Professional audio streaming company Bluesound Professional has announced its participation in a new global initiative to bring open, cloud-connected, cross-platform control and interoperability to the A/V industry as a launch partner of OpenAV Cloud. This major new initiative is a collaborative effort among multiple manufacturers to host their public APIs in the cloud, enabling cross-product integration.
Founding members BrightSign, Legrand AV, Panasonic, Shure, Sony and Xyte, along with a number of other leading A/V manufacturers and technology providers, have agreed to host their APIs in a unified environment. The initiative aims to address two of the A/V industry’s greatest challenges – proprietary control systems and siloed cloud environments that make integration more difficult.
OpenAV Cloud promises to create a unified, interoperable, customer-first A/V 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 manufacturers’ APIs in order to easily control multi-manufacturer systems. OpenAV Cloud has committed to allowing customers access to their data with capabilities to export, while adhering to security and data protection best practices.
In addition to the unifying A/V cloud platforms, the initiative will open the door to leveraging the latest advances in AI integration by supporting protocols that bring the power of Large Language Models (LLM) into the A/V 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 A/V 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,’ says Bluesound Professional Vice President and General Manager, Graeme Harrison.
Founding members are inviting all A/V 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.
‘As a brand that’s dedicated to delivering future-ready audio distribution systems, Bluesound Professional are thrilled to be involved in such a groundbreaking project – one which has the potential to transform the professional audio streaming industry,’ Harrison says.