EPISODE 184 | Guest: Brian Galante, President Americas for Copper Leaf Media
Fresh from ISE 2026 in Barcelona, this episode takes a look at what’s shaping the AV industry right now. From the rise of ePaper displays to the quiet but significant shift toward USB-C connectivity, the show made clear that innovation today is less about spectacle and more about making technology simpler, smarter, and more connected.
AI was everywhere on the show floor – some of it genuine, some of it marketing buzz – but the real story at ISE 2026 was interoperability. Platforms, sensors, and devices are finally coming together in meaningful ways, and emerging standards like IPMX are helping AV and broadcast technologies work seamlessly across IP networks.
- Discover why ePaper is becoming the go-to solution for room signs and digital signage
- Learn how USB-C is simplifying AV setups and replacing legacy wiring
- Understand what IPMX standards mean for AV interoperability
- Explore how AI is delivering real value in captioning, camera tracking, and room automation
- Hear what ISE 2026 reveals about where AV technology is headed
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See a video version of this episode on our YouTube channel, with images and videos taken right from the ISE 2026 show floor.
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: Every year. Integrated Systems Europe, that’s ISE, happens in Barcelona, Spain, sometime in early February. Like it happened this February, and we were there and we saw a bunch of things, and we’re gonna talk about it today with someone else who was there, Brian Galante.
Brian Galante: Hello, my friend. How are you, sir?
Derek DeWitt: Excellent. Thanks for coming on today to talk with me about what we saw at ISE, and thank you everybody out there for listening. I remind you, you can subscribe, follow, share, and you can follow along with a transcript on the Visix website.
So Brian, you’re the founder of Dimension PR, and things have changed recently for you. What’s going on there? What’s your new title?
Brian Galante: That is correct, sir. After 15 years of carrying that brand and gradually building a presence for myself, I have joined a wonderful global agency. We are called Copper Leaf Media. I’m one of the directors of the company and President of Americas. So, I am looking forward to a new era with a strong agency of talented people and beautiful souls.
Derek DeWitt: Wow, that’s, well, I mean, it doesn’t really get better than that, does it?
Brian Galante: It does not my friend.
Derek DeWitt: So, when you went to ISE this year, you’re on Copper Leaf’s behalf?
Brian Galante: That’s correct, yes. Although I was still there with all my clients that I’ve had in the AV industry going anywhere between 5 to 15 years.
Derek DeWitt: Good gosh. Yeah, all right. So, what were your overall impressions of the show this year? I felt there was a lot less kind of in-your-face wow factor stuff than in previous years.
Brian Galante: Yeah. I mean, you know, first of all, from an attendance point of view, once again, it was a busy show. You know, people were active, people were engaged. The foot traffic in, at least all the halls that I was in, basically one through five, you know, it was consistent, it was lively. Yes, less in your face. Really, this show, I mean, you know, if I’m gonna tell you the truth, 10 years ago, I probably would’ve found it extremely boring.
But where we are now in the industry is it’s just, you know, there’s not a lot of wow factor anymore. It’s all about moving forward. It’s about efficiency. It’s about making life easier for people. It’s about innovating products and solutions that matter for the way that people work, learn, et cetera, today.
Derek DeWitt: I mean, that in itself is a kind of wow factor. I mean, we’re almost kind of displayed out. We’re tapped out on the display thing. We’ve seen just about every kind of display you can. I did see some, they do these kind of like curved LED screens or LCD screens around desks, which I think are, on the one hand kind of cool. I mean, good for an organization to sort of use as digital signage or, you know, hotels and so on and so forth, info desks and the like; as a customer kind of annoying, frankly. But you know, we’ll see. We saw some, you know, bigger screens and yet higher resolutions, but I think we’re kind of getting tapped out on that. I think a lot of the innovation is going on behind the curtain, so to speak.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a few things that are interesting going on. And if we’re talking about displays specifically, not just inside meeting rooms and classrooms, but really, you know, they’re popping up more and more places, is USB-C connectivity in the display.
And that’s interesting because I think that we have reached a point where HDMI, while still an important connectivity tool, you know, especially in residential spaces, which as you know, is quite big at ISE, we’re starting to see a move away, a shift away from HDMI connectivity and multi- wire connectivity towards single wire connectivity. And what does that better than USB-C right now? You know, we see our laptops are moving to that single USB-C connectivity. We see, you know, that in our phones. What we see going away are these multiple connectivity options in our personal devices. And that’s starting to head the same direction with displays.
