Professional audio streaming specialist, Bluesound Professional, is a launch partner of OpenAV Cloud, the new global initiative to bring open, cloud-connected, cross-platform control and interoperability to the AV industry. This major new initiative is a collaborative effort among multiple manufacturers to host their public APIs in the cloud, enabling seamless cross-product integration.
Founding members BrightSign, Legrand AV, Panasonic, Shure, Sony and Xyte, along with a host of other leading AV manufacturers and technology providers, have come together for the first time to host their APIs in a unified environment, signifying an exciting development within the industry. The initiative aims to address two of the AV industry’s greatest challenges: proprietary control systems and siloed cloud environments that make integration more difficult.
OpenAV Cloud is set to create a unified, interoperable, customer-first AV ecosystem that benefits manufacturers, integrators and end users. The initiative is committed to developing and maintaining read-write open APIs that will enable true cross-platform compatibility. The system will be available to all AV stakeholders, promoting collaboration over exclusivity. Developers will be able to produce apps linking different manufactures API’s together in order to easily control multi-manufacturer systems. OpenAV Cloud has committed to allowing customers access to their data with capabilities to export, whilst adhering to security and data protection best practices.
In addition to the unifying AV cloud platforms, this new initiative is intended to open the door to leveraging the latest advances in AI integration by supporting protocols that bring the power of Large Language Models (LLM) to Bluesound’s AV ecosystem. An example of how these capabilities might be expanded is the addition of an MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an increasingly widely-adopted framework for managing contextual information generated by AI agents and is seen as an important step towards agentic AI. Such a server could take the output of an AI agent and output this in the form of API calls, thus radically simplifying the progress of AV control.
“As our BluOS operating system, used in Bluesound Professional products, forms a link from control input to music services, the possibilities available to us using an MCP server are very exciting indeed,” said Graeme Harrison, VP and general manager at Bluesound Professional.
Founding members of OpenAV Cloud are inviting all AV manufacturers, system integrators and managed service providers to join the initiative for free. The goal is to build a collaborative community that will drive the adoption of open and standardised cloud connectivity, as well as API-driven innovation.
