The Evolution of Enterprise AV and UC with Jason Moulden, Crestron

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners planning meeting-room refreshes, AV integrators skilling up on Teams Rooms, and Microsoft partners moving into room technology who need to understand AV design constraints.

Guest: Jason Moulden — Global Alliances Technical Lead (Technical Marketing), Crestron

Jason Moulden leads technical marketing and global alliances work at Crestron, sitting between product development, sales and the field. He and Tom Arbuthnot cover how AV and UC are converging, the pull between all-in-one Android bars and full AV systems, the state of large-room deployments, and where self-configuring and cloud-processed audio might go next.

Many thanks to Crestron, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Crestron's technical marketing team acts as a translator between product, sales and marketing, and deliberately demos products with the exact Microsoft-certified feature set rather than idealised configurations. ▶ 1:34
• Two opposing trends are running at once: buyers moving to all-in-one Android for single-box simplicity, while others extend Android devices with AV peripherals — lighting, shades, third-party DSPs and camera drivers — so the 'simple' Android category is maturing into something more integrated. ▶ 5:08
• COVID inverted the usual room-refresh order: social distancing forced organisations to kit out their largest rooms first, so 12-person rooms were skipped in favour of the biggest spaces available. ▶ 6:40
• Despite momentum in small and medium rooms, Moulden sees a large backlog of unaddressed high-end spaces — often deferred because they are seen as difficult rather than for budget reasons. ▶ 7:10
• The One Beyond range has gone from one multi-camera system to three approaches: the AutomateVX controller for the largest rooms, single cameras usable one-to-one, and a new design pairing two 12x optical zoom cameras that talk to each other and present a single connection to the Teams Room. ▶ 8:42
• Moving from Microsoft skills into AV is harder than the reverse; Crestron's three-and-a-half-year-old training course on its products 'through the eyes of Teams' is roughly 70% Microsoft knowledge for AV integrators. ▶ 13:50
• The Teams Rooms Pro Portal has removed hours of PowerShell account configuration, though Moulden still scripts when spinning up demo tenants — the change matters most for AV partners who could not scale on PowerShell workarounds. ▶ 14:20
• Practical shortcut for Microsoft partners entering AV: choose kit that removes the need for specialist knowledge, such as Netgear switches that auto-identify AV vendors and place devices in the correct VLAN. ▶ 16:55
• Cloud-based audio processing could eventually displace in-room DSPs given sheer available compute, with latency the main constraint; speakers and amplification stay physical. ▶ 18:28
• Sizing warning worth repeating to buyers: Crestron's forthcoming Android all-in-one targets medium and large rooms, and putting it in a small room fails on camera field of view even though the audio would be more than adequate — 'large and medium' does not imply 'fine for small'. ▶ 20:32

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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