This week's home automation podcast features our host Ron Callis interviewing Paul Harris. Recorded live on Wednesday, October 25th, 2017 at 12:30 p.m. EST. 

About Paul Harris

Paul Harris, CEO/CTO of Aurora Multimedia Corp, has been developing bleeding edge products for the A/V industry for over 25 years.

Starting with the creation of real-time image rotation for videowalls to setting the bar with many world’s firsts with AV over IP and HDBaseT, Paul continues to push the limits of technology.

He founded Aurora in 1998 and continues to develop integrator-friendly solutions that meet the demand for today and the future.

Interview Recap

Here are some of the topics Ron had the opportunity to discuss with Paul:

• After 25+ years in the industry, have things changed much?
• Being involved as one of the first companies to develop IP control and AV over IP
• Aurora Multimedia Corp's R&D process
• MMA and the recent Mayweather - McGregor fight

SEE ALSO: Home Automation Podcast Episode #20: A Custom Integration Industry Q&A With Bryan Stanley

Transcript:

Ron:  Hello everyone. Ron Callis with One Firefly. And another episode of Automation Unplugged. How you guys doing out there? You guys and gals. So it is currently about 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday October 25th. It is almost Halloween. So I hope you have some exciting Halloween plans. I actually think my family and I are going to take it easy this year and my son has a brand new puppy at home. So he says he wants to stay home and we're going to be handing out candy. So no costumes this year. So if you're anticipating something wacky like we've done in the past not this year but anyway let's get to it. So I have a very exciting guest actually a gentleman that I haven't spoken to in a number of years when he and I were guests on an A.V. Nation episode. I think it was probably almost five or six years ago. So I've got Paul Harris from Aurora Multi-media. So I'm going to go ahead and bring in Paul. Paul how's it going sir?

Paul: How are you doing?

Ron:  I am good. How is your Wednesday going today?

Paul: It's going very well. I'm pleased to be on the air with you.

Ron:  Awesome. Where are you recording from where. Where is your home base or your offices?

Paul: Corporate headquarters in Morganville New Jersey.

Ron:  Awesome. Now just for my audience. Some of them may not know you Paul and so don't be shy but I'm actually going to read your bio here just for a moment. This is where you can blush and be proud of your accomplishments but says Paul Harris is the CEO and CTO of Aurora multimedia. He's been developing bleeding-edge products for the A.V. industry for over twenty-five years starting with creation of real time image rotation for video walls to setting the bar for many of the world's firsts with AV over IP and HD based. T. Paul continues to push the limits of technology. He founded Aurora in 1998 and continues to develop integrator friendly solutions that meet the demand for today and the future. Paul you've been around you've been doing this stuff for quite a while it sounds like.

Paul: Yeah, been doing it for quite a very long time.

Ron:  Now you and I were chatting just before we went live that you actually I believe got your start as a Crestron and an AMX programmer and now you're running a very successful manufacturing company so if you don't mind I'd love to get the background for my audience just to kind of know who you are and where you came from.

Paul: Oh God. Well for this industry you know right at once I got into college I was doing our video walls and video wall company. So that's actually why I got my first taste of this. And then from designing our video walls and projectors then jumped over to doing AV integration company where I was doing a lot of the field work programming. You know the more the field management element of it.And then while that was going on, started up Aurora Multimedia with two of the gentlemen at the time guy by the name Mike and Larry Waldron and now it's currently a two person company Mike Talk and myself. So that's kind of where we got our roots from it. And when we first got started yeah we did our control system programming or we one of the largest probably definitely on the East Coast if not in the country just doing nothing but a large scale programming projects.And then from there we started I merged a company that I had called XYZ Tech which did paging supervisory systems for Lockheed Martin Lucent Technologies merged that capability and then we from there we started developing integrator solutions and that's where we started making the world's first non proprietary IP based control system.

Ron:  So how long ago was that? So you were you were programming and you were being hired, who was hiring?

Paul: So you're trying to reveal my age is what you're telling me?

Ron:  No you can't be a day over I'm thinking a day over 25.

