Tom Arbuthnot: Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Exciting to have Henry on again. It's been a little while, and if you haven't noticed, there's been quite a lot of Logi news. So we're gonna run down on all the new announcements. You will have probably seen the announcements by now, but I always like to get Henry's take on some of the why behind it and some of the little tidbits that on the prep call I hadn't got out of the, the launch, some, some insider details. So Henry, thanks for coming back on the show.

Henry Levak: Tom, thanks for having me back, and yeah, I'd love to tell you, tell you all the secrets that I'm not supposed to share.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yep, yep, that's what we like on this pod. So yeah, yeah. I mean, just give me a little bit of how your world has been. Obviously you've had the, the big launches, and we'll get into that, but I'm guessing it's been busy?

Henry Levak: We've been a little busy. As you know, we just had our biggest enterprise launch ever, where we announced many new things, which we'll talk about today, completely breakthrough technology, and, you know, just new partnership extensions and there's just so much to cover. But the feedback so far has been really good, and, you know, a lot of it just had to do with listening to our customers and our partners over the years wanting to know, you know, just reacting to what they wanted to see from us, and hopefully they feel like we- we're delivering it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I fed this back to your team, but I was quite impressed with the launch event, like the kind of polished, polished intro videos and then the live, the live Q&A and going live around the world in multiple sessions. I thought that was a good format.

Henry Levak: Yeah, it was, it was, it was really well done. We put a lot of effort into it, so if you haven't watched it, it is on YouTube. It's recorded or record- the session's recorded so you can watch it. But we put a lot of effort into it, and we like to celebrate these moments. It's just as important for us externally for the world to see what we, we do, but we also view this as a, a great milestone internally. It's like our moment of internal celebration, and we like to do it in a, in a nice, you know, high quality way.

Tom Arbuthnot: That was good. It was good. So let's, let's get stuck in. There's a lot to talk about. I'm gonna start off with the Rally Bar 2 and kind of work my way through the portfolio. Feel free to steer me as we talk. Yeah. So i- it's been a while since you guys have had a, a fresh bar, and there's, there's quite a lot that's new in here. W- what would you first talk about with the Rally Bar 2?

Henry Levak: Yeah. So we, we launched Rally Bar, you know, s- several years ago and the Rally Bar Mini. They kind of come out at the same time. And, you know, our, our bet back then, this was one of my first big projects after joining Logitech. Our, our bet back then was that these Android bars could do more than just small spaces, so we really launched the first big room Android bar, which was the original Rally Bar. And, and I think, you know, based on how the industry's going, I think most people will agree with that thesis. And then we took another kind of unorthodox approach. You know, we, we, we over-engineer devices. We make sure that they're built for the future, and so we made sure that the chipsets we use, the memory, the headroom was there for us to continue to improve it. So certainly some folks started building new bars as quickly as they can. We, we actually took a different approach. We said, "Let's invest in software. Let's extend the lifespan of our products with new versions of Android." Of course, we updated, you know, pretty much all of our devices to Android 12 for free for everybody, and that extended the lifecycle of their devices. So like the original Rally Bar is supported in a Teams environment, Teams and Android, till late 2030. So that's a, that's a 10-year lifecycle for a video bar, which hopefully most people agree is pretty good. And so a- and but what we're answering at this event is, well, what happens over the next 10 years? Like what, where, where is Logitech going? And hopefully we answer that in a big way. Rally Bar 2 is an extension of the original vision. So we built... We're replacing both Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini with Rally Bar 2, so kind of two different kind of use cases merged into one, and that has to do with the fact that the technology has improved so much, we are able to do wider field of view angles, small form factors with deep in-room zoom with the camera system. So we went all digital. But yeah, so Rally Bar 2 is an evolution of the original that kind of fulfilled our original vision of going into larger spaces with video- Android video bars, and we've done that fairly successfully.

