Why are hybrid meetings still harder than they should be?
Hybrid meetings have become an everyday part of working life, but joining one from a meeting room can still feel unnecessarily complicated.
Connect a laptop. Join the call. Connect to the room camera and microphone. Work out how to share content. Check whether remote participants can see it. Then repeat the process with a completely different workflow when the next person arrives using another meeting platform.
For years, the AV industry has focused on making hybrid meetings possible. Now, the challenge is making them genuinely effortless.
That means creating meeting spaces that work consistently across platforms, make better use of in-room technology and require fewer steps from the people using them. At the same time, AV and IT teams need solutions they can deploy, manage and support without adding more work to already stretched resources.
These are some of the challenges Mersive sees shaping customer conversations today.
They'll also be explored at Tech Xpo 2026, where Mersive will demonstrate its latest approach to platform-agnostic hybrid collaboration.
But the bigger question for the industry is simple: why does starting a hybrid meeting still require so much thought?
Platform choice shouldn't dictate the meeting room experience
The modern workplace rarely operates within one neat technology ecosystem.
An organisation may standardise on Microsoft Teams, but employees still receive Zoom invitations. External partners might use Google Meet. Guests arrive with their own devices, applications and expectations.
This makes flexibility essential.
A platform-agnostic meeting room lets users collaborate across different conferencing platforms without forcing the room to revolve around one application.
The principle sounds straightforward. Delivering it without compromising the user experience is harder.
Some platform-agnostic approaches require users to connect personal devices or take extra steps to access in-room cameras, microphones and displays. Others change the familiar conferencing interface, meaning users lose access to tools they normally expect to see.
The technology may technically support multiple platforms, but the experience still creates friction.
For resellers and integrators, platform choice therefore shouldn't be where the conversation ends.
Ask instead:
- How many conferencing platforms do employees and guests regularly use?
- What happens when someone joins a meeting outside the organisation's standard platform?
- How many steps does it take to start a call?
- Can users access the room's camera, microphone and display easily?
- Does the experience remain familiar whichever platform they use?
True flexibility should make the meeting easier, not simply make more platforms compatible.
Why are we still asking users to bring the meeting with them?
BYOD and BYOM have helped organisations make meeting rooms more flexible.
Bring Your Own Device allows people to connect their own technology. Bring Your Own Meeting goes further by letting users run their preferred conferencing platform from a personal device while accessing the technology in the room.
Both approaches solve genuine problems.
But they also raise another question: why does the user's laptop still need to do so much of the work?
If someone walks into a meeting room, the room already contains a display, camera, microphone and network connection. Yet users can still find themselves opening their laptop, joining the virtual meeting and connecting to room peripherals before the conversation can begin.
Mersive describes the next stage as “BY” – Bring Yourself.
The idea is simple: walk into the room, select the meeting and join. The room handles the technology around you without requiring a personal device or meeting software to get started.
Mersive Host, previously known as Mersive Tablet, has been developed around this approach. Users can tap Join on the Host screen and enter the meeting while retaining the native tools and menus they already recognise from platforms such as Teams or Zoom.
The wider point goes beyond one product.
As hybrid working matures, success increasingly depends on removing steps rather than adding more features. Users shouldn't need to understand how the meeting room works before they can use it.
Meeting parity starts with what everyone can see
Meeting equity often focuses on cameras, audio and whether remote participants can see and hear the people in the room.
Content creates another potential divide.
Imagine someone in the room shares a presentation to the display. The people sitting around the table can see it immediately, but remote attendees may still need the presenter to share the same content separately into the virtual call.
This can lead to a “double join”, where someone has to join the same meeting again from a laptop simply to share content with remote participants.
It works, but it doesn't feel seamless.
More importantly, it creates the possibility that people inside and outside the room aren't looking at the same thing.
Mersive Host approaches this differently. When someone shares content to the room display, the solution also shares that content into the virtual meeting so remote and in-person participants stay aligned.
Mersive describes this as meeting parity: ensuring everyone sees the same content regardless of where they join from.
That principle should form part of wider conversations about hybrid meeting equity.
