Gary Kayye (00:54)
I’m not muted. am unmuted. Hey, good morning, everyone. This is Gary Kayye and we are here for rAVe [TV] The AV industry’s only weekly live TV show that comes to you globally at 9 a.m. Eastern, is, which means in the UK it’s like two o’clock and in the rest of Europe, it’s three o’clock and California still asleep. Tim, Tim, I want you to show everyone. This is Tim Albright. How big his coffee cup is. It’s like a 78 ounce coffee cup.

Steph Beckett (01:12)
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Which is why we… Your coffee cup.

Tim Albright (01:15)
Great.

Because it’s 8 o’clock in

the morning where I am, Gary. And 7 o’clock for real because of stupid daylight savings time.

Steph Beckett (01:23)
Yeah, he’s on central time.

Gary Kayye (01:25)
That’s it.

Yeah.

Steph Beckett (01:28)
⁓ God,

I hate daylight savings time. Can I say that?

Gary Kayye (01:31)
I love it. I’d

Tim Albright (01:31)
Me too.

Gary Kayye (01:32)
rather it be I’d rather be light dark later, wouldn’t you? Yeah, keep it. Agreed. Yeah, agreed.

Tim Albright (01:32)
it’s horrible. Then keep it. Change it and don’t mess with it. I have no problem with that concept. It’s this annual stealing an hour of my sleep.

Steph Beckett (01:40)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Gary Kayye (01:44)
You know, if

I were running for president, that would be my one platform, was to keep Daylight Savings Time year round. I think so, because I think that’s the kind of thing that people actually care about, right? It’s like stuff like that.

Tim Albright (01:49)
and you would win in a landslide.

Steph Beckett (01:56)
Whose idea was that?

Tim Albright (01:56)
Yeah.

Steph Beckett (01:57)
Who did it first? Was it FDR?

Tim Albright (01:58)
Was it the 60s, Gary?

Gary Kayye (02:01)
I don’t, honestly, I probably should know the history of it, the theory behind it was that farmers needed more time in the fields in the summertime. So if they shift the time, then they can work later. ⁓ So because kids were going to school during the day, right? We passed a law that kids had to go to school. So they weren’t getting off school till like 3.30, four o’clock. That gave them an extra hour to work in the fields. ⁓

Tim Albright (02:02)
I don’t know.

Gary Kayye (02:29)
which really sounds good, right? Having your kids work in the fields.

Steph Beckett (02:32)
It was signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1974.

Gary Kayye (02:36)
There you go.

Tim Albright (02:37)
There you go.

Steph Beckett (02:38)
But he didn’t create it, was actually, the idea was…

Gary Kayye (02:39)
Yeah.

Tim Albright (02:40)
So it’s not that old,

Steph, is what we’re hearing.

Gary Kayye (02:43)
Yep.

Steph Beckett (02:44)
period. But it was actually credited, like the person who created it was like a British guy named William Willett. And he created the concept in 1907. And Benjamin Franklin also suggested earlier Rising in 1784, which I remembered Ben Franklin talking about it. Yeah. But

Tim Albright (02:45)
because

Gary Kayye (03:05)
So it took us like 200 years to adopt it. Like that seems kind of That’s it. I don’t know.

Steph Beckett (03:07)
Yeah, yeah. Well, we’re the United

States. We like don’t really do anything until like forced, so.

Gary Kayye (03:14)
Yeah.

Tim Albright (03:15)
Yeah, we’re still working on the metric system.

Steph Beckett (03:17)
Please give us the metric system. You know what, if I ran for president, that would be my platform, that we adopt the metric system because why? What do we need to be different for?

Gary Kayye (03:20)
Really?

Tim Albright (03:28)
It’s like us in three countries, Yeah.

Gary Kayye (03:29)
the metric system.

Steph Beckett (03:30)
Yeah.

Gary Kayye (03:32)
I just remember when I was a kid, my teacher saying, you need to learn it because otherwise you’re not going to be able to do anything without it because that’s going to be the thing. And the other thing I heard was soccer is going to be the biggest sport in the United States of America by the time you’re my age. And neither one of have happened. don’t know exactly. So anyway, yeah, we’re here to talk about AV News. I know Steph has a plan. one of the things I’m excited about is we’re going to announce the ISE best of.

Steph Beckett (03:45)
So, how’s that going for you for it?

Yes.

Gary Kayye (04:01)
ISE awards, right, Steph

Steph Beckett (04:03)
Yes.

So I wanted to give away five of our overall awards here on this broadcast to see the rest. There’s like 30 total. Check out ravepubs.com at 12 Eastern. So whatever that time is for you, I’m not doing all that math. 12 Eastern is when you can see all 30. But here we’re let’s share our five overall awards. Best Breakthrough Innovation. Big shout out to IPMX.

