The Future of Control Rooms

The market for AV products is becoming more complex as technologies are introduced and refreshed. This complexity is driven by the user’s expectations of universal connectivity. This means connectivity hardware must be selected in an informed and precise way from a versatile and flexible product portfolio. To share, extend, connect and convert signals is crucial in creating complex AV systems. The digitalisation of the world is reflected in these modern, versatile and powerful AV solutions and in turn, these solutions form the connected world.

Control rooms are the beating hearts of any advanced industry in the age of digitalisation. From rudimentary set ups in small corners of buildings, control rooms have advanced rapidly to take over entire buildings and control the most important functions of a business or public facility. Industries including broadcast, manufacturing, public schools and transport services are realising that a fully featured, versatile and powerful control room is capable of transforming the way in which an institution operates by giving users easy access to data visualisation and information.

A centralised hub of signal management needs to provide users with the capabilities to monitor and manage multiple input and output signals without interruption from a single location. Increasing data volumes, multiple IP and analogue streams and countless content sources around the globe require efficient control with standardised user interface devices and one or more displays.

The increased importance of signal and content sources in the global network means that they need to be monitored by on-site or off-site operators in real time. The foundations of any efficient control room are modular and scalable solutions that keep the control application future-proof and expandable. Powerful matrix switches and long distance KVM devices are major components in next generation control rooms. As more resources become shared throughout an environment it becomes more difficult to make sure the right content arrives at the right place at the right time. Workstation and server sharing is common at almost every workplace that uses a centralised network shared amongst individual employee workspaces. These systems are vital for day to day operation of a company and therefore careful monitoring and management must be available 24/7 with a full suite of control features.

So how can AV equipment be used to create and enhance the most complex control rooms in the world?

Visual information is vital in modern control rooms, having all the available information displayed at a glance is necessary to allow operators to make the correct decision as quickly as possible. This information must be real time and displayed across one or more high resolution displays. Despite high resolution devices often being synonymous with public facing installations they are equally important in control rooms. In scenarios where video walls are in 24/7 operation it is important that the control room features high bandwidth capabilities to replicate, convert and scale the image for internal monitoring across one or more displays.

Data from secondary sites or other locations may passthrough a single centralised control room and therefore state of the art solutions must be deployed that can provide easy access and monitoring of signals from remote environments. This enables control room operators to quickly assess and respond to any mission critical emergencies regardless of location.

The modern control room must handle all these circumstances and factors in a clear and precise way to facilitate the correct deployment of resources to correct errors, or change content. Education, data centres, manufacturing plants and utility control are all influence by unforeseen factors that require versatile solutions that can provide multiple avenues to solve problems. AV devices can be deployed in a variety of ways to create fully featured solutions that turns signal monitoring from a complex, time consuming task into a clear, actionable process regardless of the distances or amount of signals involved.

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