Most AV professionals I know don’t think of AV as being the “construction industry.” While I can entertain arguments for fitting it under that umbrella, if anything, the AV business is “construction-adjacent.” It’s that adjacency that means that AV pros need to understand liens and holdbacks since they’re a reality of doing business. How holdbacks […]

I know this should be obvious and common sense, but to some people, it is not. Therefore, I always try to understand the reasons behind certain people’s inability to communicate clearly, whether on purpose or due to other circumstances. There are countless articles on this subject, yet I occasionally come across a situation that could […]

As we acknowledge the ever-changing impact COVID-19 and its variants have on our industry, our editorial team seeks to keep an updated list of what companies and audiovisual groups we can expect to see at CEDIA Expo 2021. Rather these manufacturers and exhibitors are in-person, hybrid or virtual, we plan to keep this article updated […]

I was recently looking through some of the very first articles I posted to LinkedIn, and I ran across this one called “Taking YOUR Road Less Traveled.” I wrote this about a time I was contemplating a change in my career. I bring it up again today because, over the past 18 months, many of […]

The Sony CLED has been the torchbearer for microLED’s wow factor for four years now. Everyone remembers the first time they saw it at InfoComm in the Sony booth. It was and continues to be a, “wow, that’s an amazing image” kind of thing — over and over. But, the CLED from Sony has been […]

In the first installment, I started talking about the importance of holding the line in the face of unreasonable requests from clients to discount your labor charges. As I am sometimes painfully reminded, there’s a difference between a hobby and business. Specifically this: If it costs you money, it’s a hobby. If it makes you […]

A few months back, I wrote a piece on the 3 environments integrators should be offering to their customers.  One of those 3 environments is the studio. In the piece, I stated, “Whether producing marketing content like podcasts and unboxing videos, teaching hybrid classes, doing worldwide company events or introducing new products and services to […]

Like G-force when a roller coaster takes off, the COVID-19 lockdown shoved me deep into my own seat. Forces greater than myself took away the freedoms I was used to. Possibilities were restricted. But work still had to happen. I had to find new ways to reach out of my space to work with others. […]

It’s Merger and Acquisition season again, and if you didn’t see it, Diversified just brought HB Communications into its fold and staked its claim as the world’s largest AV integration firm. In 2019, AVI-SPL and Whitlock became one as well, making it the previous heavyweight champ. These two titans have been battling it out for […]

What motivates a hacker or group of cyberattackers? The answer is typically money. For each column in this series, rAVe writer Paul Konikowski takes a deeper dive into a recent security event or data breach, shedding light on supply chain vulnerabilities, infrastructure and cyber-physical security. The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in May of 2021 caused […]

Not long ago, I submitted a piece titled “Things That Come Up a Lot” where I dove into some of the common challenges AV and CE businesses face, regardless of the specific vertical they’re in. I made the point that most are more similar than they are different, and while specific solutions may need to […]

Jerry Garcia and crew certainly had it right when they sang, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” Seventeen months ago, colleges and universities around the country abruptly shut down in-person learning and sent students home. Over the summer of 2020, they worked to make sure their faculty and students were prepared to learn and […]

Budgets are a bummer, and coming out of a global pandemic means they are tight. When your HOW customers could use an upgrade on six or seven key pieces to their system but only have the budget for three, which do you recommend and why? Here are the first three — in order of most […]

One of the topics from the sessions I hosted on my Pexip Platform (see my previous column, “What I Learned By Hosting 32 Sessions With Different Topics and Speakers During the Pandemic”) last year between April 2020 to July 2020 included a very interesting presentation and point of view from Josiah Hobson, managing director at […]

Not long ago, I submitted a piece titled “Things That Come Up a Lot.” I dove into some of the common challenges AV and CE businesses face, regardless of the specific vertical they’re in. I made the point that most are more similar than they are different and that while specific solutions may need to […]

I took my third business trip post-vaccination today and headed up to New York City for Sony’s first-ever AV Tech Expo at its 25 Madison Ave. location. I’d say it was worth the masking, walking and mouth-sweating (inside the mask). The expo was primarily focused on the new B (for high-brightness) and C (for high-contrast) […]