Gary Kayye (04:16)
That’d be new.

Steph Beckett (04:32)
This was the first year that it was here as a standard and it was definitely there at ISE It is literally all I heard about. So ⁓ had to, I mean, okay, I heard about other things, like.

Gary Kayye (04:43)
Really? Is that all you heard about? no, but I

mean, what I’m asking is like, how many, were there a bunch of new brands with IPMX? That’s what I’m asking.

Steph Beckett (04:52)
Yeah.

Tim Albright (04:53)
And they had just gotten off their interoperability ⁓ study.

Gary Kayye (04:57)
Conference, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, what I guess what’s unique about it is that it gives us an AV over IP standard. But Tim, you and I have talked about this. Steph, I know you’ve heard me talk about this. Extron and Crestron have not adopted it. And I don’t believe it’ll become a standard until one or both of those companies adopt it.

Steph Beckett (04:59)
So.

Mm-hmm.

Tim Albright (05:19)
Until one of them. Yep.

Steph Beckett (05:22)
I agree and I have hope.

Gary Kayye (05:23)
In

other words, it’s a standard, I don’t believe it’ll be widely adopted. Yeah.

Steph Beckett (05:26)
You don’t know that it’ll like be V1. mean

like.

Tim Albright (05:30)
I think part of, I have no idea behind either company, right? But my sense is nobody of, big like that was gonna jump in early. They were gonna wait for the interop to happen, right? To prove it now that you’ve done that, we’ll have to wait and see over the next couple of years.

Steph Beckett (05:50)
agreed. But to me, this was the one breakthrough that I saw. I don’t I didn’t see anything else that really fit this mold. So most impactful use of AI. And by this, mean AI that’s actually helpful in a space goes to HP Poly’s voice score AI. It is very, very cool. I highly recommend that you guys go check it out and check out the videos that we have on it on rAVe [PUBS] This is incredibly helpful in the meeting room space.

Gary Kayye (05:51)
Right.

Steph Beckett (06:20)
Eco Forward AV Award. Shout out to Nathan, we’re having a few minutes, but Logitech has really, really put like their money where their mouth is when it comes to being ecologically friendly and really, really being sustainable because I did not see any other company on the show floor that would bring the same pieces of the booth and reuse them year over year. I think that is incredible. And also

how sustainable that they make all of their products. It is so much more than the packaging. Big shout out to Logitech.

Gary Kayye (06:53)
One thing I’ll mention about Logitech about that, that we mentioned, I don’t know, a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago about this, but they actually are publishing sort of like their, how they’re doing it, exact, cause they’re doing it end to end. They’re talking to their suppliers about being, you know, sustainable, really, that’s really what they’re talking about. ⁓ They’re talking to their suppliers, but then they’re living it so that they want the suppliers to be sustainable, but they also are doing it with their own products.

Steph Beckett (07:07)
Mm-hmm.

Gary Kayye (07:22)
We’re using, you know, as little virgin plastic as possible, using recycled components in other places, making the products recyclable, having a system for you to process, all that kind of stuff. So, and they made that public, meaning they’re saying, look, we don’t care if you compete with us or you’re in another segment of the market, here’s how we’re doing it if you want to learn how to do it yourself.

Steph Beckett (07:47)
And here is the best demo that goes to Sharp for the LCD 4000. And here’s the thing, this is an old product, but Sharp’s entire thing was, look, this thing has been running for 175,000 hours and we have it in our booth. It was in the Vienna airport, now it’s ours. Any product that is running that long and still works,

Gary Kayye (07:56)
a 20 year old.

Yes.

Steph Beckett (08:13)
that’s gonna get the best demo from me on the show floor because that is incredible. That shows how well your products are made.

Gary Kayye (08:20)
Yeah, and there’s a lot of demos on the show floor, Tim. You know, lot of new stuff is demoed and really cool setups, but you got to hand it to Sharp in this one because this is a monitor. They literally physically took the same monitor, as Steph said, that was mounted in the airport, a 24-7, 365 installation, and showed it in their booth as, you know, proof of concept of this is a multi-sync monitor and this is, you know, this is product that’s been running for 20 straight years.

Steph Beckett (08:33)
Mm-hmm.

Gary Kayye (08:50)
And if we can build a products running 20 straight years, you can trust us for the rest of the products. That’s a great, that’s the kind of thing Apple does. It’s not the kind of thing that you expect companies in our industry to do.

Steph Beckett (08:55)
Yeah.

Yes. And so

Tim Albright (08:58)
Yeah.

