Church AV decisions get made differently than corporate ones. There's usually no procurement department and no dedicated technical staff — just a staff member or a volunteer team doing their best with money the congregation gave for a specific purpose. And unlike an office refreshing its conference rooms every few years, a church raising capital campaign funds for a new sanctuary or renovation may not touch that system again for fifteen or twenty years. That combination — hig

AV-over-IP is the default now. Routing video, audio, and control over the network instead of dedicated cabling is cheaper to install, easier to scale, and lets you reuse infrastructure you already have. Every integrator will tell you that part. What most won't walk you through is what happens after the ribbon-cutting, when the system is live and the real costs show up. Network capacity isn't optional anymore A traditional AV system lived on its own wiring, isolated from every

If you've searched for an "AV consultant in Columbia, SC," you've probably noticed most of what comes back is integrators — companies that design your system and then sell you the equipment to build it. That's not a knock on integrators; good ones do solid work. But it means the same company writing your spec is also the one profiting from what's on it. Palmetto AV Consulting is based in Columbia and works across South Carolina doing something different: we design, specify, a

AVIXA named cybersecurity the top AV industry trend for 2026, and ISE just launched its first-ever Cybersecurity Summit to address it directly. That's a notable shift for an industry that spent years treating security as someone else's problem — usually IT's. The reason for the shift is simple: AV systems aren't isolated equipment anymore. They're networked endpoints, and they're being targeted like one. How AV Quietly Became a Network Risk A modern conferencing room has a ca

When an organization's AV needs grow past "figure it out as we go," the instinct is usually the same: hire someone. A dedicated AV manager feels like the obvious fix — one person who owns the systems, knows the building, and is always available. That instinct isn't wrong. It's just incomplete, because the real comparison isn't "hire vs. do nothing." It's "hire vs. bring in outside expertise when you need it" — and the numbers behind that comparison are worth looking at before

Every AV project built in the last year has run into the same headwind: hardware costs are up, and they went up fast. Tariffs on imported components have pushed prices higher across displays, DSPs, cameras, and networking gear industry-wide. AVIXA has been tracking this pressure for months, and the Pro AV market is still expected to grow from $332 billion in 2025 to $402 billion by 2030 — but that growth is happening alongside real cost strain on individual projects, not beca

Everyone's talking about the AV labor shortage as a hiring problem. It's not just that. It's a quality control problem, and most companies don't find out until the system is already on the wall. Here's the chain most people miss: integrator staff are stretched thin, so the technician who used to do a final walkthrough is now running two jobs at once. The engineer who used to review a design before it went to the client is now also pulling cable. Corners don't get cut on purp

Every AV system starts the same way: someone has to figure out what to design, spec, and install. Palmetto AV Consulting focuses on that first part of design, specification, technical support, and quality assurance, without selling equipment or running an installation crew. That independence works two ways. AV integrators bring us in for overflow design capacity, a second set of eyes on a spec, or an independent QA check before sign-off. Education, corporate, and healthcare