Tom Arbuthnot: I like the, the aluminum body, the die cast is, is a really, looks really slick and I gather there's an engineering logic to that as well as a prettiness logic to it

Henry Levak: Certainly. So the original Rally Bar when we launched it was built in a m- you know, a traditional sort of using high-grade plastics. While we were doing that, we were experimenting with recycled plastics. And so once we, we, we cracked that code on how to do that well and reliably, we went and actually re-engineered all of our video devices, schedulers, controller p- everything to use PCR plastic. And then we encouraged the rest of the industry to do the same. So we essentially open sourced our technology and, and, and made it available to our partners, our competitors, everybody. And we are starting to see more and more people finally utilizing PCR plastics in their products. As we were building Rally Bar 2, we took a similar sort of approach. We said, "Hey, what does the next generation of sustainable design looks like?" Right? So the first generation was recycled plastics. And then what is the second generation? And the answer was circularity. We wanted to use components and materials that are even more recyclable than, than the last generation. So we built the entire body out of one piece of die-cast aluminum, which was a, a, a big challenge, but we actually, were able to do it. And I'll tell you, 'cause I tell you all my secrets. When we started on Rally Bar 2, the original point of re- the point of record was to use plastic because we actually thought that recycled aluminum at such a big volume and, and the manufacturing scale might be quite challenging. And, and it definitely was. But the engineering, the design team, they leaned in and, and they figured it out. And then as part of using the recyclable material, not only do we give a more sustainable product but it's also a higher performing product. So we use the entire body as the, the, the, the, the, the heat sink. So not only do I have a newer, more faster processor than most of the industry, but I also have what I would guess is probably the biggest heat sink in the industry 'cause the whole body is one heat sink. It, it, it's a very, very beautifully crafted and high-performing video solution.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's cool. And y- you know, you sort of secret seeded some of these to some of the customers, and I was on some back channels on the launch. We have, we have some WhatsApp groups with a few people. And, and the funniest thing to me was, like, the... Some of the most excitement was about the mount and the forward-leaning mount. Like, people were like, "This is so, such a, a good feature." Like, not, not the camera, not the aluminum, the mount. W- was that a real conscious design thing?

Henry Levak: Yeah, we spent a bit of time again, collecting feedback from our customers, our partners about what they love about the original Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, and also things they wanted us to improve. One area we focused a lot on was the mount. Now, of course, the new device is lighter, it's smaller, so it just requires a very different solution. And what we did is create a, a very, very well beauti- very simple but beautiful mounting solution that works above and below the display. Maybe we'll show some animations later i- i- i- in the just to visualize it for people who are watching this blog post. But really it's ultimately designed for, for single person in- installs. So just one person walks in the room, puts four screws in the wall, and that's pretty much it. And then easy accessibility. So if you ever need to get to the back of the device to connect a, a mic pod, a camera, it really is simple to do. So it's very functional, but in terms of aesthetics, it looks super clean. It allows me to install the, the bar right above or below the display, so it's very close to just... There's not a lot of separation between the device. It, it just looks, looks the way it should, I think.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Nice. And to go with the Rally Bar Pr- 2, you've got the Tap IP 2, so second generation of the Tap. Anything specific we should know about that?

Henry Levak: Yeah. So to your point, we, we announced Tap IP 2 and Tap Scheduler 2, and there's a, a couple things we did, again, based on the feedback we've gotten over the years. So we, we, we, we pride ourselves in making really nice flexible mounting systems. The original Tap could be either table mounted or wall mounted, but in the original Tap we used PIR, right? So when you wall mounted, the PIR sensor would look upwards towards the ceiling. So I would rely really on the cameras of the bars to be aware if someone's in the room or not. So we, we wanted to evolve that a bit. So we used a different type of technology to detect presence. So regardless of how the device is mounted, table or wall it will know if there's someone in the room or not, which just simplifies things and make it, makes it more robust. And the Tap Scheduler 2 we, we really simplified or elevated the sustainability elements of it. So, you know, of course, we have a new chipset, we have a better display, but what we added is presence awareness to the scheduling panel. So what that means is if no one's standing near it, you know, let's say more than five meters away, we know that and we turn the display off. And as you walk, approach the device, the device will automatically turn on and, and, and awaken. So based on our estimates, you know, it's about 30% power conservation, when the display is off. So it's one of those really nice user experience things that is completely automated. You don't have to really think too much about it, but it kind of just, just handles it for you without disrupting the user experience, but saves on energy consumption.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And both those devices now MDEP with Microsoft, like we've been waiting kind of for what you guys are gonna do around MDEP. So talk me through that.

