Join us for the season 2 premiere of SDVoE LIVE! This year, SDVoE LIVE! will be broadcast in the SDVoE Academy, as well as THE rAVe Agency’s LAVNCH platform. So who better to join as our first guest than rAVe’s own Gary Kayye? With only days since the lights went out at InfoComm 2021, we’ll get Gary’s take on how things looked at the show for AV over IP. What will the hot new products and trends at the show tell us about the technology and business climate for 2022?

Episode guest

Gary Kayye
President and CEO, rAVe [Publications]

Gary Kayye has worked in technology branding and marketing for more than 25 years. He was the founder of Kayye Consulting, a technology consulting company, and currently serves as president and CEO of rAVe [Publications], a publishing and digital strategy and communications company that he founded in 2003. Prior to that, he served as the vice president of sales and marketing for Extron and a VP at AMX Corporation.

Gary’s been the keynote speaker at over 1000 technology shows and events because of his extensive marketing and branding expertise as well as his entertaining and approachable speaking style. He has either assisted or helped create a number of branding campaigns for dozens of tech companies (including brands like Cisco, NEC, HP, InFocus, Sony and even the University of North Carolina) and has even served as an expert witness in branding court cases.

In addition, he also teaches classes, leads workshops and writes about technology and the future of advertising, marketing and public relations. Gary is recognized as a social media and new media technology expert, especially in the B2B markets.

Episode transcript

Justin Kennington (00:09):

Hello. Hello, everyone and welcome. I’m Justin Kennington, Welcome to SDVoE LIVE!. This is TV for pro AV. Folks, we are back. It’s been a great summer and they’ve let us back on air for season 2. Isn’t that the great thing about having your own TV channel? They always let your TV show come back. But actually, we’re not just our own TV channel anymore. I want to offer a special, warm welcome to those of you watching us in rAVe’s rePLAY week. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m very happy to announce that this year, for season 2, we’ve created a great, new partnership with rAVe where our show, SDVoE LIVE!, will be broadcast, not only inside the SDVoE Academy, welcome to those of you watching there, but also on rAVe’s LAVNCH platform.

Justin Kennington (01:01):

So thanks for joining us. If you’re just here for rePLAY week and just finding out about SDVoE LIVE!, I hope you’ll enjoy the show and please be aware that we do this every two weeks, so come back and see us for the rest of the season. We’re going to run this all the way through May 2022 this season. I said we’ve just come back from a summer break, but it was a very busy summer. We polled our audience. We found out what was working in the show, what could be improved, and how we can make this a better show for you. The feedback we heard said, “We want more time with the guests. We want the interviews to be deeper. Don’t hold any punches. Let’s see what these people really have to say.” So, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re also going to keep some of the news coverage and news commentary that we know our audience loves and benefits from professionally.

Justin Kennington (01:46):

So again, thank you for joining us. I also want to mention, from a topics perspective, this has been a show about technology, and we’re going to keep it there. It’s a show for pro AV, but this year we’re also going to spend some time on the human side, the personal side of pro AV and explore some of the people in the industry, how they got here and what that means.

Justin Kennington (02:08):

Today is going to be a technology show. Today we’re talking about the state of AV over IP as seen at InfoComm 2021. Our guest, Gary Kayye, is maybe the best person to talk about that since he sends his team to all of the hundreds of booths at these trade shows. Who’s going to have a better perspective than Gary? So if you have questions that you want me to ask Gary, get an email to live@sdvoe.org and I’ll be monitoring that live during the show and if you have questions for Gary, I’ll go ahead and bring those to him and we’ll hear what he wants to say.

Without further ado, why don’t we check out a little trivia question and see what else is in store?

Justin Kennington (03:04):

All right everybody, scratch your answers down. I don’t want any cheating when we show you the answer in a few minutes. Here’s a great new segment we have on the show for this year called “Hotline Central”. Matt Dodd, my co-host, is manning Hotline Central so let’s check in. Matt, are you there?

Matt Dodd (03:17):

I’m here in Hotline Central with loads and loads of calls coming in, so keep them coming in. Justin, good to see you again. How are you?

Justin Kennington (03:35):

I’m good, Matt. It feels great to be back on the show, don’t you think?

Matt Dodd (03:39):

Great. Please do keep your questions coming in at live@sdvoe.org. We have a questioner here from Rock Island, Illinois who’s keen to know what it was like at InfoComm. A small attendance, I’m sure, but did that make a difference to the feel of the show?

