Mar 18, 2021

Screen management in any boardroom: simple, swift and seamless

4 min read

The boardroom is the VIP of all meeting rooms. When you need to close a deal with a top customer, discuss future strategy, or make the decisions that will guide the company’s future, it is the room you want to use. The room needs to support professional, premium videos and content, be pixel perfect, show the graphics in the best colors, and be easy to use. It must be an extension of the people that use it.

Adding a screen management system to a boardroom creates the wow factor needed to support your branded experience. This room is more than basic collaboration and content sharing, it is a content experience. You must be able to use any source at any time, easily switch from one layout to the next, ensure that the right content makes it to the screen as intended, with only the press of a simple button, all without asking for help from IT or the facilities team.

Screen management systems bring informative content to the next level. They capture all your content, process, convert, scale, and distribute this to the meeting room screen (or screens, if you have a larger set-up).

Solutions for any type of content

Whether it is a presentation shared from a laptop, or a video from a smartphone, the visual experience in the boardroom should be impeccable for your top customers or stakeholders.

To share BYOD and BYOM (Bring Your Own Meeting) content from laptops or mobile devices, you need an easy wireless collaboration solution like Barco ClickShare or ClickShare Conference. A straightforward user experience makes full screen sharing from any device simple. You decide what content goes on screen thanks to moderation or ideate with blackboarding and annotation features.

If you want to upgrade your visual experience to a professional level in a boardroom, you can add a screen management system like the PDS-4K. You can even manage up to 4 independent displays.

  • Anyone can use a presentation switcher like the Barco PDS-4K because of its unrivalled ease-of-use. Put the presenter in full control of the story with intuitive source and layout switching, that can be done via a tablet or phone. There’s no need for specialized trainings for technical staff or presenters.
  •  With a PDS-4K, you can design stunning layouts, showing videos, pictures or presentations on a static background. Normally you would use the entire screen for your content, but with a presentation switcher you can add PiPs (picture-in-picture layers). The Barco Technology is developed to make sure your company branding is represented in the right colors and dimensions. You will impress even the most critical of audiences like shareholders or external partners with your professional presentation layouts.
  •  Flexible and seamless transitions between content and sources are as flawless as your presentations. The PDS-4K ensures best in class processing, guarantees a perfect lip-sync for videos and provides the highest image quality for any type of content. Your company video is played perfectly, assuring a unique viewing comfort and the best visual experience for anyone present in the boardroom. As a single unit can drive multiple displays and even convert embedded audio to Dante™ streams, you impress audiences with the best 4K experience.
Simple yet capable

Adding the customer focused PDS-4K professional switcher to a boardroom set-up does not equal making the set-up complex or more difficult to manage. In fact, it reduces the need for a video wall controller typically placed in a separate small control room or AV/IT closet. With the included cueing and external device control software, all equipment in the room can be managed via a single push of the front panel buttons. Custom programming is accomplished with our EventMaster Toolset, enabling control via the toolset directly, our hardware controllers, or even your mobile device. Building a custom user interface for third party control devices is supported by our APIs. This makes switching between customized layouts all really easy and intuitive, even from personal devices. Take a look at our video for PDS-4K set-ups in boardrooms.

All this simplicity is connected to very impressive capabilities that can handle main screens with up to two 4K outputs that show content in layered windows on a branded background and to a side monitor that shows only content. You can even drive 2 LED walls independently with the same content, but with different sizing for each LED wall.

In fact, when adding a PDS-4K in front of the LED wall in your boardroom, you really maximize the use of your LED wall. With the “Area Of Interest” (AOI) feature, the quantity of inputs/outputs and multiple functionalities like smooth quality image transitions, the PDS-4K brings many advantages to enjoy a more reliable, flexible and easy-to-manage solution.

By using the AOI feature you size your output to match the exact LED resolution, while sending a standard timing to be understood by any device. Of course, all inputs will be “scaled” or resized to the AOI and perfectly fit the screen thanks to the renowned Barco Athena™ scaling technology.

The PDS-4K is also a sustainable solution for your boardroom, it receives an A-score in Barco’s ecoscoring methodology, mainly for the use of recycled materials in product design and packaging. It is an energy efficient product that has been optimized in size, weight and packaging for logistics and transport.

A flexible presentation switcher like the PDS-4K can accommodate change, helps to avoid technical display issues and assures the easy connection of new equipment. The chassis is modular, so if any new standards are introduced in the future, you can still use your unit. You can simply add a new card supporting the new standard if needed. The number of facility interventions remains low, accidental changes in settings & configurations is limited and the highest availability and uptime is assured.

Want to know more about Barco’s presentation switching solutions for your boardroom?