You know, I don’t normally write about sales-related topics. But I’ve always liked this story my dad told me when I first started out in AV/IT/automation over 20 years ago. It’s one of the many awesome #DadAdvice tidbits I got over the years as a second-generation entrepreneur. Though he was a pinstriper and signwriter and […]

I just finished watching Loki, a Marvel-inspired series on Disney+. For those that haven’t seen it, I won’t include any spoilers here, just that the show revolves around a concept called “the sacred timeline.” This refers to the way we see the world and all of the potential opportunities the timeline had to branch, creating […]

  I am actively engaged in the online AV community on Twitter. This weekend, a chat called #AVintheAM challenged integrators to discuss and explore how sports broadcasting as a vertical could yield some fruit on the local and K-12 level. There were a lot of ideas on the viability and profitability of systems and projects […]

Why did the pipeline get shut down if the hackers only attacked the business end?  For each column in this series, rAVe writer Paul Konikowski takes a deeper dive into a recent security event or data breach, shedding light on supply chain vulnerabilities, infrastructure and cyber-physical security. By now, most people heard about the Colonial […]

By Tom Kehr Almo Pro A/V Alphabet Soup and Math. Not your favorites, I know. I didn’t get all this at once, but I’ll share some things that helped me immensely. First, let’s sort out these letters. Circuits have properties, and we use values to quantify those properties. There are different symbols used depending on […]

Written By: Kate Couch Sustainability was at the top of the global agenda before the pandemic in 2020. But this thought was put to the wayside as disposable wipes, masks and gloves now litter our sidewalks. With governments having bigger fish to fry, will the fight for sustainability come back? Though maybe not just yet, […]

When discussing business matters with my dealer clients, most of the conversations center around finding ways to grow their revenue and increase profit margins. Ideally, we cover both. They’re both worthy objectives, and it’s something clients look to me to help them achieve. But they’re also only part of the puzzle. As important as growing […]

We’re fewer than 100 days from InfoComm 2021 week — the first InfoComm since 2019 and the first time two InfoComm shows will be in the same town two times in a row in over 20 years. I don’t think we need to review how and why we came to where we are with this […]

In March of this year, AVIXA released an Inclusive Language Guide through its Diversity Council, supported by TAD and Audinate. I highly recommend you take the time to read the guide: You can find it here. Better yet, I highly recommend you print it off and hang copies of it around your offices, workshops and […]

There’s a joke one of my sociology professors used to beat to death. It goes, “There are two types of people: the first type categorizes everyone they meet into one of two types.” I didn’t say it was a good one — my professor certainly thought it was funnier than we did as he always […]

I recently heard from a friend in higher ed that they had been laid off. This person worked in the AV group as part of the overall IT department in their college. Two things stuck out to me about this layoff: first, that any school would consider laying off parts of its AV team after […]

There’s an expression that has stuck with me for a while now: “The way you dress indicates the respect you have for other people.” It stuck with me partly because it’s not an expression I’d already heard a thousand times, like, “The early bird gets the worm.” It also stuck with me because, when you […]

WARNING: Might be best-read with incense burning. Symbiotic relationships. Yep, I’m going to go there. I’d like to talk about symbiotic relationships specifically as a design theory in relation to technology and AV. If that seems like a lot, bear with me, read on. In architecture, this principle already exists, and I truly believe this […]

By Gordon Dutch Re-Sauce Sales & Business Consultancy Ltd As I am sure regular rAVe readers will know, the regular ISE 2021 show in Barcelona planned for February 2021 was initially moved back to June 2021 and then canceled this year due to COVID. Shortly after, ISE announced a series of regional roadshows starting in […]

What does AV look like in other developed countries?  Written By: Kate Couch for AV Bend It’s easy to forget that many of the amenities and services we have in the U.S. are also available in other countries. Just because they speak a different language than us or have different customs doesn’t mean they’re not […]

Hello, #AVtweeps! On June 30, I hosted this webinar with Rob Ziv, vice president of business development and strategy at Almo Pro A/V, as well as Adrian Doughty, director of North American sales at Nureva. For this webinar, we discussed how virtual mic and mic-array technologies revolutionize meeting rooms and classrooms — and this is […]