Page 26 - Campus Technology, April/May 2017

AV T R E N D S dian schaffhauser
5 Big Trends in Higher Ed AV
Audiovisual offerings seem to change with the seasons. But keeping these trends in mind canhelp define the products and features that will serve your campus best.
THE BUSINESS OF audiovisual has come a long way, baby. What used to be a department in charge of the film collection and movie projectors has now morphed into an organization that addresses collaboration needs, streaming media, assistive hearing and a whole lot more. In fact, as the use of technology in colleges and universities has grown, much of its implementation, especially for classrooms, has fallen on the shoulders of the AV crew. Here are five trends driving AV in higher ed today.
1) AV Wants to Run on IP
“The big push right now is AV over IP,” declared Mike Tomei, an independent AV design consultant who serves higher ed clients and is a frequent contributor to Campus Technology. While AV used to be a point-to-point system that relied on “expensive matrix switchers” to connect equipment, now
schools are moving to systems that use streaming encoders and decoders that can operate through standard gigabit- caliber network switches.
Penn State is studying this trend closely, noted Dave Test, group leader of classroom technology. “Having that flexibility of running all of your AV stuff over commodity network hardware and cable runs — that’s something we’re going to be evaluating as we develop new spaces and certainly as we take part in new building designs. Instead of investing so much money in a proprietary switching system, [we want to] embrace that commodity network ethos. That’s pretty appealing.”
The idea of AV over IP wasn’t always popular, particularly among networking professionals. Two or three years ago, said Chris McIntyre-Brown, associate director of profes- sional equipment at Futuresource Consulting, “If you spoke
to an IT manager about hanging AV off the network, they’d run a country mile: There’s lack of control, I don’t know how secure it is, etc.” That has changed “almost quantitatively” now, he said. “There’s an acceptance that it makes more practical sense to manage all of your assets — be they AV or IT — on a single network. There’s an education that’s happening in IT to understand that AV is no longer a dark art. Those barriers are coming down.”4
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | April/May 2017
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