The commercial market is proving to be a plentiful source of revenue and opportunities for residential integrators to pad their profits. Indeed, resimercial is becoming more frequently heard among custom integration companies and their vendors.
Did it seem like almost every booth at CEDIA Expo 2019 was sharing some sort of commercial or resimercial perspective?
The Expo had no shortage of commercially focused products on display, as well as commercial success narratives or themes from happy vendors that are more than pleased to see how their product features are translating beyond the home and into bars and restaurants, corporate offices and conference rooms, small offices and more.
Loudspeakers Pro & Outdoors; Dante Denizens
The pervasiveness of the Dante audio networking protocol, which is commonplace in commercial system designs, was enough for its creator, Audinate, to send a press release about the “debut of Dante” at CEDIA Expo 2019 noting that 17 exhibitors at the show are Dante licensees: Atlona, AudioControl, Bosch, Bose, Control4, Devialet, Harman, Just Add Power, Legrand, Liberty AV Solutions, MSE Audio (SoundTube), MuxLab, Nortek (Elan), Powersoft, Radial Engineering, Trinnov and Yamaha.
“For years commercial integrators have recognized the cost savings, ease of use and flexibility that Dante delivers, so it’s exciting to see the adoption of Dante in CEDIA taking off,” stated Joshua Rush, SVP of marketing for Audinate. “We look forward to working with CEDIA manufacturers and integrators to continue to deliver solutions that benefit the residential market.”
One of the themes of Yamaha’s booth was how its dealers could get its residential and commercial products and support in a single place rather than multiple points of contact. The company highlighted room solutions at its booth that included a café that used background music, mic-mixing features, live music, etc., for a complete commercial scenario that residential installers could handle all from Yamaha.
Meanwhile, loudspeaker manufacturers were providing lots of options for implementing 70-volt systems, outdoor speakers and subwoofers, and combined audio and lighting products that address a range of commercial applications.
Control & Signal Distribution Scale Upward
Do you install residential products in commercial environments? You already distribute audio and video around large-scale houses and try to simplify the owner’s operation of everything with slick touchscreen interfaces. A repeated message at manufacturer booths was that you have what you need to step up to light commercial work without much headache.
Companies were showing their solutions distributing AV-over-IP, using PoE to pare down infrastructure, creating drag-and-drop video walls, and controlling it from devices with intuitive and simple operation.
Veteran control manufacturers were chief among those talking up how they can address commercial customers, with the likes of RTI and URC, for instance, suggesting sports bar applications in particular.
Video Goes Wall-Sized
Video walls have long been the domain of the commercial world. Companies like Sony with its Crystal LED technology and Samsung have made massive LED walls that can certainly be applied to stunning commercial customers’ visual messages.
Check out our slideshow of how companies were steering residential dealers toward commercial work at CEDIA Expo 2019.