Steph Beckett (09:00)
when it was coming to this and we were thinking about like, okay, a demo that really stood out to us, this was the one that I kept thinking about because this is the one that like stuck in my brain the first time I saw it.

Gary Kayye (09:12)
Yeah,

no, I think I agree with you. think it’s very well done. mean, but you know, we’re gonna we got a we’re giving awards to a lot of different companies. doing a lot of different things. And and I think we you know, these little previews will kind of tease you a little bit to go check it out at Raypubs.com at noon today.

Tim Albright (09:13)
No.

Steph Beckett (09:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. And the last one I want to give is best prototype that goes to Daktronics. They had a point one eight millimeter micro LED on glass and it was such a beautiful prototype. I have like my eyes could not even like truly understand how narrow of a pixel pitch that was. So definitely check out the Rave video on that. And to see the rest of who wins all of our awards, go to ravepubs.com at noon Eastern today.

So yeah, all right. We are going to go into a ViewSonic commercial really quick. Big shout out to ViewSonic, our sponsor and partner for this show. And we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna talk about South by Southwest.

Gary Kayye (10:05)
Congratulations.

All right. ⁓ I think we’re going to bring on Nathan, right? Are we going to talk about South West, South by South West first?

Tim Albright (12:01)
Don’t tell her. Don’t tell her that she’s muted.

Gary Kayye (12:02)
Yeah, let’s

not tell her she’s muted. why don’t we just keep going? Anyway, we got Nathan Coutinho from ⁓ Logitech. Hey, could you see, can you see us backstage? Nathan? Okay, so did you see you, Logitech got an eco-friendly award from us for ISE?

Nathan Coutinho (12:15)
I can, yes, absolutely.

I did, I was surprised. I

was like, is this the reason why they had me on? It was just a coincidence. I couldn’t figure that out.

Gary Kayye (12:23)
No, it’s

kind of ironic too, right? Because it wasn’t planned. ⁓ And we had, you know, we had signed you up to come on a long ago, but I’m going to be at South by Southwest. I’m flying out of here Friday morning. Tim, I think you’re flying out Thursday night. Is that right?

Tim Albright (12:40)
I’m playing out today, actually. I will be with Nathan tomorrow morning.

Gary Kayye (12:42)
Today, okay.

Yeah, so ⁓ Logitech has a big presence at South by Southwest this year. Steph, are you back with us? ⁓ there you go, there you go.

Nathan Coutinho (12:44)
gonna save better.

Steph Beckett (12:51)
I hope so. Silencing me

during Women’s History Month is crazy, by the way. I said silencing me during Women’s History Month is crazy!

Gary Kayye (12:55)
What’s that?

You

I don’t know, you’re playing, you’re playing card there, I think, but anyway, we’ll come back to reality here. But anyway, we, ⁓ we wanted to have you on number one, you know, congratulations to all that Logitech has done really in the last decade, but certainly since the pandemic. I think you’re one of the brands that kept our world running. I, I imagine that there are more Brio cameras on top of people’s monitors than any other camera in the world. ⁓

Tim Albright (13:18)
Yeah.

Gary Kayye (13:30)
based on the numbers I saw coming out in 2021 and early 2022. ⁓ And obviously things have changed since then. More people are in the office, which makes it a lot more complicated. It’s easy when you’re in the office and you have control of your environment. It’s much more difficult. And you guys have come out with some really cool products since then. And really, you’re the only company that is truly an accessory company in our industry. I know you don’t wanna call yourself that.

But it’s hard to be what you have become.

Nathan Coutinho (14:03)
Yeah, think, I mean, I listen, accessories is a massive business for us as well today, right? But I think when we got into video in a big way, we felt like we could really truly take a stab at making the overall experience better. And that’s what we’re really kind of focused on between desk to mobile to large conference room, right? You know, you’ve seen our products. So we’re continuing to try to, you know, build out that entire portfolio. So thank you for the sustainability award. I feel like we’ve done.

A significant amount. We’re not there yet, right? We still have a lot more to do, but definitely definitely getting there.

Steph Beckett (14:34)
Absolutely.

Yeah, no, y’all are making really, really great strides. So I was happy to get to recognize you guys for that. tell me a little bit why you guys are attending South by Southwest, because this is not an AV trade show. This is about culture. This is about creators. This is about startups. So Nathan, what does Logitech learn from being in that environment that you wouldn’t get from an Infocomm or an ISE?

