Walk into any modern esports arena and you’ll feel it immediately: the energy, the intensity and the expectation that everything is about to go off without a hitch. From when the lights come on to the moment the event goes live, every screen and sound needs to perform flawlessly. Just like with athletic sporting events, there’s no room for delay, no margin for error. Welcome to the new proving ground for intense AV technology.
Esports: The Ultimate AV Test Bed
Esports spaces are pushing the limits of what live AV can do. Competitive gaming demands a level of integration that leaves no place to hide. Gamers, streamers and even their fans are among the most demanding users on the planet. This is exactly why esports is helping to shape the future of AV.
When we design AV for esports, we are solving for an environment that simultaneously combines real-time performance, immersive visuals, interactive audience engagement and high-stakes reliability. The innovations that emerge from this space are not only making esports better but also creating a playbook for AV across every industry.
No Room For Error
The truth is that the average esports player or streamer has a sharper eye (and ear) for AV performance than many professionals. They expect seamless audio, ultra-low latency, high refresh rates and minimal technical hiccups.
This pressure has pushed AV designers and technologists to raise their game. From cable infrastructure and signal flow to encoding and display calibration, everything in an esports venue must work at peak performance, every single time.
That level of demand is forcing the AV industry to innovate faster and smarter — and we are better for it.
Innovation Under Pressure
Esports venues have quickly become a platform for bleeding-edge AV technology.
Many of the solutions we’re now seeing adopted in other industries were put through their paces in the esports world. In these high-pressure environments, it’s crucial that AV systems deliver seamless performance for both in-person spectators and online viewers. It takes all these technologies working together to create a flawless, immersive experience.
If esports environments have taught us anything, it’s how to design more flexible and engaging spaces, which is something every sector of AV technology can learn from.
The Ripple Effect of Esports
The lessons we’re learning in esports aren’t staying in the arena. Today’s students, employees and consumers have grown up with a variety of high-performance digital experiences at their fingertips. They expect responsiveness, quality and engagement everywhere they go.
For example, in higher-ed lecture halls environments, they are being outfitted with interactive displays, gaming-grade processing and cloud-based collaboration tools. In corporate spaces, clients are demanding ultra-low-latency video conferencing and production-quality streaming capabilities. In live entertainment situations, audiences expect graphics and audio that feel more like a Twitch stream than a traditional stage show.
In short, expectations are rising everywhere and esports is a major reason why.
What’s Next for AV?
So what does all this mean for those of us in the AV world? Whether you’re designing for esports or other spaces, the bar is rising higher. If we want to meet these new, heightened expectations, we need to shift how we think about AV integration.
Main Takeaways
Here are three primary takeaways:
- Design with agility in mind: The pace of change in esports is lightning-fast. AV systems need to be modular and scalable and most importantly, ready to adapt. That same flexibility is becoming critical in other markets, too.
- Plan for hybrid from day one: Every event now has both a physical and digital audience. The AV experience needs to be just as good online as it is in the room and the expectations in esports are showing us how to get there.
- Obsess over the user experience: No matter who your users are, they want your AV system to be fast, frictionless and symbiotic with the environment. The best AV experiences won’t call attention to themselves — they will simply meld into the use case.
Esports is the current innovation battlefield in the AV world. It’s where the pressure is highest, the users are sharpest and the innovations come quickest. As we look ahead, the environments that meet the esports standard today are the ones that will lead the AV industry tomorrow.
Bill Thrasher, COO, has more than 15 years of experience at AV-Tech Media Solutions.
