Commercial AV works with the facility. It has always been necessary to take customer locations into account for the installation. AV was purpose-built to meet the needs of the users and the buildings they inhabit. Dozens of AV businesses were created to serve the corporate market. Businesses and offices have very predictable use cases and common designs — conference rooms, huddle spaces, auditoriums and private office designs were created and improved the use again and again for customers in their buildings.

With all this history, integrators could predict what was needed and consult the customer on the sort of design that would best suit their desired outcome. Office workers are so very predictable and fairly uniform in their needs. They have regular hours. They use the AV and the network it rides on in the same ways and on a predictable schedule. There are well-worn best practices for setting up the infrastructure for the workers and the equipment. Users know these methods work reliably.

But things change. The last couple of years have been a work-from-home revolution. The COVID-19 pandemic had a huge rise in businesses that required their employees to work from home. In April 2020, reports say that 44% of workers were from home. Now, in March 2022, workers are starting to come back to the office. Still, more people work from home than before. People are looking at their homes with a new perspective. The home has had to be repurposed to fill the function for which the office had become so ideally suited.

Compared to the office, a home is surprisingly unpredictable. Unlike the planned and structured office, the home (and the people that live there) create an IT and AV ecology of their own. When working at home, business office users might not even be the highest consumers of AV and IT. Every inhabitant in the home has their own use cases, from the infant to the bed-ridden grandmother and everyone in between.

Once upon a time, residential AV integration was the story of home theater systems. Contemporary residential integrators’ experience makes that story seem dated as a VHS tape. The reality of the home AV experience had mushroomed into so much more. The leather recliners with cupholders as a luxury AV accessory would not have dreamed of the multiplicity of streams and devices.

Amanda Wildman, owner of TruMedia Home, top residential integrator and a diamond seller of Samsung, Sonos and Lutron, took the time to speak with me and share her experience of residential integration in the decade of the 2020s. Since she began this business in 2014, she knows the ways homes and their owners are engaging with AV integrators. The family units in homes contain a wide variety of interests and technology needs. Music, streaming video and gaming systems are some of the most obvious uses. This is not your father’s residential install. AV is part of the home technology expanding through multiple essential services that homeowners and customers cannot do without.

Each and every one of these devices requires a connection to the internet. Businesses, as I noted earlier, have a good setup for providing reliable internet connection to all their occupants. Homes are trickier, and everyone in the family still needs a reliable internet connection. Baby’s monitor and sound system, the kiddos’ homework and gaming centers and grandma’s telehealth devices — all of these require homes to have network access in just about every nook and crevice. The AV integrator has become the only trade with the knowledge to set up the home with that kind of coverage properly. Sometimes the electricians get asked to run cable. But any integrator knows that there is more to passing signal reliably. It takes some thought and design. Residential AV has taken on the role of creating the signal path and grouping the wires correctly to ensure the quality of the experience.

The customers and even the other trades are not aware of the troubles that can arise from improper infrastructure. This magic is created in the deep dark places that only the experts know. Just as the personal computer revolution 50 years ago brought new expectations to the workplace, residential integrators can show people what is possible in their homes. Everyone has gotten smarter — even the homes.

So many people have invested in upgrades to their homes or even moved to a new home altogether and had new requirements for what that home needed to provide. The current work-from-home and hybrid workforce are having new insight into how these services will fit together. Workers are connected to their colleagues and their families in ways never seen before. The internet and all its things (IoT) are woven into the fabric of the world of AV experience.

The home has incorporated many things that used to be only for offices, such as the personal computer. But just as offices taught homes how to get connected to high-speed internet and get on the cloud, now offices are going to have to learn from what homes have created. The division between commercial and home has become more permeable.