THIS IS A PROMOTED POST A few years ago, the AV industry had a visibility problem. Today, it has a context problem. That’s a very different thing. We’ve gotten pretty good at knowing what’s happening in a room. We can tell when a display goes offline, when a camera disconnects, when a firmware update fails, […]

For the better part of the last decade, the technology industry treated “The Cloud” like the answer to every question. Need more processing power? Cloud. Need analytics? Cloud. Need AI? Definitely cloud. For a while, that was the industry’s favorite chorus. And for a while, that made perfect sense. Centralized cloud computing gave organizations enormous […]

Xyte, maker of cloud-based support tools for AV, recently published its midyear 2025 AV Cloud Data Report. I encourage you to read it — it offers some interesting insight into how the AV industry views the cloud. Before I go further, I should put my cards on the table. I’m a strong supporter of cloud-based […]

This month’s Temperature Check survey is now closed. Keep an eye out for next month’s survey! The cloud conversation in ProAV isn’t going anywhere — if anything, it’s heating up. With remote management, diagnostics and interoperability becoming key concerns, cloud-based solutions are taking on a bigger role in the way AV systems are designed, deployed […]

ISE 2025 was filled with the potential of an upcoming AV Cloud onslaught. Big brands such as Legrand AV, Crestron, QSC, Shure, BrightSign, Philips, Sennheiser, and Microsoft each had cloud-related pre-show announcements and were pitching their versions of managing products via the cloud. The show was simply too big to walk in four days, but […]

In the summer of 2023, a Chinese hacking group tracked as Storm-0558 compromised Microsoft’s cloud, eventually leading to the breach of hundreds of thousands of emails, including those email accounts of U.S. government officials in charge of managing our relationship with China (Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, United States Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China […]

What a show! I am proud to say we sent reporters from rAVe [PUBS] to every single booth at ISE 2024 earlier this month to shoot videos of new (and returning!) products. We amassed a cache of more than 2,100 videos, and we posted them all on our (beautiful) ISE microsite, which also includes photos, […]

Last month, we talked about AVaaS, (Audio Visual as a Service) and how it relates to the future of the rental and staging segment of our industry. My basic premise was that the current wave of cloud-based digital offerings has distorted our definition of the word “service,” much as social media has distorted our definition […]

Hopping down from the church stage platform, iPad in hand, the church technical director sees one lighting fixture not quite overlapping the center point upstage position. He casually selects the fixture on his iPad and drags his finger while keeping his eye on the scalloped edges of the light moving slowly, stopping only when he […]

By Anthony Coppedge The promise of ‘The Cloud,’ Internet-based software access and storage, has firmly taken root in both the desktop and mobile spaces. Even if people can’t easily articulate what ‘The Cloud’ means, they do know that their favorite companies, such as Google, Amazon and Apple, have made cloud-based services a big deal and an everyday occurrence. Churches, too, […]