ISE Wrap: Dave Haynes Goes On And On About Last Week’s Show
February 9, 2026 by Dave Haynes
I remember when Integrated Systems Europe expanded its exhibition floor schedule to four days how numerous observers said that was a day too many, and was unnecessary.
Well … organizer Integrated Systems Events was right, and the chattering class was wrong.
I could have used 14 days, but of course the poor souls who staff exhibits would all have perished from exhaustion. Or be sent straight to rehab after all the evenings with free-flowing cava.
THAT was a big show. It broke records once again, which is documented here.
The Fira Gran Via is a BIG facility, but ISE has already pushed it to its physical limits. My last meeting before I bolted Friday was with a vendor who was out with a bunch of other late-signing exhibitors in a side lobby. Kinda like an overflow camping area.
There is a new building rising across the street that will take more capacity, but I think that won’t be available until 2028.
All that stated, getting in and out and around was not all that hard, despite the teeming masses. The show’s organizers, and I assume the venue operator, have a BIG team of people outside guiding people to entries and exits, and some of the stuff that caused access problems in past years (needing the show app, etc) were long gone.
Despite the crowds, I never felt like I was fighting my way through halls and walkways, or that there were simply too many damn people. Hat tip to Mike Blackman and his crew for pulling that off, and continuing to grow this thing despite some observers suggesting it had peaked out.
There were a LOT of Americans at this one, as well as fellow Canucks, and folks from all over the planet. I met a nice bunch from Argentina. I split a cab with a coupla guys from Australia.
When I first started going and writing about ISE, a decade ago when it was still in Amsterdam, it was VERY much an EU show and a small handful of people knew me. The anonymity was wonderful for me, given I can’t now walk more than a few paces without someone stopping me for a chat. Good problem, but a problem. It is hard to cover so much ground when I spend so much time catching up with people.
Incremental Innovation
As usual, I tend to trade observations with others who have seen a lot through the years and don’t tend to be swayed by booth bait and eye candy. And as usual, I tend to reinforce how digital signage and the broader pro AV industries don’t tend to have giant tech leaps year to year. As ever, it is more about incremental improvements. My peers agree.
The display manufacturers almost all have fantastic-looking stuff – both flat panel and LED. In the early years, you could see some unfamiliar brands from China with product that looked like hell. But I maybe saw one or two stands like that this year.
I have stopped calling BS on whether product billed as microLED really is, because there genuinely is product being made now, and more to the point, who cares. The display marketing people have moved on, for the most part – perhaps because only hardcore display nerds are asking about whether something is MIP, COB or some other acronym.
What ISE attendees and their end-user customers want to know:
- Does it look good?
- Will it last?
- How is it supported?
- How hot does it run and how much energy does it consume?
- And the big one: How much?
I speculated that ISE might be better called AISE this year, but … not so much. AI was all over the place, but there was not a lot of over-selling of it. That perhaps owes to it still being early, but also how its power tends to be more about what it is doing behind the scenes.
You can maybe liken it to modern-day cars. Back in the day, when people bought cars they’d go to a dealer and look under the hood to see the engine and other components. Who does that now?
But what’s under the hood is rather obviously mission critical. If any companies in the ecosystem are not looking at AI and how to use it – even the infrastructure people with stuff like mounting systems – they are heading for a cliff.
That is particularly the case for CMS software companies, notably those with no clear distinction in terms of the vertical market they serve or the capabilities they offer. Will it make sense in the near future to spend a few bucks a month per SaaS license for a broad platform with a bunch of functionality that never gets used, or use AI to write an app that has the specific functionality that’s needed, presented with a UX the operator wants.
No more SaaS fee licensed from a commercial CMS and operators can run it off a management and distribution platform like BrightSign’s, SignageOS, Samsung’s VXT, LG’s version or, and this will make a lot of people twitchy, Google TV. I had a chat with a couple of Google guys at a mixer last week, and they laid out what was already possible.
I’d relate more, but it was loud and late, and I frankly can’t remember it all. The tech giant’s second go-round in this sector is much more serious and compelling than when Google came into the market and seemed to be asking people to bend the knee.
AI Unevenly Applied
I had chats and demos with a bunch of software companies about applying AI, and the level of maturity, sophistication and applicability was all over the place. Some was not a whole bunch more than basic layout generation, but I also saw some valid, real world efforts – like drawing from multiple data sources using MCP.
I had a long chat with ScreenCloud’s Mark McDermott, who has recently brought on a CEO, so he can hand off the business stuff and focus on product as CPO. Super bright guy and he has done a LOT of thinking about AI. There’s a few people like that who see around the corners and stay relentlessly modern and relevant.
The U.S. firm OptiSigns was demoing what it called OptiDev, an AI prompt-based app builder that looked interesting, but very weirdly marketed at the show. I asked for a demo and they showed me how it built a game for a touchscreen. I said that was nice but what the heck did that have to do with media on public screens.
I was told games are hard to build in AI, and this showed what could be done. OK, fine, but a handful of nerds would have got that and most people would have just been confused. Like me. Another demo I saw on video built website landing pages, which again was nice … but relevant???
Nothing wrong with what they were showing, but context and relevance matter.
I nudged numerous people to bob, duck and weave over towards the back of Hall 2 to see a Boston-area start-up called NetSpeek. I have known these guys for a while, and what started out as agentic AI to speed up troubleshooting and resolution in pro AV NOCs is now heading towards being like an AI-driven single pane of glass platform that can intelligently and autonomously monitor, manage and resolve stuff that goes wrong with connected end-points.