Paul: Over 26 years I've been doing this. So I started about twenty-six years ago out of college and then as far as doing the programming, Aurora's on its 20th anniversary. So we got incorporated at the end of '97 open the doors on January 1st of '98. So we've been going at this for 20 years for the Aurora part of it at least.

Ron:  Do you still program? Do companies still hire you to do programming across different systems?

Paul: Crestron's our competitor now.

Ron:  Oh, Crestron's your competitor now. So now Yeah that's right.

Paul: That's what the C stands for is competitor.

Ron:  Oh I'm not going there. I'm not even touching that with a stick. So at what point did you start not just programming things but making products? And I understand you're you're big in terms of the A.V.over IP kind of movement. You were there at the inception. If I understand it correctly.

Paul: Yeah well I mean there's other companies who were doing it prior to me. It's just a matter of the take that we do things on one of the points when we develop our own products is not to be like everybody else. So we don't want to make the same old product that you just see 20 of the same thing but with a different silkscreen on it. So one of the goals when we develop a product is to simply make a difference. So we target mostly integrator solutions things that make a difference that are going to change the way that things work for the better. So when we did the first control system we knew that the whole world was going towards the I.T. realm. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to create a control engine that was not proprietary based on standards like our HTML and Ajax and Java and so on and we wanted to make the web engine the control engine rather than have some proprietary engine that just had web capabilities. So that was kind of the start of it. We probably I think that was about 16-17 years ago we made our first control system and that was what we called the wacky control system. So it stood for web accessible control interface. Yeah we like those silly type names.

Ron:  It was really called the wacky control system. That product name you went to market with?

Paul: Yeah it was. But you know what you never forget it. Who remembers the X Five thousand and one dash J.R. whatever but you never forget a name like wacky. So we had products like Ditto and PTO and you know you have some fun with it. People like it. They still remember it. Plus we made cool t shirts at the time so you can't get a good product you've get a good T-shirt.

Ron:  Amen I want to get one of those shirts by the way I'll send you an Automation Unplugged T-shirt.

Paul: There you go. We will have to trade some T-shirts.

Ron:  That would be cool. Now Paul what sort of changes have you seen from a high level maybe 30000-foot view and you can dive down as deep as you want over this 25, 26 year career on the control systems side I'm assuming you've seen some pretty interesting projects. What changes have you seen happening over that timeframe or that would mean a lot to you to share.

"Control has been a slow progression."

Paul: Well you know the control has been I wish I could say that's been something revolutionary and control's been a very slow progression there hasn't been anything that you know you can look at it doesn't mean anything monumental. Some people are going into the cloud there's blessings and curses with doing that. There's all different models that people have tried. For the most part, people are still using 232 they're still using relays and IR and IO and land control so it really doesn't involve that much. There was a fad for a while where people were going really large and screens where you started off with seven inch touch panels and next thing you know up to twenty one inch touch panels and then it went right back down again and it kind of got out of that hole bigger is better a touch screen element and a kind of the sweet spot. So then at the seven inch and the ten point one inch which most people seem to focus on. But when it comes to control going in just maintaining libraries and having the same old ports that continue to go along and just making certain that it writes the code and the tools are easy to use, it really hasn't progressed all that much there's really only so much you can do with it.

Ron:  Now I want to speak real quick Paul. We are streaming live here on Facebook so I want to just speak to our audience. First of all if you're out there thank you for watching and listening and if you are driving please only be listening and not watching. That would be the safe way. I was just at a number of shows recently and I had some people tell me in their commutes they're watching and listening I was like no. Only listen do not watch. That would not be safe. That is of course if you're driving but if you're out there please like this. Please share this. I see we already have a couple of shares so that others in the industry can benefit. And then of course if you're out there and you have a question for Paul and if you are watching this here live if you type into the comments any questions or comments for Paul I'm going to do my best to read those off and have him address those live. And you know what else I'm going to do here. I'm going to go ahead and for those of you that like to learn more about Paul's company I'm just going to drop right here and drop in his web address so you can see that there in the comments. There you go. Yeah just populated, cool. So Paul you are designing and creating solutions for integrators. Can you talk to my audience a little bit about the R and D process you take?