So, Lenovo for example, they have a series of displays out there with USB-C connectivity. While there may still be other connection options, what’s happening there? You have video, audio, data, and even charging capability now, you know, can all go over USB-C. So, less need for HDMI. Less need for DisplayPort. And for areas where there’s digital signage or just displays where, you know, you’re showing video content or presenting content, you could even send display port signals over USB-C technology with the use of some real innovative equipment. One example is a company I work with called M Solutions that was quite interesting. But the point is connectivity is changing everywhere. We are moving to a simplification, and that is one interesting element I saw on simplification.
Now, otherwise, on the integration side, one of the major topics I saw at ISE was partnerships, companies coming together to make things simpler for their customers, to build solutions that were more integrated, to build solutions that were interoperable. And I think this year we’re seeing the fruits of that through actual integrations.
The Q-SYS networking platform is one that I found to be quite visible. A lot of companies are beginning to create plugins for that, which can be effectively configured and controlled right in the Q-SYS designer, which I find quite interesting. And a number of companies are basically connecting their platforms to Q-SYS and creating a very cool little AV ecosystem.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, that’s kind of cool. And I like this idea that things are sort of becoming simpler, which is quite nice.
Like the USB-C thing, I believe was actually kicked off by the EU, because back in 2022, the EU passed legislation saying, all right, we’re tired of all these different charging cables and all these different kits, it’s a pain in the neck. And yeah, we’re looking at you Apple with your weird, you know, elongated thing that only works on your devices; that’s not cool. That’s not what we’re all about. So, you know, you’re gonna change that. That went into effect, like, December 29th, 2024. Basically, any device that is sold in the EU has to have that connectivity, USB-C.
And for laptops, it’s this year. I don’t know if it’s already happened January 1st or will happen later in the year, but this is the year where all laptops sold from here on out in the EU must have that connection capability. And so it makes sense that it’s gonna just extend to displays and, and pretty much everything, you know? And it annoys me that we didn’t do this earlier.
Brian Galante: Absolutely. And another area that we’re seeing integration, you know, on the network, over IP networks, sensor technology. More central platforms, or sensing platforms that can, you know, really through open APIs anywhere on the network, pulling sensors from other systems. HVAC systems, displays, lighting, it’s all coming in through a centralized platform now. And the importance of that is for the tech director, for the IT director, for the electrical contractor who might be working there, they can see everything that’s coming into the central platform and pull that data to make decisions on how they’re operating, how the environmental conditions are changing, how they’re utilizing certain meeting spaces, how they’re utilizing certain technologies.
Derek DeWitt: You know, speaking of meeting spaces, in that direction, I can’t remember the name of the company, but I saw a demo by a company that had sensors and all this. And they basically had two main things, it’s all about meeting rooms, fairly large meeting rooms, cameras and directional microphones. And you just set up the system and it’s all there. And you got your cameras, your microphones, and your sensors, and now you, as the person who’s presenting, hopefully you’ve learned, don’t just make a bunch of PowerPoint slides and then stand up there and read the PowerPoint slides. That’s not how we do things anymore. It’s not dynamic.
And to make things even more dynamic now they’re kind of smart. I don’t know if they integrate some kind of AI or something, but you can just walk around that room talking and their system automatically. It does like cuts. It’ll cut to you. It knows if someone’s nodding and it’ll cut to that person nodding. So it’s almost like watching a filmed scene that was thought out, but it’s happening in real time. And I was like, oh, well that’s, I mean, it’s gonna be interesting when we see that extend to other things as well, ’cause it was really quite impressive.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. Camera tracking technology and beamforming microphones. So, the microphones that are hanging down from the ceiling beams and capturing that moving air coming from the lecturer or the students, you know, as they speak, you know? That microphone is beaming in on that specific area of the speaker. Camera tracking technology, absolutely, triggered by sensors and AI. You know, tracking movements of the lecturer as he walks around the room.
Derek DeWitt: So, speaking of other innovative technologies that, they’ve been around for a while, but we’re starting to see really take off, and this was the year that I really saw it take off, is ePaper. EPaper was everywhere. Just like a few years ago, room signs started to show up and, little plug for Visix room signs was one of the first, if not the first digital signage company in the room sign space. And then I think it was last year or two years ago, my wife and I were at ISE, we were like, Oh, now everybody has a room sign. Oh, isn’t that exciting?
