Installation Magazine
Insights for Integrators and the Pro AV Industry
Installation Magazine — long known internationally as Installation International — is a business magazine for the professional audiovisual industry, published in London as part of Future plc's B2B division. For over twenty-five years it has provided insights and technology updates on professional AV for the commercial and residential sectors, serving systems integrators, installers, distributors and consultants, along with influencers such as architects and interior designers. Its portfolio spans a print magazine, a constantly updated website, daily email newsletters, eBooks, social media and events — the full apparatus of a modern trade brand.
Professional AV is the invisible technology of modern buildings: the meeting-room screens and video conferencing of offices, the sound and video of theatres, stadiums, museums, hotels, churches, control rooms, universities and shops. Installation is the title that reports the industry that designs and installs it — its products, its projects, its people and its arguments about where networked, software-driven AV is heading.
More Than Twenty-Five Years in Pro AV
Future's B2B profile of the brand records that Installation has covered the professional AV industry for over twenty-five years, under the Installation and Installation International names. The magazine's own landmarks confirm a long run: its November/December 2023 edition was its 260th issue, a point its editor marked while looking ahead to the twentieth anniversary of the ISE trade show in 2024. Across that span the industry it covers has been transformed — from analogue, standalone systems installed room by room, to IP-networked, cloud-managed AV integrated with IT infrastructure — and the magazine has chronicled each stage, including the disruption of the pandemic years and the hybrid-working revolution that made meeting-room technology a boardroom priority.
Longevity has made Installation one of the reference points of the European pro AV press, a status reflected in its institutional roles: for years the magazine has published the official show daily for Integrated Systems Europe, the industry's largest trade fair, placing its editorial team at the centre of the sector's biggest annual gathering.
Publisher: Future B2B
Installation is published by the B2B division of Future plc, the British media group whose specialist portfolio spans technology, gaming, music and many other professional and consumer markets. Within Future B2B, Installation sits alongside sister pro AV and broadcast titles — among them AV Technology and Systems Contractor News in the United States, with which it jointly hosts industry events such as the AV/IT Summit — giving advertisers and readers a transatlantic professional network rather than a single national magazine.
Future describes Installation's audience in terms a media buyer can use, publishing brand highlights that include tens of thousands of global monthly users for its website and thousands of newsletter subscribers and social followers. The magazine's own advertising pages have cited a circulation of around 12,500 across print and digital formats, a reminder that in business-to-business media, value lies in the seniority and specialism of the audience, not its size.
Editorial Leadership and the Modern Magazine
The magazine's recent era has been led by Rob Lane, who joined as editor on 1 November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and later also served as content director. His editor's columns — introducing each new edition with a tour of its features, interviews and special reports — give the modern magazine a consistent voice, and his three-year anniversary editorial in late 2023 captured its remit: reporting the industry's resilience through successive crises while tracking its set-piece occasions, from ISE previews to reports from landmark installations such as the Las Vegas Sphere, whose U2 residency the magazine reviewed from the ground.
Each edition follows the established trade-magazine pattern, strengthened by special content: news and appointments, product coverage, a lead feature on a major theme, in-depth sector specials, interviews with industry leaders, and round-ups of the latest and greatest installations from around the world. Eight magazines a year form the print core of the brand, in Future's own description of the portfolio.
Coverage: Sectors, Technologies and Convergence
The breadth of installation AV defines the coverage. Workplace and education technology feature heavily — lecture capture, hybrid teaching, meeting equity and collaboration platforms — alongside hospitality, where hotel and restaurant AV accelerated after the pandemic; live venues and immersive attractions; broadcast crossover; houses of worship; digital signage and retail; and high-end residential installation. Technology coverage follows the industry's technical frontier: AV-over-IP and networking standards such as NMOS and IPMX, control architectures including the AES70 open standards, KVM systems enjoying a second life beyond mission-critical rooms, cloud-managed and software-defined infrastructure, immersive audio, projection and display technology, and presentation tools.
A defining theme of the magazine's recent years is convergence: between AV and IT, and between AV and broadcast, as IP protocols and shared display, production and audio technologies erase old boundaries. Installation has led editions on that union, noting established AV companies diversifying into broadcast and broadcast vendors moving the other way — the kind of structural story a trade title exists to explain before it becomes obvious to everyone else.
Notable Features: Watch Lists, Interviews and Show Coverage
Recurring features build the brand's identity. The Pro AV Watch List, published annually from the early 2020s, selects the community's most notable influencers — fifteen in the 2024 edition — from dozens of nominations, giving the industry a talked-about roll of honour. Exclusive interviews open major editions: the first issue of 2026, previewing ISE in Barcelona, was led by an interview with ISE's managing director Mike Blackman on the growth of a show that began in Geneva in 2004 with 120 exhibitors and a few thousand attendees and now draws well over a thousand exhibitors and tens of thousands of visitors.
Show coverage is a core service. As publisher of the ISE Daily — the official show publication for Integrated Systems Europe — Installation's teams work the Barcelona fair each year, producing daily news for the attendee database and Future's global AV audience, and its previews and reviews of ISE and of the broadcast show IBC in Amsterdam structure its editorial calendar.
Digital Presence: Website, Newsletters and eBooks
The brand's website, installation-international.com, publishes the latest news, features and analysis from the industry, updated daily, organised into channels reflecting its beat — technology, business, and specialist areas such as AV-IT — together with the magazine's editions in digital form. A daily email newsletter digests the site's news for subscribers, with open rates its publisher quotes at a quarter to a third, and targeted e-shots, solus campaigns, webinars, webcasts and bespoke events extend the commercial offer.
Quarterly eBooks add depth on selected themes, while social media carries the brand into the daily conversation of an industry that does much of its networking online. For readers, the effect is that Installation is no longer only a magazine that arrives eight times a year; it is a continuous information service in which print editions are the considered summaries of a running story.
Audience: The Integration Profession
The readership is the professional AV community itself: systems integrators who design and install, the installers and engineers who build systems, distributors and manufacturers who supply them, consultants who specify them, and the architects, designers and end-user technologists who influence buying decisions. It is an international audience befitting the International in its longer title — Future reports global monthly users for the site alongside American and European readerships — because pro AV is a global industry of multinational manufacturers and integrators working across borders.
For that audience the magazine performs the classic trade-press functions with unusual completeness: it tells them what competitors and collaborators are doing, which technologies are winning, which vertical markets are spending, and who is moving jobs. A product launch, an appointment or a flagship installation reported in Installation is, by that fact, known to the trade.
Significance in AV Trade Publishing
Installation Magazine's significance lies in its place at the centre of a young industry's professional identity. Commercial AV grew from the margins of the electrical and entertainment trades into a distinct, technology-led profession with its own standards, certifications, global trade fair and vocabulary — and Installation, publishing through that entire formation, helped give the profession its shared record: more than 260 editions of its projects, arguments and ambitions.
Under Future B2B, and now in its fourth decade's approach, the title continues to adapt — from print journal to multimedia brand, from European magazine to a node in a global AV media network with American sister titles. For anyone who wants to understand how the screens, sound and systems of the built environment got there, Installation remains the industry's own account of itself.