A good hybrid experience isn't simply about getting everybody onto the same call. It should give everyone access to the same conversation, content and context.
Simpler for users needs to mean simpler for IT
Removing friction from the meeting room only solves half the problem.
AV and IT teams face their own version of hybrid complexity.
They need to support different room hardware, conferencing platforms and user requirements, often across multiple locations. Every additional workflow, configuration or point of failure can mean more support calls and onsite visits.
And organisations increasingly expect those teams to manage more technology with fewer resources.
That makes operational simplicity just as important as user simplicity.
A platform-agnostic approach can help by reducing the need to build different room experiences around different conferencing applications.
Mersive is extending this approach across its Polaris product suite. Alongside Mersive Host, Mersive Link enables wireless peripheral bridging for Teams, Zoom, Google and other platforms within Mersive Pro-enabled spaces.
For integrators, the aim is a solution that can work across conferencing platforms and room hardware, with fewer variations to install, manage and support.
For customers, that can mean greater consistency as their meeting room estate grows.
This matters particularly across corporate, public sector and education environments, where organisations often need to standardise technology while accommodating different users, rooms and workflows.
The simplest room isn't necessarily the one with the least technology. It's the one that asks the least of the person using or supporting it.
Hybrid collaboration needs to work beyond the corporate meeting room
These challenges aren't unique to traditional offices.
Higher education needs spaces that can accommodate different lecturers, devices and collaboration platforms without requiring every user to learn a new workflow.
Public sector organisations need consistency and ease of use alongside security and standardisation.
Hospitality environments increasingly combine digital signage, bookable conference rooms and meeting venues, where guests may arrive with little knowledge of the technology and expect it to work immediately.
Different environments create different requirements, but the underlying expectation remains remarkably consistent:
People want technology that adapts to how they work rather than forcing them to adapt to the room.
For resellers, this makes understanding the user journey an important part of specification.
What happens from the moment someone walks into the space? What do they need to connect? Which platform might they use? What happens when an external guest arrives? How much support does the room require when something goes wrong?
Those questions can reveal more about the right solution than a feature comparison alone.
Is AI the answer to better hybrid meetings?
AI will undoubtedly influence the next generation of meeting spaces, from intelligent tracking to automated meeting tools. But adding AI doesn't automatically remove friction.
The starting point should still be the user problem. Does joining take too long? Are remote attendees missing important interactions or content? Does IT spend too much time resolving recurring issues? Are different platforms creating inconsistent experiences?
Once the problem is clear, technology can address it with purpose.
The next phase of hybrid collaboration is about removing friction
The industry has already solved one fundamental challenge of hybrid work: connecting people in different places.
Now customers expect more.
They want meeting spaces that work across platforms, make in-room technology easy to access and give remote and in-person participants a consistent experience. AV and IT teams need the same environments to remain straightforward to deploy, manage and support.
That changes what good meeting room design looks like.
The goal shouldn't be to add another step, device or workflow every time a new requirement emerges. It should be to make more capable technology feel simpler to use.
Mersive Host represents Mersive's approach to that challenge, moving beyond BYOD and BYOM towards a Bring Yourself experience where the room handles more of the complexity behind the scenes.
Together with Mersive Pro, Mersive Essentials and Mersive Link, it forms part of a wider approach to flexible, platform-agnostic collaboration.
And that may be where the hybrid meeting market needs to head next.
Not another way to join a call.
A meeting room where joining the call is no longer something users have to think about.
Experience Mersive at Tech Xpo 2026
Mersive will join Midwich at Tech Xpo 2026, where you can see the new Mersive Host and explore its approach to simpler, platform-agnostic hybrid collaboration.
But Tech Xpo isn't just about seeing individual products.
Bring the meeting room challenges your customers are facing and discuss them directly with Mersive, Midwich specialists and technology partners from across the wider AV ecosystem.
Whether you're trying to simplify the user experience, support multiple conferencing platforms or reduce the burden on IT teams, start with the problem you're trying to solve and explore how the complete environment can work better.
Join us on 21-22 October 2026 at Ascot Racecourse.
