2010 PRO AV Spotlight Awards
Take a pair of 21st century arts schools, mix in a casino’s giant LED screens, add a sprinkle of Army distance learning with hospital telemedicine, then shake it all up in a giant soda bottle that doubles as a projection surface and you’ve got a taste of what the pro AV industry’s best have to offer. This year, 16 projects took home Spotlight Awards. Will yours be in the running next year?
The pro AV industry is like the New York Yankees: Every year, it seems, it has a new roster of all-stars. In this, the third year of the Pro AV Spotlight Awards, judges recognized 12 companies that hadn’t won before. Since we established the Spotlight Awards program in 2008, we’ve handed out 42 crystal prizes to 33 different companies representing the widest imaginable variety of large and small AV installations. That’s what we call a talent-rich system.
2010 Spotlight Award Winners
- 2010 Best Corporate AV Project (under $250K)
- 2010 Best Corporate AV Project
- 2010 Best Education AV Project (Tie)
- 2010 Best Education AV Project (Tie)
- 2010 Best Entertainment AV Project
- Best Government AV Project (Federal)
- Best Government AV Project (State & Local)
- 2010 Best Health Care AV Project
- 2010 Best Hospitality AV Project
- 2010 Best House Of Worship AV Project
- 2010 Best Museum AV Project
- 2010 Best Residential AV Project
- 2010 Best Restaurant/Casino
- 2010 Best Retail AV Project
- 2010 Judges’ Award
- 2010 Judges’ Award
Like the Yankees, the Big Apple is home to five 2010 Spotlight Award winners: CMS Audiovisual Consultants’ work at the Bank of America building, Walters-Storyk Design Group’s masterpiece at NYU’s Dolan Recording Studio/Research Lab, AVI-SPL’s mission-critical situation room at New York City Hall, Robert Singer & Associates’ creative projection design outside the Stay Hotel, and VideoSonic Systems’ innovative wayfinding touch system for the New York City Visitors Information Center. That’s to say nothing about the winner of our first-ever Best Residential AV Project award, a sprawling, 31-zone, $800,000 installation by Electronics Design Group in the New York suburb of Greenwich, Conn.
This year, 16 exceptional companies took home Spotlight Awards at a ceremony during InfoComm 2010 in June. The journey started with a call for entries at the beginning of the year. By springtime, judges, including Pro AV editors, AV integrators and consultants, and the editors of two of our sister magazines, ARCHITECT and Architectural Lighting, were working through more than 70 entries, submitted by installers, consultants, architects, lighting designers, and even end-users.
For the second straight year, judges liked two education projects so much they deemed both worthy of awards. NYU’s James L. Dolan teaching complex was built so that any room could be used for recording, while the Center for Creative Arts at Cuyahoga Community College, designed by Westlake Reed Leskosky, features a hybrid fiber-Cat-6 AV network for sending high-quality content throughout campus and beyond. A highly educational venture, D J Willrich’s Centre of the Cell, incorporated just the right amount of interactive fun to be the Best Entertainment AV Project.
For innovation, look no further than our Judges’ Award winners, one of which uses a giant Coke bottle as a front-projection surface, the other a series of touch tables that launch video fly-throughs of New York City. The late George Steinbrenner would be proud. And none of these winners cost as much as A-Rod’s contract.