InfoComm 2025 Show Summary  – BYOD (Bring your own device) Technology

by Scott Kelley, Senior Associate, AV, San Francisco

This year marked my return to InfoComm Orlando for the first time since the 2019 edition, so I was pleased to reconnect with industry friends, old colleagues, and the SM&W AV team again in person for a great week of networking, new products, and engaging project discussions. On the technical side, my area of focus for this show centered around BYOD technology for conference and presentation spaces, including support for videoconferencing.

BYOD Connectivity

BYOD spaces make up a large portion of the room systems we design, so it is important to stay up to date with the latest technologies and system design strategies. As client demand for BYOD spaces continues to grow, so too do their expectations for ease and convenience of connectivity. USB 3.1 and USB 3.2 solutions are becoming more prevalent, lending themselves to the true “one cable” connectivity solution the market has continued to ask for year after year.

Lightware’s latest offerings offer USB 3.1 connectivity, simplifying the meeting room connectivity experience to a single USB-C cable for signal transport –including video out to the room display as well as peripheral access to the room’s microphones, cameras, and loudspeakers – as well as device charging. Their Taurus UCX line of products offers compatibility with both Windows and Mac devices, and includes support for USB host control anywhere along the signal chain, mitigating the challenge of host emulation when switching room peripherals between an in-room PC and a BYOD laptop. The Taurus UCX line also offers analog and Dante/AES67 audio de-embedding, giving designers more flexibility for audio processing and routing using dedicated DSP devices. There are Taurus UCX chassis available for all of the most common system configurations, and some of the less common configurations too, with offerings to support various input/output layouts including 2×1, 4×2, and 4×3. One interesting innovation at the Lightware booth this year was new integrations with Cisco and Poly, enabling customized soft-touch buttons to control Lightware devices on those manufacturers’ proprietary control panels.

This year, Logitech debuted a refreshed Rally and Tap line of products that support USB-C connectivity for BYOD devices right from the Tap touchpanel for streamlined device connections. What was most interesting for me was their deep integration with Microsoft Teams; by opting in to Microsoft services through the Teams environment, Logitech’s Rally devices can leverage multistream technologies to split a room’s video image into dedicated tiles for each individual participant. Via opt-in to Microsoft’s services, the Logitech camera can further assign names to those tiles based on facial recognition.

Biamp showcased a number of BYOD innovations at this year’s show, but my favorite was the new MPX 250 connectivity hub. Previously known as the MPX 200, earlier iterations were limited to one device per system which made it difficult to specify for larger tables where each seat at the table needs to have connectivity within arm’s reach. The MPX 250 solves this challenge by allowing designers to daisy-chain up to four MPX 250 units for a total of 16 user connections. Auto-negotiation for display priority between connected devices works seamlessly, and the only element of user interaction required to switch between connected devices is to touch the colored LED at the unit to select an input. By virtue of selecting an input connection, all peripherals connected to the MPX 250 system are shared with the selected laptop, enabling seamless BYOD videoconferencing.

Finally, Yealink debuted their new A50 meeting bar with built-in UC compute and powerful AI-driven video processing for participant tiling and snappy auto tracking. The bar also features AI-driven noise suppression without removing parts of the frequency spectrum that help speech sound natural. Most useful for designers, however, is that the bar provides BYOD extension to the conference table over a single USB-C cable for device charging, content sharing, and peripheral access. The A50 meeting bar is a great solution for small to medium rooms where a client wants modern conferencing features that leverage AI for a more “produced” meeting feel without breaking the budget.