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Installation Europe

October 2007

Protect Kit and Margins With Furniture and Mounts

Far from being a mundane shell around hi-tech goodies, furniture and mounts are becoming both more technologically sophisticated and more important for safeguarding integrators’ profits. Joy Zaccaria reports.

As commoditisation increases for projectors and flat panels, their mounts and furnishings are under pressure to maintain margins for installation companies. Meanwhile, furniture is becoming more intelligent; where it was previously used to house various technologies, it’s increasingly having those technologies built into it.

When speaking of mounts and furniture in Europe, the education market often comes up. And when schools and colleges are mentioned, discussion of security is sure to follow, given the liberties taken by some students with this generation’s classroom aid, the projectors.

With the consumer boom for flat panels and projector displays in full swing, these hi-tech items have come down in price quickly and so have the prices for their mounts. “Everyone is jumping on the universal mount bandwagon,” says Robert Seward, marketing director at Unicol. “Loads of them are made in China and shipped all over the world.”

The main trends are based around price. “Volumes have certainly grown in the past couple of years,” says Stuart Lockhart, general manager of Vision. “In three years, a bracket has gone from costing a trade customer £99 or even £130 to costing them £50. It’s not just projector brackets. The LCD screen wall mounts have gone from £50 to £5 in the space of two years.”

A driver for this increase in volume has been Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, which issued guidance in 2004 for schools to install AV equipment. “The catalyst was the incredible investment the government made into projectors for classrooms,” says Lockhart. “It meant that rather than selling 500 brackets a month, we’ve been selling 2,000 a month.”

Becta set a marker, which dictated the price and therefore margins made by resellers. With the government initiative to buy volumes of AV gear for schools comes a need to standardise. “They limited resellers to which brand of projector to get and even which model. It was quite specific,” says Lockhart. Integrators in the education space are under more price pressure because there’s hardly any margin on projectors now. “Brackets are a straightforward way to increase margins,” he says. “That’s been a real powerful driving force.”

When resellers are making 5% on a projector due to commoditisation, it’s important to keep pockets of margin in other things, and brackets are one of them. Maintaining a price for mounts benefits the manufacturer, reseller and installer. “We control the channel so that a reseller can buy a bracket off me for £29,” says Lockhart. “He’ll quote £99 to his end user. That’s a good price to an end user and it normally means he’ll get the deal. If he does need to move a bit, he’s got £70 of margin to play with.”

For a professional installer, the proliferation of the universal mount means more time spent on the job site making that universal mount fit the product. “The last thing the installer wants to do is mess about with fixings,” says Unicol’s Seward. “They want to get a bracket they know is going to fit to that screen and put it up quickly.” Unicol builds universal mounts, and also builds ‘exact match’ mounts that fit the particular specifications for various manufacturers’ screens and panels.

“You’ve got to take it out of the box and have it up on the ceiling lightning fast if you’re going to make money on your installation,” says Lockhart. “In education, if you’re a contract installer doing four classrooms in one day, if you do fewer than that you’re not going to make money as the margins are so tight.”

Engineering and security

“We haven’t changed the principle of our main wall mounting system since it was first designed back in 1963,” says Seward. “A lot of people have used it and know it.” Seward has spotted a trend among mount manufacturers which, unlike his company, are supplying on a global scale. “There seems to be an over-elaboration in the design and I would imagine the reason for that is they’re trying to get competitive advantage,” he says.

“If you’re providing a global universal solution, you are providing it to consumers. The consumer wants choice and may have the perception of a ‘simple’ design as one that wouldn’t cost a lot of money.”

Vision’s focus is on the various products that are included in an installation, brackets among them. “We are sticking with one universal bracket aimed at education and that fits most applications,” says Lockhart. “We’ve tried to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible.”

“In the UK, there has been a big push for security fixtures on mounts,” he says. “There’s been a push for just having it look nicer. Even the education customers who are so price-oriented, do get a bit picky about how it looks. They don’t want to see too much of the tilting mechanism.” Vision redesigned its bracket to make the part that fits to the projector as small as possible so it can’t be seen from the floor.

When it comes to security, the key word is ‘deterrent’. Schools are suffering from an epidemic of stolen hi-tech equipment. Thanks to Becta, classrooms are loaded with new projectors that are easily repurposed for entertainment instead of education. Some students maximise their time ‘casing the joint’ and come up with innovative ways to make a projector their own.

On the basic level, manufacturers offer security screws for mounts that require a special tool to undo. “We have options where cable is run around all the fixing points, so you can’t get to them,” he says. “We also have an audio alarm system that goes off if the power is disconnected from the screen. The alarms seem to be popular,” says Seward.

Another option, followed by manufacturers including Vogel’s, is to encase the proejctor in an anti-theft housing that can be secure with a padlock in addition to anti-theft screws – without compromising maintenance access, according to the company.

There are still plenty of ways for thieves to get a projector of their own. At a school in Manchester, a projector was mounted to an old oak beam. Thieves cut through the beam on either side of the projector and took the whole thing, mount and all.

“If the thieves want it, they’ll get it,” says Seward. “At a London college, an installer was working in a classroom upstairs. When he looked out the window, he watched a kid run off with a projector they had just installed downstairs.”

All of these schemes don’t mean much to the mount manufacturer aside from the fact that, for the foreseeable future, there is plenty of work in the education market that is only exacerbated, or improved, by the thievery.