Henry Levak: Yeah. So everything we announced is built on MDEP. We've been working with our friends in Microsoft for, for quite a while. And really the, the intent was to combine kind of the best of both worlds, the security, the compatibility, the forward supportability of MDEP for the Microsoft ecosystem, but along with what we do really well in terms of user experience and peripherals. And so we've actually been working on it for a while. I remember some of the early announcements and, and blog posts from others. I, you know, we took a, we took a, a, I think a clear approach. We were... We only announced when we were ready. We didn't want to add more confusion to the market around availability. And we have a very clear message, which is everything that you have from us now in second generation is MDEP from launch, built on MDEP. And we're really excited to be part of the platform. The MDEP team's been a great partner of ours as well as, of course, the Teams team as well has been a longtime partnership. And now we're gonna do even more things together. Yep.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Yeah, the from launch is interesting 'cause I- the devil's in the detail with some of these MDEP announcements of like- Announcements... It's coming soon versus actually live. So it's, it's from launch, so from the factory, all that good stuff.

Henry Levak: Absolutely. Yeah, and i- it's important that these products are there from, from the launch because there are certain security elements that need to be considered that might not be possible to execute, you know, after they leave factory. So we've, we've worked very closely together to make sure we were ready with them at launch.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. So I think judging by how well you guys have done in the past with the Bar and the Tap, not, not a huge surprise, right? Second generation. Now we're getting into some of the more interesting stuff that maybe you wouldn't have necessarily guessed. So talk us through System 2 Pro and the kind of modular approach, and you're, you're really punching into some bigger and different spaces now.

Henry Levak: We're punching in a big way. Yeah, absolutely. So interesting enough, the, the first project I- when I joined Logitech a little over eight years ago, the first project I walked into was the Rally System, and that was our first kinda modular solution to go into larger spaces. It's, it's a very successful product for us. I really- it showed the world that, you know, we're able to produce things more than just, you know, smaller video bars, but enter in much larger spaces. But over the years, the feedback has been for us, "Hey, we, we really love your bars. We love the simplicity. We love how you, how you make all these things work in a really simple, elegant way. Can you please go fix our large rooms for us?" 'Cause in the large rooms, that's usually a combination of multiple vendors with, you know, very kinda legacy, like ceiling legacy, ceiling speaker approaches. And the world has been pushing us, both our partners and our customers have been pushing us to think bigger and, you know, and do more in these environments. So we've clearly been working on something. And as you noted we announced the Rally System 2 Pro, which is a, a big evolution of the original Rally System. But it's more than that. We announced the whole ecosystem of products. So Rally System 2 Pro is certainly a kit with, you know, the cameras, the mics, the compute built in, but it's really a, a reflection of the broader ecosystems. Now we have cameras, speakers, mic pods, computes RoomMate 2 Pro was announced. And all these things come together with something we call Logi LINK. So Logi LINK is our AV over IP protocol. It makes it super simple to connect peripherals to support divisible spaces to, to basically create something that's very powerful, but in a, in a, in a very traditional network-friendly, kind of IT-friendly way.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I love this kind of the, the where, where everybody's going with the over IP thing. It just makes so much, so much sense in terms of deployment and simplicity.

Henry Levak: Yeah, and you know, our, our history of course has been we've had a lot of USB and we've defined a lot of the USB spec ourselves. We, we, it was very successful for us. We'll continue to support it. USB is still a very universal way of connecting things and, and e- even in our new large room ecosystem, we have specifically left affordances for, you know external third party audio solutions to work in our new ecosystem. And that, that largely is USB based in terms of kind of cross-vendor connectivity. But certainly we see an opportunity and, and have invested a lot into making things more kind of like a network device, right? So the speakers, the microphones, the cameras they're really simple to connect. They're simple to manage, and it uses kind of standard based protocols and cables to, to make it all come together.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. I'm holding back on the new audio tech. I wanna talk about the Speaker Bar 2 and the, the, what look really impressive, the Pro and the Max. But i- talk to me about, like, divisible and modular, 'cause that is traditionally the kind of the, the top end of complexity in terms of our space, and it's programmers, and it's secret special codes and things like that. And, and I caught a bit about Scenes in the, the keynote, so talk us through what that means.

