We recently sat down with Maris Ensing of Mad Systems to discuss the company’s new non-proprietary AV solution, QuickSilver®.
CI: We wanted to ask you about the QuickSilver product that you guys have that I’ve been hearing a lot about and seeing it being used in various locations. Could you tell me what it is and how it came to be?
Maris Ensing: QuickSilver is a new type of AV system. We started building it about three and a half years ago now. We’ve always wanted to go for a non proprietary solution to AV and really try to concentrate on providing something that had a long term life.
We were looking at updating a system that we put in 16 years ago, the client has asked us to do an update. And as it happens, that also uses PC based service, which we developed at the time. But it really started when we started noticing that, all of a sudden, laser projector prices came down, monitors have became a commodity. And computers became smaller and smaller.
One of my guys was playing with some of our software on one of the tiny little computers, and came to the conclusion that we could easily run video off one of these tiny little things. So we started looking at wireless as a control protocol. We’re not streaming, but we wanted to be able to control using wireless because a lot of money is always being being spent on infrastructure cabling, which in most of our applications, nobody will ever see and nobody wants; and it’s a lot of money, a lot of work. So we started QuickSilver, and we’ve got to the point now where I think we’ve got some 40 or 50 individual components that make up the QuickSilver AV system.
To learn more about this product, watch the video above.