Nathan Coutinho (15:02)
So good question. would say our consumer division has been here off and on over the years. It’s been probably smaller trade show type things. But our customers are changing. There more creators. Gary and I and Tim, we’ve talked about broadcast studios. They’re building them in corporate studios for the last couple of years. It’s been a big deal. Home studios, stuff like that. So now the creator has essentially moved. It’s not just publication companies or agencies. It’s actual, like me and you,

that is sitting at a company running a business and actually having to create content. So we’re trying to basically reach out to folks because like we’re not only getting visible through IT now, like people are watching us on TV, they’re going to trade shows. And this is a big event. This is a big event where a lot of creative types are coming. South by Southwest, EDU is happening right now as well. And then you have the Innovation Center happening. So it’s not just all fun and games, right? South by Southwest is an actual business event now as well.

So we’ve decided to basically do multiple activations. So number one, if you’ve heard of Logi Work on Wheels, it’s our trailer that we built last year. It goes around the country. Talk about eco, right? You build it once, you don’t have to keep rebuilding it over and over again. Well, there’s the gas, you know, you drive it around the country, right? But so that will be right on 4th Street and Brazos. And that’s basically right next to the Innovation Hub. So as folks are coming into the Innovation Hub, they’re checking out some of the other trailers, they’re checking out all the activations and come in.

talk to our engineers, see some of our technology live. And then we decided to build this thing called the Logitech, ⁓ Logi Work Lounge, I should say. It is on seventh ⁓ and Congress and it’s basically in Carolines upstairs. So we basically rented out the whole space. We’ve converted the whole space into workable areas. So the thought process was, you know, it’s going to be noisy, right? That’s South by Southwest. If you can’t find a spot to work, if the internet’s not working really great at your local coffee shop.

You know you have to register so it will give you the link to that so if you can send that out it would be great but basically register you show up you can have a beverage you can chat with our engineers with our creative people and I’m actually gonna see Gary on Friday and actually Tim on Thursday because I’ve set up a full mobile podcast studio so if anyone wants to check out how we built it and when we built in all the components of it I’ll be happy to talk to you, but I’m the host of that show Unscripted Which is a Logitech B2B show so that will be there for two days as well

So we’re trying different things. We’re trying to get to different customers. And I think this is just a great, great media event ⁓ and actual event to go to.

Steph Beckett (17:29)
And Tim and Gary, tell me a little bit about why you guys are attending this year.

Tim Albright (17:36)
Because Nathan asked me.

Steph Beckett (17:37)
Hahahaha

Tim Albright (17:40)
⁓ I have never been to South by Southwest and the way you described it is exactly it. It is a mixture, a cross section of culture, of music, of technology. ⁓ Obviously Logitech is there. You’ve got Adobe that is there. You have a bunch of tech companies. ⁓ It’s a bit like Silicon Valley figured out that they needed barbecue once a year and so they all migrate down to Austin. But it’s going to be a really great event and really more of an education

Steph Beckett (18:02)
Hahaha.

Tim Albright (18:10)
for me ⁓ because you what you and Nathan were talking about is that content creation part is absolutely migrating away from the big ginormous you know multi-million dollar studios into people’s homes, into remote locations, into the ability to pack everything up into a case and take it wherever you go. for us it’s really important to learn about that because the folks that read AV Buyers Club the people that read AV Nation, they’re doing

They’re tasked with putting these systems in their corporate facilities.

Steph Beckett (18:45)
Absolutely. And

Gary, you’re taking your class. Is it a whole class or just some students?

Gary Kayye (18:50)
Most of the class, I’m taking 12 students from my new media technologies class here at the University of North Carolina. And those are students I’ve had now for that would be their third, second or third semester, mainly most of them third semester. And I’m taking them because, know, obviously I like to push a lot of my students into the world of technology. I mean, you’re a former student of mine, Steph, a number of my former students work not just for me, but for companies in the industry. ⁓ And

Steph Beckett (19:14)
It’s true.

Gary Kayye (19:20)
I, you know, I think, you know, our industry is kind of like the best kept secret, but I think there, there are fringes of, of, of technology that are that way. And South by Southwest is a great place because you actually get to, there’s a lot more time to talk to it is noisy as Nate said, but it’s a lot more time to talk to individuals and sort of build relationships. And a lot of the brands like Logitech are hosting, ⁓ you know, experiences, right? They’re, doing, you know, pop up experiences and activations.

Steph Beckett (19:39)
Absolutely.

Gary Kayye (19:50)
and you get a chance and they want your feedback. the generation that they’re most interested in is the one that has the largest buying power for the next 25, 30 years. And that’s Gen Z, which are my students. If you look at their buying power, it’s much larger than mine or Tim’s or even your stuff. So they’re interested in what drives Gen Z because they’re spending, my students, Nathan, are spending on average two to two and a half hours a day on TikTok.

Nathan Coutinho (20:03)
you

Gary Kayye (20:18)
And I imagine that Logitech probably isn’t doing much on TikTok. And they may have a presence, there’s consumer products on TikTok, which obviously B2C is easy to figure out. But when you’re B2B, that’s where it’s a little bit more difficult. And let’s be honest, most people don’t end up working for B2C companies. Most people work for B2B companies. So, yeah.