Henry Levak: Yes. So I remember when we first started this project and we were working on this stuff about two, three years ago, and I was getting feedback from, again, our, our close customers and partners, and asked one of my great mates who's an IT manager at a, at a, at a big tech company. And I said, "Hey, we're thinking about entering into this divisible space. Is this something, you know... Is this a problem? What do you think?" And he, and he said, "Henry, divisible rooms are, we, we've solved this a while ago, right?" Which was kind of an interesting thing to hear from him 'cause everyone else has been complaining to me. And I said, "Well, how'd you solve it?" He said, "We just stopped doing them," right? And so that told me that it's a big problem that we, you know, at Logitech we can help. And if you think about everything we've always done is we've dramatically just simplified complex solutions and made them much simpler, right? Whether it's bar or multi-camera support with Sight. And so we took this on as a big challenge. So LINK, which is our univer- IP protocol, allows us to connect multiple systems together. So you can actually connect up to three Rally System 2 Pros with each other. And then you can use something we call Scenes. So Scenes are pretty much really simple but very powerful ways to configure different room environments. So you can say, let's combine all three into one system. I wanna make these two systems one system, and you can do this in a very dynamic way. They're simple but they're powerful, so our partners now get to customize these environments and create experiences that, again, some people simply wouldn't invest into. So again, my friend who's in a big company simply w- does not deploy divisible spaces. So for any partner, that's no longer really an opportunity, but I think we can do it in a way where they would be open to it, and that, that's been the challenge. So, so yeah, with LINK and we are able to connect multiple systems together and with Scenes you can pre-configure different s- configurations. You can set different camera settings, different microphones, turn certain speakers on and off. And you can trigger these Scenes in the room. You can trigger with an API. You can trigger through cloud. So our partners are excited 'cause they can do building automation in more spaces. So now it doesn't have to be only one space at the whole company that has this sort of capability. You can imagine every building now has these advanced rooms because they're, the barrier to entry is much lower, so you can actually do a lot more of them.

Tom Arbuthnot: And is there an objective here to make this easier for the installers, be that in-house teams or AV partners? 'Cause traditionally that has been quite a skilled thing to do in terms of programming and layouts and things.

Henry Levak: You know, I, I think we, we certainly have to satisfy both the end customer but also the partner. End customers are telling us, "We want solutions that are simpler. We wanna, we wanna mass deploy these." 'Cause the interest is to have great AI experiences, great video experiences in a much broader range of rooms, and they want to make sure that they're reliable and represent kind of the work that they do. Partners are more and more asking us, "How do we differentiate? How do we build unique experiences that weren't possible before?" And we're about to talk about, of course, the new speaker systems. But the technology we're announcing is gonna create completely new discussions around what is even possible in these large rooms. And that's where our partners are gonna be able to come in, and they're gonna be, you know, everybody wants to put AI everywhere, but now they're gonna be at the center of it with Logitech because we can do things that historically have not been really possible in video conferencing rooms

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. So I've, I, I think I've held you as long as I can. Let's talk about the speakers, 'cause this was the kind of the big thing that I don't think many people saw coming. And essentially the, the, the, the pitch here is a front-of-room speaker that can give level audio over the whole room, but also can divide audio into different multi-channels. But y- you talk us through that, that kind of conversation.

Henry Levak: Yeah. So this has been a secret project that even our sales team didn't know about until a week prior to the announcement, and we purposely saved it to the end of the event just to really have that shock and awe moment where it's like, "What?" And it's, it's been a secret project we've been working on for a few years. And, and I'll tell you, when we s- when we started on large room audio, you know, initially the, the, the mind goes to kind of legacy a- approaches. Like, "Oh, we should make a ceiling speaker." That's kind of the obvious thing to do. And there's some merit with that, obviously, that's been done many times before but there's huge limitations, huge costs. Like, and you know that we could talk about complexity and cost, but, like, the user experience of ceiling speakers is not ideal. You know, you, you see the person's video in the front of the room, but the audio's coming from the ceiling. It's kind of this weird, you know... So w- to us it's, it's always been important to couple audio and video together to create that natural interaction experience. So we considered also building speakers all over the room, you know, just some in the back, some in the front, but even, even that has its complications, and we wanted to simplify it. So we, we spent a bit of time looking at a lot of different technology that was out there and landed on something that we call SoundShape. So we announced three speakers, but the Rally Speaker 2 Pro and the Rally Speaker 2 Max are unlike anything we've seen in video collaboration before. They use the Pro is a 32-speaker matrix array, and the, the Max is a 64 speaker array. Funny enough, when we when we were doing the, the, the, the, the, event, the Logi Launch event and we first unveiled it, the question was like, "Did aliens design this?" 'Cause it actually looks like it's out of this world. It's like I've, you know... There's very few places in the world where you go and you see speakers like that. There are a few venues that, of course, have something similar very large venues. And so we so it's a 32 or 64 speaker driver. These drivers work in harmony with each other. So even though it's 32, they really operate as one system. And the technology that we implemented is what we call SoundShape. Now, traditional speakers as you know, have a kind of a omnidirectional distribution of audio. It emits audio everywhere, and then audio's bouncing around the room and that creates intelligibility echo issues and so forth. That's like a, like a light bulb. And the way we like to describe SoundShape is instead of projecting audio everywhere, we shape it. It's more like a flashlight. And so we're able to beam audio more precisely into, into various parts of the room. Where this makes a fundamentally big difference is you basically tell us the dimensions of the room, the system will automatically tune to those dimensions, and it'll beam audio just into that kind of, let's call it that, rectangle. And what that does is then audio's not bouncing off of walls, it's not bouncing off of, you know, floors as much. It, it, it's like it, it's, it's a lot, a lot more controlled. Of course it's something you have to hear to believe, but pretty much everyone that's heard it is like, "This is a fundamentally better audio experience." And probably

