Parker Group discusses AVenue, VuWall, and the shift to AV over IP

DALLAS – The Parker Group has unveiled its comprehensive AV over IP solution tailor-made for control rooms, AVenue, and Security Systems News (SSN) was on the scene at GSX 2023 to discuss its offering in greater detail.

“Many of the use-cases are after action review, being able to pause content, rewind content, bookmark content,” Parker Group CTO Ray May told SSN in an interview during the show discussing the AVenue platform's DVR capabilities. “You can either do the entire video wall or do a subset. For instance, if you have like 24 pieces of content in a pre-set layout on the video wall, you can choose just one, two, three , four pieces of that content, and we give you a software tool to actually play them back, or in real-time do DVR functions.”

The Parker Group was demonstrating these features live on the show floor for guests attending its booth together with VuWall, a provider of video wall control systems and unified visualization solutions. In a release the company described the control room landscape as “transforming” and moving from solely AV-managed signals to a mix with IP-based transmission.

“There’s so much you can do with IP video that we’re still discovering,” Nick Mathis, director of business development at VuWall, told SSN. “Our current product that we call ‘PAK’ is a little decoder node half-rack mini-PC running Linux that’s built to decode a lot of video. Each little box is rated to decode 32 video streams at 1080p 30fps, which is a lot of video for a couple of monitors on a video wall, and as the wall grows you just stitch together multiple units and it gives you a single canvas.”

The Parker Group indicated that this shift toward AV over IP is driven by the availability of high bandwidth networks and empowers control room operators to now support diverse sources. As such, AVenue is designed to address these changes by facilitating smooth source management, bridging the gap between traditional AV and modern IT requirements, and promising a consistent user experience across all platforms according to the company.

“In today's fast-paced digital landscape, real-time collaboration and decision-making are paramount. With AVenue, control room operators can now experience enhanced visibility, facilitating better collaboration for more accurate and timely decision-making, and optimized data analysis,” May said in a release issued by the Parker Group. “By bridging the gap between AV and IT, AVenue is setting new standards in interdisciplinary integration.”

“There’s a ton of new potential for where this stuff can be used going forward,” Mathis added during his interview. “It’s fun to talk about, it’s a little Swiss Army knife. You put the right pieces in the right places, and you can deliver video anywhere.”

AVenue is set up and providing demonstrations at the InfraGard booth #1819 at GSX 2023.