Tons of potential. It won’t re-seat a loose cable or swap a part, but APIs and remote commands can boost up-times and speed up fixes. Or prevent the need for fixes, because the bot saw the problem developing and used its learning to resolve it.
Crappy Displays Now Rare
On the display side, SO much stuff now looks good. The big LED totems designed to replace high-bright LCDs are now, I’d say, visually there when it comes to resolution, but maybe not on cost for the super-tight pitch stuff that rivals LCD for granularity.
Taiwan’s DynaScan again did a nice job showing LED vs LCD vs Color e-Paper, side by side in totems. LCD still looks superior.
Sansi (SNA in North America) had some LED totems that also looked really good. It used to be really obvious when LED swapped out LCD in these big units. Now you have to look a little closer.
Media Resources out of the Toronto-area also had a good looking totem (as did others), though what was really interesting with the Canadian guys was a demo of their engineering work to greatly reduce power consumption on outdoor displays. Power is EXPENSIVE, so if you can substantially reduce the draw, it can mean a big reduction in operating costs for media companies.
The mesh LED products are getting really good, and while China’s Muxwave has very successfully got a Kleenex thing going that sees mesh LEDs referred to as Muxwave displays, there are numerous companies who have similar products. Each, of course, will say why their version is superior. Muxwave has the great advantage of having its product on the front entry windows of the ISE venue (above).
I did not see a lot of OLED.
I did not see that many gimmicky things, though manufacturing giant BOE had a very large glasses-free 3D display for I have no idea why.
Another big manufacturer – Barco, I think – had one that needed glasses. Again, why? What’s the addressable market?
On the theme of why – Samsung made its Spatial Signage displays in three sizes front and center at its massive stand. I am told the execs from Seoul were sooo proud of these units, which share the idea of virtual, faux holographic presence with those shower-stall transparent LCDs. The difference here is it is a much, much thinner display, with the depth done with “trompe-l’œil”-style backgrounds that create the illusion of a deep white cavity. There’s then a take on the old glasses-free 3D lenticular lenses, except this time it is on the inside of the display face, so the image looks a bit different left and right and center.
Cool, but it is eye candy desperate for a rationale. I have been debating its relevance on LinkedIn and just about lost a mouthful of coffee when I was told unit prices are $20K.
As the phrase goes: Good luck with that.
Color E Paper Everywhere
Like 2025, color e-paper had a big presence, with some 30 stands showing product. I wonder how many attendees understood almost all of it was their own adaptation of E Ink Spectra or Kaleido products. There are not 30 companies with 30 unique e-paper designs and patents.
I’ll be corrected or nagged at, but the most interesting one for me was the American firm Agile Display Solutions, which is focused solely on targeting the big market for large format backlit poster replacements. There are LOTs of big jurisdictions out there that are not going to allow fully digital totems with tanning booth brightness and motion graphics, but they will go for e-paper ones that just replace the print “cassettes” on sidewalks and plazas.
The Agile guys have added a 150 nit film that goes over the front face, making them like giant color e-readers you can use with the lights off. They also wrote middleware and control software.
I also happily found a company that is doing color e-paper that is not E Ink (I like E Ink, by the way, but competition is always good). The tech from China’s ePaint is different – reflective like E Ink products but based on LCD tech. Instead of 4,000-ish colors with E Ink Kaleido, this format can do 16 million.
I saw tons of other stuff, but this is getting long. The one other thing I will mention is my friend Ed Crowley’s add-on speaker for voice AI applications, which he was demo-ing at a tabletop in the Elo stand. He could not find a speaker and mike set-up that could manage voice AI transactions in loud environments, so he designed and built one.
So in the lobby of a busy QSR or amidst the throngs at a busy airport, this can carry on a coversation without the user hollering and straining to hear responses.
Not the most exciting thing, but I have a deep affection for stuff that just solves a problem, as opposed to creating short shelf-life Wow moments.
I was going to do video blogging from ISE and even had a gimbal-equipped camera going that had me walking and talking and being cheeky. But my voice totally cratered – like gone – by 4 pm on Day 1. So that was the end of that idea.
If you were in Barcelona, I hope traveling home was uncomplicated and you somehow dodged some virus or other. Not I, but something was up with me before the show even started. Lotsa knuckle-bumps.
Last hat tip and hugs to my friends from Displax, who served me little pours of highly medicinal and restorative port from just south of them in Porto – the home of that stuff. They’re up in nearby Braga.
Thanks to Invidis for doing the Sixteen:Nine mixer and SignageOS for sponsoring, keeping the traditional alive without killing me with the organizing and execution work. It has been 20 years now for this site and almost as long for mixers, so they had a gold blender made as a trophy (blenders are called mixers in the EU). Very kind, and funny.
I may have had a couple of glasses of wine by then …
Thank you as well to the hospitality of Peerless AV, Service and Support Ltd, i5LED, Google, Trison, OpenEye Global and the others who hosted events or plied me at some point with adult drinks or offered water for my damaged voice box. It is kinda mostly back, and I’ll be singing Nessun Dorma once again, soon enough.
OK, maybe not.
In order to travel from India i would require to submit the application atleast 15 days prior, i had a last moment travel and missed it out by 1 day and the embassy didn’t accept my application for visa, i thought i lost it all but i think no after reading your post i felt i was available all through the event just could meet you and socialise thanks fir the amazing insight and walk through the event .
Thank you – I always enjoy reading your summaries.
I like your form of retirement; you’ve stopped working, but you haven’t stopped working. “Schrödinger’s Dave”…