Tom Arbuthnot: The most- Yeah, again, the I haven't been hands-on yet. Hopefully when I'm over for Ignite I'm gonna get to your offices to get hands-on. But on, on the back channels, again, it was like, "Oh, this is legit." Like, like I went, I went and I had my little sound monitor on my mobile and I walked around and it was level, like like just like the demos. So yeah, I have to get hands-on, but initial feedback from the, the back channels was very impressive.

Henry Levak: It's, you know, all the skeptics when they hear this they're like, "You, you're gonna balance the audio and it's gonna sound... There's no way." And then they pull out their iPhones, they got their SPL measures and they're like, actually what they're saying is right. And you know, sometimes people think, like, we're, we're, we have some special venues, like, we, we came in and specially tuned it. We literally, like in London and Paris, we just did live demos to hundreds of people. We showed up and one hour later we're doing demos. Like, there's no tricks here. It's just a fundamentally different approach and different technology than what the industry's been used to, specifically in video conferencing. You, some of these things kind of exist in some high-end kind of you know, AV venues and we're applying it in a much more approachable way. And it creates opportunity- I mean, is there like, is there- Yep...

Tom Arbuthnot: Is there DSP tuning to do? Like, do I have meters and levels? How, how auto is auto?

Henry Levak: It, it's so I would say there's the happy path where you open the system, you connect it all, and you just give us the room dimensions and it pre-configures itself. There will be addi- additional knobs and capabilities that we will for, for our kind of AV partners to be able to tune and adjust. So one of the demos that I would say maybe caught the most amount of interest and attention, 'cause it's just more, like, from a, you know, like, it is the dual language. It's just, it opens people's mind what was possible. So the way the system works is we literally create two separate zones. In each zone we play a different audio track. So on the left side of the room you'll hear one language, on the other side of the room we have a completely different language. And if y- you've probably seen some of our ads where people are literally walking, you saw Ilya, he's walking back and forth in arena at Albert- Yeah. The reaction usually is like, "I didn't know audio worked this way." It's almost like it defies physics, but it doesn't. It- w- we're actually using physics in a clever way with destructive and constructive audio waves. And so now our partners can have a conversation with their customers on how to create a completely different experience for maybe they have a divisible room or where you have multi-language support.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, and I guess that's where you said this on the announcement, that's where you're gonna be then working with the, the UCaaS vendors, I guess, 'cause right now Teams doesn't have a concept of two channels, one system, and I guess you'd need something like that to, to give it both audio paths.

Henry Levak: Exactly. So we'll work with our friends at Microsoft another industry first with them, where they will do live translation, and what we will do is send the audio streams to two different parts of the room. So anyone with like an EBC or like a big town hall where like, you know, Logitech's such a global company even with us when we have our partners and vendors come in, having dual language support is so inclusive and just like so futuristic. It's like, again, it's like you, you just don't realize that audio can work in that way and, and we're demonstrating it.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And, and I guess the technology sounds amazing, but going back to the kind of install and the simplicity, the interesting he- thing here is you're getting into larger spaces where you can have level audio and all your cabling and install stays in one spot front of room as opposed to the, the running cables and ceilings and speakers and all that complexity. So is it... I, I- again, is that kind of the goal there is like I, I can see a, a much simpler install for the size of space potentially?

