When I started school, we used overhead projectors.

By the time I finished school, every classroom was equipped with smart boards. 

Can you relate?

The transformation in audiovisual (AV) technology has been nothing short of revolutionary – yet, integrating AV into environments remains overwhelmingly complex. 

Today, universities are practically built on AV technology. Classrooms are decked out with digital projectors, screens, microphones, and video conferencing tools. What began as a fledgling industry only a few decades ago is now our primary window to the world, especially in education. 

However, the rapid evolution has led to a significant challenge: AV integration is complex and often difficult to manage. Hardware advancement has outpaced the software development that would usually tie complex systems together, but that hasn’t stopped the hardware becoming vital.

“AV became essential before it became easy.”

Paul Yahchouchy, founder and CEO of Innomate. 

Innomate’s software platform, Innomesh, was built alongside universities to enable them to bridge these tech gaps. Servicing the most prestigious universities in the country gives us intimate insight into the challenges of modern universities.

Here’s our guide to overcoming common obstacles in AV integration – with a sneak peek into how our AV engineers solve these challenges on the ground daily.

Ensuring that your new AV tech meshes seamlessly with existing systems can be a major stumbling block. 

IT systems have this figured out – networks can talk to each other with no problem. 

In AV, systems tend to work in isolation. There’s no easy way to make your Crestron panel be part of the same ecosystem as your projector from Epson. 

Without the right software, these devices would be like cats and dogs: unable to communicate.

For compatibility issues, use modular solutions to help your AV devices speak to each other and allow for incremental upgrades.

Innomate’s Head of Engineering, Anthony Chan, says the benefits of a modular system are that it “offers consistency, flexibility, reliability, cost efficiency, supportability, and goes a long way to helping with standardisation.”

A modular platform enables any university to integrate a range of technologies, software, and brands into a unified system.

“At Innomate, the full ecosystem is designed to be modular, but our room control application in particular is built to allow users to easily add and remove functionality, tested and battle-hardened by its use across different clients – all the while providing consistency of behaviour and user experience.”

“Whether you need to support a new projector model or migrate to AVoIP for video switching rather than a traditional video switcher, using a modular system means you can add and remove components yourself.”

Using a modular AV system means:

• No more expensive service call-outs when you need a control code update to accommodate for your AV integration needs
• You have the building blocks for building your room standards that you know are supported in software

“A modular system creates flexibility and supportability that you can count on,” Anthony says.

Another solution for the compatibility of your AV environment is to ensure your platform is vendor-agnostic. This flexibility ensures that you can futureproof and leverage the best solutions in the market without being locked into a single vendor.

Tim Hinwood, Manager for Learning Environment Design at QUT, says that flexibility through agnostic AV systems is one of the key steps that allow business units to navigate the AV landscape with confidence.

“Being able to pivot when product isn’t available, or technology changes is key to keeping our Learning and Teaching spaces operational and projects moving forward.”

“This, in turn, allows us to maintain a continuity of service and experience in learning, teaching and meeting spaces for our students and academics alike.”

Anthony agrees: “Being vendor-agnostic offers a wide range of benefits to the organisation. It means that they are able to take advantage of the best tech offered by a wide range of vendors, without having to be tied down to a specific vendor’s ecosystem. It also safeguards them from hardware stock shortages and other supply chain issues, by giving them the ability to pivot quickly, and providing them with more options when alternatives are needed.”

As a platform, Innomesh is foundationally built to be vendor-agnostic. It can integrate with a wide range of AV hardware and devices, and is even able to tap into the proprietary world by means of middleware solutions. 

“As seasoned AV software professionals, we have the in-house expertise to develop on proprietary equipment from Crestron, AMX, Extron, etc. in order to open them up for integration into our agnostic technologies. We then overlay these with a “single pane of glass”, offering our clients the ability to manage and support these technologies all from one place,” Anthony says. 

Software restrictions can limit the capabilities of your AV hardware. In our work with universities, we often find teaching space technologies need to evolve quickly alongside pedagogy – which means usually integrating new tech.

However, the speed of change is limited by being tied to specific manufacturers. This makes teaching environments resistant to change, since they are often overly analog and not future-proofed.

