Volume 15, Issue 6 — March 28, 2018
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Editorial Editorial Editorial
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Industry News Cables, Furniture, Mounts, Racks, Screens and Accessories Control & Signal Processing
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Toys R’ Us and Missed Opportunity
By Mark Coxon rAVe Blogger
Just in case you were hiding under a rock this month, the big news in the business world was that Toys “R” Us will close or sell all of its 735 stores in the U.S., ending a 70 year legacy for the retailer and also putting 31,000 workers back in the market for a job. Of course, analysts are all pointing toward Amazon as the main reason for the collapse, and rightly so.
However, eCommerce in itself is not the main reason that Amazon is starting to wreak more havoc in the retail world. Amazon launched in 1995 and it took 8 years for them to turn a profit. As it expanded through acquisitions like that of Zappos in 2009, they widened their net and began to gain steam. However, despite an ever-growing mix of products and great customer service, retailers still maintained an advantage:
Instant Gratification
Consumers can be impatient and many were willing to pay more to get things right away. Retailers enjoyed a stay of execution, as brick and mortar was still the fastest way to acquire what their hearts desired. Amazon knew this was inhibiting their growth and so Bezos did something that no one else in eCommerce had ever done. He turned the corner on logistics and same-day shipping and did so in a way that leveraged reasonable subscription services to eliminate large additional shipping costs on each individual purchase. Now the curve has again accelerated and retailers have been on the run. Amazon shoppers can get the best price and get items right away, it’s a deadly combination.
In fact, many think that brick and mortar may continue to crumble under the weight of the web until it is almost non-existent, but I believe that retailers have one last stand to make if they want to survive.
I’m 6’5 and about 220 pounds, which in itself, makes it hard enough to buy clothes. However, I have an even larger challenge as well. I don’t have overly long legs, but I have a really long torso. This means I’m not wide enough for extra large shirts, but I’m too tall for large ones. If I’m going to buy a shirt of any kind, I 99 percent of the time have to try it on and I can’t do that if I’m shopping online.
At one time I also belonged to a co-op for produce. It was an amazing deal. I would get 20 pounds of local fruits and vegetables for about $15. However, I like my apples extremely crisp and my bananas slightly on the green side. I like avocados when they’re firm. I quickly found that although the co-op was extremely convenient and priced well below supermarket prices, I still liked picking out my own produce.
I have two Nespresso machines at home. One is especially for espresso and has a milk frother. The other is more focused on coffee. I’m in a coffee club that delivers the highest quality coffee and I get to pick the ones that have the flavor profile and intensity that I personally like the best. I could easily have a cup of coffee at home on my days off and sit in the comfort of my own home enjoying a leisurely morning. Yet on Sundays, I find myself getting up and driving to Bear Coast Coffee in San Clemente or at my favorite Peet’s, paying five times what it cost me to have coffee at home.
What do all my anecdotes above have in common? One thing.
Experience
Each of the scenarios above provides an experience that goes above and beyond price savings and convenience. In fact, you could say that each of them takes MORE effort on my part and costs me MORE to get what I want. However, the experience, either with the product or with the environment surrounding the product, is what makes the difference.
If you’re out there rolling your eyes, underestimating the power of experience, you’d be wrong. What is the best evidence that experience actually matters in a post-Amazon world and that brick and mortar still have value? The fact that Amazon itself is building physical stores. The strategy behind this move and its potential advantages were laid out by Fortune magazine just last year. The strategy boiled down to one thing:
Experience
Coming full circle, when Toys “R” Us found itself on the ropes with its behemoth warehouse-style stores getting beaten handily by the Amazon in the war of price, it should have leveraged experience instead. In the face of Amazon’s new logistics capabilities rendering the “I want it now” argument moot, experience was the unseen solution.
Toys “R” Us should have leveraged its footprint to host LEGOS Brick Masters clinics, STEM learning labs utilizing the newest coding kits and circuit building toys, or even eSports tournaments, just like movie theaters are doing as they see a continued shift toward home-based entertainment.
If Toys “R” Us had created a place to not only buy products, but also to create a community, to engage creativity, and to help kids develop skills around their passions through interactive play, they would have been providing something Amazon could never dream of providing online with a Prime membership.
