As a business, how can an AV installation change your day-to-day life?
Some of us are old enough to remember the days when the most mind-bogglingly inventive form of technology for the office was the fax machine, and when organising seminars and business meetings would take weeks of advance planning. Aspects to consider included the booking of conference rooms and the physical transportation of attendees across long distances that may have entailed them needing overnight hotel accommodation or facing a gruelling journey home on the same day. Happily, these days are gone — largely thanks to cutting-edge new audio-visual (AV) technologies. The longest distance that any attendee needs to travel for such events today is either to their laptop or smartphone, or to a comfortable room dedicated to ‘virtual’ AV-enabled meetings at their place of work. No one will have to endure the indignity of waiting for hours and removing belts and shoes at an airport, no one needs to travel from one city to another, no one needs to return home weary, stressed and running on fumes. Today’s AV systems can be installed anywhere, from the boardroom to the shop floor. At a stroke, they facilitate anything from marketing promotions with eye-catching video productions right in front of your customers’ eyes as they walk around your store, to communication and learning events with internal team members or with colleagues based in distant towns or cities, or even overseas. Sectors blazing an early (and successful) trail with the tech via video walls and attention-grabbing visual signage include leisure, hospitality and retail. Now, it’s time for the rest of us to climb aboard. Putting it bluntly, business communication has been revolutionised by AV. In an age when more teams than ever work remotely, it allows your staff to interact effectively together wherever they’re located physically. Here are just a few examples to illustrate what we mean. Take meeting room AV, for instance. This can be swiftly installed in a suitably sized room and feature large-format digital display screens so that all attendees can take in key information. Digital smart boards can allow presenters to get their ideas across to participants in visually attractive ways — all without glitches and delays. There are even digital ‘meeting capture’ systems that remove the need for laborious minute taking. Then there’s video conferencing. Phone conferencing suffered from the disadvantage of being an aural-only medium. Cloud-based video conferencing systems effectively deliver face-to-face communication with participants from around the world in a single room. You can make presentations to clients in different countries or towns, as well as drawing on expertise from partners in Dallas or Silicon Valley, or Oslo or Kyoto. Need to connect a variety of smart devices to a single display screen? Try wireless presentation systems, which involve no ugly cables traversing desk surfaces or carpets and allow anyone to display their content from a smartphone, tablet or laptop. No cumbersome presentation slides to put into a projector in the right order — just an easy ‘plug and click’ operation. These systems are easily retrofitted into existing rooms. If you want to grab your customers’ attention on the shop floor for your latest promotion, then retail AV systems are a real boon. Not only do they make your store more visually appealing, but they also allow you to present new products, launch new promotions, and boost sales with head-turning videos. After AV, you’ll never look back.