Choose software that scales with your needs and regularly updates its features – look for evergreen SaaS that is highly tailorable to customer needs.

This might look like:

• Decoupled user interfaces for customisation
• Tenant-specific UIs for adaptability
• Custom workflows and branding capabilities
• Ability to add custom system behaviour with low-code or no-code

This allows the adaptability needed to customise AV for your own unique requirements and allows maximum UX flexibility and customisation.

Advanced AV setups require specialised skills for effective operation. IT teams are often tasked with implementing and updating audiovisual solutions but lack the specific knowledge to do it with ease. 

Think electricians and plumbers – same industry, very different skill sets. A great electrician is a slow plumber. 

While automating processes and creating user-friendly interfaces help make the technology more accessible, investing in staff training is one of the most effective and crucial ways to help reduce complexity. After all, complexity is relative, and dependent on knowledge.

Have your AV specialists run training with those that are interacting most with the technology. In universities, this will likely be your academics and your IT team.

At Innomate, we use AV managed service provider UXT to run staff training with every teacher on campus. This ensures academics have the foundational knowledge needed to use AV equipment without interruptions.

When a university needs to scale training across the organisation, we provide the option to add Virtual Room training using Augmented reality, with video guides, audio overlays and captions. Making training self serve goes a long way.

“The best Innomesh AV environments we see are ones where the support staff are well trained on how to take full advantage of the Innomesh platform, and have well established procedures on how to integrate Innomesh into their support workflows,” says Anthony.

“These are the environments that run the most smoothly on a day-to-day basis, make the best use of Innomate/UXT support to address real issues beyond simple user errors, and drive innovation on our platform as they discover gaps in their workflows.” 

“At Innomate, we offer unlimited training and support sessions to help our clients succeed. We recognise the importance of enabling our clients, and that as a SaaS, their success is our success too.”

High-quality AV solutions can be expensive. However, the real issue is often the lack of specialised AV knowledge. Without proper insight into the lifespan and management of your devices, you’re likely to find yourself replacing equipment much sooner than necessary.

“There is a school of thought in the industry that if you want to rejuvenate an AV space, you need to rip out everything and start fresh.” Anthony says.

However, starting fresh with your AV environment isn’t cost-effective – and it’s not necessary.

“While it’s always nice to be able to have a fancy new fitout,” Anthony says, “there is a lot of value in rejuvenating and extending the lifetime of existing AV spaces. It gives you a better return on your investments, is better for the environment, and allows you to increase supportability of your entire AV room fleet more quickly.”

“At Innomate, we believe in the importance of being able to coexist and integrate with your existing tech, so our product offerings are designed to do precisely that – adding a monitoring and support layer to existing AV systems without fundamentally changing how they work.”

Achieving cost-effectiveness is all about giving your old proprietary hardware a second life on new systems. Here at Innomate, our engineering team is made up of seasoned AV professionals well-versed in the traditional arts of software development for platforms like AMX, Crestron, and Extron. Building and deploying middleware on these systems can open them up for modern integration and give them a new lease on life.

Instead of retiring your fleet according to the date marked on your warranty, analyse the lifecycle of every device from the inside based on usage statistics to find out whether a device actually needs replacing months in advance. 

With advanced data analytics, you don’t need to retire your fleet; you can extend the lifecycle of your devices and elevate their capabilities to align with any new hardware joining the environment with a uniform user experience. It can extend the lifespan of your current AV fleet by years.

The cost-saving potential alone with data analytics is huge. If you have a projector used only 5% of the time, you can decide to sunset that device and not replace it. 

“The AV landscape is now a world of increased budgetary pressure, product shortages, shipping delays, and constantly moving goalposts,” says Tim Hinwood. “Meaningful data is the granular detail that informs us when, how and where AV devices are being used to drive informed decision-making.” 

In a rapidly evolving sector, treating your AV ecosystem with the same principles as your IT is the key to staying ahead of the curve. 

Whether you’re an administrator, a faculty member, or a digital transformation evangelist, understanding these challenges and their solutions is your first step toward seamless integration. At Innomate, we solve these challenges daily – we were born from them.

Don’t just survive the maze—master it.

Do you want to make your AV environment easy to manage?