Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Pro AV today. I am your host, Ben Thomas. You know, one of the things that I love most about the last few years is really a renaissance of live inter entertainment, immersive experiences, even things like theme parks and attractions, that world has evolved so dramatically. And and you see you know, whether it's performers like Taylor Swift or Beyonce having these massive concert tours or venues like the sphere opening or new ride technologies, being deployed. The world of immersive experiences just evolved so dramatically. It's incredible to see. One of the byproducts of that, though, is that world has found its way into influencing our commercial installations, whether that's our hotels, even some hospitals in some cases. And and even our basic commercial installations, like conference rooms, things like that. And, I wanted to bring on someone today that could really speak to both sides of that world, and that's John Steinhauer from solo tech. So we're digging in a little bit today, John. Thanks so much for coming on. Hey. Thanks for having me, Ben. I'm looking forward to it. Well, John, really at a high level, right? Most folks in the industry know who you are and know a lot of your experience, but, obviously, solo tech is company who who has lived on the live event side of thing for a long time, but also does some fantastic commercial installations. You know, on a high level, talk about some of that experience that you have, and then we'll kinda dig into some more specifics. Sure. Yeah. I'd love to. Yeah. I've been here at Zolotech about seven months now. The company's been around for forty seven years. So, founded in nineteen seventy seven, and, around entertainment from his very inception. Company really was started for the Montreal Olympics back in seventy seven, and, has grown in leaps and bounds since then to you know, really some world class stuff like you mentioned in your open. The Taylor Swift tour is something we've done. The sphere we were involved in as well in Las Vegas. So a lot of really high profile things we get involved in on the entertainment side of the business. But it's little known fact that a bigger part of our business is our systems integration business. And, a lot of that falls into the same adjacencies, you know, whether an arena buys a system or rents a system. Right? So, we have huge rental, component of our business But when they buy, it's more than fifty percent of, the business we do. And that that's the group that I joined, the systems integration group. And what's really cool I think about our DNA being an entertainment is, as you said, so many, experience type spaces are in corporate. They're in transportation. They're in, you name it, retail. Paul name it. Right? Everything is bad. It's a a ton, all of them. Education, e sports, all sorts of, yeah. So it's like, you know, the traveler experience, the fan experience, the employee experience, it's experienced stuff, and a lot of it is driven visually through LED. Like you said, used to be a novelty. Now it's, you know, table stakes. LED is everywhere. And the way, the app occasions are evolving is really pretty creative. You know, we used to, sit in these rooms with these big corporations talking about their briefing center, how they're gonna tell the story of their brand visually. And, I remember years ago sitting in those types of meetings and people would come in because, you know, they're they're a corporate, you know, citizen as well as a, you know, a fan who just went to the Taylor Swift concert the night before. And they used to come into these meetings and say, I have just had a concert, and the way the artist told their story on these LED displays, and that's what I wanna recreate in our briefing center. Do you guys know how to do that? Now being a solo tech, you know, that's an advantage. Like, that is the world we live in. Part of it, and we could bring that over into the, more commercial side of the AB business. Well, I love that you mentioned really kind of the the experience side of our business, right, where where I might work at market scale, for instance, for instance. Right? But I I went to the show or I went to see Matallica, whoever the night before, and there are things that I'm grabbing as a creative from that and bringing back saying, man. It would be really cool if we had a three hundred and sixty degree display system in our, you know, in our showcase rumor or something like that, but it's so interesting to talk about that world. Right? Do do you see the influence primarily coming from, folks who are attending these events, maybe after hours, after work or is it just maybe a a macro design implementation installation thread or maybe a little bit of both. Yeah. I think it is. I think it's, you know, the human experience. You know, we, we're we're multifaceted. You know, we're working from home. We're going into the office sometimes. We're We're constantly being stimulated by different environments, different experiences, whether it's, you know, for play or for work, while we're traveling, but, like, we're just bombarded all the time, you know, for our attention. And I think, you know, it's just kind of where we've evolved as an industry where I think before it was, you know, very kind of sterile. You come here, you do this. This is the only place you can do this kind of communicating. You sit in the conference room and you wait for the device to boot up, and then you reboot it because it didn't work. And then you throw it across the room, and you get on the telephone. Like, those days are gone. Like, everything has to work together now. Like, the way we're doing this, you know, is a perfect example of that. It's, I assume great quality when it gets published. You know, there is no no issues with latency. We didn't have to dial