Nathan Coutinho (20:25)
Right.

Tim Albright (20:35)
Yep.

Steph Beckett (20:42)
That’s true.

So Nathan, another question, what does success look like for you guys at South by Southwest? Is it like brand exposure, feedback, partnerships? Like what are you looking to get out of it this year?

Nathan Coutinho (20:55)
I think definitely number one brand exposure. mean, it’s all of the above, obviously, right? But I brand exposure is one thing because again, those creative types may not know ⁓ beyond the webcam, the keyboard, the mouse they use. They don’t know about our video products. They don’t know about our ⁓ our Amiibo cameras that we use in studios now, right? There’s a lot of products that we’ve released even in the last three years that they may have not had exposure to. And, you know, the other thing I talk about a lot in this space, especially in broadcast or creation space,

I call it the sub $10,000 per device kind of space because it’s things like Blackmagic that are amazing cameras, way more expensive. ⁓ But most people who try to start this process, I know I did this and thankful for your videos and your content that you guys create, but also on YouTube, I had to go to YouTube to figure out how to do all this stuff. Like creating a studio, building a studio, recording, editing, all this was not like, there’s no class. Maybe Gary, maybe you have a class for it, but I didn’t take it unfortunately, at least not yet.

Um, but I had to do spend a lot of time in YouTube. So how do people figure it out? They go to Amazon, they just buy whatever they want. Right. And we have so many pieces that are built for businesses. The warranties are actually built for longevity, not for like, you know, use it for a year and throw it away. Uh, so I think if we can make sure we, wouldn’t say, uh, brand necessarily, but update people on what we have in terms of our entire life cycle of products, uh, both for consumer as well as B2B.

And obviously get the contacts, have great conversations, great, great feedback from customers, which I know we will. Uh, I’m a little, my, my main intention here is beyond doing all those things. I’m trying to grab content. So obviously, you know, we’ve set up the studio. We’ve got like 12, 13, 14 podcasts that are going to be recorded. So I’ll have content for months literally. Um, so that that’s our objective is one, obviously make sure the brand is, uh, loud and proud and make sure we can show customers what we’re made of in terms of all the products and solutions.

And then just maybe, right? Dare I say this, have a little fun along the way as well. So we’re pretty excited about it.

Steph Beckett (22:55)
Absolutely.

Awesome. Well, where can people go to find out more about Logitech and everything that you guys have going on in the next coming months?

Nathan Coutinho (23:03)
So Logitech, the best place to find out our content is on logitech.com. That’s the first place people go. The secondary place is our YouTube channel. ⁓ I would also follow our LinkedIn page. So there’s a lot of different venues that you can get to. But I think for business, most people follow us on our LinkedIn page or our YouTube page. And then those obviously have links to all the other sub-sites and different platforms that we have.

Steph Beckett (23:25)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And all of you have so much fun at South by Southwest. I’m so jealous. ⁓ Tim and I are gonna do the rest of the news in a minute. But before that, we’re gonna go straight into a commercial from our sponsor and partner, Shor. So check out the importance of AV security and the digital age. We’ll be right back.

Nathan Coutinho (23:31)
We’ll be thinking of you.

Steph Beckett (25:34)
Okay, thank you. ⁓

Tim Albright (25:37)
I

was not responsible for muting you. just want to point that out there. That’s fine. I got a problem with that.

Steph Beckett (25:40)
No, I just wanted to blame you guys.

Because it’s Women’s History Month and I just felt like I should blame you guys. So, all right, Tim, we’ve talked about M.Dep a lot. A lot. Do you, what do you, like, I know we’re going to probably be talking about this for the next like three to five years, 100 percent. So.

Tim Albright (25:55)
a lot.

and we’re not done yet.

Steph Beckett (26:07)
What are your true thoughts on it? Like I know that we talk about that it’s good because it’s making getting things like Microsoft Teams like actually approved easier and it’s creating this like very natural progression for a lot of different products to work together. But is Microsoft taking over?

Tim Albright (26:30)
Yes. Yeah. This is an old playbook that I am old enough to have seen at least three times in my life. And I have nothing against Microsoft. I’m sure it’s a fine company. But I have seen this more than once. And my hesitation and my little bit of…

concern is that yes, Microsoft is positioning themselves to take over the space and ⁓ in essence, dictate what software is being used throughout the ecosystem, throughout everybody’s conference room. And that is certainly something for at least for me to be concerned about, yes.

