So it’s been a couple of years now, and Apple’s AirPlay has reached, while not ubiquity, certainly a presence in the marketplace.

For those of you who just awoke from a spell cast upon you by a wicked witch, AirPlay is Apple’s vehicle for streaming through networked devices. Beyond just Apple TV and devices running iTunes, such as computers, iPhones and iPads, AirPlay is being integrated into all manner of residential and commercial AV hardware.

Sending and controlling the content via the sending device is simple to anyone who’s familiar with Apple’s interface which itself qualifies as ubiquitous today — which brings us to the issue of how AirPlay affects the business of the AV install pro and the specialty AV retailer.

Simply put, AV pros and specialty dealers need to embrace these features. It’s tragically common to see dealers with feature-rich devices in their showroom but haven’t connected the features to make them work as part of their demos. That’s true of not just AirPlay, but plenty of other connectivity features, such as the Ethernet connections on TVs and AVRs. These AV products have these features, so why wouldn’t you promote their benefits to customers?

This is the world we live in now, and AV pros need to get used to it. This kind of connectivity isn’t going to go away, it’s only going to become more prevalent and AV pros and specialty dealers need to embrace this change and, most importantly, find the angle that’s going to allow their company to profit from it.

In truth, the situation is actually far better for dealers than it is for vendors. It wasn’t long ago that iPads consigned hideously expensive touch panels (I cringe when I think about the $20,000 Crestron TPS units I specified into whole-home jobs seven or eight years ago) to the recycling bin, and now the ability to share content from mobile devices to AV systems via AirPlay makes obsolete an awful lot of AV distribution equipment.

Just remember that from the perspective of you, the seasoned AV pro, AirPlay devices are ridiculously easy to configure, but what you need to remember is that your clients don’t always think so. And the fact is that people who can do it themselves aren’t your client anyway.

The ones who are your client come to you for your expertise in all things AV-related, and no matter how easy you think control and networking are, it’s a foreign language to them and they just want you to take care of it. In that light, it’s no different from taking care of their Wi-Fi network for them.

It’s also worth pointing out that when iPads replaced touch panels, dealers found better margin opportunities by balancing out their product selections. Really, a client’s budget is what it is, regardless, whether it’s fifty thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars, five hundred thousand, whatever.

AV pros quickly learned that once they scratched touch panels out of the design, which might have taken up 25 percent or more of the budget suddenly there was they ability to specify better, higher margin audio or even higher end video projectors.

History repeats, and in this business it repeats quickly. Think of how much nicer the audio and video you can specify into jobs if you don’t have to allocate as much to the distribution end of your design.

Everybody knows that technologies go extinct, but AV pros don’t have to. None of you are still installing volume control knobs (Right? Right!?); you’ve evolved beyond that. So while the face of both AV content distribution is changing (again), that only means that AV pros dealers to capitalize on the new opportunities rather than complain about the loss of old categories.