So that’s a wrap on the week of screens and connectivity called Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), our first in a few years. Our focus here at ¡AU! is the creative industries – any and all businesses which aim to inform, entertain, or enrich an audience. A good chunk of ISE is dedicated to smart homes, control rooms, and corporate tech, but there is a huge footprint relevant to the content industry – from digital advertising to onstage spectacle to drone swarms that create magical pictures in the sky.

¡AU!’s big show news was the launch of Headway to ISE, our partnership with ISE to get people to the show via low carbon transport. This year’s launch took us from Paris to Barcelona (first class, ahem) and was supported by our friends at Greening of Streaming.

I’m delighted to announce we have a green light for a much bigger train event next year which, we hope, will feature a packed train carriage full of networking, fun, and green brainstorming. A year seems like a long time, but trust me, it’ll be here before you know it. So if you’re interested in being a passenger, sponsor, or partner, register your interest now for next year’s Paris to Barcelona event by emailing ise@au-works.com

ISE is a massive trade show. The halls at Fira De Barcelona Gran Via are filled with a bewildering array of tech from hugely divergent sectors. A full analysis of the big themes – and the big themes relevant to the creative industries particularly – will take some time. But picking through the big ISE toybox, here are a few things that popped out:

Sectors coming apart at the seams

An anxiety – or at least a topic of interest – that came up repeatedly on the show floor was “industry convergence” – that is, sectors once relatively distinct are merging into something new, and what do we do about that.

We know the TV industry is coming apart like wet tissue paper. As it struggles to find a future, we see traditional broadcast tech providers showing up more and more the ISE show, trying to get their wares in front of the audio-visual market. Vendors, once riding the gravy train of tech refresh cycles at big broadcasters, are now frantic to find new markets, and new revenue sources.

Meanwhile AV is experiencing its own identity crisis. The sector is growing – the ISE show, Europe’s top gathering for AV tech in Europe continuing to balloon. Its Barcelona venue, already mammoth, is constructing an entirely new exhibition hall – driven in part to accommodate the snowballing ISE show.

But as AV is growing it also becomes less focused. What is “AV”? Gaps open up in once clearly understood business models, and new sectors – like broadcast – begin to find opportunities in those gaps. Being able to connect anyone and anything with a screen makes for a lot of creativity opportunity, as well as a lot of volatility. And it can be fine a line between opportunity and bewilderment.

For example, the advertising format of OOH (out of the home), a tried and true AV vertical, embraces roadside billboards and digital signage on trains, but IP technology increasingly underpinning the ecosystem means means being able to display any content to anyone anywhere. Anywhere. For good or ill, Minority Report’s personalized mall signage is becoming eminently doable.

On the other end of the workflow, content can be more easily produed. Canva has taken over the jobs of traditional graphic designers, and anchors of major news organizations have decided to say so long and just start their own YouTube channels. Technology is rarely a limiting factor anymore. What makes for good content now is craft and creativity, plus a deep appreciation of your audience. These qualities are still not easy to come by, but the point is that when you have the right idea and the right people behind it, there’s no technological bar to placing it exactly where you want it.

What we mean when we talk about tech convergence

When we talk tech convergence, it’s important to pull ourselves up a bit and remember that what we are really talking about is a technology forcing new business models. That means pain for some, but it also means opportunity. It’s is up to creative businesses to be ambitious and take advantage of that opportunity. You can build all the roads into a bright new future that you like, but they’re pointless unless people begin taking journeys on them. Or you can lead a horse to new water technology, but you can’t always make him drink.

¡AU!’s goal is to see the creative industry innovate, communicate, and serve in ways that change lives and heqrts for the better. To ride this convergence wave effectively, the industry needs to fund and champion creative pioneers experimenting with these converged media technologies. The passive alternative, reacting, rather than creating, will waste all the opportunity that has opened up right now. If we don’t move forward into something new, the default will continue to be digital platforms pumping algorithmically determined lowest common denominator content through tiny screens, which will suck the life – and prosperity – out of the industry, its creators, and audiences.