"How do you really define where you're going to spend those energies and then what's the process that results in you ultimately making a product that you take to market?"
I mean how do you really define where you're going to spend those energies and then what's the process that results in you ultimately making a product that you take to market?

Paul: Well I can't give away all our secrets to get to market.

Ron:  Just give me the stuff that's not secret.

Paul: I'll give you the basic guts and glory. A lot of people don't always know how products are developed but what will happen is you'll start off depending on what you're developing whether it's let's say AV view over IP for example and you'll find the chipset that you like and usually that manufacturer will have a reference design which is a board that proves that s!#* works along with some basic software to get started. That's why you'll see a lot of similarities in products that are out there. Some companies will literally take that reference design just copy it exactly as it is throw a box around it and off it goes to market. Other people will move connectors around and make it look a little different. And then there's us where we say we want to do this and this. They tell us no you can't do that. And then we say watch us and then usually a few months later there's something unique that's different.So let's take AV over IP is a nice easy one for me to target. The more recent stuff. And it's something that we really differentiate ourselves with. So we'll take a reference design most people are used to transmitters receivers otherwise known as encoders, decoders and we looked at it and said well that's not acceptable we need to make it easier than that. So we made transceivers so we rearranged the engines the way they were intended to develop, rewrote the code and we allowed it to reverse direction.So this way there's only one SKU, only one box so it opens up new capabilities. We actually even have patents pending on some of the stuff that we've done with the transceiver technology. So whereas most people look at it and they say well we'll keep it simple we'll keep the cost down just an encoder decoder. We now give you the ability where it's only one box one wall plate one SKU. You can also do new things like reverse directions. I can have a wall plate in the front of a room wall plate in the back of the room. I could tell one to become an encoder one to become a decoder. Use it as an extender across the room send it to other rooms and so on. So that's one example. Other examples would be we took other technologies like Dante and we mixed it in for the first time with other video standards. So where people were treating Dante as just an audio standard. We said well that's great standard. And why not mix it in with a video standard to break it off? So we did something to that effect and the list goes on we purposely go out of our way to do things that make a difference that simplify the installation, simplify what it takes to inventory the product to service the product as well as the overall objective and the techniques that you can use within a facility that you just didn't have prior to it which gives us our unique edge in our products. So it differentiates us from everybody else. So when somebody's selling a product, there is not quite anything like it on the market.They don't go apples to apples it's really apples to oranges. And we can justify why we do the things and how it's going to make a difference.

Ron:  Does that uniqueness and or proprietary nature of the solutions you're offering does that enable. I'm just curious from the dealer side does that let them charge more or make an appropriate margin? Maybe that's better in some cases than some other products are. How do you handle our approach that side?

"One of our big things is to protect the integrator."

Paul: Well yeah actually it's one of the things that's very important to me is one of our big things is to protect the integrator. This industry is broken and it's just one of the things where I preach it so I'm going to sell a little bit like a reverend.

Ron:  All right I'll give you a soapbox man. Go for it.