Justin Kennington (04:21):

I’ll push it over to Gary. Meanwhile, why don’t you come join me, check out this set yourself, and let’s talk about some news.

Matt Dodd (04:27):

Love to. In the meantime, here’s the answer to that trivia question.

Matt Dodd (04:50):

Whoa.

Justin Kennington (04:50):

Come on in. Come on in. What do you think?

Matt Dodd (04:53):

This is lovely, a whole new show set. I’m very impressed.

Matt Dodd (05:25):

News item number one, FOMO, fear of missing out. Did you get any FOMO from this show JK?

[For links to this week’s news articles, visit SDVoE LIVE! Season 2 Episode 1: State of AV over IP at InfoComm 2021 in SDVoE Academy]

Justin Kennington (05:34):

I got a little bit, I’m going to be honest. A couple of months ago, we decided that SDVoE Alliance just wasn’t going to be able to put on a good show. The travel restrictions were a big problem for us since the bulk of our team is based in Canada. Our video team, right across the room from me here, is based in the UK. I didn’t see a way for us to make it effective. But I have to say, after watching some of the social media coverage, a lot of the news articles that came out last week, talking to some of my friends who were at the show, I really did wish it had been able to go a different way. So too bad about that, but it seems like it was an interesting show and I’m really looking forward to ISE, for sure. Matt, did you get to see any coverage? Did you wish you could have been there? Were you thinking about sneaking over in a rowboat? Or how does that work from the UK?

Matt Dodd (06:30):

Well, we’re not allowed to do that anymore apparently, so no. Of course, I wished I could have been there. It was such a shame that it was the first InfoComm in many, many years I haven’t been able to make, but having spoken to a lot of the guys who are out there, they did say that there was an intimacy at the show. Even though it felt a bit strange, I think we’re all in agreement that there’s a real hunger out there for tradeshow attendance and coming back to them again. I’m looking forward to hearing what Gary’s got to say, but absolutely, ISE, bring it on. I think there’s a lot of people now who are just ready. They’re just absolutely ready, certainly over this side of the pond, to head back into tradeshow world.

Matt Dodd (07:12):

I think what I missed most of all was the connection, the networking, being able to see our buddies again, right? We’ve been locked away, globally, for such a long time and it’s so important to us, mental health wise, to get out there amongst our friends and peers and just talk about the industry, talk about the tech. Speaking of tech, let’s head over to news item number two. There’s something particularly interesting about it, isn’t that right, Justin Kennington of the SDVoE Alliance?

Justin Kennington (07:52):

First of all Matt, that was a beautiful segue. Really, really nicely done. Yeah. So every year, of course, several of the magazines and publications give out awards for interesting technology, for interesting products, for useful devices. This year, like any other year, AV Technology gave out a set of awards, about 18 or 20, I think, for AV technology. I guess that’s the name of the magazine, but also the name of the category. This was a very broad category. They gave it for microphones, collaboration displays and large-scale projectors and so on and so on, all different categories across pro AV.

Justin Kennington (08:34):

But what I noticed as I browsed through the list is that only three of the products in the list were specifically related to AV signal distribution, devices that move video signals across a network, across a switch, et cetera. All three of those products were SDVoE-based products! That was very exciting for me.

Justin Kennington (08:52):

It’s worth calling the three of them out. ZeeVee’s ZyPer 4K-XS, which are their encoders and decoders, and some of the very first to be based on a new ASIC chip from Semtech. This is a chip that’s going to really reduce the power consumption and the overall cost of SDVoE systems. Great to see some of that out there, especially from a leading SDVoE player, such as ZeeVee, one of our founding members.

Justin Kennington (09:19):

Also Black Box MCX series. Black Box has made a big splash in the SDVoE arena with a complete solution of encoders, decoders and software to manage a distribution network. Their product won this award too.

Justin Kennington (09:33):

Last but not least, Aurora Multimedia’s IPX-UC1 ULTRA is actually a really, really cool device. The first bidirectional, real time, AV over IP encoder/decoder. It also mixes not only SDVoE but some one gig technology. It uses NDI and it uses H.264, and it can actually cross those domains and move signals from one domain to the other. Matt, what did you think about it?

Matt Dodd (10:06):

That Aurora piece is fantastic. It just goes to show how the technology is so rapidly evolving. Something else that’s been included in these devices now are the really cool compositing features. It just goes to show how quickly that’s coming into market and the options and the flexibility that these products have. So, yeah. Really, really cool.