a thirty six character, you know, code to get this call going. We just kinda clicked the link. You know, Making it easy and accessible to everyone is really where I think this is all going. So whether it's an immersive experience, a traveler experience, an employee experience, what have you. It's a human experience. So we're always around technology, and it it drives certain behaviors. You know, when it comes to, the whole back to work thing, the hybrid work, you know, somebody, I I was using an old expression, the the magnet, not the mandate. I'm gonna stop using that. But technology is a tool to bring people back to the workforce. And this is a new one I heard. I liked a lot. It was we have to earn our employees commute. We have to earn their commute. You have to make them wanna drive here and be a part of this. And so much of that is the human experience and all the elements that allow us to kind of seamlessly collaborate, even when some of us are there in person, man, it's better, when folks are. And, you know, I think a lot of corporations are learning that, the human experience is so important. In every aspect, of what we offer to our employees. You know, being home, has advantages at times, but Man, it's got a lot of disadvantages, you know, from a culture perspective, from a creativity perspective. And I think what we're doing in the industry is, is really earning folks commute back to work. Yeah. And and one of the things that that our industry really learn during COVID. I I'm still talking about COVID. It was four, five years ago. And, but we're the impact on our industry can't be understated. Right? Because What happened was our collective industry went from almost a really nice to have, almost kind of the artsy eye candy side of the world. To essential, basically, overnight. Right? And, you know, it no longer was it, you know, I need to have a nice cool screen here and do this. It became very, very practical. And immediately, we began to serve industries that we may not have, served quite at scale. Right? Retail, we've obviously always done a lot of work in hospitality. We've done some work in one of the places that really jumps out is health care. For me, in some of the places that that we're able to serve with things like, circadian rhythm lighting, tonalities and and speakers, and all sorts of different applications. But, you know, when you think about this end user experience specifically in in the live entertainment, immersive entertainment side of the world. What verticals do you think typically are impacted most? Is it the retail? Is it the hospitality? Is it some of those traditional verticals, or do you see it going even beyond that? Yeah. It's definitely all the above, I think. You know, when it comes to hospitality, the first thing that comes to mind, is the cosmopolitan in, Las Vegas. Remember when that hotel first opened. The lobby was, like, blew people away, all the visual aspects, all the, professional, audio visual that odd type of LED displays all over the place. I think they called it techquerading at the time. That that that went by the wayside quick. Yes. Using technology to decorate. But that that's certainly one. The one that I'm really fixed on in our earlier conversation I mentioned transportation is is is transportation airports. We did some work at the Hong Kong airport. Really spectacular stuff. Entertainment based stuff. You know, the crystal elevator is called huge LED display. We also did the waterfall gardens, LED, waterfalls, you know, vertical and across the floor. Just amazing things to entertain people, you know, through the drudgery of travel, international travel, especially where you're stuck in airports for hours. There are things to do and captivate your attention as a traveler. So I think that's really cool. On the retail side, we've done some really cool work with a big retailer. We're not supposed talk about, who they are, but the application is super cool. Huge LED display. Clothing samples on it. Load yourself into the device. Put the clothes on yourself, walk around the space on the LED screen and see what you'd look like in the clothing. Just super cool stuff like that. Yeah. That's I love hearing about experiences like that because it goes back to the the human centricity of design and application of technology. You know, and and one of the things that people will say to, obviously, our technology has advanced pretty dramatically and and continues to advance rapidly as we continue to move further and further, you know, away from, you know, the innovation of electricity, but You know, this phenomenon of end user preference being impacted by, we'll call the experiential or or the almost the out of home world. That's a totally different conversation. I recognize it's a digital signage term. Don't shoot me. I know that. But, you know, that's not really a new phenomenon. Right? I always go back to you talked about LED walls a little bit ago. The YouTube Popbark tour was really one of the first shows to leverage LED technology at scale, obviously, it was a massive, massive screen. But it's funny you look at the ramifications of something like that, Okay. Well, LED is now starting to pop up, you know, immediately after that, and installations and experiences, you know, would you say, you know, that this phenomenon is something really that that is newer or or does it even go beyond further than that? Well, it's it's evolving for sure. YouTube is a great example. When you look at their performance, in the sphere, you know, they were innovative with LED displays back in the day, but, now you look at what they're doing. They're reinventing, the, the kind of, the production value of using LED in a very unorthodox, format. Right? And that that puts challenges on artists too. If you're gonna perform there, you better have content that's built