Steph Beckett (27:17)
Yeah, no, that’s completely fair. Where do you think it’s going next? Do you think just like everyone is going to make sure that they are a part of MDEP? I know we’ve got a few stragglers, we got a few holdouts. Are they just gonna get strong armed into it? Like what do you think?

Tim Albright (27:29)
There’s a couple. We just had one of them on. ⁓

I honestly, this is Tim’s two cents. I think that by the time it’s all said and done, and I don’t know if it’s a year, I don’t know if it’s two years from now, Microsoft will eventually say, if it is not M-DEP, it is not going to get Teams approved. Period. End of sentence. And at that point, yeah, at that point you have to make a choice if you are a manufacturer.

Steph Beckett (27:38)
times two.

That’s what I think. Why would they? know, like from Microsoft’s point of view.

Tim Albright (28:01)
you can either say, okay, yes, certainly we’re gonna go down the M-Depth road, or they can say, you know what, forget you, Microsoft, we’ll partner with Teams and we’ll partner with WebEx and we’ll partner with all the other teams, we’ll partner with Zoom and with Cisco and everybody else and see where the chips fall. But they will have to make strategic decisions, I would say, sometime in next 12 to 18 months.

Steph Beckett (28:15)
Zoom,

No, that’s true. And I don’t see Teams going away as like one of the main platforms. Like it’s been, I mean, like a lot of big enterprises use WebEx, but for most people that I meet with on the day to day, it’s either Zoom or Teams.

Tim Albright (28:29)
No.

Yeah, yeah, and Teams by and large, if you look at any industry report, Teams has absolutely…

pulled away from Zoom as far as a percentage of folks using it, which is remarkable to me because I was thinking about this the other day. It has been seven years since Teams was introduced. It is an odd kind of weird thing that happens in life. It was a conference in New York in 2019 and it was at the Microsoft. They have an installation there, an office in in Midtown Manhattan.

Steph Beckett (28:53)
Mm-hmm.

Tim Albright (29:20)
and they unveiled this thing called Teams, right? It was an inner office communication, this, that, and the other, and it was very, very, very basic. And the fact that they have been able to explode this in seven years, some of that’s pandemic, absolutely, but they’ve been able to do what Microsoft does best, which is get themselves in a position of control.

Steph Beckett (29:42)
Yeah. So, you know, we’ll see what happens. It is really wild that it’s only been seven years. I feel like it’s existed for longer than that. Because Zoom has existed for longer than that. The first time I heard about Zoom, the first time I used it was in 2017 or 2018. My graduate advisor used Zoom and I was like, what is this? I was like, this isn’t Skype.

Tim Albright (29:51)
Yeah, it has, yeah.

my gosh. Poor Skype. ⁓ absolutely. Skype was it dude.

Steph Beckett (30:07)
Which is like Skype used to be like the one thing you use.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly. Like I’ve done like job interviews over Skype and stuff. Yeah. So isn’t that crazy? Well, all right. Let’s keep moving. You brought up this as well. Newcastle United banned working from home for all staff. Last month, 500 people. Yeah.

Tim Albright (30:18)
Okay. That is crazy.

I did.

Yeah, 500 people, right? 500 employees.

It’s like you’re not working from home. Sorry kids. This is a larger context, right? You’ve got Amazon doing the same thing. You have Starbucks for their corporate office. Obviously you can’t make coffee from home.

Steph Beckett (30:48)
Obviously the people making

the coffee have to go in.

Tim Albright (30:50)
Yeah,

but their corporate office, right? And there’s some hoo-ha around that because the guy that works at the CEO of Microsoft doesn’t live near the office. So, you know, it’s a little bit hypocritical there. ⁓ Yeah, this is a larger move and it depends on the organization, but it does two things. Number one, it forces your IT department and your AV folks to go, okay.

What do we have? Are we capable of bringing, in this case, 500 people back to the office? My guess would be probably not today. So for folks that are in that position, you gotta do a couple things. You have to assess your systems, and then you gotta go, okay, well what do we need then to make sure that we can house and allow 500 people to communicate and to do their job on a daily basis?

Steph Beckett (31:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s fair. I just think hybrid is the perfect model. Like you’re never going to convince me otherwise because I base my entire week around when I’m going to be in the office and when I’m going to be at home. Like when I’m at home, that’s my writing time because there’s no way I’m to be able to focus on that if I’m in the office with, you know, our entire team. That’s when I schedule like all of my meetings. So.

Tim Albright (31:49)
Hmm?

Steph Beckett (32:10)
I don’t know. Like, I don’t agree with people being like, ⁓ if you’re in the office, you’re more productive. I don’t think that that’s true. Like, if I have people around me, I’m not going to be more productive.

