Making Auracast Work in Theatres: GN and RNID’s New Playbook

Hello everyone, and welcome to This Week in Hearing, live from the GN booth. We’re here to discuss a new initiative between GN and RNID regarding enabling venues to install Auracast and use it effectively. Thank you all for coming and speaking with me in this very busy time on the show floor at EUHA. I appreciate it very much. Would you please introduce yourself to everyone? Sure. I’m Alastair Moore, and I am technology lead at RNID. I’m Gideon Hoffman. I’m someone that’s used hearing technology all my life and Auracast for the last few years since it was launched. And I’m Laurel Christensen. I’m the Chief Audiology Officer for GN Hearing. Terrific. Thank you all. Tell me, what was the reason?

What did you see that made this initiative necessary? So Auracast has been around for a few years now. You’ve been singing its praises. And what we saw was that the public awareness of Auracast is not as high as it might be. And really there is this chicken and egg situation between needing venues to have Auracast for people to feel the need to have devices which have Auracast. And so the nice thing about a theater is that people are used to arriving and borrowing a receiver. And so in the theater context, people are used to the idea that you’ll borrow something, and Auracast can also be used with a standalone receiver.

And so getting Auracast into a theater means that there’s now somewhere for people to go to experience Auracast. So this is kind of the reason for wanting to help this particular sector do Auracast, but there’s also A sense that in the past maybe assistive listening systems have been installed but not been maintained, or the delivery of the user experience hasn’t been everything it could be. So we wanted to not only explain the technology but explain how to do it in a way that really delivers. Thank you, and I will testify Chicago area is predominantly FM systems. And most of the time they don’t work well, and I’m getting really tired of it, to be honest with you.

So now that Auracast is starting to spread into the Chicago area, I’m really appreciating the better listening experience. Now, from your point of view, Laurel, I mean, GN has been not only producing devices that work with Auracast for a long time, but been very proactive about trying to get Auracast Well, what was the rationale? It may seem obvious, but I’m going to ask you, what was the rationale for getting involved in this and how did this work as a partnership versus just letting RNID do the whole thing? Yeah, well, I think, you know, GN has been extremely active.

We’ve been out there at Sydney Opera House and Lincoln Center and in very big, you know, theater and concert venues. promoting Auracast because, you know, first we saw the need to promote it to hearing healthcare professionals, but the need is even greater today for consumers. And, you know, we believe accessibility should be for all, and we want to be a part of promoting it all the time. For me personally, I get asked every single talk I give, I get asked about Auracast. I get asked about where can I get information, how can I advocate in my community? How can I talk to theater people about putting it into my theaters? And so it just makes complete sense to have the Theater Playbook.

And there is so much great information in the Theater Playbook way beyond installing and the acoustics, but the maintaining and getting people from the community who are hearing impaired in to do all the testing and helping. I mean, You know, Gideon has a great story about using some assistive technology recently that just wasn’t done right. And so you— we really need to do it correctly. We need to test it. We need to make sure all the mix-in signals that Gideon would want to hear are all there for him. And so, yeah, for us it just makes sense. We want to push Auracast as fast as we can. get people using it everywhere they go. So that’s why we’re involved.

Terrific. And Gideon, I want to ask you, I put my other hat on, that’s the hearing-impaired person’s hat, and I want to hear your experience with assistive listening today and how you feel Auracast improves that experience for you. Okay, well, I think firstly on Auracast, I’ve used it for years in terms of this device that we’re using now to hear. When I go to conferences, I take along this little Auracast box, and I take along little wires, and they plug it into the sound system, and then they broadcast to me wherever I’m sat in the room. So you’ve actually been bringing a TV streamer and asking the venue to plug it in? Exactly. I take independent power along.

I take with cables that will be almost every amplifier on the market or power system. Yep. And they stream directly to me. Normally that one, yeah. Yes. Yeah. So I’ve been doing that for a few years, but of course you can’t go to the cinema and say, please, can you plug this in? And you definitely can’t go to the theater and say, please plug it in. Sydney Opera House, would you pop this into your mixer for me? Exactly. For a few years now, I’ve only gone to the theater when it’s captioned. But obviously it’s very exciting being able to hear the same quality of stream Directly in my hearing aids. So, but the question is, why did you feel it necessary?

