Recorded May 21, 2026

In this road-show episode of Off the Rails, the crew broadcasts live (from the same room, even) from NWMET in Salt Lake City, surrounded by too many laptops, too many cables, travel fatigue, and the kind of improvised conference setup that makes AV people both proud and deeply ashamed.

The conversation starts with two cheerful reminders that everything is temporary: digital signage may be "dead," meeting room appliances may be next, and anything running on abandoned Android builds is probably just waiting to become tomorrow's security problem. From there, the group digs into the real higher-ed pain points behind cloud-managed signage, appliance lifecycles, accessibility requirements, captioning, and why "cheap and fast" usually leaves "good" bleeding out behind the rack.

They also recap NWMET itself, including the executive summit, AI sessions, accessibility discussions, vendor floor discoveries, oversized displays, strange LED signage widgets, USB bridge boxes, and one especially baffling speaker deployment that may or may not have been designed during a bad trip. It's a conference recap, a product roast, and a warning label for anyone who thinks AV support can be handled entirely from a browser tab.

News articles:

Alternate episode titles:

Converting it to Kentuckian
What is this A-1 thing you keep talking about?
Place water near your special area
Higher Ed Festivus
It doesn't work like that
Is that because everyone lost their sh*t in the mail?
It was an Austin Powers moment
Tissues, Fabric, and Muscle
A lot of speakers on the wall
I know, it was sold out!

We stream live every Friday at about 315p Eastern/1215p Pacific and you can listen to everything we record over at AVSuperFriends.com

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