Lightware CEO Gergely Vida: My predictions for 2023

As we head into 2023 and beyond, we will see much more widespread adoption of internet security in meeting room solutions in the corporate and enterprise sectors, and in solutions for the education sector.

The challenge of the education market going forward is for higher education institutions to have a better understanding of how to design a classroom environment to bring accessible hybrid learning to every student.

The welcome return of the events/rentals sectors sees an emerging demand for rental equipment, and a more viable cost-effective solution in particular for one-off shows.

The need for the security of physical devices and data protection, which has been accentuated this year, is setting Lightware firmly on further bolstering the security features in our products and expanding their compliance with the key network security standards.

AV over IP solutions will be more popular in the future for the event/rental sectors, so Lightware is also focusing on these markets – offering a 1G and a 10G solution as well. The VINX series extenders designed for 1G Ethernet networks and the award-winning UBEX capable of performing the challenging duty of delivering 4K60Hz 4:4:4 uncompressed AV signal across 10G networks will enjoy further recognition among AV integrators.

Since its introduction in 2021, the Taurus has been a huge success for corporate meeting room solutions. First of all, because we introduced it at the right time, the market was in great need of an easy-to-use AV device that supports hybrid work, and secondly, because we brought a solution based on USB-C to market before everyone else.

We will continue the development of our UCX products in 2023, in the direction of making it even easier for the end user to use, and we are working on real-world industry integrations that will be released in 2023.

Taurus won The Best of ISE 2022 award and the AV Awards 2022 Collaboration Product of the Year Award. We are confident that we can introduce new hardware and software with Taurus that will bring further success to the product.

With electricity bills soaring and potential blackouts a palpable threat, we expect the need for room automation and assets’ remote control, maintenance, and bulk upgrades, will continue to be high. With this demand, we continue to nurture our automation and control firmware and products.

The Taurus’s firmware, LARA (Lightware Advanced Room Automation), will, in particular, offer customers and integrators a set of new control features scheduled to be unveiled in Barcelona at ISE 2023. LARA will boast an unmatched easiness of configuring, extensively based on the use of the pre-written modules, the drag-and-drop method, and a number of other features aimed at simplifying AV integration and configuration.

AV solutions will continue to become more integrated, either within a brand or as a result of collaboration. The trend for integration has been precipitated by the growing need for further flexibility and the enhancement of the videoconferencing and presentation experience. Collaboration with manufacturers in order to improve the overall AV user experience has been championed by Lightware for several years now.

We are proud to extend the benefits of partnerships with Cisco, Utelogy, and Barco to users. More partnerships are to be announced in 2023. As we strive to offer fully featured, smoothly operating solutions we have recently introduced an AV integration department and will continue supporting system integrators globally by assisting in designing and developing their projects to attend to emerging customers’ needs.

In 2022, we have seen the events sector regaining its pre-Covid activity. We believe this trend will continue in 2023, and so there will be a need for powerful professional AV matrix switchers and AV-over-IP solutions. Lightware’s UBEX AV-over-IP extender which has recently been awarded the title of AV Awards 2022 Event Technology of the Year will be an optimum fit for live events and esports.

With LED technology growing more affordable and so more applicable, we have seen more LED screens installed everywhere, from corporate town halls up to the most technologically advanced settings like XR studios. We believe the popularity of LED walls and surfaces for creating immersive environments will keep growing, driving the need for professional signal-delivery solutions to carry uncompressed 4K60Hz 4:4:4 maintaining colour fidelity, pixel accuracy, and zero latency. Lightware’s UBEX will cope with such challenging applications.

Having once launched a product, Lightware never ceases developing it, and we are looking forward to unveiling new features of our award-winning solutions at ISE 2023. We believe the exhibition will be themed around security, efficiency, and immersion, with exhibitors promoting cross-industry collaboration and showcasing suites of networked, cyber-secured products, presenting a further merger of AV and IT technologies and delivering an enhanced user experience.

2023 promises to be very exciting for Lightware.