In a challenge to Crestron’s AirMedia wireless room system and Barco’s ClickShare, Mersive has taken an aggressive approach to marketing its Solstice software-based solution. In calling the Crestron AirMedia a, “proprietary piece of hardware” and “difficult to update or maintain,” Mersive is pitting itself against a giant in room control and signal distribution. Mersive even claims in a recent product bulletin that Crestron’s AirMedia may become “obsolete” when the Wi-Fi standards change in 2014 with the introduction of 802.11ac.

Mersive claims that because Solstice is software, it can also be centrally managed with the Solstice Dashboard, which enables an IT administrator to centrally update all the Solstice displays throughout the entire enterprise.

But, truth is, our industry (AV) likes hardware solutions and it’s the reason Barco’s ClickShare is doing so well in this space (another solution that Mersive takes on in its latest product bulletin). Crestron’s AirMedia is similar to the ClickShare product in many ways.

Mersive has an uphill battle as we (the AV industry) don’t do software well. The company realizes this and is taking the approach that conceptually selling its software-based solution vs. the hardware AirMedia solution.

Here’s the comparison chart Mersive is using to sell against both the AirMedia and ClickShare solutions [PDF].
You can learn more about the Crestron AirMedia here. You can learn more about the Barco ClickShare here [PDF].
You can learn more about Mersive Solstice here.