When I was in school, science class had a bad habit of making certainty sound permanent. We memorized neat little rules like Ohm’s law and what it said about resistance, even as the science we were learning kept changing around us.
For example, in grade school we were taught that the noble gases on the periodic table would never bond with anything. Ever. Full stop. By junior high, the story softened – under very rare conditions, they might react. By the time we got to high school and college, the same teachers who once swore those elements were loners for life were now telling us they were pairing up like rabbits.
That whiplash is a good reminder that “settled” science and technology often turn out to be more flexible than the people teaching it. The world changes, our understanding improves, and things that were supposedly etched in stone start to look a lot more like chalk on a sidewalk. Walking the halls at ISE this year, that same pattern was hard to miss.
In collaboration and AV right now – and especially at ISE this year – the tools are getting smarter and simpler, all while some parts of our industry increase their resistance, digging in their heels and insisting that the new ways are wrong…because they are not the old ways.
The Self-Configuring Room
For most of my career, there were only a handful of “proper” ways to build AV systems. You mounted displays or screens on walls, wired up a rack, added a control system, programmed a custom interface, and integrated DSPs, amps, and microphones from best-of-breed manufacturers. It was an art form and a craft.
It still can be. But best practices change.
Take room audio. At ISE, we saw systems that, frankly, program themselves. A great example was Nureva’s new HDX room speaker system. You surface mount it on a wall and/or ceiling, connect it, push a button, and it auto-configures into a voice-lift-capable, no-feedback room system. No manual zoning. No painstaking DSP block diagrams. No “call us back after commissioning” dance.
And here is the kicker – Nureva is doing all of that without leaning on AI. Add modern AI-driven sound cleaning algorithms into the equation, and you get cleaner audio from far simpler pickup systems than many still insist must be embedded in ceiling tiles to be effective.
Every time I describe this kind of thing in an article or a video, at least one seasoned AV pro will respond with some version of:
“You can’t do it that way.”
or
“Sure, maybe – but it will only ever be ‘good enough’ audio.”
That is not technical criticism. That is muscle memory. It is what happens when the tools evolve faster than the people using them are comfortable with.
MDEP, ODMs, and the Myth of the Lone Genius Vendor
At ISE we saw a similar shift on the video side. For decades, if you wanted to be a “real” videoconferencing manufacturer, you had to build a platform from the ground up – your own embedded OS, your own call control, your own video stack, your own everything.
Today, if you want to ship a Microsoft Teams Rooms-style device, you can make a deal with Microsoft and adopt the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform, MDEP. That instantly gives you a hardened, Teams-centric Android variant, a certification path, and a seat in the ecosystem.
Then you pick up the phone to a capable ODM – one of the manufacturers that has been quietly building hardware for multiple brands for years – and say, “Here is what we want the product to look like, here are the features, and here is the price point.”
A year or two later, you are a “video hardware company.”
This modular approach is not theoretical – it is how a lot of the industry already works and has for years. MDEP handles the platform. The ODM handles the industrial design, optics, and electronics. The brand on the label handles the channel and the relationship with the customer.
What has not evolved is our willingness to talk about it. Many vendors still act like admitting they work with ODMs is some kind of shameful secret, even though the exact same model has been perfectly acceptable in our world for decades. Odds are better than 50–50 that the ‘manufacturer’ on the label is not the company that really built your AV device, whatever it is.
So we now have a world where:
· It is easier than ever to build a solid room device
· It is harder than ever for buyers to know who is actually doing the engineering and if they have any real qualifications to build a good device.
Changing the way we view this not-so-secret secret would be a great first step.
Everything Over IP, Eventually
Another area where the tools are getting ahead of attitudes is infrastructure.
Look at what Cisco is doing with its collaboration portfolio: cameras, microphones, and other peripherals in its systems are connected over IP and powered via PoE. Control, AV, and power are increasingly riding on structured cabling and network switches instead of proprietary boxes and point-to-point runs.
No one seriously argues that AV-over-IP, control-over-IP, and PoE-powered endpoints will make systems more complex in the long run. The opposite is true. Fewer home-run cables, fewer weird interfaces, fewer “don’t touch that” boxes in ceiling spaces. It is a cleaner, more scalable architecture that aligns with how IT teams already think about infrastructure.
But again, every step toward that future runs into familiar resistance:
“We have always done it another way.” “Our techs do not know networking.” “What happens to our existing hardware lines?”
Those are real concerns. They deserve real answers. But they are also the same kind of rigid thinking that said noble gases would never bond and that automatic camera tracking would never be as good as “a human director with a joystick.” Each generation of tools erodes the certainty of the generation before it.
The Only Constant
At the end of the final episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper quotes a well-worn idea: the only constant in life is change.
In AV, we seem determined to add a second constant – resisting that change for as long as humanly possible.
ISE this year made it very clear that life is getting easier for users and, in many cases, for integrators too. Rooms are increasingly self-tuning. Platforms like MDEP are standardizing the messy middle. Devices are moving to IP and PoE. Behind the scenes, some of the most interesting innovation is about removing friction and complexity, not adding knobs and switches.
The question is not whether those trends are real. They are here. The question is how long parts of our industry will keep treating them as temporary fads instead of the new normal.
We can keep insisting that noble gases never bond and that rooms never self-configure, or we can admit that the science – and the technology – moved on while we were busy defending the past.
Personally, I know I’m a “Digital Immigrant.” I have to consciously work to be open to ideas that were not good, or not even possible, just a short while ago. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. If you miss the boat due to resistance, you may remain stuck on an island.
Samsung also highlighted its EM13DX color e-paper display, which represents a different kind of innovation: ultra-low power visual communication.