Tim Albright (32:20)
I’m with you because I am hybrid as well. work from home two days a week and that is from a creative standpoint some of my most productive days. Now when I’m in the office, different type of productivity, right? It’s when you get to interact with people in real life, in real space and there’s a certain level of collaboration that happens in real space that is difficult, not impossible, but difficult over video conferencing.

Steph Beckett (32:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes.

Exactly. So I don’t know that I agree with like all the CEOs dragging their employees back in office full time by the hair. ⁓ That’s that’s just like, I just don’t agree. Like it to me, it seems like very clearly the CEO trying to like make the lease worth it for the building. Like that’s what it seems like for me. Like they’re like, well, I think it’s going to make employees want to further their careers. Like, I don’t think that’s true. I think you just want to make the money worth it.

Tim Albright (33:19)
And there is an undercurrent there, especially Gary was talking about Gen Z. There’s a Gen Z kind of theme on, especially on TikTok, where the idea here is that you making me go back to the office just so the building owners don’t lose their lease is silly. Yeah.

Steph Beckett (33:44)
Yeah, it is silly.

So I don’t know, whatever. Okay, Atlas IED, New Experience Center in Germany. I pulled this piece from your website. So that’s actually pretty exciting for them. They’re kind of expanding their global footprint in a big way.

Tim Albright (33:50)
Yes.

Yeah.

This is ⁓ a direct extension of their partnerships with ⁓ Fine and with a number of other manufacturers, but Atlas has done some leaps and bounds over the last, let’s say, five years when it comes to the global. Now, they were already global. A lot of airports, one of the aspects of Atlas IED is mass notification. They were in a number of airports globally already. This is an expansion though on the AV side.

⁓ whether that is the speakers, whether that is their atmosphere system. And this gives ⁓ them a foothold and allows both customers as well as integrators in the EU market to have a physical space they can go and experience the technology.

Steph Beckett (34:50)
Absolutely. So next story, this is from Audinate. This is like a pre NAB story. They launched Dante Director Professional. This is for remote management of large AV networks. ⁓ This is a web-based management platform. It’s designed to help organizations monitor and manage large scale ⁓ Dante enabled AV networks. So Tim, why is this a big story for AVIT end users?

Tim Albright (35:19)
There’s a couple things number one is that monitoring of all your systems and Dante is a pretty Highly used standard right so if you are a Dante house something like this is incredibly important for your entire network ⁓ Whether that is a stadium or whether that is corporate headquarters this gives you visibility To everything that’s going on and gives you the ability to do things like update update firmware ⁓ and monitor

for the traffic and the security of that traffic. So this is a huge thing for them.

Steph Beckett (35:54)
Very cool. Last product story, Gary and I talked about this briefly last week, but I wanted to bring it up again. This is Epson’s mobile cart. So why do you think a mobile cart with like a portable ultra short throw, you know, projector, ⁓ why is this useful specifically in a university setting?

Tim Albright (36:15)
And why is it a category again? Like that, this is the second or third one of these that I’ve seen from other manufacturers where, yeah. Now, I am old enough to remember when my teacher would bring in the actual film projector. That’s a different conversation, but it reminds me of this, right? No, no, no, no, no, no. Actual film stuff. I am that old.

Steph Beckett (36:18)
Yeah.

Yeah, Panasonic has won.

Wait, I remember that. It was like the overhead with like the lamp-based projector and they would write on it with vis-a-vis marker. no, sorry. Yeah, you lost me.

Tim Albright (36:45)
⁓

But this reminds me of that, right? It is a portable display system, but this system has built-in speakers. So it is the idea of instead of doing full-on installations into a classroom, this gives facilities managers, it gives IT folks the ability to say, this room doesn’t need it for X, Y, Z reason, but this group of five or 10 rooms, you guys can share a cart when you do actually need it. And then kids get the benefit of having the rush of, oh, we’re having

a film today.

Steph Beckett (37:18)
Or

do you think it’s like for rooms that don’t have a front of room?

Tim Albright (37:24)
That’s possible too,

Steph Beckett (37:26)
like for

those like flexible classrooms that sometimes have students in groups of four, sometimes they’re all in a row. But if it’s like where there’s no podium because it’s made to be a truly flexible classroom, it’s made for the projector to just project whatever wall they decide that day. So.

Tim Albright (37:44)
wherever, yeah. Yeah, and it makes

it a lot easier in those collaboration spaces for those types of teaching spaces.

Steph Beckett (37:55)
Yeah,

so it’s interesting that is a full category now because there’s I think three companies that do this so really weird. All right, we’re going to go to a quick spot from our other sponsor and partner Crestron. So check out this about AutoMeasure and then Tim and I are going to come back and tell you about a few events we have coming up and yeah.

Tim Albright (37:58)
Yeah.

