Chanan Averbuch, Blue Square X

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT LED video wall technology is now so pervasive, and there are soooo many vendors, that it is increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate and compete. That's compounded by a lot of manufacturers selling on specs like pixel pitch, and the form factor of their products. Very few, however, spend much if any time talking about the why and what of video wall projects - as in why is this project being considered, what's it for, and also what's going to be on the screen when it gets plugged in. So I was intrigued when I was in touch with Chanan Averbuch, a South Florida LED industry vet. I learned he'd left his longtime executive sales gig with an LED display vendor to join a spinout that makes premium LED displays, but leads with creative. The company is called Blue Square X - with the X being short for experience. While most manufacturers just make the stuff, and ship it to integrators, Blue Square plans to bridge a couple of gaps - acting as consultants and producing creative for digital experiences ... with integrator partners doing the final install. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chanan, thank you for joining me. We've traded messages on LinkedIn and everything else and as we were saying before I turned on the recording, we probably had a brush by, “Hey, how are you doing?” I think at some trade show, but we haven't chatted at length. Can you tell me what your company Blue Square X does, because I'm unfamiliar.  Chanan Averbuch: Sure. Blue Square, I guess you could more or less call it the parent company has been in business for over 10 years. But Blue Sqaure X is a relatively new venture, leveraging more of my background and my partner's background in the space, and inside Blue Sqaure X, I'm focused on the innovation side more so than anything else. So Blue Square X is displays that are 90 inches and larger on the LCD side, and on the LED side, everything from, 110 inches all the way to unlimited sizes. We have projects we're doing that are a hundred-foot-long LED walls and 40 feet high, concave, convex, curved, all that stuff.  But Blue Square X at the end of the day is not another led company. We're focused on the experience first, which means content first, software second, and LED third.  Yeah, which is quite different because, through the years I've had no end of companies, relate stories about how they sold big LED displays, had them installed and then the customer would look at them and say, “This is great, what should we put on the screen?” like an afterthought.  Chanan Averbuch: I've gotten that over the years, time and time again, somebody will have the brain fart of, “Wow, it would be really cool if we did a sports bar instead of a bunch of TVs, let's do LED.” Okay, and then two weeks before the grand opening, “Wait, what are we doing on this thing from 8 am to 4 pm when we're not watching sports games when there's no live sports?” So we did digital art in those spaces.  So you're, the terminology I use is, a solutions provider in that you're not a pure play integrator because an integrator doesn't tend to think about content or experience so much. There's the odd one that does, but for the most part, we put together the projects we deploy, maybe we manage them, but we don't really think that much about what's on the screen. Chanan Averbuch: Spot on. I think one of the key issues that I've experienced over almost the last two decades in the AV industry is that most of the channel has thought about how to move a box and has never really thought about what the client is trying to feel from an emotional perspective in a space.  What are they trying to create when someone walks into a space, when they leave a space, how do they want them to feel? I think in the era now where you're trying to get employees to come back to work, right? It doesn't matter if you're in the US, on the Democratic side or the R