Matt Dodd (10:44):

I spent a little time just before we went live looking at the feature set, it just goes on and on and on, very impressive.

You’ve got a guest coming up. I think he’s waiting in the back there. Who have you got today?

Justin Kennington (11:37):

Our guest today is Gary Kayye, president, CEO and founder of rAVe Publications.  As I said in the introduction, I’m not sure there’s anyone better to sum up a tradeshow than the guy who’s crazy enough to try and take a video of every single booth at a tradeshow. Gary, welcome.

Gary Kayye (12:06):

Hey Justin, how are you?

Justin Kennington (12:08):

I’m doing very well. So, how was it? How was the first big trade show in two years?

Gary Kayye (12:20):

I was so excited to be there with, I don’t know – five, six or 7,000, including exhibitors? They haven’t announced official numbers, but there’s no question it beat expectations, as long as you had realistic expectations that it was going to be a small show. As Matt said, it was more intimate. I can imagine how some people who didn’t go might have a little bit of FOMO, because it was a unique, different opportunity. You actually got to spend a lot of time with people. I saw the NETGEAR team, John, for example, five or six times and every time we had a conversation. Before, I’m rushing from booth to booth and don’t have much time for conversations. What it showed me is that the power of tradeshows is the networking side of things and the people stuff. So I think what’s going to happen in the future is you’re going to see less product being shown and focused on at tradeshows and more people stuff.

Justin Kennington (13:21):

That gets to something I wanted to explore, which is, what do you think are the lessons that people will take from this InfoComm, that they’re going to apply to future shows? How is the modern AV tradeshow going to change as a result of what people saw at this InfoComm?

Gary Kayye (13:39):

Well, shows like ISE and AVIXA’s InfoComm show and other shows like that, they’re not going to die. People think that shows are going to die, they’re not going to die that quickly and they’re not going to die. Some of the big ones like these aren’t going to die but what I think will happen is that brands will come up with different ways to use that presence. I don’t think most manufacturers are going to gear product launches around tradeshows anymore. There was already a move away from that over the last five or six years, but certainly over the pandemic it became a lot easier for brands to launch product. There were so many online events, webinars. They built their digital audiences and the trust with the digital audience. They did a better job building it over the last year and a half because a lot of brands, they had a website, but that’s it and it was more static. Now, they all had to add webinar functionality. So I think what’s going to happen is that they’re going to utilize that for product introductions and then wait for tradeshows to build better relationships, and still show product there, but not as many as before.

Justin Kennington (14:50):

Isn’t that sort of, “what’s old is new again.” Isn’t that what tradeshows for us were 25 years ago when it was taking orders on the show floor and really moving product? I’m not saying we’re going all the way there necessarily, but that was fundamentally more about networking and meeting people than about new product launches. Is this just another cycle of life?

Gary Kayye (15:18):

Well, I’ll give you a personal experience. When I was at Extron, I first started there so my first tradeshow at Extron, we were a little company surrounded by big brands, companies like Sharp and Barco and Sony that were there at the show, big broadcast brands like Panasonic and Ross. We had a very small booth and it was very difficult for us to get any attention, which is the whole reason why I started the program where we go to tradeshows, rAVe does, and shoots videos at every single booth. I remember how it felt to spend a lot of time and effort fixing up a booth and having barely anyone go to the booth because the show was so busy that people just didn’t have time to notice us or even care about us, even though we wanted them to care about us.

Gary Kayye (16:03):

Extron now is one of the leading brands in the industry, right?  That show didn’t help us. What happened was, once I came up with the concept of coming out with shooting videos at every single booth, it equalized the playing field. There are 240,000 people in our industry and in the best year, only 45,000 went to InfoComm. Which means that about 200,000 didn’t even go to the show. After the show, they’d look at our coverage and everybody’s square for their videos was exactly the same size. It equalized everyone. You could discover new products and I think that’s the reason why shows will continue to exist, because there’s going to be a need for brands to still be discovered. I think if there are less products and more people and more networking and more relationships and events and things like that, then that’s going to give those smaller companies an easier ability to be discovered.

Justin Kennington (17:01):

I feel like we’ve touched on the answer to this, but I want to give a shout out to Georgia. Thank you for writing in your question. She said, “of course, it seems like the show was much smaller in attendance this year, but was that necessarily a bad thing?”

Gary Kayye (17:17):

We all knew it was going to be smaller. With the pandemic, there were thousands of people who said they didn’t want to go, so instead of 45,000 people including exhibitors, depending on how they count, I think that we’ll have somewhere like 7,000 people that went to the show. Definitely, it’s a lot smaller but I don’t think you’ll talk to anyone who went to the show who will say they were disappointed in going to the show.

