Programming in the AV industry?
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The audio-visual industry (AV) is a small part of the information and communication industry. The industry is based on the production of devices that ultimately create an audio-visual experience, whether it’s listening to a concert in an outdoor or indoor space, watching a movie in a movie theater, or interacting with a hologram in a museum. For many years, the industry enjoyed the status of a pure hardware oasis where the peak of an engineer’s job was the calculation of physical quantities that affect the audio-visual experience.
With the development of technology, various programs have arrived that solve such a complex problem with just one click. At a similar time, equipment management systems were developed, and the most common form of management was serial protocols, where the RS-232 protocol played the most significant part. With the parallel development of the network industry and its increasingly frequent interference in the AV industry, the era of control of AV devices via the network, better known as TCP/IP control, began. In doing so, each AV device received its own address and, by connecting to the Internet, became potentially available for control worldwide. At that moment, all major companies tried to develop their control panels, which seamlessly create a transition between one state and another at the push of a button.
The emergence of smart devices
In the past few years, the market has been hit by a fever of smart devices, many of which can be classified in the audio-visual category. From now on, every consumer can buy a smart projector on eBay for less than $100 that has its own mobile app, or a $50 smart speaker that plays your favorite music via a streaming service. Many devices available on the market created a noise of products of dubious quality, but despite this, some eminent manufacturers have managed to maintain high quality and keep up with the times.
In all this technology boom, the classic engineer in the AV world has become the person who must invest an inordinate amount of energy in explaining to the user that his $100 speaker is at least 3 times better than a $30 speaker. From the client’s request that he wanted quality sound in several zones in the apartment, it came to the request that the client wants to control the music in the bathroom via a mobile phone while having a bath.
Connecting the development world with the AV world
As a continuation of the control of AV devices and the increasing of common smart devices that have their own APIs, there was a need for a quality platform that enables the control and unification of absolutely all controllable devices. In this field, Crestron has made the most progress, which enabled the programming of their devices to take place in the widely used programming language C#, and the development of the management interface in the HTML5 language. With this move, Crestron opened its doors to immense possibilities in which AV equipment takes on a completely new meaning.
Final thoughts
The AV industry has evolved from a classic hardware engineering industry to an industry where AV, network, and computer industries are intertwined. According to the apparent state of the market, there has been a large gap between the computer and AV worlds where the AV industry seems to have been unaware that at some point it will have to catch up with the ubiquitous developer industry which, according to some facts, is far more developed than the AV industry, either because of its commerciality or because of greater agility. Classic AV engineers found themselves in a situation where, in addition to their standard work, they must learn to program and keep up with the times just to meet the requirements of clients who have been pampered by the development industry and learned that they can get an app for everything and that everything can be managed with one click or by using a simple voice command. AV manufacturers themselves are slowly closing the gap between device programming capabilities. The first method is the drag-and-drop method, which enables simple system adjustment without the necessary knowledge of programming, which is popularly advertised as “No-Programming-Required” for devices. Another way is classical programming, in which the engineer must possess advanced programming skills to successfully program a complex system tailored to the client’s requirements.
This created a need in the AV industry for companies that specialize in software solutions in the AV sector, and the company ONIO Interactive belongs to that group.
If you’re still not sure where to start when it comes to a smart audio-visual system, don’t hesitate to contact us, we’ll be happy to help!
