Gary Kayye (00:51)
Hey Steph, how are you?

she’s muted. There you go. There you go, Steph. You’re good now. Yeah. With this, with this new platform, we always forget to unmute, but yeah, this is a kind of a wild, 10 days we’ve had here. Just so you know, for those of you, this is rAVe [TV] the industry’s only live TV show. We come to you every Wednesday live on ravepubs.com on YouTube and LinkedIn, all the rave stuff.

Steph Beckett (00:58)
I’m, okay, sorry.

Hey.

Gary Kayye (01:21)
And of course we just got back from ISE in Barcelona, but we didn’t all just get back. Steph has actually flew directly from Barcelona to California. And then you did the Almo Pro AV E4 yesterday.

Steph Beckett (01:30)
Yes.

Yeah, I did. what a time I’ve had. I’m very tired. ⁓ I can’t wait to get home tonight. But it was really good. mean, like, I don’t know why they chose to start E4 earlier this year, because I think it usually starts in March and this year they started in February, but it still went really, really well. ⁓ And I taught a new course this year and it went really well. And my tour went was

cool and fun as always. So I’m happy that they asked me to be part of it again.

Gary Kayye (02:05)
Yeah, I mean, you’re a big draw now to the show. And you did a keynote from what I understand to help integrators basically build relationships and manage relationships outside of product, Meaning, it’s easy to get someone interested in you because you have access to a product, but it’s harder to hold their interest over a long period of time when they’re not buying from you every day.

Steph Beckett (02:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think like what I have learned from integrators that I know and have talked to in the past is that a big part of their job right now is communication and that that is also the hardest part of their job right now. So what my talk was about was here is how to communicate all of the wonderful knowledge that you have to your clients because they don’t understand what specs mean a lot of the time. So why are you coming in?

talking about, this projector is 5,000 Anti lumens. They don’t know about that. They don’t know how to compare an Anti lumen to something else. So here’s how you should be talking about your projector to your clients for them to understand, ⁓ I need this versus I need this.

Gary Kayye (03:17)
Yeah, well, you’re great. You’re great with that because you’re great at being able to sort of dumb down the complexity of things and talk like regular people do. So I think you’re a great person to be doing that for them. And was the attendance good? Were they happy with it?

Steph Beckett (03:27)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think

it was good. I think it was like 10 to 15 people came to this class. It was taught at the same… ⁓ yeah, for E4 it was good. ⁓ I don’t know if it was the busiest one I’ve ever seen was either Chicago or Dallas last year. Those two are huge, ⁓ but it was pretty busy.

Gary Kayye (03:38)
No, I meant overall for the E4. Yeah. Good.

Yeah.

Yeah, California is always lighter. ⁓ But congratulations. I know you’re going be happy to get back home.

Steph Beckett (04:01)
Yeah. When’s last time I was home? Does anyone know? Was it, I think it was like 12 or 14 days. Yeah.

Gary Kayye (04:04)
I know, like I said, like 10 days at least.

So when you left North Carolina, it was like 12 degrees and you’re going to come back, it’s going to be 60 degrees today. So you’re coming back to good weather. yeah, other than the big piles that they shoveled in, they’ll be gone by the time you get here though, because it’s all going to melt today. But anyway, I watched a ton of TV and movies on the airplane. Did you watch anything good?

Steph Beckett (04:14)
Yeah.

I guess. Are all the snow gone?

Okay. Great. Perfect.

Me too.

Yes, have you seen or heard of a movie called Blue Moon?

Gary Kayye (04:41)
Blue Moon, yeah, that’s David Lynch’s old movie with, I’m trying to remember who’s in that. That’s what we got, what’s Blue Moon? How come I’ve seen that, I’ve heard of it.

Steph Beckett (04:47)
no, that’s blue velvet, right?

Blue.

you know, Rogers and Hammerstein, like the two like very famous wrote all of the music for all of these great musicals. Rogers wrote with someone else first, and they had this whole working relationship. And I cannot remember the guy’s name, which is really sad and kind of the point of the movie. But it’s about like Rogers moving on from him and the other guy kind of like drinking himself to death. So it’s it’s basically

Gary Kayye (04:54)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Sure.

⁓ I don’t think I’ve seen that.