Gary Kayye (17:55):

Now I definitely think you’ll talk to people who are happy they didn’t go to the show because of the risk/reward trade off, because there wasn’t a lot. You could do that whole show in a day. It’s not like there was a whole bunch of amazing technology we’d never seen before like there is often at shows because a lot of it had already been introduced and virtually no one has a cycle to introduce products in October. So when InfoComm got moved from June to October, it meant that what we were going to see is stuff that was already introduced.

Gary Kayye (18:26):

Crestron, the biggest booth on the show floor, didn’t have any products, not a single product in their booth. They had a sign promoting their roadshow. But Aurora, who was right at the front of the hall, they surrounded their product. They had an L-shaped booth where they had, I don’t know, at least 10 different products in the booth and they made it like a regular show. So depending on what you were doing, you got something out of the show. I think the people who didn’t go are happy they didn’t go. The people who did go are happy they went. I think everyone is satisfied and I think AVIXA did a pretty good job pulling it off.

Justin Kennington (19:01):

Yeah. I kind of wish I’d seen it, is the honest truth.

Gary Kayye (19:10):

You can, if you go to ravepubs.com/infocomm2021. All 420-some videos that we shot are right there and you can literally play through them all and watch every single new product video. Literally, that’s what we do. And it’s free. You don’t have to do anything to get them.

Justin Kennington (19:22):

That’s amazing. You must have a ton of people cranking away all weekend at that.

Gary Kayye (19:30):

We did. We had people work over the weekend.

Justin Kennington (19:32):

Let me drag us back to where I need to take the show, which is let’s talk about signal distribution specifically. Now maybe your answer is what you’ve talked about, that product wasn’t the focus, but did you see any important new trends in the signal distribution area? Is AV over IP trending the same way it has? Are there any changes? What’s going on with the technology for distribution these days? What did InfoComm show you?

Gary Kayye (20:04):

Well, probably the number one thing that’s going to accelerate AV over IP in 2022 is going to be NDI. The fact that NDI is being adopted by so many brands is going to actually accelerate AV over IP. So I think you’ll see a lot of NDI in SDVoE products for control and management, and I think that will accelerate the adoption rate of AV over IP. It’ll depend on the segment. If you’re in higher education, AV over IP was the way to go. There’s nobody in higher education building systems the old fashioned way, if they don’t have to. If they’re just fixing a room that already exists, okay. But if they’re building any rooms, they’re all putting in AV over IP. Corporate is going to be slower because still no one knows how many people are going to go back to the office. UCC is already networked, so taking that outside the UCC room, the meeting room into other spaces, the best way to do that is AV over IP.

Gary Kayye (21:00):

I think if you’re not already doing AV over IP, SDVoE Academy is a great learning source, and definitely more than half of those classes don’t even mention SDVoE. If you’re concerned about taking that class and feeling like you’re just going to get a sales pitch, you’re not. I have to give you hats off for that because you actually put together a really good program there. I think that there’s an easy way for you to drop in, but at the same time, we’re going to have parallel systems. You’re going to have the IPMX, you’re going to have Crestron, Extron and then you’re going to have SDVoE all running in parallel and depending on who you’re aligned with is who you’re going to put in.

Justin Kennington (21:35):

Okay. Well of course, we want everyone to align with SDVoE, but that’s a topic for another show. Do you think that with some of the trends you mentioned, AV over IP is finally heading towards a majority? I think the consensus that I’ve seen and that I believe is that still today, the matrix switch is the bulk of ports that are shipping into designs that are getting installed. Do you see that changing in 2022 as a result of some of these trends?

Gary Kayye (22:05):

It won’t be more than 50%, but you’re moving that direction. You’re going to probably tip to 30%, which is a significant tipping point for the industry. Availability is going to be an issue. I think if products are available and there’s plenty of availability out there and the shipping constraints and supply constraints don’t become an issue, 2020 year will be a huge year for AV over IP. If those become an issue, then it’ll be 2024. So I think that if Aurora said, “we have tons of product in stock, don’t worry about, we’re not going to have any problems”, if that’s true for everybody, then you’re okay. The big inhibiting factor isn’t going to be technology adoption, it’s going to be availability.