Henry Levak: If you can install a video bar, you can install our new audio system. That was always the goal and it's that simple. And it's all based on category cable. We do power and data, so just run it directly into the RoomMate 2 Pro. If you have the Max unit, we might do something like a power injector in there. Otherwise, that's pretty much it. I mean, it's, it's pretty simple

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And there was a third speaker, the, the Speaker Bar. The Speaker Bar 2? Like, like I, I, I kind of like I was all excited about the, the Pro and the Max, but talk me through, talk me through the bar.

Henry Levak: I feel bad 'cause the Rally Speaker 2 that we announced as part of the Rally System 2 Pro Kit is- That's it... A state-of-the-art soundbar. Like it's incredible. A- and our team out, out by Cambridge designed it, and it's like amazing. But of course, the, the, the alien design looking speaker, you know, stole the show. But the Rally Speaker 2 is a seven driver line array, and it really it's aimed to support where the furs- furthest participant is about eight meters away. The Pro is 14 and the Max is 20 meters. So depending on the room size any one of those speakers will sound like it's state-of-the-art. The SoundShape technology's only on the Pro and the Max, so if you want the dual language sci-fi experience, you need the Pro or the Max. But the Rally Speaker 2 is, is, it sounds incredible, but to your point, like it's kind of like it's in the shadows of the Pro and the Max. But when people hear it, I think it'll stand on its own, and people are gonna really be impressed with how good a, a line array can sound.

Tom Arbuthnot: So similar, similar technology philosophy. Obviously not as many speakers, not as large spaces, but you're still getting some of that new sound tech in that bar form factor as well.

Henry Levak: Yeah, and it'll sit nicely below a display above or below, just like a traditional video bar. And there's even less tuning. It's not even room dimensions. You just tell us the general size or the general shape of the room. Is it a wider room or deeper room? In between those we adjust the, essentially a, a beam forming algorithm we adjust depending on those simple configurations, we'll, we'll adjust the tuning. But it sounds like all the, everything I've heard in the lab, I think people are gonna be shocked at how good something like that can sound.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's really exciting. Yeah, and I think that's a, like the, I, I haven't seen the price points of the Pro and the Max, I don't know if they're public yet, but like I imagine it's gonna be the higher end. So knowing you've got a bar for the more mainstream scenario is, is, is good to know as well.

Henry Levak: I think i- i- if you consider all in, like the experience, I- I think it's gonna, it's gonna be a experience, the cost of installation, it- it's gonna be a killer deal. We'll, we'll- Yeah... We'll publish pricing next year.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Cost of installation is, is the interesting one, isn't it? 'Cause you factor that in, and actually we've hit a bit of a tipping point in some of these scenarios where the install's starting to outweigh or be a significant percentage of the, the actual install. So that factoring that in for TCO is definitely an important part of it.

Henry Levak: I think it's that, I think experience, and I think, again, for partners, the scale that this will open up. I, I, it's, it's... I kind of reflect on the original MeetUp days where, you know, back then you, most companies had maybe dozens of meeting rooms video enabled, and then all of a sudden, you know, MeetUp sold, you know, well over a million units by now. And then all of a sudden every room's becoming video enabled. I think we're gonna see something similar here as well, where a lot more larger spaces are gonna now, they're gonna ask for these sort of capabilities. And yeah, the upfront cost will be a little bit less, but, you, you will have more of these spaces, you'll have even better experiences, and we'll spend our time focusing around these new AI capabilities, multi-camera, multi-language, you know, multi-speaker experiences. I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be an exciting-

Tom Arbuthnot: And that, and that's part of this conversation both with the Rally Bar 2 and the System 2 Pro. You've put the upper end chips in terms of the Qualcomm, and I'm not sure if you're sharing parts publicly, but like, like, like you've got longevity here and you've got horsepower here for what we think is coming.