Steph Beckett (05:19)
It’s

Ethan Hawke plays the main character. It’s very, very good. And it’s kind of all about this other guy’s life knowing that he’s kind of drinking himself to death. It’s new. Yeah. It came out in 2025. He’s good. He’s good as this role and it’s a movie written like a play. So it’s on one set and the set doesn’t change.

Gary Kayye (05:29)
Is this a new movie? Okay. Okay. Yeah, I’ll have to see that. I like Ethan Hawke a lot, so I’d have to see that.

Steph Beckett (05:46)
and it’s very much written like a hangout movie, you know, where like, it’s all in this one bar, which I thought was a really cool choice. So yeah, definitely give it a watch. Yes.

Gary Kayye (05:53)
Yeah, I like movies like that. The Whale is the last one I remember like that.

Similar, you and I both love plays and musicals, so that kind of stuff turns us on. what about, you told me you saw the movie The Moment. And what’d you think?

Steph Beckett (06:01)
Mm-hmm.

I did. This

one is kind of like a mockumentary about Charlie XCX’s brat era, which is, you know, popular with the youngsters right now. And it’s basically what would have happened in an alternate universe had she sold out and like gone with what the label wanted versus what her vision was. So it was really interesting.

Gary Kayye (06:11)
Mm-hmm.

huh.

Youngster.

Okay. Did you see that she had

⁓ a Super Bowl commercial? Did you watch it? Yeah. Yeah. Did you?

Steph Beckett (06:34)
Did she? yes, with Poppy. Yes. And it was, it was

kind of making fun of her doing that and all this stuff. It kind of felt like she was making fun of Taylor Swift a little bit in the movie being like kind of insinuating that Taylor Swift sold out for her vision, but.

Gary Kayye (06:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I also don’t think the people at Poppy like, I think the original founder of Poppy doesn’t like the direction that Pepsi’s taking it right now. ⁓ I think they’d be disappointed because they built the whole thing based on health and wellness and stuff and they’re going after pop culture. Which you have to do, right? When you want to grow something, you have to hit pop culture. So it’s got to transcend the brand. But in any case, ⁓

Steph Beckett (07:01)
Hmm, interesting.

Gary Kayye (07:21)
We just got back from ISE. That’s where we spent all last week. How many videos did we shoot at ISE last week?

Steph Beckett (07:28)
2300 a little more over

Gary Kayye (07:30)
So 2,300 videos, you can actually see all of those on our microsite. And it’s easy to find, just go to Raypubs.com and click on the banner. Or you can go to Raypubs.com slash ISE and you could see all of those videos. ⁓ And you can type in, you can search by topic or you can search by video. So you can actually type in any brand. If you know the product, great, type the product in. If you don’t know the product, just type in brands. If you just type in Sony.

All the Sony videos are gonna come up. I’ve been sure all the Shure video is gonna come up. And we shot, we actually shot, correct me if wrong, like 34 videos at one booth. Wasn’t that the record was one booth had 34 videos, one brand? Yeah, so we actually, one booth had 34 videos. On average, most companies have maybe three or four. But 2,300 videos, there were…

Steph Beckett (08:12)
Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

Gary Kayye (08:25)
You know, it was a really good show. We’re actually ⁓ going to do ⁓ a replay ISE, which we’ll talk to you about at the end of the show next week. So we’ll tell you about the details and how to sign up for that. Of course, you can always go to launch.com and sign up for everything. L-A-V-N-C-H.com. But in the meantime, we have one video to show you, I believe, on a new product that we wanted to kind of debut. So check this out from AVStumple. It’s a product configurator.

⁓

Steph Beckett (09:24)
So I included that because everyone has a software now.

Gary Kayye (09:28)
Yeah, everyone does, don’t they?

Steph Beckett (09:30)
That was major

trend alert. Everyone has a software now.

Gary Kayye (09:34)
Yeah, I think that comes from everyone realizing that they need to get into services. And I’m not sure software is the best service to offer. But, know, in the case of AV Stumple, that, you know, theirs is specific to control of live events. So that’s what’s, you know, that’s, that’s their bread and butter there. But yeah, I mean, there was a lot. I mean, you’re right. In fact, when I, I don’t want to mention the brand, I’ll let them tell, you know, the integrator. One of the big integrators told us.

Steph Beckett (09:39)
Yes.

