Chief Executive Officer, Broadcast Television Producer

>> So, my name is Shaun Clair, I'm a Penn State graduate, Engineering Science. And I went to work for a company called Clair and we provide technical solutions to the live entertainment industry. So, touring, festival, broadcast and corporate markets and then we provide solutions that range from audio systems and sound reinforcement, to communication systems, wireless technology, IT systems, back line and video systems. So, it happens, it's very dynamic and it's different every time. So, for example, U2, they'll come to us a year an a half in advance and they'll say, we have this crazy concept, we want to do 360 degrees in stadiums and we need an audio solution that facilitates the ability to do that. There will be a year and a half of planning, there will be some product development, there will be a lot of system design that is 1 scenario. The other scenario is we pick up the phone and it is, you know, an award show or a major event and they're saying, oh, no, we are having a problem with our current vendor and we need you to show up in a week and provide this particular solution. So, there are, you know, last minute fly by the seat of your pants, you know, troubleshooting and solutions providing and then there's also long, much more organized planning. We sat down, we have a think tank within Clair and we looked about 3 years ago and we said hey, how is the landscape of entertainment changing? And we drew out a general trend that we saw. It used to be about the music, seventies, eighties, sound reinforcement was a big part of it of the show. We watched that transition to being part that it was ultimately part of the picture and it was about the spectacle. So, I'll give a few simple examples that you'll see in phase 1. So, you can imagine that somebody who is in the crowd wants to be able to interact-- we're watching a transition where you go from video screens to videoscapes, so you have very complex projection mapping solutions, whether it's in an outdoor venue, where the projection mapping upon buildings or it's upon the set that's there. And then the last, you have this projection mapping and now a person with their phone can select a light and choose a color and how it blinks and how it's presented and then they can select where it is presented onto that video screen. And now, their light is there and they're able to interact with that light. Now, multiply that by the 20,000 people that are in the crowd and now they've created their own light show and interacted. Another innovation that I'm particularly excited about is something we call augmented audio. So, in sound reinforcement, high frequencies, as they propagate through the air, attenuate faster than low frequencies. And room acoustics make it very difficult to create really HiFi audio solutions in these large deployments. So, what we've done is we developed a technology where you are able to transmit audio over Wi-Fi. The smart phone that's in your pocket has the ability to listen to the sound reinforcement in the venue and time align that audio to sample accuracy with that sound reinforcement. So, you now have this element of augmented audio, where you have the impact and the power of the loudspeakers, but you have the subtlety and the clarity of a perfect stereo image, a crystal clear vocal, no matter where you're sitting throughout the venue. And now, that you've created that connection between the fan and the event, you can have custom messaging and things of that nature that was previously not possible.