So, Visix moved on to ePaper and became quite innovative in that space. And now we see ePaper everywhere, including some big guys. I saw 55-inch with very good color display. They do A3 size ones as well. It was really… we’re seeing a lot of new innovations in the ePaper space.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and what’s not to like about ePaper? It’s visible. They are affordable. Let’s look at a university, you know, who wants to, you know, hit every classroom and be able to show, hey, here are the classes that are coming up, here are the schedules. A large corporate campus with multiple buildings. It can very quickly add up if you are buying hardware-centric room signs. EPaper what an affordable entry level. And why not continue to use it? It works. It works. And they’re replenishable. They last long. I mean, what battery power in some of those for five years? Do I have that right?
Derek DeWitt: Sometimes. There are a lot of factors that go into it. It depends on how often the image changes and so on. Because it only, they only use power when the image changes. Basically if you, if you stuck a full screen thing up there and left it up all day, then you only used power, and it’s a minuscule amount to change those E Ink pixels into that image at the beginning of the day, and that’s it. That’s your whole day’s battery use. Even if it’s, say, you know, five months, it’s still good.
And more importantly, when they’re done right, at least the ones Visix uses, they are portable. They’re moving around. The batteries, yeah, you gotta go change the batteries out, you gotta charge them up and things like this. But you can kind of move them anywhere. I did see some E Ink things that were cabled, which kind of I feel like is counter the idea of E Ink, but, you know, yeah.
The real indication for me was a company called SEEKINK, I think they’re Chinese, and they’ve actually, for the last two years, they were a favorite of Deb’s and mine. Very small booth, but man, I mean, they had all the way down to the tiny, tiny, like in the supermarket, itty bitty little price tag guys on the shelves, all the way up to something a little bit bigger. And last year, they actually assembled, like, four of them together that were bezel-less and created a kind of a mini E Ink video wall. And I was, like, well, that’s impressive.
And then this year, suddenly, their booth was… five times as big? I mean, it was massive. They had all this stuff. They had so many more products. And they had, I’m looking at a picture of it now, they had an, again, using bezel-less E Ink screens and, you know, their software, they had a video wall eight by seven screens. It’s huge. It took up a whole, I don’t know how long it was, but it was, I don’t know, six feet?
Brian Galante: That’s very cool. That’s very cool.
Derek DeWitt: And I was like, oh, so the time of the E Ink video wall has arrived, and it looked good, and transitions were actually getting even smoother. I know a lot of people don’t care about the transitions, but I, as a user do, and I think every year they’re just gonna get faster and faster. I saw, the average last year was 20 seconds to change from a full color image on an E Ink display of a reasonable size to another one. This year it was 12 seconds. And a couple of companies, it was 6 seconds. So, they’re getting better and better.
Brian Galante: I love it. I love it. And if I’m a tech director with a limited budget on a school campus, a college campus, an office building, but I really want, I really have a desire to get that room sign technology out there, just so people know where they’re going, when they’re going, what room is available, what room is not, why not go with ePaper?
Derek DeWitt: Exactly. Exactly. I honestly predict in the next few years, almost all screens will be ePaper. Another thing of course we saw everywhere was the term AI. AI! AI in this, AI in that. I made a joke at one booth and I said, oh, why not, you know, pretty soon our dogs will be screens, and they’ll have AI, you know? It’s just everywhere. I don’t really know what it means. I feel like some companies are maybe shoehorning in AI, just because for marketing purposes. Now, if you don’t say AI, then you’re behind the times, and so you’re a dinosaur and so nobody wants to deal with you. But AI integration; it’s here.
Brian Galante: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s some areas where it’s really shining today. I mean, live captioning and translation for sure. And that’s been going on for a while, you know? And that’s carried from the broadcast side over to the AV side. One company that’s really been leading the way, there’s a company called ENCO, and there’s several players out there right now.
You know, what I’m seeing in broadcast, and you know, probably starting to see a little bit in AV as well, is there are a lot of companies, businesses, you know, integrators that they are working with. A lot of technologies now that, you know, have AI, and are coming from different manufacturers that are using different AI models. So, how do they simplify all of that AI, different models, dancing on their same network? That’s going to be an interesting question moving forward, you know. And I know there’s a company outside of this industry, you know, more broadcast that’s working to simplify that for the end user. Kind of, you know, making AI dance from all these different sources into, you know, a kind of a singular routing platform.
Beyond that, as far as what’s happening right now, I think we are seeing AI deliver true value in captioning and translation. You know, because it can be spun up on prem, it could be done in the cloud, it can be done instantly.
Derek DeWitt: And I think that we’re seeing AI in a lot of backend control systems as well. It’s like, you know, like you said, especially with all this integration, and you’re suggesting we’re gonna see AI integration in the probably not too distant future, it’s gonna be honestly a case of set it and forget it.
