With the coming of AI and the sophistication of new equipment, technical companies are no longer just equipment sellers and installers, they are “solutions providers.”

At IBC 2025, AVC’s  Ian Campbell and Simon Jackson spoke to Steve Ahern about the trends they saw at the IBC exhibition and discussed the way that technologists are now thinking about the work they do.

“Australians and New Zealanders push the boundaries of technology more than most,” said Campbell, revealing that they get more feature requests from broadcasters in those countries because they want to use the technology to its fullest.

AVC supplies products through the Telos Alliance to give them the biggest range of equipment to satisfy customer needs.

Simon and Ian from AVC, you work with a lot of companies in the Telos Alliance. You’ve been installing studios and equipment now for quite some time. What have you seen and what are people talking about?

I think everyone’s talking about AI, not surprisingly.

It’s interesting how people are using AI, probably very inappropriately. Something like last year was just workflows, now it’s AI…

One really good example is taking old archives, which have been pretty much dead because they didn’t have sufficient metadata, to become actually really useful. Now we’re able to go back and mine those and actually apply context to them. We have clients that are finding information they didn’t know they had. In this time where creation of content is necessary more than ever, being able to go and use what you already have is the cheapest sort of production and most effective.

I agree with you about AI. It’s really been a marketing term where people just put the AI stamp on something and thought it was new. But this year, I’m seeing that it’s changing a bit. It’s not just simple AI, use it to cut some costs. We’re starting to see, just as you were saying, that it’s being used for better handling of content.

Yeah, making us be able to rapidly produce content as an assistant, as a force multiplier.

You could be using it to reduce workforce, but actually I think more importantly, it could be used to produce more and better content using resources you have, unlocking all that old archive material, audio and video.

People don’t realize what they have. And I think now being able to go back very quickly and efficiently respond to things that happen now by finding what you’ve got in the past and be able to present that very effectively… previously you’d have to spend a lot of time listening to a lot of content to decide actually there’s nothing really useful here. So now AI can provide transcription to thousands and thousands of hours of old content from dating back to sometimes the 30s and 40s. It’s really powerful and it’s quite exciting.

AVC plans and installs a lot of facilities. How are you changing your thinking when broadcasters are asking for more with the new types of equipment that they can get?

It’s very prevalent in New Zealand and Australia. It’s something in the psyche of media people in those two countries that say, yes, I’m going to buy this. But I don’t want to do what it says on the box. I also want to do other things. They’re always constantly pushing the barrow about how else can I use this product to do something else? How can I automate my workflows and stuff? Which turns into feature requests for us.

We don’t just install things. We design solutions using a really interesting toolbox from the partners we have with really amazing technology. Our job is to take and translate what the customer need is, understand the kind of solution they’re looking for, and then see what it is we have available to put that together for that solution.

It’s not that we’re just taking these three Telos products and then selling them the Telos products, we’re providing solutions that help them do their mission, like tell their story. To tell their stories much more effectively and using really powerful tools that our partners are creating. We rely on our partners to be up to date with the latest technologies and to be at the leading edge of innovation. But somebody needs to do that translation. We act as a translator between the needs of the customer and the technology of our partners.

I think that’s probably the most important thing now because the technology allows us to just plug in a blue cable and a power cord and it will work. But it’s all that planning to actually adapt it to how the people want to work.

Yeah, you can’t do it successfully by dropping and running, you’ve got to start and work through the design and say, okay, we’ve got that right, got that wrong, and then find the solution. So there’s a fair bit of this being done mid -project.

You can do a design and a plan, but when you actually get into it you need to have the ability to change as well, change gear. We went through that at nine when they moved from layer two to layer three in mid -project. That was a lot of fun.

We see our job as helping people tell stories. And we help them apply technology efficiently to do that. Our job is not to sell them something, it’s actually to help them tell stories, help them make their mission more effective.

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