InfoComm 2018 , North America’s leading audiovisual (AV) convention and exhibition, was held earlier this summer in Las Vegas, Nevada, and TeamPeople was there to take it all in.

The Place To Be For Pro-AV.

Despite daytime temperatures reaching a high of 101 degrees, AVIXA , the Audiovisual and Integrated Experience Association (formerly InfoComm International), reports a staggering 43,000 registrants. When factoring in 964 exhibitors spanning 550,000 square feet of exhibits, demo rooms, and special events space, AVIXA is proclaiming this the biggest InfoComm ever.

The event kicked off with a record-setting TIDE conference, drawing its largest crowd to date. Jason McGraw, Senior Vice President of Expositions for AVIXA, explained that the TIDE conference challenges AV professionals to “…. consider ways of applying human-centered design to AV solutions.” New programs such as Design Thinking for AV and Integrated Life Day were well received by the attendees and had participants collaborating in ways they’d never imagined.

Never Stop Learning.

In a sea of new technology and innovation, the true value of InfoComm is not just in its products, but in its passion for learning and education.  Inspired by AVIXA’s new motto, “Together, we can change the way people experience the world”, InfoComm attendees were digging in to learn what they love and empower the industry.

Among our TeamPeople representatives were technology managers, audiovisual technicians, integration technicians, design engineers and others, representing many of our clients as well as our corporate headquarters. Three TeamPeople employees became CTS -certified on their first attempt at the very challenging exam. Others attended classes and seminars ranging from audio, video and unified communications to emerging trends, live events and technology management. As expected, classes dealing with the AV/IT merger were at the top of everyone’s list.

The Future of AV Starts With A Packed Booth.

The exhibition itself is a collection of sights and sounds that would give the Vegas strip a run for its money. Arena-sized video walls could be seen everywhere you looked. Only a few short years ago there were a notable few, super-impressive, video wall manufacturers and almost everyone else struggling to compete for attention. Fast forward to the present and the challenge was to find a large format video display that didn’t impress its audience. Sony Corporation seemed to have won the attention battle this year with a stunning large format videowall that featured breathtaking content, detail, and color reproduction that had attendees shoulder-to-shoulder within the booth. Live audio continues to demand interest at the show with most manufacturers innovating in the direction of more compact, cost efficient designs. “Dante Spoken Here” signs were omnipresent throughout the exhibit hall as every manufacturer wanted it to be known that they, too, could deliver uncompressed, multi-channel, low-latency digital audio over a standard ethernet network.

Manufacturers are continuing to innovate in the direction of simpler and faster integration products that installers will love. Parts that are accessible and easy to swap, accessories that are interchangeable and snap in place, as well as product interoperability were all welcome advances for our industry. It’s difficult to pick a standout technology among so many innovators, but a few companies were displaying “holographic” images – seemingly floating in air – that demanded everyone’s attention. These large, 3D, multicolored, moving images seemed straight out of sci-fi and had dozens of attendees jockeying for the best position to video the strange, new, technology. Most attendees expect to see this technology make appearances in select settings in the coming year.

At TeamPeople, we believe in investing in our employees. Through training, certification, accreditation and exposure to emerging technologies and industry events, we ensure that our technicians, engineers, installers, and designers are consistently developing and evolving as technology professionals.

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2018 marked the second iteration of the Future of Media Leaders’ Summit hosted by Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar. While there were product demonstrations by a few of the supporting vendors, the focus was clearly on the information shared through key note presentations and panel discussions. The ever-evolving theme of the summit revolved around cloud technology and artificial intelligence (AI). During panel discussions, three simultaneous panels were held, one focusing on technology, another on workflow, and the third one on content and distribution. Panels consisted of media and technology executives that candidly shared their views on the topic at hand.

On the first day of the summit, cloud technology and cyber security were at the center of the presentations. Avid’s recent partnership with Microsoft Azure, both of which have partnerships with Al Jazeera, is evidence of maximizing the cloud by utilizing cloud-based applications that will give content producers much more flexibility to create and edit material on the fly and in the field. In regard to infrastructure, the impression I got from the panelists was that a hybrid solution, consisting of on premises and cloud-based storage, was the mixture that the majority of major film and media industry titans were either already utilizing or had plans to implement in the near future.

Over the last few years, there have been multiple attacks on cloud-based storage, which was the primary focus of the cybersecurity talks. Most of the cloud-based attacks were a result of security tools not being properly used and the discussion moved to providing training and convincing non-technical users to take advantage of two-factor authentication and various other cybersecurity tools to ensure only authorized people had access to sensitive material stored on the cloud, but it seemed to be accepted universally, that the cloud was more secure than traditional storage systems, due to the fact that cloud providers had an army of cybersecurity specialists working on defending and developing tools, whereas, the media industry did not. Additionally, in the realm of cybersecurity, “Fake News” also played into the narrative. Keynote Speaker Haroon Meer, founder of Thinkist, demonstrated how his team used “Weapons of Mass Distraction” and was able to easily manipulate trending news feeds on major news websites such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. In the end, the panelists didn’t have many recommendations on how to combat “Fake News” beyond making sure their organizations continued to deliver fast and accurate news to their viewers.

Day 2 of the summit shifted focus to Artificial Intelligence or AI. Over the last 2 days, no topic created more buzz in the summit, than AI did. From concerns of machines taking over the world, to journalists potentially being out of jobs, everyone agreed that AI can be useful to augment the capabilities of the media and should be sought after to implement in the media industry. One panel focused on the creation of the position “Chief Algorithm Officer” to determine how AI should be used in an organization to meet its goals, which the panel all seemed to agree on. My favorite quote from the AI discussion came from Dr. Yaser Bishr, the Executive Director of Digital for Al Jazeera, saying “AI is not the industrial revolution… The speed of evolution we are experiencing with AI far exceeds anything that we have [seen] before”. He went on to say that any machine that can produce knowledge that has not previously existed in a matter of hours, is dangerous to humankind.

Lastly, the afternoon panels combined cloud technology and AI to demonstrate what the newsroom of the future would look like. There was much disagreement on what it would look like exactly, but everyone agreed that cloud technology and AI would help media organizations greatly. I am personally excited to see what’s next in the coming years and to be working in an industry where both cloud technology and AI are going to have a huge impact.

Did you attend The Future of Media Leaders Summit? What were your biggest take-aways? We’re heading to Avid Connect and NAB in April and InfoComm in June! If you’ll be there, let’s connect!

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