Two decades of innovation at ISE - part 4: Networked screens and video communication

Displays could be the litmus test for AV growth. In 2000 They barely existed in the AV market, which was still dominated by CRT. Even in 2004 the majority of LCD panels shipped were 24-inch. For larger displays you required rear view, or front projectors for a short throw.

The residential market drove demand for larger, cheaper flat panels. HD transmissions, made first in Europe in the UK in late 2009, drove 16 x 9 formats.

“In 2010 we started to see display prices become affordable for corporates, retail, hospitality and transportation enabling them to expand their signage footprints and to use display to communicate internal and external messaging,” says Sean Wargo, Senior Director of Market Intelligence for AVIXA. “This drove the digital signage and DooH market from 2008 to 2015.”

Industry consultant Peter Lloyd also identifies display commodification as one of the biggest tech trends to have impacted AV. He says, “Although displays are still a massive revenue area, unit costs and profit margins have declined. Flat screen displays have reached capabilities and a price point at which they have become the obvious display for use in most ‘room’ installations.”

"Millennials pushed companies to use video and so video became an even bigger demand on networks”

Sean Wargo, Senior Director of Market Intelligence, AVIXA

By 2020, the first generation for whom personal digital communications were second nature began entering the workforce.

“For millennials, video is a natural language,” says Wargo. “They pushed companies to use video and so video became an even bigger demand on networks.”

With mobile and fixed screens increasingly seen as a means for engaging an audience the focus turned to delivering more immersive experiences. In museums, houses of worship, hospitality, retail, and other verticals video, audio and lighting began to be mixed on the same network and used in increasingly creative ways to showcase content.

Wargo says, “Better resolution, larger screens and high-fidelity audio were always the goal in cinema and home entertainment but museums and other spaces began to reimagine themselves as immersive experiences versus static displays of information.”

In 2004 data storage was measured by gigabytes in hardware devices with terabytes only on the horizon. By 2011, data had shifted to networked storage with Cisco predicting that by 2015 the majority of global internet traffic (61 percent) would be in some form of video. By 2016 it declared the official arrival of the zettabyte (a billion terabytes). We will be in the yottabyte era before this decade is out, with data scientists having had to invent new words (ronnabyte and quettabyte) to describe the quantity of data storage going forward.

>> Next: The rise of multifunctional spaces