Gary Kayye (10:03)
⁓ at the show, we actually interviewed ⁓ the founder of, ⁓ I think he was the founder of Yorktel originally, right? ⁓ And they just purchased or got purchased or merged with, who was that, Steph? Kenley, that’s right. And he was telling us that 40 % of their sales are services now. ⁓ And so that’s pretty amazing. Most integrators aren’t at that level, but ultimately that’s where you need to get to.

Steph Beckett (10:14)
Mm-hmm.

Finally.

Gary Kayye (10:32)
So check out this video. can’t do this show without our sponsors. Our three sponsors are Crestron, Shure and ViewSonic All three of them were at ISE. So check out this new video spot from Crestron highlighting their new products.

Steph Beckett (10:32)
Yeah.

Gary Kayye (11:43)
That was a big deal that Crestron introduced their own compute device. So they’ve been using third party computer companies and they’ve been repackaging their compute. Now they have a Crestron branded compute. Now obviously they’re not making the computer, but what they are doing Steph is they’re custom configuring it specifically for their application and it’s not to be used for anything else. So that will help with reliability and availability. That’s one of the problems that everyone’s going to start running into is availability.

Steph Beckett (12:04)
Yeah.

Gary Kayye (12:10)
because there’s going to be a chip shortage in 2026. Memory chips are going to have be problematic. went to every booth I went to, I asked them if they’re going to experience it. About half said no. know, I, for example, Nureva said we bought all the chips we need for the next two years. We’re good. But about half the booth said we’re going to have a big problem and we’re trying to figure out how to divvy that up with inventory. So this is going to be a big year for our industry. 2026 is going to be a record year potentially.

But if we have availability problems, that might cause some issues.

Steph Beckett (12:41)
Yeah, interesting. Huh.

Gary Kayye (12:43)
Yeah, so anyway,

hey, yesterday Christie agreed to sell their broadcast and pro video group to Vista, a new company, which is a, know, kind of a P &E company, ⁓ kind of a, you know, but ultimately what’s happening here that is interesting is Steph is that Clark Williams, who’s the guy who originally created the original broadcast products, which Christie purchased.

Steph Beckett (12:51)
Yep.

Gary Kayye (13:11)
they’re selling it back to him and he’s got venture capital behind him as well. I think, you know, this is interesting. You know, I did that piece on the show floor about how I thought, you know, venture capital ⁓ money is hurting our industry. In this case, it’ll actually be okay because you’re selling it back to the person who actually is the technologist. Where it’s hurting us is where they’re buying companies and then they’re

Steph Beckett (13:24)
Hmm.

Thank you.

Gary Kayye (13:38)
cutting costs rather than buying companies and building them up. We saw what happened to diversified as an example of that and they’re going through a correction because of that. And it can be done right, but most of time it’s not done right. And I’ve been concerned about that. So that’s what I talked about, but a lot of people don’t know this. So Christie is now just a display company. I don’t know how I feel about that because she has some great broadcast products and live events products. And I feel like

Steph Beckett (13:40)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Because spider is one of the things.

Gary Kayye (14:07)
that’s always a big part of their heritage. I don’t know if they should have done that. I I know why they did it, but ultimately it allows them to focus on one thing specifically, but I think they got into a lot of places with that product line as well.

Steph Beckett (14:15)
Yeah.

agreed. So I don’t know, I feel like I say this a lot, but this is just another example of something that we’ll just kind of have to wait and see how that pans out and how it works out for the industry.

Gary Kayye (14:32)
Yeah, yeah.

Steph Beckett (14:36)
But in another interesting piece of news, this one is very kind of cool. So AVI-SPL the largest integrator in the world, ⁓ announced this executive advisory engagement with Sol Rashidi. And Sol was the keynote speaker at ISE 2026. She was all in on AI before anyone else was even thinking about that. So I think Julian Phillips was like,

seeing what she was all about. And so the XTG side of AVI-SPL is also big on AI and sees that as a strategic priority. So I think having her be the strategic advisor for them is going to be really interesting for our industry.

Gary Kayye (15:24)
All right, real quick story about it. Not anything major, but NAB has just moved ⁓ the TV and radio stuff, the stuff that the people that from our industry would go to from the central hall, from the West hall to the central hall. So if you’re going to NAB, just be aware of that. I’m sure you plan your day so that that wouldn’t probably affect you. But hey, we got another sponsor who’s a big part of us.

