Three wise men followed a bright star in the sky.  They traveled a great distance, hoping to find the prophesied savior that would deliver them from certain doom.  As they approached the star, they stood in awe as it started to descend from the heavens.  They dropped to their knees and bowed their heads as the light grew closer and more intense.  They listened in silence, awaiting the sound of a choir of all the angels in heaven.  The silence broke, not in a chorus, but in a gentle whisper, a rhythmic whirring unlike anything they had heard before.  When the anticipation became too much, they at last opened their eyes to see the one who would save them all face to face.  They looked up to see a black disc suspended in air by four fans.  “It’s just a freaking drone???!!!”  They all threw their gifts in the sand and headed back home.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like drones as much as the next person, and I would never be disappointed if one showed up on my door step.  The recreational uses of drones are undisputed.

I also know that drones do have some commercial viability in everything from site surveys to delivery services to security to broadcast.  I also know that most AV businesses aren’t doing site surveys of delivering packages.  If you do happen to be in the broadcast or security markets, I concede that drones may open up some new opportunities for your businesses. Likewise, camera manufacturers and wireless video streaming device manufacturers can capitalize on the drone market by getting their products integrated into these small scale aircraft.

However, for the vast majority of us in the commercial and residential AV space, we have virtually nothing to benefit from drones.  Just because there was a pavillion on the floor at Infocomm doesn’t make them commercially viable.  Sure it drew a crowd.  Drones are fun to look at and watch.  Microsoft drew a crowd in 2014 too with the soccer game because it was fun to watch, but their presence made zero impact on our businesses that year.

Drones are a distraction from the bigger picture of how we continue to add value as an industry.  They are being embraced because quite honestly, we haven’t been given much else to get excited about in the past few years, at least on the “new and different” scale.  They’re more fun to talk about than 4:4:4 sub-sampling and HDR, so we succumb to being preoccupied with what is cool but virtually worthless in a business sense.

I hear complaints all the time about how it’s difficult to sell true AV hardware with the immense online competition we see from sites like Amazon and the commoditization of our hardware.  Now imagine trying to sell drones in that environment when we add literally no value to the purchase and it has little to do with the larger AV system itself.  Welcome to a nightmare before Christmas.

So lets get serious about 2016 and start delivering awesome systems that bury the off the shelf alternatives.  I’m excited to see what manufacturers and integrators alike can do with a singular focus on real business segments.  I know next year can be amazing!

So if you really love drones enough to base your AV future on them, I admire your passion!  In fact, I’ll even buy a drone from you in the next couple years when you end up working at Wal-Mart.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!