The title – devoted mainly to 16mm training film in the days of the great sponsored film units – continued until late 1971, when plans were made to replace Film User and Industrial Screen (as it had become since incorporating its main competitor) with a more broadly-based title, Audio Visual. A dummy edition was produced in late 1971. Maclaren Group’s new Audio Visual magazine came out in January 1972. It differed significantly from Film User in its coverage of a wider range of technologies.

Fifty years on, and AV is now in a radically different world. The magazine, or in modern publishing parlance – the brand – is almost unrecognisable from the tome that was ushered into our lives in 1972, and covers technologies that fulfil a much wider set of functions than could ever have been envisaged at its launch.

Indeed, if AV were a soccer club it would have been promoted a couple of divisions and now be playing in the Champions League.
AV has attained the status that the personal computer and the internet reached two or three decades ago, and the telephone a century ago. It now seems almost inconceivable for us to function without it.

“AV has always been about extending the connection between people, sharing an experience,” says Dave Labuskes, CEO of AVIXA. “Whether the technology was analogue or digital, audio or video, local or remote, didn’t really matter.

“Today, AV is the ubiquitous video call, the hybrid meeting, the sporting event, the corporate broadcast, the drone show. But that will change, and for as long as we define AV as one set of products or technologies, we’ll be limiting ourselves to a definition bounded by time. When we define ourselves as specialists in extending the connections between human beings, we’ll be relevant and core for as long as the human race survives.”