Paul: So but the problem the problem with this industry comes from everybody the manufacturers the integrators the consultants everybody. And when got broken is at one time and you'll hear me repeat this here and there and everywhere. Because it's what I preach. But it's what I believe in is at one time life was simple for our commercial industry. You had when you were a commercial integrator you had a B and C connector your quality of your analog circuitry was better and you've got to charge a premium for it.
And there was a delineation between consumer greed and there was a delineation between what you were for commercial or broadcast and what happened was with the advent of digital signaling it got blurred. Commercial never stayed on its own path. What happened was HDMI, DVI, Display Port. All these got merged into the commercial world and there was no longer a delineation between commercial and consumer. So now all these got blurred together. And then what happened is you see a lot of overseas companies that used to make mostly consumer products start saying hey we can make it for commercial because it's pretty much the same thing. So it started creating new types of companies that are out there that really aren't manufacturers. They're just somebody possibly working out of their house happy to make five points above charge though as little as they can in OEM it from some company overseas. Slap their name on it you'll see five with the same product with five different silk screens and you know they're duplicates which stuff like that does harm to the industry. Obviously there's a responsibility of integrators and dealers to try to choose the manufacturers based on the fact that they make their own product, that they support their own product simply because it justifies the value of the product. And what you can do with the product. When you deal with those other type of companies and something's wrong with it very difficult to get support because they don't really make it. But yes you get it cheap but cheap isn't always better for an industry. It may sound appealing but at the end of the day it's really doing it a disservice and it's ultimately affecting their bottom line.So integrators are ultimately became installers. Customers records. But I see the same product online that I could buy for one hundred dollars less so why am I going to buy from you? So I'll tell you what I'll go online I'll buy it. You can come over and install it for me. So integrators used to have these products that they could sell for a decent amount of money, justify their value of supporting it and go in there install it, sell the equipment and everything and now it's a hybrid where some stuff the customer wants to buy and some stuff they buy and it becomes a mishmash. So that's part of it. The other part is manufacturers have a responsibility. That responsibility simply put as originality. That's what we're here for. We're supposed to make products that distinguish ourselves from other manufacturers. Back in the day life with simple control system companies. You had scalar companies you had projector companies everybody was specialized that's something very unique. And now everybody tries to do everything. I mean we do it too, we're guilty of trying to do a little bit of everything so trying to stay competitive with the market for that one stop shop. But that's fundamentally where it's broken is dealers, consultants need to specify manufacturers preferably me. Yes it as a self plug in promotion right there.

Ron:  You're allowed to do that.

Paul: So there we go. I'll do a crazy Eddy commercial. Yes. That's a classic. So what. No but in all seriousness they should be picking manufacturers that are truly manufacturers that can support their product fix their own product when things aren't working right.
And put back into the industry allow people to have the margins that they deserve and they're entitled to. Doesn't mean we have to charge an outlandish price but there is a difference between underselling and being reasonable. So when you look at our products we don't sell it at the highest prices that are out there like some companies do. We don't sell at the lowest price. But we're somewhere in the middle where it justifies its value. But you can make a proper living and justify why we do what we do. We also take measures where we don't allow people to sell online and if they do put our product online they have to put MSRP or call in for pricing. We don't like the online sales. That's not good for the integrators and when we find out about it usually we'll call up whoever the offending person is and we try to get them to follow the proper guidelines that we have set forth for what we do. So we're a big advocate to make certain that we protect the integrators and then registrations, things like that. So yeah we're very big into that.

Ron:  Paul you've chosen as I understand it to manufacture most of your products in the U.S? Is it most or all of your products in the US? And why did you take that stance?

Paul: About over 10 years ago I think it was we bought all our own actually, twelve years ago we bought all our own equipment so we have our own Pick and Place lines robotics assembly we do it all right here in our building in New Jersey probably about 90 percent of it is built right here. Yeah we have our what we call the tchotchke which is the fill in the blanks for the one stop shop where no one is guilty as any other company we have the OEMs but our OEM stuff usually if we are we admit it's built to our specification is something unique to us so it's value added. The industry has done for a long time. But the key is to value add it make it have its own unique appeal. That's about 10 percent of our product, the guts and the glory. The HD based T products the control systems the AV over IP that's all built right here. Everything that we do. We found that one quality control response time. I've taken products where we've gone from inception to full out shipping within four months. People are like, how the hell you pull that off? But we do. We have our own. Those are the things I can't tell you how we do it but sure we've learned to parallel certain tasks. We've learned to speed things up reuse of circuitry things of that nature that you that you know standardize on internally. We don't make a product unless we can power through POE. So we've got circuitry that we can repetitively use over and over again to keep that quality up. I mean like any other company if you come out with a new product you know some people if they want to be on the cutting edge of a new product you might run into a few bumps and hiccups at first that we have to plug up. But usually we have a team of programmers that are ready to go that if anybody reports anything we're all over it. And usually sometimes within hours if not a day or two we'll have that plugged right up and then usually typically a product will settle down within a month or two of any of the obvious bugs.

Ron:  What is the go to market strategy for Aurora? Do you guys have like salespeople on the street. Do you work through reps. You work through you have stocking distributors. How does an integrator that wants to say purchase your products. How do they do that.

