The Network Did More Work Than Any Camera at InfoComm 2026

Cramer's Senior Technical Director on the tech that earned its place on a show floor full of noise.

Matt Malone stood on the show floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center, watching a demo camera the size of a fist lock onto a single person in a sea of bodies and hold the shot. When the person turned their head, got jostled by someone walking past, or drifted toward the edge of the frame, the camera held on. A few years ago, Malone wouldn’t have trusted that shot to anyone but a human operator. This year, he’s recommending it with one condition: not the main GS or the main feed of a webinar, outside of that, it earns its place.

That’s the story Cramer’s Senior Technical Director brought back from InfoComm 2026, and it runs quieter than the headlines about AI suggest. The conversation across the show floor centered on convergence — AV, IT, broadcast, and artificial intelligence collapsing into a single stack. What Malone found walking through the many exhibitor booths and activations was more specific: a handful of decisions about where automation earns its place, where the network quietly absorbed the cable, and where the “loudest” products on the floor were the ones least deserving of a client’s money.

Trust Has a Ceiling, Even for a Camera That Never Loses You

PTZ cameras — small, motorized, easy to tuck into a breakout room where there’s no space for a full rig — have been around for years. What changed is the auto-tracking. Malone watched it hold a clean, framed shot on a moving presenter with a consistency he hadn’t seen even two shows ago.

While this tech has grown in reliability and technical ingenuity, he wouldn’t put it on the main stage with a keynote speaker because a moment carrying that much weight should continue to have a human behind the lens. However, a breakout session that a client didn’t budget a camera operator for is a different calculation and where the technology pays for itself: a static wide shot of someone pacing the room becomes a tracked, framed recording for a fraction of the labor cost.

At a conference centered on technology, AI was everywhere—as expected. As new iterations and applications of the technology hit the floor, they proved that trust in a product still has a ceiling. Malone noted that one booth had built an entire control room run on voice commands — a single operator calling camera cuts and video rolls to an AI switcher instead of a crew. Malone trusts AI in jobs small enough to fail safely. Comparing it to a struggle we can all empathize with, Matt put it simply: “The same assistants that misread ‘call my brother’ as ‘call mom’ are now being pitched by vendors as the only thing standing between a director’s cue and a live broadcast feed, and that’s not for us.” Holding the trust of a client means you need to feel confident in all the people, technology, and production assets you bring to the show, and a missed cut on a general session carries a different kind of cost than a wrong phone call.

What Replaces the Wire

The bigger shift lived underneath every booth on the floor; it lived in the cabling nobody photographs. Video signals used to travel point to point, camera to switcher, over dedicated cable. The industry has been migrating those signals onto standard IP networks for years, and at this show, it crossed from emerging to standard. Malone described feeding camera and audio signals from ten breakout rooms back to a general session entirely over a venue’s existing network, with no dedicated video cable required.

What made the idea land for him was NetGear’s AV line — managed switches that ship pre-configured for protocols like Dante audio-over-IP, so a setup that used to require a dedicated IT specialist now needs someone who can plug in a switch and load a preset. Every other vendor on the floor seemed to be running on it. Malone’s framing applies directly to how Cramer buys, even though it will never show up in a client deck: the value is a guarantee that the signal arrives where it’s supposed to, every time, regardless of who’s watching.

When Every LED Wall Starts to Look the Same

One of the pieces of tech at InfoComm that stood out most to Malone was transparent LED, and it was everywhere — and it’s genuinely strange to see in person. These LED panels read as a blank pane of glass until an image snaps on, bright enough to stop you mid-stride in a hotel hallway. That was a wow factor that he would recommend to clients. These products even come in double-sided versions that can run two different images on the front and back of the same panel, turning a hallway wall into a wayfinding tool, a digital kiosk, or a stage element depending on what’s loaded.

The harder note buried in that excitement covered everything else on the LED floor. Malone’s read was that LED has become the default over projection, fine technology that’s saturated to the point that distinct products start to blur into the same pitch behind a different logo. A wave of cheaper LED from smaller, lesser-known manufacturers has driven the price of a big screen down while also lowering confidence in long-term service and support. Cramer’s position holds regardless of what’s trending on a show floor: stick with vendors who stand behind the product, because a general session is the wrong place to discover a discount panel can’t be repaired on short notice.

The one piece of hardware Malone flagged as a direct buy for Cramer sits underneath all of it — Pixel Hue’s large-screen switchers, which deliver more 4K processing at a lower cost and connect straight into existing LED processors over fiber, with no conversion gear in between. Fewer links in the signal chain means fewer places for a show to break. In other words, a common thread among much of the technology shown at InfoComm was its ability to simplify complex workflows and make technical processes more streamlined and reliable.

A Crew Built Around the Network, Not the Camera

The most practical recommendation from the floor had nothing to do with a screen or a camera. ClearCom’s FreeSpeak Cell runs crew intercom over cellular instead of a fixed-range antenna, which sounds minor until the show is a multi-hub event, spread across twelve venues with no shared local network. A traditional wireless intercom can drop once someone moves beyond the effective range of an antenna. This one doesn’t, which means a producer can step out for lunch and stay on comms, and a multi-venue show stops needing a local fix for what is fundamentally a logistics problem.

Put it all together, and the clearest signal from the show was where the skill requirements of a Cramer crew are heading. Malone put it plainly: the job is moving away from video engineering and toward tying a network together. The camera, the switcher, the intercom, the LED wall — all of it increasingly lives on the same IP backbone, configured through software instead of patched together by hand. Cramer’s technical team needs to start hiring and training for that shift now.

What Outlasts a Show Floor

Malone has walked this floor enough years running to notice that the products with staying power are never the ones that get the spotlight. Tech ages fast — what’s unveiled under a show floor’s lights one year is outdated within a cycle or two. What survives is whatever takes a process that used to need a dedicated specialist standing in one spot and lets it run on its own. AV over IP, the NetGear switches, the cellular intercom — none of it was the flashiest thing at InfoComm 2026. All of it left fewer variables to chance, and that’s exactly why it’ll still be in use next year.

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