⁓ And rAVe [TV and been there since the very beginning and that’s sure and they introduced a bunch of new stuff at the show Check out this this piece from we actually shot on the show floor I think it was the first morning of the show. So check out this video This is the new Intellimix video bar or what they call bar pro, which is their first foray into the video industry I want you to pay attention to the fact that it has four cameras and what the outside cameras are doing. So check this out

Steph Beckett (17:12)
you’re muted. There we go. you’re-

Gary Kayye (17:13)
show stuff. That product

was really popular at the show stuff.

Steph Beckett (17:19)
It really was in everyone’s like, what a video bar? Why is a video bar a big deal? Because it’s a Shure video bar, because this is Shure being like, we’re moving into this market and Shure has everything else already. Shure has the DSP, Shure has the ceiling microphones, Shure has virtually everything else you could need in that meeting room space. So why wouldn’t they have a video bar too?

Gary Kayye (17:44)
Yeah, and in their case, those outer cameras on the outside of the video bar are shooting diagonally across the room, it sort of gives them the ability to get two different ⁓ shots of the same person. So a front shot and a side shot. ⁓ And I think that’s kind of interesting. And that wasn’t the only thing they introduced. They introduced a bunch of new stuff. We have a story about the new MXA 320 table array. I’m not sure why that picture is their logo, though. That’s incorrect.

We got to replace that picture. But the MXA ⁓ 320 table ray is like a little, we should take that down. It’s a little hockey puck looking microphone that allows you to remotely locate microphones for larger spaces. And it’s compatible with the entire Microflex ecosystem.

Steph Beckett (18:15)
Yeah.

Yes, so just another thing that they had at the show. ⁓ Also, Airtame showed Airtame 3 at ISE, which is basically a product that I think is going to be, I think it launched in December, but you know, they say it’s their most powerful all-in-one platform to date. It allows for screen sharing, video conferencing, digital signage, emergency alerts, remote management, but basically it kind of…

locks in its broader platform strategy and it delivers that why all that stuff wirelessly. So very cool.

Gary Kayye (19:09)
All right, so QSC’s Vision Suite VSA 100 and Core 24f are now certified for Microsoft Teams, obviously. People have already been using them in team spaces, but now they’re officially certified for Teams. of course, QSC’s booth was busy every time I went by there. A lot of people were curious about what they were going to do, how they were going to exhibit now that they’re part of agility, but their booth was back.

Steph Beckett (19:29)
my god, yeah, I wanted to-

I wanted to do their demo that they had, but I never had time. So I’m sad that I didn’t get to do that.

Gary Kayye (19:41)
That’s okay. It was good.

It was really good. I watched it. They always do something really, really good and they were busy and I think a lot of people were curious if they would hang around in our industry or all of a sudden become part of just the smart building industry. But they had a big presence at the show and they said they’re going to do the same thing at Infocom. anyway, and then our third sponsor is ViewSonic. ⁓ we actually like same with all the other brands. We shot a bunch of videos on the trade show floor and ⁓

Steph Beckett (20:08)
Mm-hmm.

Gary Kayye (20:10)
of the ViewSonic products. This particular one is a new MIP163, which is a native 4K all-in-one DirectView LED display. So you just plug in an HDMI cable like it’s a TV or a monitor and it runs. But again, this is a 163-inch all-in-one 4K and it uses their new LDP series.

LEDs. So this is a new series they launched at ISE. So check out this video

It’s always hard to show LEDs like that.

Steph Beckett (22:13)
But that didn’t

look bad.

Gary Kayye (22:16)
No, no, it didn’t look bad. It’s just hard to kind of really appreciate the product. But it’s an all-in-one. They had a three-panel wall set up there and he was standing in front of. MIP technology, there were a couple of brands that had it there at the show floor. Planar was showing a prototype ⁓ of it. And that’s sort of like the next generation. It’s ⁓ higher quality, better blacks.

You’ve got three LEDs stacked together and you actually can ⁓ generate each color separately. there’s a lot of advantages to that. That’s the next sort of like wave of product. But this particular one is from ViewSonic. And I think a lot of people forget about ViewSonic and all that they have. So I’m glad they’re part of RaveTV so we can start getting the word out there because they’re a good ⁓ company for off-the-shelf products.

