Industry veteran Mike Beatty reports on CEDIA Denver 2026

I flew out to Denver on my own this year for CEDIA Expo and, in some ways, it felt a little different from previous trips.

I’ve been coming to CEDIA shows for a very long time and, for much of my career, I’d arrive with a fairly fixed agenda. There would be brands to represent, customers to entertain, meetings booked from morning until night and usually a team of people around me.

This time I had a bit more freedom. I was there to meet people, look at what’s happening, have conversations and, perhaps more than I’ve done in the past, just walk the show and take it all in. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I’ve recently written about my first trip to India and how interesting it was to experience an AV market I’d never visited before. Denver obviously couldn’t have been more different, but I found myself doing much the same thing: talking to people, listening and trying to understand how they’re feeling about the market and where they think things are heading.

I don’t think anyone is pretending it’s easy out there at the moment. Business is challenging in many parts of the world; manufacturers are having to think carefully about where they spend their money and integrators have more choice than ever.

Which made something about CEDIA particularly noticeable. There were still manufacturers spending serious money to be there and, more importantly, making a real effort to demonstrate their products properly.

I’ve always loved that about our industry. Some products can be understood from a photograph and a specification sheet. Great AV isn’t always like that. Sometimes you need to sit in the room, close the door and experience it.

There were some outstanding demonstration rooms in Denver and quite a few occasions where I found myself thinking about just how far we’ve come. I don’t want to turn this into a list of who had the biggest room, the most speakers or the latest piece of technology because there are plenty of show reports that will do that far better than me. What interested me was the commitment.

Building these rooms isn’t cheap. Neither is shipping everything to a show or bringing in the right people to design, install and demonstrate them. So, I found it encouraging to see companies continuing to invest and effectively saying, come in and experience what we’ve built.

One company I will mention is Kaleidescape. I have a long history with the brand from my distribution days, and it was great to see the grand exhibit they had created right on the show floor. It was difficult to miss and felt like a confident statement from a company continuing to invest heavily in our industry.

That sort of thing matters. Trade shows need a bit of theatre. They need companies prepared to make an effort and give people a reason to stop, look, listen and talk. Walking around Denver, I thought there was still plenty of that.

There was obviously a lot of new technology too, but perhaps I’ve reached an age where the words “new technology” on their own don’t excite me quite as much as they once did. I’m more interested in what it actually does and whether it makes something better.

Does it improve the experience, help an integrator design a system more accurately or make something easier to install and use? If it does, I’m interested.

One thing I noticed was how much more intelligent the technology surrounding the products is becoming. We’re getting better at modelling rooms, predicting performance and dealing with potential problems before an installation is completed. Processing continues to become more sophisticated and we’re finding increasingly clever ways of getting remarkable performance from systems while hopefully making them simpler for the person who ultimately has to live with them.

Displays continue to get bigger, thinner and more impressive. Audio continues to move forward and the quality available from professionally designed systems is extraordinary. Some of what we now accept as normal would have looked fairly ridiculous if somebody had shown it to me when I started in this industry.

And then, inevitably, there’s AI.

I’m fascinated by it, although I think we’re still working out where it genuinely adds value and where somebody has simply added the letters AI because they think they should. I suspect some of its biggest impact on our industry may eventually happen behind the scenes, helping people design, programme, diagnose, predict, communicate and generally remove some of the repetitive work that consumes time.

I certainly don’t see it replacing the knowledge of a great designer, engineer or integrator. Used properly, I think it will make them even better at what they do.

But for all the technology in Denver, my favorite part of the week had very little to do with products. It was the people.

One of the slightly strange things about having been in an industry for more than 35 years is walking around a trade show and realising just how many people you’ve accumulated along the way.

I caught up with people I’ve known for decades, some of whom have created brands and technologies that helped shape the industry we work in today. I met plenty of newer faces too and had some fascinating conversations with manufacturers and integrators about what they’re doing and where they see the opportunities.

That’s the bit of a trade show I still don’t think you can replace. We can all jump on Teams, watch product launches online and probably conduct a perfectly respectable business relationship with someone on the other side of the world without ever meeting them. But it’s not quite the same as bumping into somebody on a show floor, grabbing twenty minutes together and having a conversation that wasn’t in the diary.

This year I also joined CEDIA.

Having worked in the industry for as long as I have, I’ve obviously known CEDIA and many of the people involved with it for years, but this was the first time I’d experienced the show properly as a member.

The team made me feel incredibly welcome and Matt and Wendy in particular went out of their way to introduce me to people they felt I should know. Those introductions weren’t simply a case of collecting a few more business cards. They introduced me to individuals who could potentially help Directly AV with what we’re trying to achieve, creating opportunities for the brands we work with in the US and ultimately around the world.

I’ve heard people over the years question the value of belonging to organisations such as CEDIA. Having now experienced it from this side, I think anyone who doesn’t see the benefit of their CEDIA membership probably isn’t utilising it properly.

Talk to them. Tell them what you’re trying to achieve. Ask for introductions and get involved. That’s what I did in Denver and the value was obvious.

My personal highlight of the trip actually happened away from the CEDIA show floor.

My good friend Wendy Griffiths had asked me to say a few words before she received an Inspiration Award at the Women in Consumer Technology event. I’ve known Wendy for more than two decades, so being able to talk about her contribution to the industry before watching her receive the award was genuinely special.

The CEDIA Awards was another reminder of what I like about this business. Amanda Wildman gave a beautiful and moving speech, I spent the evening sitting with Dan Goldstein, who is just a lovely guy, and every trip across the room seemed to involve stopping to talk to somebody else.

At some point during the week I put something on LinkedIn along the lines of, “I bloody love this industry.”

I do, and I’ve realised over the years that a large part of the reason is the people.

Having a little more freedom to walk around Denver also gave me time to think about some of the challenges we face. There are an extraordinary number of good products competing for attention.

I’ve seen great products succeed during my career and I’ve seen equally great products disappear. Often the difference hasn’t been the engineering. It’s been whether enough people knew the product existed, understood why it was different and had the confidence to specify it.

I think that’s getting harder.

An integrator can only support so many brands. A manufacturer can only attend so many shows and a smaller manufacturer with a genuinely clever product doesn’t necessarily have the marketing budget or international sales infrastructure of the company on the stand next door.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I think that’s an interesting challenge for our industry. How do we make sure good ideas can still find their way to market? How do manufacturers reach integrators efficiently? And how do integrators discover products that might genuinely improve their projects without having to wade through hundreds of brands to find them?

Those are conversations I found myself having quite often in Denver.

Maybe that’s partly because I’m looking at the industry differently these days. After spending most of my working life inside established businesses, I’m enjoying being able to stand slightly further back and ask questions I probably wouldn’t have asked ten years ago.

Despite the challenges in the market, I didn’t fly out of Denver feeling negative about it. Quite the opposite. I saw manufacturers continuing to invest, some fantastic technology, brilliant demonstrations and people finding better ways of doing things we’ve been doing for years.

Most importantly, I saw an industry that still seems to enjoy getting together.

Next year CEDIA Expo moves to Las Vegas, which will undoubtedly give the show a different feel. Denver has been a good home for it and I’ve enjoyed my trips there, but change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ll certainly be interested to see what Vegas brings.

For now, though, I flew out of Denver with pretty much the same feeling I had while I was there.

After 35-plus years, I still love this industry. The technology is incredible, but the people are even better.