It’s Saturday. It’s the weekend and it’s time for another series! No, not on TV, this is ‘Worth it?’ a series of posts at a time looking at a given scenario and the products that attempt to solve it. The first topic I’m going to cover is AV Management in the work and home.

Introduction

In our current day and age, there’s few people that don’t have access to a screen. Be it using our televisions and devices in the home to watch content, to using one in meetings at work and conferences to having on on your desk or counter in your day to day work When it comes to combining lots of bits of kit though, people often have differing views on how they wish to control it and maintain it.

For example, there are people in the home that are contempt with having several remote controls to access their TV, their disc/SSD player (Blu-Ray, CD, DVD, iPod Dock, digital media player etc), Games Consoles and speaker systems – however these remotes can and will grow over time as you buy more technology and for some it only serves to confuse.

The fear that most people have about AV management and control is that it’s only for the rich and smart. This isn’t the case these days though with more usable and affordable technology coming out all the time.

Another popular fear that people have is that they’re not technology ‘literate’ and after being shown the basics on their remote control they’re happy with what they can do and they just ignore all of the other buttons. Whilst that is totally fine, what if there are other people who are fiddlers and tinkerers and change things that fall outside of your delicate ecosystem (how dare they!)?

Simple AV management can keep this basic experience for you (albeit laying the buttons out differently) and at the same time, allow you and any guests you invite in your home or to house sit without any fiddling. Another distinct advantage, particularly in the home that you’ll save on the vast amount of batteries that you are constantly having to feed to them and the large amount of exploration under and inside the sofa to hunt down the right one that you/your family/your pets have managed to hide somewhere, just in time for your favourite programme to come on the TV.

In this series of posts, we’ll have a look at some of these options and see what their benefit is over the traditional method. We’ll look at Multi-remotes & Universal remotes, programmable home solutions & IoT solutions, at professional solutions for work and, for the hardcore some solutions of working with RS-232.

I hope you like this series and new type of post and if you have a scenario that you’d like to discuss or me to take a look into in the future, feel free to get in touch or place a comment down below.