Steph Beckett (39:24)
All right, final few minutes of the show. Let’s talk about a few of the virtual events we have coming up. The first one is Rooms That Respond. That is March 19th at 2 p.m. That is with me. It is all about kind of what Tim and I were talking about, the flexible classroom in 2026, what that looks like, how you build an adaptable learning space. I’m excited. So make sure to go and register for that. It’s like an hour, so.

2 to 3 p.m. Eastern. It’s yeah, you can join. It’s not that much of a commitment. The next one is planning a direct view LED wall. What IT and AV teams need to know before buying. Sorry, I was like, this is long. March 24th at 2 p.m. This is sponsored by Sony. Tim, you are hosting. Tell me a little bit about what this is gonna be about.

Tim Albright (40:07)
Yeah.

So the DV LED market is another one of those areas that certainly in corporate as well as in education, folks are looking at these as a replacement to projectors, right? Sometimes it depends on the size, but they are equivalent. And this is not something you just go to a box store and pick up off of the shelf. This takes a process. And so we’re going to talk about the things that you need to know. What are the questions that you need answered

Steph Beckett (40:40)
Mm-hmm.

Tim Albright (40:47)
before you go down this road, this is from facilities, this is from stakeholders, this is from your CEO, like what is it they’re hoping to accomplish? What do they need to get done here? And then you can go ahead and go, okay, I’ve got those answers now, now we can go and design this system.

Steph Beckett (41:04)
Absolutely. And then finally, amplifying safety security integrators pipeline into audio systems. This is March 31st, again at 2 p.m. And this one is sponsored by Atlas IED. Tim, you’re also hosting this one. Tell me a little bit about what this one’s gonna be about.

Tim Albright (41:20)
Security is an interesting thing because you and I are both going to ISC West, which is a huge security show. And Atlas is…

Steph Beckett (41:24)
Yes.

Tim Albright (41:29)
has been in that space for a number of years. So we’re going to talk about ⁓ looking at how security integrators can integrate ⁓ audio systems, but also on the other side, how audio integrators and AV integrators can start leveraging some of the Atlas opportunities and the Atlas products for security. And we mentioned mass identification. Mass identification, depending on who you are, can be security, can also be AV. So talk about that little crossover there.

Steph Beckett (41:57)
It’s true. That’ll be cool.

Tim Albright (42:00)
Yeah.

Steph Beckett (42:00)
Cause I think the crossovers will only continue in our industry. So I’m excited to see how that crossover is going at ISC West. is my first time going. So, well, we’re going to have a good time. So, all right, Tim, thank you so much for doing the show with me. ⁓

Tim Albright (42:04)
percent.

Mine too. Mine too. I think… we are.

Well, hang on. We got one

one event that’s not virtual. Almo E4 you and I get to hang out. You and I. You’re going to DC next week, Steph.

Steph Beckett (42:20)
What is it?

I’m so done.

Tim Albright (42:29)
So Steph and I get to hang out again. We got to hang out in Anaheim. She’s been a fantastic class and a tour, so you get to hang out with her and watch her class and take the tour. But you and I get to go to the DC area on the 17th of March ⁓ for Alamo E4.

Steph Beckett (42:32)
Yes. Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yes.

And Tim, you’re giving the whole keynote, the full keynote for the entire… Yeah. Yeah. And you did a really good job. It was really, really fun to get to watch you do that in Anaheim. So I’m excited to see you bring that energy into DC. And the great thing about it is it’s all about security, more of that crossover.

Tim Albright (42:51)
All by myself! Crazy.

Thank you.

Steph Beckett (43:09)
and you look up like local security regulations. So you change it a little bit in each city that you give it, which I think is cool.

Tim Albright (43:17)
And it’s fun for me because I get to learn something new every time. obviously Anaheim, we did California. This time around, because of where we’re at, I did all three areas. They refer to the area as DMV, the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area. So I have a different slide for each one of those ⁓ municipalities, I guess, because DC is not a state, but all three of those areas.

Steph Beckett (43:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That’ll be cool. I’m excited to check it out. Cause I go to the keynote in every city I always do. So I’m excited to see what I can learn from your keynote in DC. So Tim, and if you guys want to come, it’s completely free to integrators and end users. So definitely go to eforexperience.com if you’re in the area and go ahead and register and come and hang out with us. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And then you can see what other upcoming cities there are this year. It’s going to cook.

come back in the fall in Dallas and then again in Boston. So make sure to register for the city closest to you and come hang out. So, all right, Tim. Okay, now thank you so much for doing this with me today. And yeah, and I will in fact see you in DC next week. All right, bye everyone. Thanks for joining.

Tim Albright (44:20)
Thank you, ma’am.

week.