Volume 19, Issue 5 — March 16, 2022

March 16, 2022 | Volume: 19 | Issue: 5

Happy Wednesday! It’s hump day, and I am looking forward to the weekend. Then it’s off to Enterprise Connect next week! Will you be there? Our first column today covers broadcast boxes and how much they’ve changed over the years. A decade ago, people were canceling their broadcast TV subscriptions to make the jump to entertainment over the internet. Cable companies were also predicted to die off, but time proved these predictions wrong. Lee compares more past predictions with present-day trends surrounding broadcast boxes in this piece. What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed? Another column this week by Mark Coxon discusses how all the parts of AV need to work together as one. Mark says AV is more than just adding capabilities and solutions together, though, so how does this work for home tech? Hybrid meeting solutions with speaker audio should be directional, such as hearing a participant from the left or right side of the room depending on where they sit on a Zoom or Teams meeting. Even when it comes to VR and XR, AV solutions need to match up to the viewer’s senses to avoid motion sickness or fatigue. Read more on this topic here. Well, that’s all I have today! See you soon, #Hometweeps. Bye!

— Katie Clark

COLUMNS

+ What Has — And Hasn’t — Changed About Broadcast Boxes [Lee Distad]

It’s remarkable that streaming boxes are eminently controllable but broadcast boxes aren’t. It was bad enough years ago when broadcast boxes were IR only and didn’t have the decency to have 3.5mm IR ports on the back, necessitating the use of eyes. No, now broadcast boxes (depending on the maker) use a cryptic mix of IR, RF and Bluetooth with little actual documentation. To top it off, they’re all IP-enabled. But are they IP-controllable?

+ AV Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts [Mark Coxon]

If you’re looking at someone on the left side, you should hear audio coming from that location. The sound should come from the position of the visual focus, as otherwise there will always be a disconnect in the brain on the source (your visual attention is straight ahead but your auditory attention is focused above you). It may not make you vomit, but it will cause fatigue over time.