Are You What You Are? Or What?

AV comes in on a cart. Production comes in on a truck. With terms being bandied about for marketing like “immersive”, “AI” and “AV” it’s easy to lose the sizzle from the steak. Entertainment experiences come in all flavors and forms. I‘ve been fortunate to have experienced quite a bit. That helps define my perspective.

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few years are a couple of allied applications/trades are glomming onto the production industry as it were one of their own. Or worse yet that they spawned it. Some may say this old roadie is just butthurt others are now leading the way. Fact is though, they aren’t. At least not in entertainment production or broadcast for that matter. During Covid a whirlwind of new applications and a few technologies were accelerated by the need to work remotely. Entertainment had to find a way to stream at scale using remote production methods. Broadcast was in a similar boat and needed to scale even larger with a greater number of events and crews. Businesses had to adapt by employing even more complex remote work solutions.

Some of the business solutions were relatively easy. Provide VPN to more users, open resources that might have previously been accessible on premise and find a way to collaborate in real time. It’s the last one that presented the need for scale. Enter Zoom, Teams, Slack, pick your poison. At this point the Audio Visual departments responsible for conferencing and collaboration events were even tied more closely to the information technology departments, specifically networking. There were collaboration applications developing prior to the pandemic but the pandemic accelerated it in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without outside influence.

It happened to us as well. Most of the entertainment business, at least at any scale, was shuttered for a year and a half or two. There were a few markets that were open but mostly everything was closed. We too had to scramble to provide solutions for entertainers and artists to share their art and try to keep the money coming in. Our applications were powered primarily by broadcast technology whereas corporate communications and collaboration were using traditional unified communications and audio visual meeting technology. The collaboration and UC business exploded as did remote broadcast. Entertainment held on by the skin of our teeth. We struggled to keep working.

As the pandemic waned and some sense of normalcy resumed office based businesses were thrust into a new paradigm. Remote work at scale. Once theaters reopened and tours embarked again remote entertainment dropped like a stone, the exact opposite of collaboration/UC. The collaboration and UC side things were on fire. IT departments were the business units that controlled that side of things. That was driven largely because those devices, rooms, applications were connected via a network. The boxes providing the audio and visual services are “endpoints” and “nodes” without regard in some cases as to what the equipment actually does. The application isn’t what the wire connecting them does. It’s what goes into the box on one end and comes out of the box on the other end. The network is giving it a ride. In many cases a complex ride depending on what else is riding with it but a ride nonetheless. That’s not to minimize the importance of networking rather to emphasize the application.

Meanwhile back at the ranch we started to open and build shows again. Entertainment didn’t experience the growth of tech or revolution of new methods and equipment that conferencing/UC experienced. However we were already well into a technology advancement cycle prior to the pandemic. The pandemic stopped us. It put a boot in the ass of collaboration/UC. With IT fully locked into the corporate side places like Avixa, some manufacturers and some integrators the term AV started being used in conjunction with market segments that weren’t traditionally AV applications. The only requirement seemed to be if it had audio and visual components it was AV. And if you networked them it might be IT.

The technology segment can be condescending to AV or production types at times. At the last Infocomm I attended a panel of the melding of AV and IT. It’s happening and has to happen. It’s a converged world in the collaboration/UC space. A presenter, I recall from one of the big social media companies welcomed us with “you are all technologists now”. Whisky-Tango-Alpha-Foxtrot? The implication was “it’s OK concert production types, you’re now worthy of being in AV and IT”. We’ve been technologists since Bell yelled at Watson over wire. It’s the tail wagging the dog.

In my young roadie days the term AV was limited to small scale meetings, conferences and the like with an occasional convention thrown into the mix. In the 90s many corporate events started to scale in a way that leaned more into entertainment production rather than some meeting at the Kiwanis Club room in the Hojo’s off the turnpike. A colleague of mine that specialized in that called it “corporate theater”. By the turn of the century (I love that phrase) it was full blown concert production level stuff. The C-Suite got to fulfill their dreams of being rock stars though without the rock. About the only one I’ve seen that’s worth a damn musically is the late adult supervision of a Harvard kid that dropped out of college to start an operating system company.

The implements that made these corporate presentations possible were almost exclusively from entertainment technology. That still rings true today. In some circles people are heralding “AV technology” as the reason for the production value in live entertainment. What it’s from are talented designers and techs using equipment designed for that purpose. The AV industry is late to this party. By several decades.

Networked audio and video didn’t originate in the AV sphere. There were initial implementations of digital audio over CAT cable for installs in the 90s but the current crop was developed for live entertainment, broadcast and recording studios (when there were such a thing…). There weren’t yet applications for collaboration/UC. The video capture and distribution tech comes from broadcast. Everyone builds from that. Presentation is a combination of broadcast, in terms of monitors and live entertainment in terms of LED panels and projection technologies. It’s not coming from Carol in accounting’s presentation on the projector in the conference room. It’s coming from someone that’s using it to projection map a stadium. Spacial audio is from motion picture presentation (various Dolby formats) sound artists, production shows and themed entertainment. Only over the last few years has it found its way into concert applications. Muting speakers or panning the presenter in a conference room is more of a mix minus application.

I don’t wish to drag my AV colleagues. Not too much anyway. Not everything that uses audio and has visuals can or should be considered AV. Any given industry segment, be it entertainment tech, manufacturing or any other field gets to define itself what it’s called. It’s not for people that think it’s good marketing to define it regardless of the intent. Some may say it doesn’t matter and I’m just being a curmudgeon. That’s likely to be true. The curmudgeon part. Very few, if any outside the industry will care what a part of the industry is called. Those inside will though and you may not present yourself in the best light if you don’t.