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Podcasts
From Council Estate to £10M AV Company: The SPOR Group Story
The version of this story that gets told at industry events is the one that starts at the first £800,000 deal. This is the version that starts earlier, in Liverpool, where there was no father figure, no mentor, no business background and no idea how to spell the word entrepreneurship.
Chris Gore
Jul 26 min read
This Is How You Deploy Useful AI in Your Workplace
The four-day week trials have run. The data is largely positive. Productivity holds or improves. Staff wellbeing improves. Retention improves. The case for it as a concept is reasonably well established at this point. The question that gets far less attention is a practical one: is the office actually capable of supporting it?
Chris Gore
May 185 min read
Revealing The Secret Footballer | Future Workplace Podcast
A Premier League footballer turned whistleblower on the culture, mental health failures and high-performance secrets inside professional football. What does it mean for your workplace?
Chris Gore
Apr 15 min read
How to Brief an AV Company: What to Include and What Gets Missed
The quality of the brief you give an AV company determines the quality of the quote you get back. Send a one-line email asking for a price for a meeting room and you will get wildly different quotes from different suppliers, because each one is filling in the gaps with their own assumptions. Send a properly structured brief and the quotes you get back become genuinely comparable.
Chris Gore
5 days ago3 min read
What Is DSP Voice Lift and Does Your Boardroom Actually Need One?
Voice lift is one of the most commonly misunderstood line items on an AV quote for large meeting rooms. It gets bundled in by some suppliers as a default for any room over a certain size, and skipped entirely by others who do not understand when it is genuinely needed. Neither approach is right. Voice lift solves a specific problem and either matters significantly to your room or does not matter at all.
Chris Gore
6 days ago3 min read
Single Sign-On and Meeting Room Panels: What IT Teams Need to Know
A meeting room booking panel goes live with a generic local login. A touch controller ships with a default password nobody changes. Multiplied across fifty rooms in a corporate estate, this becomes a genuine security gap that most AV-only suppliers never raise during the sales process, because configuring SSO properly requires IT involvement, identity provider access and testing time that pure AV installers are not set up to deliver.
Chris Gore
7 days ago3 min read
The Problem With AV
How a Major Insurance Company Transformed 8 Meeting Rooms With a Full AV Fit-Out
They had eight meeting rooms on a single floor that needed a complete rethink. Not a patch job. A proper, standardised, future-ready AV fit-out. That's where SPOR came in.
Chris Gore
Apr 216 min read
When One Room Needs to Do Two Jobs: Microsoft Teams Room Meets Dolby Atmos
Most meeting rooms are built for one thing. A screen, a camera, a speakerphone, done. But what happens when your business needs that same space to pull double duty? One moment it needs to run a flawless Microsoft Teams call with a client in New York. The next, it needs to drop jaws with a cinema-quality product demonstration.
Chris Gore
Apr 175 min read
How SPOR Group Transformed Masdar's London HQ Into a Seamless Microsoft Teams Rooms Environment
When a global clean energy company relocates its London headquarters, the pressure is on to get everything right and that includes the technology that keeps their people connected. Masdar, one of the world's leading renewable energy developers, needed a complete Audio-Visual overhaul at their new Paddington office. They turned to SPOR Group to deliver it. Here's how we did it and what the end result looks like.
Chris Gore
Mar 114 min read
Reviews
Logitech Scribe vs Huddly IQ: Which AI Whiteboard Camera Is Right for Your Room?
The question of how to include a physical whiteboard in a hybrid meeting has been around since hybrid working began. Two of the most commonly shortlisted solutions are the Logitech Scribe and the Huddly IQ. Both use AI. Both involve a camera in the room. But they are solving the problem in fundamentally different ways, which means the right choice for one room type is completely wrong for another.
Chris Gore
18 hours ago3 min read
CapEx vs OpEx: How to Pay for Expensive AV Upgrades
The meeting room project is specced. The rooms are designed. The hardware is selected. Then someone in finance asks whether this should be CapEx or OpEx and the conversation slows down for a month while procurement and IT work out the answer.
Chris Gore
Jun 254 min read
How to Get an AV Price in 60 Seconds Without Talking to Anyone
You Google how much a meeting room AV system costs. Every result takes you to a contact form or a schedule a call button. Within thirty seconds your phone starts ringing. Someone wants to do a discovery call, understand your requirements and give you a consultative solution. All you wanted was a number you could put in a budget.
Chris Gore
Jun 125 min read
How Much Does AV Cost?
Cisco Webex Board vs Microsoft Surface Hub: The Honest Comparison
The Cisco Webex Board and Microsoft Surface Hub are both premium all-in-one touchscreen devices designed for collaboration-heavy rooms. Both start above £8,000. Both include 4K display, integrated compute, camera, microphone, speaker and digital whiteboarding. Both are designed for flagship spaces where the technology is expected to impress as well as perform.
Chris Gore
2 days ago3 min read
Neat Bar vs Neat Bar Pro vs Neat Board: Which Device Is Right for You?
Neat has built a strong reputation in the UK corporate market for clean, minimal hardware that integrates tightly with Microsoft Teams Rooms. Unlike manufacturers who support multiple platforms, Neat devices are designed specifically for the Teams experience, which shows in the polish of the integration but narrows the platform choice if your organisation runs a mixed environment.
Chris Gore
Jul 23 min read
Town Hall AV and All-Hands AV: What's Different About Speccing a Large Space
Organisations frequently treat their town hall or all-hands space as a large meeting room and spec it accordingly, a bigger display, a more powerful video bar, slightly better speakers. This approach consistently underdelivers. A space for fifty or more people is not a scaled-up meeting room. It is a fundamentally different category of AV problem with its own specification requirements.
Chris Gore
Jul 13 min read
Comparisons
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