Paul: Okay so far in the United States we we go direct to us. So we don't do distribution the United States when it's international and outside of the US.So Canada you know anywhere like Norway, Netherlands, Australia. New Zealand, Japan you get the idea. Those are stocking distributors. So to be an international distributor for us you have to stock local you have to have a support person who can locally support the product and so on. So when it's outside the US, yes we do distribution has to be stocking in local support when it's inside they go direct to us and we set up direct relationships here for them. We have sales reps across the country and in some areas we especially like our own backyard will will deal direct. So it's a combination and it's a mix.

Ron:  OK understood. Now am I correct in understanding that a lot of your products are IP based either IE riding over the network?

Paul: Oh yeah. Yeah. Just about all of them.

Ron:  That's what I thought. I'm not the most technical person so I didn't want to overstate the facts. So what does the landscape look like out there these days in terms of the integrators you know value and appreciation of having a robust network? And is that what you're seeing out there do you see that the integrators completing these installs have addressed the network that your technology is riding on? Or is that problematic? And if so what are you doing about it or is there anything you can do about it.

Paul: It's called education. Education is king right now. Right now everybody's trying to educate the dealers. I mean nobody's used to more of a plug and play style parameter. But once you get into the network based devices you really have to start understanding network switch typologies, how to move bend with the course switches, how to set up the switches. Probably the number one thing that we have the tech support with is not so much our product that's more with the actual setting up of the network switch and how they ran the network itself. So getting a better understanding of the network that is really what is the hardest thing for people to come to grips with. And that's what we've been doing is we've been we recently hired George Tucker. His job and only job in the company is to educate. So he's a sole dedicated educator for a company where he's doing the certification points so the CBS credits for InfoComm. He also is creating all the programs videos on how to set equipment up how to use it. That's how important it is to us as we we literally just have a person just specifically just for the intent of education. That really makes a better experience and then this just the features of things that make it easier to deploy these products. So that's another big part here is you know just making certain that they have tools that will help them make deployment easier and faster. And so that's a lot of what we focus on.

"I called him and I said hey how do I get Firefly on Facebook. What do I do and how do I do it. And here we are 10 years later the largest marketing company in the industry serving the AV industry."

Ron:  I'm just gonna give a plug for George. I'm actually going to have George on Automation Unplugged. George so if you're out there. What's up sir. So Paul, you may or may not know this but about 10 years ago when I started One Firefly what at the time was Firefly Design Group. I remember George was at Crestron at the time. I think maybe a Social Marketing Manager or social media person. I don't even know if that was his role but I knew he knew stuff. So I called him and I said hey how do I get Firefly on the Facebook. What do I do and how do I do it. And here we are 10 years later the largest marketing company in the industry serving the AV industry. So you've got a good man there in terms of who you're assigning to get the word out for your company. I'm excited to see what he cooks up for you.

Paul: Oh thank you. Actually he happens to be sitting right next to me over there.

Ron:  Oh OK. All right. Hey what's up George. That's funny. Well everyone we'll hear more from George. George is also one of the men behind A.V. Nation. And we've had Tim Albright on from a notion not too long ago as well. So Paul when you're not being Mr. CEO and Mr. CTO of your company I understand that you have a bit of an appreciation for the mixed martial arts as do I. So I was curious is that the case at least that's what my notes tell me.

Paul: Yeah as I do Krav Maga.

Ron:  Now that's the that's the Russian form of mixed martial arts. That's right.

Paul: That's Samba I believe that's called though I know this is Israeli.

Ron:  So we've got to give the Israeli. OK. It was either Russian or Israeli. So do you practice Krav Maga? I mean do you go to?

Paul: Oh yeah every three times a week I'm constantly going at it but doing it for years now. I enjoy it a lot. No competitions for it because not really meant for competition.
Well you know people with Krav Maga would be a very fun competition. It's got its perks as far as the things that it teaches you to do and to protect yourself and to it's a very aggressive form of martial arts. So it's. I tell people if you want to learn how to do Krav Maga the first step is learn how to hit them where it hurts. Almost every move ends up with hitting them where it hurts somehow some way. So usually what we tell people.