Justin Kennington (22:50):

That’s interesting that you bring that up. We’ve got a show scheduled in a few weeks (Dec. 14) to talk about the supply chain with Mark Coxon. But I think that’s a wild card in all this, honestly. It’s going to depend on what products, what chips aren’t available. It could be that what you need for a matrix switch isn’t available and suddenly AV over IP is the only game in town or it could go the other way, that the pieces you need for AV over IP aren’t there and a matrix switch is what you have to stick with.

Gary Kayye (23:16):

Well the nice thing about AV over IP is you have a lot less gear in a system. You’re probably going to benefit from the chip shortage because you’re taking a system that may have had 60 core chips in it for a typical large lecture hall kind of environment, or a heavy duty meeting room environment’s going to have 20 or 30 chips, and you’re bringing it down to six or seven. It could benefit from that, but I don’t know. I will tell you that a lot of big brands told me they’re going to have major supply problems the first quarter of next year. A lot.

Justin Kennington (23:52):

That’s something that’s really coming for us all. Not only professionally, but even personally.

Gary Kayye (24:00):

Yeah, I told all my friends back in April, if you’re in the market for a TV during the holidays, you need to buy it now because you’re going to pay twice as much and TV prices have gone up 50% since then.

Justin Kennington (24:11):

Wow. I hadn’t noticed that. I do have a closet full of Legos that I pretend are in case there’s a supply chain issue for my kids for Christmas. Of course, my kids are four and five years old and these are adult Lego sets, but I pretend it’s for them. So that helps me.

Gary Kayye (24:28):

You bring up Legos, the greatest ad for Legos ever is a headline that says, “Legos, destroying parents’ feet since 1946” or something like that. It’s the greatest ad because that’s exactly how I think of a Lego – stepping on it in the middle of the night.

Justin Kennington (24:47):

I’m with you. Actually, my four year old, for the first time, got it himself the other day. He stepped on one. I love my son, I don’t want to see him cry, but there was a moment of, “yeah, you see. You see what I’ve been dealing with? Punk.” He’s okay. He’s okay, folks. Don’t worry. He’s just fine, Gary, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for the partnership and for featuring us on rePLAY week, today. Again, hello to everyone watching us on LAVNCH.

Gary Kayye (25:10):

We’re very excited to have you. Not just part of rePLAY week, we’re very excited to have you part of LAVNCH. The whole season’s going to be inside of LAVNCH. We’re excited to be part of it and we’re proud to have been picked, and SDVoE Academy, I hope you’re going to push that, because that’s a big deal.

Matt Dodd (25:59):

It was a really good interview and thanks again to Gary, some lovely words there about SDVoE Academy.

We’ve got a new course in SDVoE Academy “8K and HDMI 2.1”. Do you remember last season we had Chris Chinnock from the 8K Association on episode 5 “The 8K Revolution in Pro AV” and Stéphane Tremblay from Semtech on episode 4 “HDR Explained” – a bit of rivalry there about 8K? Well, we have then talking together now, which is fantastic.  Watch their conversation about 8K for pro AV.

Justin Kennington (27:20):

We’ve made it. What a great show! Thanks to Gary. Thanks to everyone in the rePLAY audience. Thanks to our faithful viewers in SDVoE Academy. And thank you to this episode’s sponsor, Semtech, one of the steering members and founders of the SDVoE Alliance. I want to thank them for their support for the show. I also want to remind you to check us out on social media. You can find us on Twitter and LinkedIn at #sdvoelive. Don’t miss us on YouTube where the archive of the show is always available. If you miss an episode, if you want to see something again, head on over to youtube.com/sdvoealliance, and you’ll find us. Don’t forget to subscribe so you’ll get a notice for anything new we post.

Justin Kennington (28:05):

We do this show every two weeks, as Gary already mentioned. If you’re watching us in rePLAY, I want you to come back to the LAVNCH platform two weeks from today. We’re going to talk to my new friend, Alexis La Broi about bringing young talent and energy into the AV industry. Should we do it? Is it worth it? As you can imagine, she thinks yes, and I have to say she’s got some good arguments. More importantly, how do we get that done? So that’s something to watch for two weeks from today on November 16th, tune in the exact same place that you’re tuned in right now.

Justin Kennington (28:36):

Meanwhile, if you want to have a reminder, if you want to have some way to know what’s coming up, to see our full season schedule, head on over to sdvoe.org/live and get all that information.

With that, it’s time for me to wrap up this show. Thanks to Gary. Thanks to Matt. Thanks to Paul and George in the studio. Everyone, have a great time and a great night. We’ll see you in two weeks. Goodbye.