You go to places that have an assistive listening system today, and yet you’re bringing your Auracast in a bag. Why? I didn’t— so I didn’t have questions. Why are you using this instead of just using the assistive listening system that’s already there? Well, they’re not always there. That’s the thing, they’re very rarely there in the sort of places I go to conferences and so forth. Most B2B conferences don’t have assisted listening systems. Normally they don’t have people with hearing aids either, so normally you have to make your own arrangement if you want to hear the content. Got it. Okay, yes, you’re speaking of conferences in particular.

Conferences, going to the synagogue, going to alumni talks. going to meetings, and I do normally, if you want to hear, you make sure you can hear by bringing your own system. Very rarely I’ll go to somewhere and there is a solution, but nearly always this is a better solution anyway. Well, you’ve hit a real weak spot because of— even in the US where I’m from, we have the ADA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, but houses of worship are excluded or not required. And conference centers have a system, but it’s usually locked in a closet somewhere, completely difficult to get. And yet the acoustics in those spaces are often not good. They’re dreadful. Yeah.

So I am excited by theaters putting them in because it’s one of these things that the dialogue is absolutely crucial to hear. It’s like watching Netflix where you don’t know what they’re talking about. And as I say, it’s harder than it looks because I think there are 3 parts to any Auracast venue being useful to you. So the first part is, do you know it’s there? Can you use it? Can you work out how to connect with it? And I think there’s all sorts of things theaters need to do to, you know, put it on their website. You know, this is how to book. And you mean live theater? Sorry? You mean live theater? I mean live theater.

But for example, in the UK, a cinema chain announced in a press release it had Auracast, and I thought, brilliant. So I went to the website and I read chat function. Where can I watch Auracast? You know, what’s that? You know, so, so, so there might be some screens I can find the content out, but without knowing which ones, I’m just not gonna book. Okay. So, so specifically in theater, because I’ve been to the theater recently, And the next 2 parts of the chain are important as well, because I think firstly I need to connect reliably with the broadcast.

And I went to a theatre where I deliberately asked for seats that I could see the captions, because normally you can’t see them in every part of the theatre. But it turned out those seats did not have a good connection to the, the Auracast system. So therefore it kept chipping in and out. So I can tell you the contrast between when it worked and when it didn’t work, you would never opt for when it didn’t work. You know, when it works, it’s a nice rich sound. I could hear the actors clearly. I could laugh along because it was a comedy. But obviously it’s not good if a venue doesn’t make all the seats include Auracast.

Right. Because it’s quite easy to So you, you brought up several things that I want to ask you about, okay? Because you talked about making sure people know it’s there, you’ve talked about making sure the transmission can be received everywhere, and you’ve talked about the sound quality, which also is involved in how we mix it. Well, exactly, because I, I should say I saw something last week I knew it was there. Great connection, even worked in the toilet. But it was a musical and someone had decided not to put music into the Auracast, so I could hear the actors and I could hear a tiny bit of the music through the actors’ microphones.

So, so the sound quality going in is critical as well because it’s not necessarily the same that you put through the speaker system Or the sort of channel choices you might do for a different type of show. Yeah, quite so. And individuals have different needs. So for example, I listen best when I go 50/50, so 50% live, 50% Auracast. So if they only give me the vocals, it’s not great, but it’s okay. But if you’re listening 100% Auracast, that’s a— they’ve ruined the experience for you. Well, I normally want to mute the noise, otherwise you’re hearing, you know, You’re hearing the speech in one form and a slightly different speech for the Auracast.

And normally it’s better to hear it cleanly in the Auracast without people eating popcorn or rustling their clothes or— Yeah, certainly. So how then does this initiative, the Playbook, how does the Playbook address those issues? So the Playbook was based on us talking to lots of people. Consulting the community that we support and getting their feedback for what things they’re interested in, what things that matter to them, which are the things you’ve pointed out. And then it tries to break things down by the different individuals or the different teams within the theatre that are involved so that we can target specific sections to people for whom it’s relevant so that we can speak, you know, the right level of language.

So there’s a section on the audio strategy that you know, talks about DVs, you know, so that it’s relevant to them. Whereas there’s other sections that are about why should we communicate broadcast, that’s more aimed at the marketing department and the front of house people so that they can be aware of the need to raise awareness and, you know, talk about it. Yeah. I forgot what the third thing you asked me about was. So yeah, so it’s the idea is that we have different sections aimed at different people, but that will equip the teams within the theater to address these different things.