People visit public spaces like retail outlets and malls for a variety of reasons, only one of which is to complete a task like making a purchase. There are several human motivations for visiting these types of spaces (I’ll be blogging about these reasons soon). Retailers with brick and mortar should be looking at how they address those other motivations to create a physical destination people are drawn to, to create something impossible to replicate on the Internet because it’s not a task-driven exercise. It’s an experience.
Perhaps, just like in the modern day stories of Blockbuster and Netflix, there are some lessons for our industry in the fall of Toys “R” Us. We also face an invasion of commoditized hardware through online vendors and through non-traditional AV channels that have been eroding our margins. The solution may be to move from our traditional role as hardware integrators to a new one dealing with overall experience.
Sure, as integrators and manufacturers, we have always delivered an experience with our product or service. However, the experience with our hardware and services has always been a by-product of the hardware plan we developed and services we sold. The experience was therefore arrived at by accident. Maybe it turned out well, and maybe it didn’t.
The model needs to be flipped on its head, with experience being the end-goal and not an accidental by-product.
Experience needs to be discussed and agreed upon with the end user, and then the hardware, systems, services, etc. provided need to be tailored in a way that they meet the end goal. There must be some flexibility and headroom built in to accommodate the customer in the case that he or she decides they subjectively don’t like the current performance. After all, if the customer says the system is a failure and not what they expected, then they’re right and we failed. If we fail consistently over time, our market loses confidence in us in more ways than one.
For those who keep arguing that experience is not a relevant part of their AV business because they don’t build theme parks or museums, think again. Experiences are not limited to large AV jobs with a “wow” factor. Experiences are also about consistency, ease of use, relevance, social connection, etc.
Experience is not a fad. It is a new reality.
Creating experiences not only sets you apart from the turn-and-burn box movers, it may just save your business in the long run as well.
Toys “R” Us had the opportunity to embrace experiences and potentially change their destiny. They missed it. What will we do? Leave a Comment
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How Plugged In Are You Really?
By Lee Distad rAVe Columnist
In a recent editorial, talking about the importance of vendor reps making face-to-face contact with their dealer base, I mentioned shop-talk as one reason why: Finding things out through the grapevine that might not learn any other way, especially sitting in your office waiting for the phone to ring.
Keeping an ear to the ground, a thumb on the pulse or any other analogy doesn’t just apply to vendor reps, but to everyone in the industry who needs to know what’s really going on.
As an AV pro, you don’t exist in a vacuum. You’re part of a network of relationships between your peers, partners and rivals, not to mention existing and prospective clients.
Everyone keeps tabs on what’s going on in his or her market, one way or another. Whether it’s casual gossip or making a more concerted effort to find out in-depth information, it’s beneficial.
I know that I beat this drum all the time — that you need to evaluate every aspect of your business and strive towards making all your functions best practices, and that applies to being plugged in to your network. Maybe it’s because I love gossip, but I’ll assert that the only difference between a personal strength and a character flaw is whether or not it pays off for you.
We all have stories about how a rumor or casual comment from a peer paid off as being actionable intelligence that led directly to a new business opportunity. That should underscore the importance of cultivating your network and actively working it for information.
As I mentioned earlier and in fact, mention all the time, everything you do at work should have a process and gathering information is no different. I break the process down into three steps.
The first is collection. You can find things out in two ways. First, people bring information to you. Second, you go out and find it for yourself.
That’s why it’s important to keep in touch with your network. Whether you’re having a business meeting or just catching up over coffee. Make the effort to reach out on a regular basis to stay in the loop.
I like the analogy of fishing: Cast your reel out again and again and see what you can catch.
I’d like to stress the importance of keeping an open mind when you hear things. Not everything you hear is always going to be obviously crucial.
Read between the lines and puzzle out of there’s more to the story — which leads to the next point.
Corroborate your information. Odds are, when you hear a story or rumor, there’s at least one other person in your network who’s heard it or has another piece of the puzzle.
Just for example, when I heard from an unlikely source that a major player in my channel was closing eight locations in Alberta, the first thing I did was reach out to people I know who are involved with that company who would be able to tell me more.
Once you’ve confirmed your information you need to decide what you’re going to do with it. Whether it’s a lead you need to follow, or a competitive threat you need to address, forewarned is forearmed. Leave a Comment
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Extron’s Global Scripter and the Value of Being Non-Proprietary
By Scott Tiner rAVe Columnist
Recently, Extron has become more public about its Global Scripter programming features. I believe that this new path that Extron is taking is going to be a major change for the AV industry. The biggest piece of news is that the Global Scripter uses Python as its base for programming. The potential that this opens for the AV industry is incredible.
