed by integrators. “A big job was getting 10 rooms, so it was very different mindset back then.”

Ten years ago, most manufacturers in the AV industry focused on a specialty such as control, switching, audio, video, lighting, and other standalone applications. Today, go onto the InfoComm Show site to the exhibitors list, filter by category, and you’ll see the same manufacturer or solutions provider in several.

The Connection

Jackson says, “What happened was we saw this analog sunset coming where people were going to be forced to use digital, and that was basically predicated on the fact that connections on laptops were changing.” We’ve seen these progressions with composite video to S-video up to VGA. The AV companies had been about the need to connect different endpoints and adapting to the next iteration of connectors.

The analog to digital transition was a disrupter that took the AV industry a while to catch up with—and it took even longer for end users. You still see VGA connectors in some meeting spaces and classrooms. One of the reasons it took a while says Jackson, is because you had to throw away everything you knew about analog. “The analog stuff was put on a scope, it was all about bandwidth, you could troubleshoot each of the five wires independently, and you would bring all of your equipment and you could test things out.”

Most everything changed in the digital world. “You can't test, and you can't see the signal going down a cable,” notes Jackson. “You have to rely on the devices themselves to actually provide you the troubleshooting tools, which was a really major shift for the industry.”

The Infrastructure

Today network infrastructure is becoming as much a part of the AV vernacular as Cat5e. “The change is not being driven by what you connect to, it's about what infrastructure you run on, and that's a very different thing from just being a signal or connector change,” says Jackson. “If you look at when we introduced DigitalMedia in 2008, at the cost of a little bit more than an RGB switcher, it protected you for the future. We've had customers come back and say, ‘Thank you for saving us a million dollars because we would have had to rip all this stuff out in three years and put in new stuff anyway.’”

The shift to network video is the current frontier. Integrators and AV managers are facing a similar retraining challenge, notes Jackson. There’s much more to learn beyond, “Hey, I know how to do digital video, I know how to punch out RJ45s and test and troubleshoot this stuff.” Understanding the impact of AV on the network has become even more important.

Alex Peras, Product Manager of DigitalMedia at Crestron says, “Where we see [Crestron] differentiating is not just the performance or the video looking good or if you can run it on normal cable, but it’s the tools and trainings and everything that give people the ability to really deploy things on the IP network.” It's a skill set that the industry is going to have to learn quickly.

AV Over IP — A Sea Change and Opportunity

Once audio and video equipment made the transition to the digital realm, the AV world changed forever. Can you say “IT”?

Early-on, as soon as the term “networked AV” was mentioned, the first reaction from IT directors was, “not on my network.” This relegated most networked AV to VLANs, which in some instances was necessary.

Audio and video expertise will always be squarely in the hands of AV integrators and managers. IT directors are not looking to take on the responsibility of programming or deploying a control system or mastering the intricacies of DSP.

AV over IP is maturing quickly. AV and IT experts are learning to speak each other’s language, and they are taking a seat at the planning table together. With a better understanding of network security issues, determining quality of service and bandwidth requirements, AV integrators and managers are able to answer questions and ensure products can be properly tested before they are placed on the network.

Concurrently IT managers are answering the demands of management and the workforce to collaborate seamlessly and access audio and video without delay.

This sea change of networked AV creates opportunities far beyond what was possible just a few years ago. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

At the InfoComm Show three years ago, networked AV products were just making their way into exhibitors’ booths. As InfoComm 2018 approaches, it’s easy to see that most will be showing a full suite of networked AV solutions. The question is, are they capable solutions?

Watch for the second of six installments of the Networked AV Blog Series where Jackson and Peras discuss why “Not All Digital AV Needs to be On the Network.” Isn’t that contradictory to what we’ve been hearing? Stay tuned!