In case you missed it in the general hoo-ha of ISE 2020, Biamp announced the acquisition of Huddle Room Technologies, the Italian developer of the much-lauded Huddle Hub One (HHO) wireless presentation and conferencing products.

The use-case that the HHO products address is beginning to get a new moniker – BYOM or Bring Your Own Meeting – and it is one of the fastest-growing segments of the AV industry.

BYOM refers to a video meeting using, say, MS Teams or Zoom, for example, being initiated from the user’s mobile device rather than a resident processor in the room but still making use of the professional AV components of the room like the display, speakerphone, camera or all-in-one etc. in order to achieve a high-quality video conference from a mobile device (sometimes referred to as AV pass-through) 

The Huddle Hub One goes one step further by making this possible wirelessly and without the need for any cable connection or USB dongle to the user’s device.  Typically, this would be a laptop but with the HHO, this can easily include tablets or smartphones as well.

Uniquely, the HHO can also stream the shared content or conference back to the other user’s devices (smartphone, tablet or PC) in the room (so-called rebroadcasting) so that participants do not need to rely on being able to see the main display.  In fact, sharing sessions are possible on the HHO without a room display at all because of this rebroadcasting feature (HRT call these virtual sharing rooms “Smart Rooms”)

Smart Rooms allow ad hoc or scheduled meetings to occur anywhere in range of the corporate network making meetings in the cafe, a casual meeting area or in rooms without wall displays simplicity itself.

Intermedia CS is the appointed distributor for the HRT product line in the UK and Ireland.