First, the popularity of Python is very high. Most professional programmers understand the language or are very easily able to learn it. It looks and functions like other common professional languages. This allows professional programmers to begin programming in our world. I understand that some AV programmers could see this as a threat, because it opens up what was previously a walled garden. For an future-sighted person, it actually presents flexibility and growth for our industry. It opens up a much broader base of applicants for programming jobs and brings in a trained programming mind to firms. This is not meant as an insult to the hundreds of very talented AV programmers in our industry — but many of these people are trained in the specific programming application, as opposed to being trained in the study of programming.
Many businesses already employ talented programmers; this includes education as well as other sectors. By using the knowledge these programmers already have and partnering with your AV programmers, you also open options as to what systems can be integrated. Using the various APIs of building automation systems, calendaring systems, security systems and any other type of networked systems, integrating AV systems becomes much easier. Something that has long bothered me is when interesting new products come out, but they tie into other proprietary systems. Some examples of this are touch panels that sit outside of rooms and tell you if the room is available and allow you to schedule events in the room right from the panel. But those systems are typically tied into one or two scheduling systems. Also, all of the remote monitoring systems produced by AV manufacturers are proprietary. They need to provide a link into other systems. With Python, which is open source, designers are able to tie into any other system that has APIs. You don’t have to rely on a vendor creating that link for you.
A significant push in our industry has been to market ourselves to high schools, colleges and tech schools. I think we have struggled in many ways with that because we had to work to prove we were more than just an industry that sold and mounted televisions. This move, and hopefully future similar moves by other companies, makes it much easier to recruit computer science majors, engineers and other technology focused students. At a recruiting fair, open AutoCad and show the students the schematic drawings, talk to them about programming in a language they know and suddenly they can begin to see a future in the industry.
Not only will this bring new opportunities and new ideas to to our industry, it will also bring some challenges, and of course with that, even more opportunities. One of the biggest challenges will the be security, which is perhaps the biggest issue with this move by Extron. By implementing such a popular and well known programming language, it opens the industry up to more security threats. This is something that Extron will need to deal with, and so will support programmers and their customers. But it also presents the opportunity for integrators to provide cybersecurity services to their customers.
I can only hope that more and more of our industry makes a similar move. The more open we are to alternative ways of thinking about and performing our jobs, the more sustainable we are as an industry. Leave a Comment
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Control4 Partners with Simply Reliable to Help Integrators Simply Reliable has partnered with Control4 to “facilitate efficiencies and productivity for integrators.” Using Simply Reliable’s software products, integrators are now able to generate and share proposals, then collect deposits, create accurate installation drawings in minutes rather than days.
Simply Reliable’s (SRi) smartOFFICE is tailored to the custom integration industry and offers simple proposal generation and approval with e-commerce for client payment collection, project management, logistic support and business intelligence to integrators. Combined with designMACHINE, Control4 dealers using SRi’s Ci4C4 Control Integration process can automatically create wiring diagrams, floor plans and cable schedules and integrators can get two days’ worth of work done in 23 minutes.
Simply Reliable provides a complete proposal and project management solution that can generate a high-quality, shareable, electronic proposal in just minutes. Using Quickspec, a point and click method to add Control4 and other integration products to a proposal, dealers can then export the proposal file into designMACHINE where it launches Control Integration to find and import drivers for the products included in the accepted proposal. Once these drivers are added, they become part of that dealer’s unique database of items further expediting the process in future proposals. designMACHINE then turns the proposal into a Control4 Composer Software (.c4p) file. The dealer then simply connects the bindings to complete the connections and signal paths and voila – the wiring diagram and cable schedule are automatically created. If any binding errors are present, designMACHINE will call those out for correction. This entire process takes just 15 to 20 minutes. designMACHINE takes the drafting out of creating these drawings saving integrators hours of work.
smartOFFICE has strong appeal for small business owners who have had to struggle to run their business using multiple unintegrated apps, making scaling their business virtually impossible. smartOFFICE is to business process as QuickBooks was to accounting 20 years ago — a significant and affordable digital transformation for small business.