Henry Levak: It's core to what we do. Again, the original Rally Bar, you know, it's, it was about a 10-year life cycle. And that was because we knew the hardware was more than capable to keep up with what the, the world needed because we, you know, put the latest and greatest chipsets. We're doing that again. From us from a total cost of ownership, from a environmental perspective, I think our customers or partners want longer term relationships. They want to know that they can invest in Logitech, and Logitech will push their, their kit, their gear as, you know, as, as far as technically possible. And it starts from chipset selection. It starts from thermal designs, memory allocation, and also just interest to invest. So hopefully, you know, w- we've established ourselves as somebody who, who does the right thing. And, and I hope we en- we encourage more of the industry to do something similar from a, from a sustainability perspective. The longer these products can be used, the better it is for everybody. And yes, at some point there will be kind of a refresh cycle, which is what kind of what we're going into now. But we will push the products as far as possible, and it starts with having a high-end Qualcomm chipset.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. I've, I've, I've obviously we've talked about this privately, but I do appreciate Logitech's kind of push on the environmental impact and not just the kind of token things of like packaging, but actually the recyclability, the reused materials. And we do see a lot, I think more in the UK and Europe potentially of RFIs and RFPs scoring based on that and companies thinking about the impact of their supply chain choices rather than just with their actual business

Henry Levak: I, I think it's core to everything we do, but also it, it, it's, you know, it, it's w- you, you actually get better products. These, th- these push you to come up with better solutions. So Rally Bar 2 using recycled aluminum I don't know if you've held one or seen one yet. It's stunning. It's, it's really beautiful. It's, it's, it's unlike any video bar made before. And from a thermal perspective, I, you know, I haven't tested every device out there. It probably has the most robust thermal solution which will allow us to push things further than what would've been otherwise possible. So it's, it's beautiful, it's sustainably made, but also it will push performance to a new level. So sustainability for us is core to what we do, but it also is a huge benefit broadly not just from a sustainability perspective.

Tom Arbuthnot: So give me timelines, Henry. What, what do we get when? 'Cause there's a lot there.

Henry Levak: Yeah. So Rally Bar 2, the new stunning video bar, Tap Scheduler 2 and Tap IP 2 are GA now, and they are available now, starting to roll through different parts of the world. That's available immediately. Then the mic pods that are associated to that's been out for a while as well. So the core part of the kind of the ecosystem is available now. The other thing we, we didn't touch too much, too much, too much on, but Rally Bar Huddle which exists now, we will be upgrading it to Android 15 for free for everybody. And that update's coming early next year. Then this entire Pro AV line will, will launch next summer, so summer 2027. Of course, we're gonna do a lot of beta testing early next year. You're gonna... Anyone who's listening to this will be at ISE. Welcome. You come to our booth. We're gonna have a really fun booth this year. So you're gonna see a lot of these things, but it's certainly a new interest for us. It's a new category. It's a new market. So we are, you know, announcing our intent. We're now collect- The amount of feedback I've gotten around partner programs, trainings and st- certifications, demo units, all this, and by the way, keep it coming. We love all the feedback. That is what we want, and we will shape a very successful launch for next summer. So it's gonna be a big deal.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, congrats on the, the public launch. It, it's really exciting to see you getting into some of the divisible and Scenes and the higher end spaces, but the audio stuff I'm really excited for as well 'cause that is a perpetual kind of challenge to do well, at scale. And I think the, the idea that potentially more people can achieve that level of audio is, is really exciting.

Henry Levak: I think some years from now people will look back and, you know, will wonder why, why, why it was ever different. It's one of those sort of technologies 'cause when you hear it, it just makes sense. Funny enough, one of the, the most common piece of feedback I get when we did, like I mentioned, we did this in... We did demos in New York, Paris and London. Probably have shown this now live to maybe 1,000 people. And the number one request I get is, "Can I get this in my living room?" So we've hit that level of like, you know, quality where you just personally want this sort of audio in your day-to-day life. So we're pretty excited about it. Yeah

Tom Arbuthnot: Maybe there's a maybe there's a, a consumer edition coming at some point in the future then.

Henry Levak: I don't know. The- the- It's quite-... I've been commenting

Tom Arbuthnot: At this point... It's quite, it's quite a lot of speakers for your front room.

Henry Levak: It's worth it, though. I'm gonna see if my wife will let me hang it up somewhere.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Henry, thanks for jumping on. I appreciate the inside track, as always. And yeah, I'll see you either potentially at Ignite in the office, or if not, at ISE. And as you said, you guys are gonna be in force at ISE. So I'm, I'm looking f- you always have a big stand. I'm, I'm trying to work out how you're gonna demo this. It's gonna be interesting.

Henry Levak: I- we're gonna have to get a bigger stand. I don't know. We'll have to figure it out. I'll see you at Ignite.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Thanks so much.

Henry Levak: Thanks, Tom.