Even something super complicated. Yeah, I’ve got a college campus, and I’ve got my HVACs and lights, and I want the lights to come on when people are in the room, and I want them to stay on for 10 or 15 seconds when they leave and then dim out. I want all this stuff to be ready to go, spun up, not on all the time, you know. If someone walks into the meeting room and they’re there for, you know, three minutes, then go ahead and, and turn on all the stuff automatically. And I think we’re gonna see more and more of this kind of stuff.
Just like in the States now, you know, I haven’t touched a door handle or a sink faucet, in I don’t know how long in the US, ’cause they automated it. I just walk up to a door and it opens. I just stick my hand under the faucet and the water comes out, sometimes, you know? I think we’re gonna see the same thing.
It might even be a case of, you know, I might envision a future where, you know, all the screens are AI and, you know, the digital signage basically doesn’t, it doesn’t run if the sensors don’t pick up somebody within six feet. It just turns itself off. Well, why waste the power if there’s nobody in the room? Why am I showing stuff? I’ll just wait till somebody shows up, then I’ll show the playlist.
Brian Galante: Once in a while. Once in a while.
Derek DeWitt: You also mentioned IPMX standards. What is that?
Brian Galante: Yeah. So, this is really interesting. I mean, this is, you know, a movement that’s happening. You know, it’s coming more to the forefront, but you know, it’s a standards body, so to speak. So, in broadcast, ST 2110 is really what the digital equivalent to SDI analog. Now SDI is what’s used in live production to move signals. Once it’s onto the IP network, what do you do with that? It’s changing from wavelength to a network signal. The standard to move that and broadcast, one of the leading ones anyway is ST 2110.
In AV, what’s happening right now is 2110 has very sort of broadcast-centric, very specific requirements, so to speak, because broadcast is a very mission critical, specific nature. So, you know, it requires certain procedures and protocols and processes to adhere to broadcast quality standards. In AV, you can be a little looser with how you handle things, so to speak. It doesn’t mean, you know, being careless, but you know, you don’t have to be quite as restrictive, you know, on your platforms and procedures that you’re, you know, you’re leveraging in AV.
So IPMX is essentially all the wonderful things about 2110 for interoperability on IP networks, but with some looser restrictions. You know, looser endpoints, you can use laptops, you know, you can use more software. So, we are seeing IPMX now emerge to a bit more of the forefront in AV. For product developers especially, what it means is that, you know, there are technologies out there now, modular technologies from companies like Macnica that you can basically IP enable your products. So, you know, by putting a system on a chip or a full stack module inside your camera, inside your router, inside your switcher, you’re essentially enabling it for interoperability on the IP networks.
What does that mean? Making all these products dance together. There are still companies out there that are proprietary in nature where they require you to go inside them and buy all their stuff, you know, so everything works on the network. IPMX, just like 2110, that’s meant to help, you know, to drive interoperability between all these products on the network so they work. So they work for the integrator who is specifying and designing and deploying a system. So they work for the end user who is operating the system. And, you know, so it ultimately delivers quality and benefits for the people.
Derek DeWitt: There you go. So, I think the takeaway from this is that it’s really about integration and interoperability. This is what we’re seeing. This is the trend. This has been the trend. This seems to be the year where it really kind of went “clink” and started really locking together in an interoperable way, one might say. Obviously ePaper, I’m convinced is the future of all kinds of signage, digital signage and others.
And AI is getting a lot “smarter”. I mean, it isn’t intelligent, you know, it’s kind of just a predictive model. And I just read an interesting article by a president of one of these smaller AI companies who said, you have to keep in mind a lot of normal people are using the free versions of AI; those are a year behind where they really are. If you get the paid versions, you’re getting the current version, and they are miles ahead of the free versions. In a year, it’s gonna be a whole new thing where it really is gonna be like having a team of people assisting you in whatever it is you’re trying to do. Plus, all this integration, it’s gonna be really easy for the AI and for the users to go, oh, okay, well, let’s make this all work together, and it’s all gonna work together.
Well, thank you for talking to me today, Brian Galante. He is, tell me again the title for Copper Leaf…
Brian Galante: President of Americas.
Derek DeWitt: Oh! For Copperleaf. Moved on and up into the PR stratosphere.
Brian Galante: I am growing up, my friend.
Derek DeWitt: Finally. At long last. And I remind everybody again that there is a transcript on the Visix website, and on our YouTube channel will be a video of, not us talking, which I find boring, but our conversation with some pictures and videos taken at the ISE show, if you want to see what you missed out on. Thanks for listening.