Simply Reliable is here. Leave a Comment
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TFCinfo’s Annual Projector Brand Strength Report Highlights Winners And Improvements in the Projection Industry TFCinfo today announced the release of its “Projector Brand Customer Perception and Preference Study 2018.” This report marks the 16th year that this annual projector brand benchmarking study has been conducted. TFCinfo’s report not only measures the strength of multimedia projector brands in the five most important market segments in the AV industry (large corporations, SMB-small and medium business, SOHU-small office/home user, education and government), but also analyzes important trends in customer perceptions which can have significant influence in their purchase decisions.
In this year’s installment Epson is a clear winner in the eyes of experienced projector end users and purchasers. Not only has Epson remained solid in their brand awareness and their image, but they are even continuing to improve upon many of their dominating scores. Other brands such as Sony, NEC, BenQ, Optoma, Panasonic, Hitachi and InFocus are noted for their strength and improvements in other key areas and market segments.
Awareness, Image and Intent are three main elements of brand strength that continuously need to be monitored. In this research, TFCinfo shows how individual brands perform on each of these important measures and in comparison to other brands. This allows readers to form a complete picture of where their brand is and where their brand needs to go to stay competitive.
Epson, Sony, NEC, BenQ and InFocus are the top five most recognized (aided awareness) projector brands in the industry overall. Epson has solidified their position and has a solid lead of at least 10 percent above the next highest ranked brand in every segment surveyed. While other brands may not have ranked among the top five overall, they post some of the strongest improvements and ranked among the top five in certain market segments. BenQ and Optoma are important to note on this measure as these brands have each increased their awareness as a projector brand greatly over the past few years. Optoma places among the top five for aided brand awareness among those in SMB and SOHU, while BenQ places among the top five among those in education, government and large corporations. Unaided free recall is another measurement this research analyzes and is extremely important to monitor to ensure that your brand comes to mind to be included in the important pre-purchase research.
Awareness for some brands, while still considered low in comparison to their position in total projector sales and current market share, have continued to show great improvement.
A clear picture is forming with regard to some of the most important projector purchasing factors and the brands that are being associated with them. Some of the most important factors to look at when purchasing a projector are overall image quality, reliability/build quality and price. Experienced projector users and purchasers name Epson, Sony, Panasonic, NEC and Hitachi as the top brands they associate most with having an excellent image quality.
These same brands are also named as brands that represent projectors that offer superior reliability and build quality. Respondents name BenQ, InFocus, Optoma, Dell, and Epson as the brands that offer the best price (value), while on the polar end Epson, Panasonic, Sony, NEC and Hitachi are named as offering a better investment (higher price/higher quality). This leaves Epson in a phenomenal position as end users are viewing the brand as both a great value and a high quality investment.
“Measuring brand strength and tracking your position in relation to your competitors is crucial in today’s projector market. Understanding customer perceptions, preferences and the factors that are driving their purchase decisions is critical to the brand management process and therefore to the growth and profitability of your brand,” states Tanya Lippke, TFCinfo director of survey market research. “These customer perceptions can have significant influence in their purchase decisions.”
Epson, Sony, NEC, BenQ, and Optoma are the top five brands being considered for purchase most overall, although some of these brands are being pushed by their dominance in particular market segments. Panasonic, InFocus, Viewsonic, Hitachi and Eiki hold their own on this measure posting some important consideration gains in certain market segments this year.
While Hitachi may not be one of the most considered brands for purchase, Hitachi has posted an increase in purchase consideration each year for the past six years now, and is high relative to their overall brand awareness. BenQ and Optoma are also brands where their momentum cannot be ignored. Both brands have done a great job with their awareness and image in this category and it shows. This yearly tracking study reveals that BenQ and Optoma have improved their numbers, gaining more than 25 percent in consideration each since 2013.
“Many brands post great scores this year, even some of the lesser known brands,” states Tanya Lippke, “In order for brands to turn this consideration into an actual purchase, consumers must have a clear understanding as to what your brand offers in correlation to the purchasing factors that are most important to them. This report reveals what messages the major brands are delivering and how these perceptions are affecting them in the market-place.”
Many brands were researched in-depth and each show significant strengths and weaknesses in certain areas. Brands that are analyzed in depth in this report include: BenQ, Dell, Dukane, Eiki, Epson, Hitachi, InFocus, NEC, Optoma, Panasonic, Runco, Sony and Viewsonic.
Here are the details. Leave a Comment
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Luxul Adds Dealer Support With New Customer Assurance Program Luxul introduced today a new initiative to support its growing dealer base: The Luxul Customer Assurance Program, or CAP. With this new program, the company is providing its dealers with certified wired and wireless network designs for residential and commercial applications — complete with tech support — that are guaranteed to meet their customers’ reliability and performance requirements relating to Wi-Fi.