Okay, so within the playbook, all these issues are addressed— how to, how to make it known that it’s there, rationales for checking the quality. Do you have information about how to mix for Auracast as well? Is that also in there? Yeah, we do. So there’s different strategies people can take. In some situations, if you’ve got something that is a dialogue-only play, for example, then it might be that the main mix, front of house mix, can be broadcast over broadcast, and that’s great. But where you have something with musical content, or you have something like sound effects, gunshots, or screams, maybe you want to change the levels so that you don’t overload people’s, you know, devices.

So I think there’s Great things that people can do with sound design to make sure that what they’re broadcasting is the right thing. And so now that you’ve done this thing, how are you actually going to propagate it and make sure that venues of all kinds that are part of the playbook, how are they actually going to get exposed to this playbook and see the value of it and incorporate it into their the listening plan? How are you taking it forward? Well, I think there’s a— I think it’s also a question for you, but it’s just next. Yeah. One of them is what we’re doing right now.

Press release, promoting it, making sure people have it, making sure that every talk that we give, that we, we promote the playbook, that it’s there, have it on social media, have it on all of the places where people would see it. So I mean, that’s where, you know, that’s where we will be a part of promoting it and just trying to get the word out, you know, everywhere. I’m sure RNID has their own promotion as well. Yeah, absolutely. So even in the production of this, as part of the research, we’ve been going out to venues to ask them about what they’ve done so far and like what’s worked well. And in That has raised some awareness within the community.

We’ve particularly engaged with a group of access managers across venues in the UK. We had a session with like, I think, 60, 80 people on that call talking about the playbook and what it’s going to have. And we’re going to go back out to them and start sharing it to see if we can just help them on that journey. Some of them were aware of it already. Some of them, you know, even started implementing it, and it’s about helping them get the information they need. And there’s also an element of talking to the end users. So the primary audience for our charity is end users.

And so we have information for them about how they can use Auracast in venues, which is separate from this information. But we also have a blog that went out today really describing the playbook, what it’s all about, and how they can use that as a— an advocacy tool so that if there’s a venue they want to go to where they’d like it to be Auracast, well, now there’s something they can share to say, and this is how you do it. And you brought up an interesting point, actually. When I covered the Sydney Opera House launch, I asked their accessibility person, how did you hear about this Auracast thing? This was pretty early on too. And she said, we have patients— patrons asking about it.

We didn’t know what it was. They just said, there’s this new system, do my hearing aids work with it? And she said, we had to go do the homework to find out what that was, and we found out that was Auracast. And the same thing when I asked one of the people that I interviewed at the Marriott Theatre in Chicago, they said the same thing. We have patients— patrons coming and asking us about it. And so I think that’s a great part of what you just pointed out, because— You have— you’re supporting lots of people with hearing loss, and so to enable them to advocate for better assistive listening in the venues they attend is a key part of it.

And thanks to you, because you’re doing that yourself, you don’t want to carry this Auracast in a bag, right? You want to go into a conference and just be able to tune in here. No, exactly. And I must say, it’s not just medical professionals that need to learn about Auracast and patients asking it, it’s also the venues. So the AV chap at my synagogue is used to when I turn up plugging this in to stream whatever they’re telling through my hearing aids, but now the cantor’s got new hearing aids, the synagogue’s looking at putting Auracast in to deal with the whole community.

So I think the more people that get the hearing aids and the more people that want to use their hearing aids in different places, will help churches, synagogues, school halls, you know, alumni, you know, places as well as theaters and cinemas. I think people push in both directions. Yeah, absolutely. And I think to the greatest extent you can get to the conference centers, the better, because at least in my experience in the States, conference centers are the worst because many of them have movable walls. And so the acoustics are terrible in those places. And if they have a system, it’s locked away somewhere.

But I’ve done Auracast in conferences where you just carry it in on a tripod pole into the portable mixer with it, just make sure the level is correct, and all of a sudden you’re delivering a great experience. So you know, my wish for you is that you can really drive it into conference centers as much as anything. My experience is that when you have a conference center with a big mixing desk, there’s normally a professional person there that can do all the wires in. What I find worse are law firms, private equity companies, banks that host events, and they’ve been sold a system in a cupboard that no one’s allowed to touch. And then I’m absolutely doomed because there’s no way to plug in.