Ron:  What was your take? This is completely outside of the world of AV. But again I'm a big fan so I'm curious if you had an opinion in the world of UFC Connor McGregor just fight Mayweather in that big spectacle. I admit I paid one hundred dollars to it it was hard not to even if I like I'm not paying one hundred dollars OK. I decided you know minutes before here's my hundred bucks. What was your take on that?

Paul: I knew he was going to lose.

Ron:  I think everyone. Well I guess maybe some people bet you know a lot of people would bet for the odds.

Paul: Didn't think he was going to lose I thought that he had a chance. But I don't think he's going to lose because he wasn't fully capable I mean if you put it the other way around could give him 10 seconds and Mayweather is out. I mean it's that simple. But he is fighting a game where he was up against the guy who's the master of boxing knows how to stay away nor has the endurance that he knows how to stretch it out and last.But actually one of the great examples of how I kind of knew before the fight he was going to lose is I actually went to a UFC gym a few months ago to go in the octagon and to just you know throw it around see how I would fare in the UFC gym. And when I started fighting against the person that I was in there with. What happened was I quickly learned that was spending more time thinking about what not to do than the amount of time of what to do. So a lot of times I would stop myself from doing things that you're really not supposed to do and that's if you look at the fight. A lot of times he would try to go around him and then he'd rabbit punch him on the top of the head and I could see he was trying to get back to some of his roots. And that in itself can hurt you a lot. So I knew that was going to kill him is after all the years of doing what he does and then trying to not do it instinctively, very hard thing to do.

Ron:  And his training camp was pretty brief as well. I think it was eight weeks or nine weeks.

Paul: Which is not a lot of time. It's he. He is a great fighter and I think with more time he probably could have done.Give him a year and he probably could have done a lot more damage. But with the time he had to train and with the amount of what he does which is MMA you actually put on a great show I thought it was a great fight for what it was. People didn't think I would go as long as it did and sure enough it did. Yeah I agree it was a blast. I'm happy it lasted as long as it did and I felt I got I got my money's worth. I wasn't complaining.

Paul: Yeah. I don't think they should have stopped the fight as quick as they did. One thing that the ref didn't have an appreciation for is MMA.They're used to getting pounded. I mean a nine ounce glove in MDMA is a joke. I mean you're fighting with four ounce gloves. So taking a punch from a nine ounce is not really going to hurt them all that much. So you could take a little bit of a beating and make it to the next round. I think he could have made it at least a minimum of one more round maybe gotten another round out of it. That's the one thing that I was a little disappointed as I think they didn't give him enough credit for the type of abuse he could take and a 9 ounce glove wasn't going to put him down for the count. I think he could have gotten another round out of it.

Ron:  But he was gassed. Don't you agree? I mean he didn't have much fuel left in the tank.

Paul: Oh I mean he had no fuel and he wouldn't have covered up and just given himself so he could get a little bit gas back and then he would've gotten pummeled the next round.

Ron:  But he got a rabbit punched him on top of the head a few more times.

Paul: Exactly. I think I think that in his contract that if he did any type of MMA moves on me whether it was done it was he'd automatically lose the fight.

Ron:  He'd lose the fight and give up I think a significant portion of his purse.

Paul: Hey you know what for 30 million dollars I'll go in that ring dude.

Ron:  Mayweather can punch me all day long. I'll do it for a million bucks. Let's go. Everyone has a price. I'll set my low. So Paul just one more question for you here for the audience I appreciate you've spent 30 minutes with me and my audience. And by the way Andrea just says she loves this talk. She just made a comment. So you've got a fan Paul.

Paul: Thanks.

Ron:  There you go. What product do you have or products do you have coming around the corner in the next months or quarters that you'd like to share and talk to the audience about. What do you have that's exciting or that has you excited?

