What happens when the scheduled host does not show up? Joe Way and Nancy Blanchard take over the show, turn it into an unexpected crossover episode, and have the kind of honest AV conversation that could never have been planned.
Nancy, Territory Sales Manager for ScreenBeam, joins Joe to discuss her long-standing connection to the higher education AV community and why supporting HETMA has remained important throughout her career. She explains why successful manufacturer relationships must be built around education, trust, and understanding the customer’s actual challenges—not simply pushing products or reading through a list of technical specifications.
The conversation explores why applications and installations matter more than feature dumps, how manufacturers should evaluate and act upon customer feedback, and why higher education institutions need direct access to product roadmaps, beta programs, and the people making development decisions. Nancy also shares how ScreenBeam approaches enterprise-grade wireless presentation, security, customer requests, digital signage, and the continued development of its platform.
Joe and Nancy then turn their attention to consultants, integrators, architects, and manufacturers. They examine where projects can go wrong, how competing priorities influence system designs, and why every participant in the process must remain focused on protecting the end user from the beginning of a project through its completion.
The episode closes with a spirited rapid round covering hardware versus software, classrooms versus conference rooms, Teams versus Zoom, wired versus wireless systems, standardization, ISE, artificial intelligence, video bars, professional responsiveness, and whether “good enough AV” can sometimes truly be good enough.
It is spontaneous, occasionally argumentative, deeply personal, and exactly what happens when two friends from the AV industry are handed microphones with no real plan.
Connect with Nancy Blanchard
Find Nancy on LinkedIn and X at @NancyBlanchard.
Email: nblanchard@screenbeam.com
Learn more about ScreenBeam and its enterprise wireless presentation, collaboration, and digital signage solutions at ScreenBeam.com.