Most of the audience has no idea how to adjust when they speak into microphones. phone, so I might as well just go straight home. But this is quite useful for networking afterwards. And I have one final question for you all, and that is, obviously it’s a little bit UK-centric right now, but this could be used anywhere. What are your plans for global deployment? I’ll ask either one of you that question. We tried quite hard when we wrote the playbook to talk about best practice from a what’s going to make a good experience for people, and that transcends national boundaries, that transcends any kind of local legislation, because accessibility is not about complying with some sort of tick box ticking exercise.

It’s about giving people a great experience, making people included, welcome, and able to enjoy themselves with their friends and family. And if you follow the stuff in the playbook, then we think that’s possible. Well, and I would say— sorry, I’ll just say that I completely agree with you in thinking about inclusion in a broader sense, because there are plenty of people who don’t measure hearing loss but have difficulty in situations like reverberant rooms or when there’s noise and so on. And so this is much more broadly applicable. Now, so I want to address that, because if it was an RNID playbook, you could say, well, I did it for my the area I serve, which is the UK, but you’re involved and you’re a global company.

So take it global. Tell me how. Yeah, well, when I read through the playbook the first time, there isn’t anything in there that isn’t global. Everything can be applied anywhere. And so it’ll be deployed for us out into all of our subsidiaries. And there’ll be, you know, the ability to have the playbook, be able to give that to people so that they can have that advice when they go in and try to advocate. And that is, you know, that is one of the questions I get asked the most now by hearing healthcare professionals is, how do I advocate in my community?

And there are some things, as you know, on the Bluetooth site, but there is nothing like this, especially bringing in the theater personnel and actual people with hearing loss and Making sure that everybody knows how to communicate and what to do. So there’s nothing like this out there. It’s pretty applicable outside of theater as well. So I think just any of the information in here, I think it’s going to be good for anyone who wants to advocate for Auracast, which is what we’re hoping to do. Well, you brought up an interesting point because when I speak at audiology conferences, is I’m always urging the healthcare professionals, advocate for good assistive listening in your communities, enable your patients.

You know, yeah. So a patient goes to their house of worship and they can’t hear, give them the tools to go discuss it. And so now this playbook is another tool because if I go to a house of worship or I go to a local live theater and I say, Let me explain about this assistive listening system and what it can do for the patrons of your theater. And oh, by the way, here’s a handy guide that will show you how to implement it in an effective way. So it speeds along the process and makes it easier for them to get to zero to effective. It’s a great tool. So I could see deploying this in audiology practices where they’re already doing that advocacy.

Absolutely. So I’ll tell you, I’m really— I love this initiative. Like, obviously, you know where I stand on the Auracast thing. So I love this initiative and anything that can help venues get comfortable with it, understand the value of it, and ease the implementation cycle, I think is fantastic. Anything else I should know before I just thank you for doing a wonderful job? I guess one thing we maybe didn’t cover, which is that one of the things the playbook recommends is getting people with hearing loss involved early in the process. So I think it’s very easy for people to go, oh, we need Auracast, let’s go get Auracast, and you can talk to a supplier, they can come in, they can install Auracast for you.

But I think it’s important that venues talk to their local community, people with lived experience who can say not only why it’s important to them that the venue is accessible, but help them to test it and make sure that it actually does work for them. The reason they didn’t have that experience in that one theater where the coverage wasn’t great was because they’d only been able to test it with standalone receivers, and these are more sensitive. They can pick up a weaker signal. And so with that receiver, it worked great everywhere, but when you come in with a hearing aid on where there’s, you know, smaller devices, smaller aerials, it doesn’t pick up the signal quite so well, but as it’s designed for, it should work.

Yeah, that’s a really good point. Involving end users in the process to make sure it’s really working for them, I think, is critical. Any facet of accessibility, if you’re trying to design something without any input from the people that you’re aiming at, you’re not doing a good job. So I think that’s terrific. And I suppose as you gain further experience where people are doing the installations using the guidebook, you’re going to continue to refine as it goes on, I would expect. Absolutely. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this rolls out and what effect it has. And I’m also looking forward— you’re going to send me a note holding this bag above a garbage can because you don’t need it anymore.

I do have to. It’s my wish, because I’m in the same boat as you when I go to conferences. So I want, I want to thank you all. This has been terrific spending time and learning more about the Playbook. Congratulations again. I think it’s a terrific initiative and it can’t but help people get more effective assistive listening in more places. And that’s music to my ears. So thank you all.