Steph Beckett (23:04)
Yeah.

Gary Kayye (23:09)
Right there. They’re, not in the custom made business. They’re not in the, you know, the all in one is perfect for them. and I think that they’ll do better with that than if they were, had, if they had modular led, which they do have modular led, but that’s not the thing that people use them for. So.

Steph Beckett (23:23)
Yeah, yeah.

So last kind of announcement from ISE, which there are plenty more. These are just kind of like the ones that Gary and I didn’t really talk about on rAVe [TV last week. This one’s from Cisco. Cisco announced and launched an entirely new generation of collaboration devices. ⁓ Basically, there’s the RoomKit Pro G2, the Desk Pro G2, and then the wireless phone 9821.

And so basically they are kind of highlighting AI powered management tools as a lot of people are. ⁓ But it’s allowing teams to design spaces in 3D, monitor room performance and optimize workplaces. So if you want to know a little bit more about those products, definitely go to ravepups.com because we kind of write about each one.

Gary Kayye (24:11)
Yeah. And of course, as I mentioned at the top of the hour that we’re going to have a replay ISE, which is our curated ⁓ event. guess it’s an online event. ⁓ You can actually get CTS credits for it, but it’s a, it’s basically we took, you we shot 2300 videos. We’re going to show you the say, I don’t know how many we’ll end up doing, maybe 50 ⁓ or so products from that. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll take a look at what we think are the 50 most important products launched at the show.

Steph Beckett (24:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Gary Kayye (24:40)
⁓ And that’ll be next. What is that? The 17th? What day is that? Next Tuesday? Is that right? Next Tuesday at 2 p.m. So if you want to sign up for that, just go to lavnch.com or click on the link wherever you’re watching this right now. ⁓ That is always a very popular event, but we have an unlimited ability to sign people up. So you can join and use it on our launch platform. And we want to hear from you.

Steph Beckett (24:59)
Yeah.

Gary Kayye (25:07)
We want as we as we go through the product, we want you to ask questions about them. We also want you to challenge us if you think that we picked the wrong product. So we want you to be participative in that event, right?

Steph Beckett (25:18)
Absolutely. And the last event that we kind of want to talk about is one with Zones. And this is called From Storefront to Screen How Zones Aligns AV Innovation with IT Standards. And this one is going to be February 24th at 1 p.m. Eastern. And the title kind of tells you what it’s all about, but it’s basically about how consistency and uptime are non-negotiables for multi-site operations. And this is going to be about how Zones applies these enterprise, enterprise,

IT standards ⁓ for pro AV deployment and kind of how you marry IT and AV correctly. So it’s gonna be a really interesting one. We hope you sign up for that one too.

Gary Kayye (26:00)
And that is our episode of rAVe [TV for this week. And we got a lot next week to cover for a replay. You’ll see that, like I said, curated coverage, but we do encourage you still to go, you’re typing the brand names of the top brands that you like, the ones you have a video search box on the page. If you go to ravepubs.com slash I S E you can type in all your favorite brands. And in fact, the way we’ve designed that page is that the 26 videos will come up first, then 25, then 24, then 23. So you can actually go back and

Steph Beckett (26:06)
we do.

Gary Kayye (26:28)
and go all the way back to when we, well, not all the way to the beginning. I think maybe the last 10 years worth of videos that we’ve shot at the show for each one of those brands. So just type in the name of the company and yeah, and you can review the videos that we actually shot on the show floor. So.

Steph Beckett (26:33)
Yeah, I think so.

Absolutely.

Gary Kayye (26:46)
Well, thanks for joining us today. We will see you next Wednesday with our regular rAVe [TV show. And of course, we’ll see you replay next Tuesday at 2 p.m. And of course, next Wednesday, this will be restreamed noon today, noon Eastern for our friends in California to watch it.

Steph Beckett (26:59)
Yep.

Yeah, because I doubt they got up like me and did this at 6 a.m. So it’ll be it’ll be it’ll be restreamed at 9 a.m. that this time. So all right. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Gary and I will be back together again Tuesday for replay. So we hope you join us for that. If not, we’ll see you Wednesday. So bye.

Gary Kayye (27:04)
Have a good flight, Steph.