To participate in the Customer Assurance Program, Luxul dealers simply register their projects here, where they provide project details and requirements. Based on this input, Luxul engineers will deliver a complete custom network design, including both required and optional equipment along with educational pages meant to make end users aware of things like the importance of a solid network, what remote management and internet content management are and their importance, as well as what interference is and how it can be accounted for in a proper design. Dealers simply install the network based on the design and complete it with a remote management platform like Domotz.
Luxul’s advanced support team is available to dealers requiring assistance configuring their certified networks, while any product experiencing a failure will be promptly replaced. If the wired or wireless network doesn’t perform as expected, Luxul will provide any additional equipment to meet customers’ expectations at no additional cost.
All the details are here. Leave a Comment
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Altinex Introduces TE460-137 HDMI Signal Generator and AnalyzerAltinex just launched the TE460-137 HDMI Signal Generator and Analyzer, which is designed for installers and consultants for testing and verifying all aspects of an HDMI signal path. Altinex says the TE460-137 is portable and can test and verify compliance with HDMI specification regardless of what is used between inputs and outputs.
The TE460-137 has both HDMI input and output with 18Gbps (600MHz) 4K UHD support and with 4K to 1080p scaling to support and complies with the HDMI 2.0a and HDCP 1.4/2.2 standards. An Analyzer mode is compliant with the CEA standard and HDR static metadata extensions CEA-861-F and CEA-861.3 for EDID analysis and it has an integrated OLED display to see the current signal state and results of signal analysis.
In its stock configuration, the TE460-137 comes with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a USB charging cable with power supply that powers the unit and recharges the battery, an HDMI cable for testing purposes and a hard-plastic travel case.
The Altinex TE460-137 HDMI Generator and Analyzer is $595. Here are the details. Leave a Comment
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RTI Ships XP-6s Control Processor RTI today announced that the company is now shipping the second generation of its XP-6 advanced control processor. Designed for both smart homes and corporate environments as well as sports bars, the XP-6s features a faster i.MX53 CPU for increased processing power. RTI upgraded it with eight times more RAM memory and four times more internal nonvolatile Flash memory (512MB). The XP-6s’ new rack-mountable design includes two-way RS‑232, routable IR and Ethernet. It also features three programmable relays, three voltage trigger outputs, and three voltage sense inputs. The processor’s Ethernet port provides IP control in addition to support for RTI’s RTiPanel app for smartphones, tablets and PCs. Additionally, the XP-6s incorporates an astronomical clock, allowing time-based events and timers to trigger commands and macros.
Here are the details. Leave a Comment
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For all you REGULAR readers of rAVe HomeAV Edition out there, hopefully you enjoyed another opinion-packed issue!
For those of you NEW to rAVe, you just read how we are — we are 100% opinionated. We not only report the news and new product stories of the high-end HomeAV industry, but we stuff the articles full of our opinions. That may include (but is not limited to) whether or not the product is even worth looking at, challenging the manufacturers on their specifications, calling a marketing-spec bluff and suggesting ways integrators market their products better. But, one thing is for sure, we are NOT a trade publication that gets paid for running editorial or product stories. Traditional trade publications get paid to run product stories — that’s why you see what you see in most of the pubs out there. We are different: we run what we want to run and NO ONE is going to pay us to write anything good (or bad).
Don’t like us, then go away — unsubscribe! Just use the link below.
To send me feedback, don’t reply to this newsletter – instead, write directly to me at gary@ravepubs.com or for editorial ideas: Editor-in-Chief Sara Abrons at sara@ravepubs.com
A little about me: I graduated from Journalism School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where I am adjunct faculty). I’ve been in the AV-industry since 1987 where I started with Extron and eventually moved to AMX. So, I guess I am an industry veteran (although I don’t think I am that old). I have been an opinionated columnist for a number of industry publications and in the late 1990s I started the widely read KNews eNewsletter (the first in the AV market) and also created the model for and was co-founder of AV Avenue – which is now known as InfoComm IQ. rAVe Publications has been around since 2003, when we launched our original newsletter, rAVe ProAV Edition.
rAVe HomeAV Edition, co-published with CEDIA, launched in February, 2004.
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rAVe HomeAV Edition contains the opinions of the author only and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of other persons or companies or its sponsors. |
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