to, you know, amaze in that type of, an environment, you know, it's very different. I think it's it's it's really You know, it's one of those things that over the years, you know, I've been doing this a long time. You you watch the consumer industry kinda drive the professional side of the industry. Costs come down capabilities increase at the same time, and suddenly you find yourself sitting in a room with LED or engulfing you and you're like, how did this happen? When did this ever happen? But it has, and it's gonna continue to happen. And when you throw things like augmented reality on top of it and AI and all the other kind of things that we're feeding into these kind of you know, the world we're creating, creatively through these technologies is pretty fascinating stuff. Well, we're gonna park there for a second. I I wanna dig into that. You talk about AI and obviously sort of being the next frontier of a lot of our installations and applications. You know, what do you see with being the next frontier, especially when you talk about these these fantastic installations Are we using AR? Are we using data to track things like usage rates, personalizations, tracking, you know, basic UI UX functionalities? Are those things that are kind of the next frontier of of of adaptation, or is that something really that transparently we we maybe aren't there yet? I think we're close to being there. And a lot of those but it's always when you reflect on a a year or two from now, you say, oh my god. How archaic was that? Like, you know, but but we're starting to use those tools in our service platforms now. You know, in our service, you know, the one pane of pane of glass approach to, dealing with huge enterprises of, technology. You know, AI can do a lot of the functions that we were doing manually in the past and and can supply a lot of proactive data to deal with issues before they happen, for example. So we're starting to see them built into the tools already. On the augmented reality side, it's really fun, in sports, some of the things they're doing when you watch some broadcasts and you see, you know, suddenly you're not sure what's real and what is it on the field. Right? And that's super, super creative. You know, the fan experience is really getting enhanced with technology too, whether it's, you know, get yourself up on the scoreboard, win a contest, you know, take a look at different angles on the field if you wanna see a replay and you're in the stadium and not at the where you see those replays, you can see them on your device. I mean, there's so many ways technology is drawing, more, connection, with the audience, you know, whether that audience is, you know, at a sporting event or at a f one race f one is is one of the cooler ones. Right? You can see turns, like, I don't know if you've ever been to, like a motorsport kind of an event, but Man, if you have good seats, that's great. And it just kinda goes, that's all you see. Right? And these devices are allowing you to see turn number three, turn number four. That's where the corkscrew is. I wanna, you know, see that from my seat. So, yeah, there's a lot of, creativity coming out. I think in the whole fan experience augmented, reality, and just how to use those tools to, to sell more too. I mean, let's face it. Right? We're running businesses. We want people to come to the game that want to be extra value to sit in a certain section or via t suite, what have you. And these are always to accomplish that, I think, too. Well, what's what's interesting about even that that conversation, right, is we all have one of these or we all have a VR headset or watch or whatever. And and what that's done is that's been a that that's really empowered personalization at scale, right, of experiences. And and you talked about the f ones. You talked about the sports applications of that. What are some real and meaningful applications that you've seen transfer over to the enterprise side? I would say it's mostly from my vantage point, where I've seen, especially AI is on the services part of our business more than anywhere else. I think a lot of the manufacturers in our space are, you know, like, for example, ISE, or on our way to ISE. That's gonna be a big question at many of the booths we stop in you know, how are you using this technology to enhance your platform? You know, what what can we take to our customers? So I I'm kinda geared up for this particular show, along those lines, really, to learn more, frankly. You know, where we've seen it so far in our own offerings is kind of in our service platform. Well, John, look. I mean, it's it's a really interesting world that we live in that continuously evolves. Right? We're we're one at GPT announcement away from everything changing again. Right? I think that was one of my favorite takeaways from, the last few years as things seem to shift overnight as soon as that technology came out. And look, we're we're a month maybe two months away from from something else happening. Right? And, I think it's a great time to be doing what we're doing in the industry because as you mentioned, earlier. We're focusing on end users. We're focusing on the human experience. I think that will continue to serve us well as an industry. But tell you what, John, we've gotta find a way to have you back on because, this is a conversation that a lot of people are asking, especially when it comes to, next gen, what's next for, you know, work environments? What's next for live entertainment? Right? That's a whole different conversation. Altogether. But, we appreciate you coming on. We look forward to, to see you again in the near future. Appreciate you having me. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. Awesome. And thank you for tuning in and watching ProAV today. Be sure to like and subscribe and check us out next time.