Digital signage buzz

“From an AV market point of view, digital signage is the big buzz,” says Seward. “I imagine there are going to be more plasma walls and big screens. The 103-inch Panasonic is a good size for that marketplace, but it’s very expensive.”

Advertisers are most familiar with the traditional print poster size. “The closest poster size that’s reasonably inexpensive as far as the screen is concerned is 65 inches,” says Seward. “There are going to be more portrait 65in screens going in.” For retail, Unicol has just sold some kiosk mounts as a large format screen in portrait which is interactive. It has a touchscreen on the front of it, two media players underneath, and LED lights to get people’s attention.

“Touchscreens through the shop window – we’re making stands for those,” says Seward. “We’re working on 65in single- and double-sided. The traditional printed poster is going to become an interactive techno poster.”

Often the flexibility of having access to the cables takes priority over the neat and tidy appearance of managing cable so that it’s not an eyesore. “Ascot Racecourse has got plasmas there that fold in and out,” says Seward. “They wanted them to pull out of the wall and tilt. We’ve got swing arm units on there with the cable tie-wrapped to the mounts.”

Lifts and lecterns

Weibel Lift is a Swiss company with an installation background. Hans Weibel was installing scissor lifts when he invented a new way to raise and lower a projector from the ceiling more precisely. The Weibel Precision Lift is based on four spindles and a chain for precision.

Weibel started developing his precision lift about six years ago. According to the company’s Herman Holtus, “installers like it because it’s simple and highly precise.” The current range of projector scissor lifts require 35cm in the ceiling to build the lift. With the Weibel precision lift, it is necessary to have 15cm.

“Installers are quite happy with our product because it provides a nice margin,” says Holtus. “It’s more expensive than a regular scissor lift. Also in the interest of the installer, the precision lift is designed to require less maintenance.”

In the world of furniture for AV technology, lecterns are housing, concealing and protecting more than ever. Intelligent Lectern Systems BV (ILS) of The Netherlands created a compact lectern solution designed to eliminate the need for a laptop. The ILS lectern can receive a presentation via memory stick or DVD and run it with a touchscreen interface under the presenter’s control.

For the installer, integrating the lectern into a larger system is comparable to hooking up a PC. Lecterns are walking the line between the worlds of AV and IT. ILS’ Henk De Groot explains, “We view our lectern as an appliance, like a PC. When using portable memory devices carrying a presentation, no trace is left on the lectern once the device is pulled.”

Tecom Electronics is based in Israel and has been manufacturing all-in-one audiovisual lecterns for the last eight years, with hundreds of units installed in markets worldwide.

Tecom’s CEO, Aviv Brosilovski, describes the company’s TechPod as a fully interactive, comprehensive multimedia lectern that now has the option of a sensitive interactive screen/writing board. One control panel is used for controlling every AV device, from an LCD projector, PC or document camera to a laptop, VCR and CD/DVD player.

Case study: The University of Vilnius gets intelligent lecterns

THE GRAND OPENING of the new facility at the Mykolas Romeris University of Vilnius, Lithuania on 4 September revealed the installation of two ILS16 intelligent lecterns with Smart Sympodium DT770 displays from Intelligent Lectern Systems (ILS). KAS in Vilnius installed the presentation systems in the conference/pressroom and in the auditorium. Local dealer Tautvydas Pradzevicius says the university is glad to use the latest technology, design, and functionality.

KAS equipped several auditoria at the university, along with distance-learning and videoconference centres, a library and lecture theatres.

KAS equipped several auditoria at the university, along with distance-learning and videoconference centres, a library and lecture theatres.

ILS is working with its production facility to also create a 19in rack base version to facilitate more extensive integration. These systems come with a large KVM switch to select between two internal (PC, visualiser) and two external data sources (such as notebooks).

The ILS lecterns are designed to work out of the box as high-performance touch computers with ILS’ Sho-Q PowerPoint presentation system. Sho-Q queues all presentations for a seminar or conference automatically for seamless transitions from one presenter to the next

Case study: Scottish Police College, Kincardine

TECOM ELECTRONICS has installed its TechPod All-in-One Multimedia Lectern at the Scottish Police College in Kincardine, Fife. With Tulliallan Castle at the heart of campus, the college is the central police training establishment serving all eight police forces in Scotland, comprising some 14,500 officers. It provides comprehensive training from recruits to command level. TechPod was installed in the main conference hall at the Culzean building, which can seat up to 202 delegates.

The TechPod integrates all audiovisual equipment required during training into a single compact console with a user-friendly interface, allowing the trainer to have complete control over all devices.

TechPod features a computer with a DVD player, document camera, VCR, public address audio system, interactive screen, and lighting and projection screen controls. All controls are on the front of the unit, eliminating the need for complicated menus.

Replacing the existing AV control equipment in the hall with the TechPod solution is designed to enable trainees and trainers to operate all audiovisual sources, and to concentrate on content delivery, rather than cable linkage. TechPod has also been connected to two video cameras broadcasting from remote conference rooms to the main hall, for virtual hall enlargement.

“We recognised the increasing use of multimedia presentations in training sessions and worked with trainers to create the solution to best fit their needs,” says Aviv Brosilovski, Tecom’s CEO. “With their help, we developed the TechPod, allowing trainers to focus on developing media-rich seminars, knowing that the AV equipment will facilitate the presentation rather than be a technical barrier.”

www.intelligentlecterns.com
www.techpod.com
www.unicol.co.uk
www.visionaudiovisual.co.uk
www.vogels.com
www.weibellift.com