Paul: Oh actually new products. Well the AV over IP it's progressing and people for the most part know about it. If they go on the website the one I'm actually excited about is my new HD based T products where we did a lot of things to it to breathe a lot new life into HD based T to cause a lot of people I think don't realize that from a point to point perspective HD base T is still the way to go. I know some people out there may feel it's it was just a Band-Aid fix along the way but I was one of the people guilty of that but I soon realized as we got into the 10 gig AV over IP, it wasn't going to be that simple and HD base T still is a very important role in this industry.So this new series which we're calling the HT series, we did some things to it which really give it a very keen advantage and refresh HD base T. So the first thing we did was we gave it for 4k2k 60 hertz four four four. So the fully tingling bandwidth with unsheathed cable I know a lot of people like to hear that one because they're so used to throwing shielded cable in there. We could do it with Cat 5 young children and go three hundred and thirty feet. So that was a nice little bonus there and not just ultra high def the full cinema 4K we added an IP engine in there so you can use it as our IP port expanders. We also threw in the world's first Dante into HD base T. So now you can use Dante two channel or HD67 as well as there's gonna be an option for each channel. Dante so surround sound. DANTE It's gonna be another industry first stuff for this type of product. We didn't stop there we put it in audio DSP engine.So we'll have some parametric cueing in there and then we did another thing which shows if you hook a POE switch to either side. It will not only pass all the stuff through from one side to the other but it'll pass the power through. So you can use a POE switch and have no wall supplies on either side makes it for a very clean installation as well. It's also going up on screen displays. So we made box versions and we also made a well played version in the two gang that has a V-J input with two HDMI inputs that has the Dante options and all that stuff as well.So we kind of think of it as I guess think of it as HD based on crack. So while it does it's supercharged if we want it more politically correct. So we are we supercharged it and we gave it a lot of life and we kept the price down really reasonably for all that capability. So you'll find that from a point to point perspective it's actually less money to do that compared to a 10 gig solution that could do something similar in that. And we also by Q2 of a scaled version of it as well which will have features like a four case sixty scaling with under a millisecond latency on the scalar itself. So it's going to be 0 frame latency scaling. And that's also up on our website as well so yeah we're kind of breathing new life. We're not trying like I talked about from the beginning we're not trying to be like everybody else we're purposely going out of our way to be different.

Ron:  Awesome. Paul, Trond Holst from Norway says hello.

Paul: Hey Trond is a great guy actually he's went from one of our distributors over there is he.

Ron:  And then Hamid Pillet.

Paul: Oh wow, well I got a lot of my guys out there watching this, huh?

Ron:  There you go. He just he gives you one of these. He's like you're doing a good job. Nice. Well Paul it's been a blast having you on sir. I appreciate. I know you're a very busy man. I actually was we were preparing for this. I heard you overheard you preparing for some travel that you have up and coming here right around the corner. So I appreciate you taking a few minutes with me in order to talk about your company and talk about your background. And you were a fun guest to have on here so really appreciate you taking the time.

Paul: Well thank you so much. It's been a pleasure being on your show.

Ron:  Awesome. Thank you. Well guys and gals. Hope you enjoyed another episode. If I can speak clearly another episode of Automation Unplugged. Believe it or not that was episode this is Episode 21. So we're trying to do our very best and get you a new show every week. Got a lot of really fun exciting guests coming up right around the corner. And I know I've heard from you that you'd like to see a preview list of who's up and coming and we are working diligently to get that added.So if you want to see the full list of all of the shows and the recordings if you go to One Firefly.com and go through the menus I believe it's under the Learn menu you'll see the link to Automation Unplugged and you can see all the recordings and the bios for all my guests there. So on that note make it a great Wednesday have an awesome rest of your week and I'll see you guys on the flip side. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Show Notes

Paul Harris is the current CEO/CTO of Aurora Multimedia Corp, founded in 1998. Paul has a background spanning over 25 years in the AV industry. Starting with the creation of real-time image rotation for videowalls to setting the bar with many world’s firsts with AV over IP and HDBaseT, Paul continues to push the limits of technology.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and Links from the Interview:

• WACI
• Dante
• AV Over IP

You can also learn more about Aurora Multimedia at https://auroramultimedia.com/. Be sure to follow them on LinkedIn and Facebook.