AV SuperFriends: Off the Rails - Where Have All the Integrators Gone?

Recorded May 21, 2021

Let’s start with some AV industry news about two integrators merging. Wait, why are we covering this? Ah, because Marc sees this as a coordinated move into the education vertical. After all, schools have money (CARES or otherwise), a need to spend it, and generally their staff are easy to push around.

Next up, it’s summer project show & tell! We each talk about a project that we’re looking forward to— Marc is building an aquarium, Chris is describes the Phil Collins Sussudio Stustudio, Larry is focusing on eSprouts (or perhaps eSports), Justin is cranking out Zoom Rooms, and Jamie is laying the groundwork for zero latency direct fiber connections between campuses. Rachel then surprises us all with an under-the-radar project about standardized 3D content formats that is likely years away, but sure sounds cool.

Finally, we dive deep into difficulties finding AV integrators with availability for our projects in recent months. Most of us prefer to do everything in house, but as COVID upgrades in 2020 took the place of a regular replacement cycle, we’re effectively a year behind, so our university AV staff are booked for 2021 and there’s still more to do. On the other hand, a lot of schools don’t do their own installs and never have, so they are reliant upon AV integrators. But what happens when those integrators aren’t available because they’re all busy with other commercial projects— especially the myriad of “return to the office” upgrades?

AV News articles:

https://www.avnetwork.com/news/trox-and-tierney-merge

https://www.commercialintegrator.com/business_resources/sales_marketing/trox-acquires-tierney-to-expand-education-client-base-across-north-america/

https://www.trox.com/20210426-trox-and-tierney-unite