Infocomm 2025

Jun 16

It was hard to believe that this year was my first Infocomm since 2019! I missed 2020 and 2021 of course due to the pandemic, and then had conflicts (including one year being off the grid in the Grand Canyon). It was good to be back, and it was a good show. But it’s kind of fascinating how our AV technology—while of course always improving—really has matured and stabilized. As I’ve written a lot about, our industry hit a maturity point around 2010, and that was very evident at the show. At my first Infocomm there were still overhead projectors, and I’m old enough to remember the Infocomm Projector Shootout, where in one room you’d see multiple, competing projector technologies, and now DLP dominates that market while projectors themselves are used less and less in larger applications. A lot of projector applications have been replaced by video walls, which now too are a commidity: the number of inexpensive video wall panels on display was kind of overwhelming.

Audio too is a similarly mature technology: after Infocomm five years ago I did my then-annual discussion of AVB/TSN/Milan and Dante and networked audio, but even that market has stabilized to the point that I don’t even feel like I need to write about it. That market has pretty much settled into Dante dominating the front end of the sound system market (mics and distribution, mixers, stage boxes) while several high-end speaker manufacturers are using Milan. There is some kind of interface between the two systems, but that’s pretty straightforward. Speakers too continue to get commoditized and optimized; the new d&b CCL speakers, which sounded great in the demo, are (like the Meyer Panther speakers released in 2022) marketed as being smaller and lighter weight than previous models.

Networking continues too to get optimized; there were great displays by Luminex and Netgear AV, who introduced an updated switch line.

I’m happy to say that in the current world of breathless AI hype by techno-utopians, I only saw a few references to AI on the show. AV is in an industry that generally has to deal with delivering real solutions and while AI certainly has some applications, it’s not going to replace most AV equipment, so our market should not be disrupted by it.

I love seeing and hearing all the products, but as usual the best part of going to an in-person trade show is to see all the people, and it’s especially great to unexpectedly run into old friends. I did a lot of that at our Show Control Geekout, about which I made a separate post.

Here’s some random photos of things I found interesting (click on any to enlarge):