Where Old Video Walls Go to Die (Or Don't)

A commercial video wall arrives with a detailed technical specification: pixel pitch, brightness in nits, power draw, expected lifespan in operating hours. Those specifications are documented before the first cabinet goes up, and remain relevant for as long as the wall runs.

Then it comes down. A lobby gets redesigned, a control room gets upgraded, a university replaces an array installed a decade earlier.

What happens to the equipment next? Danilo Rosich has a name for the calculation that decides it. He calls it recovery value.

Rosich runs StradEvents, a Milwaukee resale and consignment business that deals in professional AV equipment, most of it projection gear bought from production houses, venues and end users clearing out inventory. Long before a piece of equipment reaches his warehouse, he has already started weighing it.

Recovery value is not a question of whether something works. It weighs the model and quantity against condition, included accessories, freight costs, refurbishment effort, likely resale value, and the potential buyer market.

“It also takes into account the amount of effort it will take to get them to resale,” Rosich said. Packaged accessories, he added, “go a long way for recovery value.”

Working does not automatically mean valuable. A projector that switches on and throws a clean image can still be a poor prospect if moving, storing, and marketing it costs more than it will ever sell for. A unit that needs repair can be the better deal if the labor and parts required cost less than what a clean, working example would fetch.

When the economics favor it, Rosich buys equipment outright. He looks for units in what he calls the “mid-hour range”: sellable, but not likely to command a premium on their own. Cleaning, testing, or a repair, sometimes as simple as swapping a lamp, can meaningfully raise what the unit is worth. That labor is where he adds most of his value on a purchase.

Higher-value gear works differently. A 40,000-or 50,000-lumen projector might be in excellent working order and still take eight to twelve months to sell, because so few venues need something that bright. Rather than tie up his own cash in a unit that could sit for most of a year, Rosich takes it on consignment, selling it on behalf of the owner without buying it first. It lets him spread his fixed costs over a higher-value sale rather than sink capital into inventory that may not move quickly. Valuable and easy to sell are not the same thing in his business.

Refurbishing a projector is real technical work. For a large-venue unit, Rosich checks convergence and boresight, adjusts the fold mirror and integrator rod, and confirms the image is uniform, focused, and bright enough to meet resale standards; the same maintenance, he said, that large production companies already run on their own fleets on a routine schedule.

Some of the most useful equipment in his warehouse will never be resold whole. Rosich keeps donor units on hand because replacement components for older models can become hard to source from manufacturers while those projectors are still in use, and units within the same product family tend to share components. A donor unit gives him a source of OEM parts that may otherwise be obsolete or unavailable from the manufacturer. Regional production and rental companies do the same math from the other side: if they already operate a given model, a broken unit is still worth buying at the right price, purely to keep their existing fleet supplied with parts.

Occasionally Rosich ends up with equipment that no longer makes sense to sell or retain for parts. That goes to electronics recyclers he works with. He said it doesn't happen often, largely because he is selective about which lots he takes on in the first place.

Resale is not the only path back into service. SAVe, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in the AV industry, runs a program called SAVe: A Second Life, which gives organizations a way to donate AV equipment they no longer need through a network SAVe has built with educational institutions and non-governmental organizations, rather than see it scrapped. Donated equipment moves through a different channel than a warehouse sale, but the underlying logic is the same: AV gear that no longer serves one owner can still be useful to another.

Alongside SAVe’s donation network, AVIXA has also formalized sustainability work within the industry through its Sustainability Advisory Group, which brings AV professionals together to develop resources and guidance around more sustainable practices.

The US has no overarching federal extended-producer-responsibility program specifically requiring producers of professional AV equipment to manage that equipment at end of life. In its place is an ecosystem of resale businesses, refurbishers, donation programs like SAVe's, and electronics recyclers. 

Ontario regulates AV equipment’s end of life directly. Its Electrical and Electronic Equipment Regulation, made under the province's Resource Recovery and Circular Economy Act, designates information technology, telecommunications and audio-visual equipment, ITT/AV, as a regulated material under the province's extended producer responsibility framework. Producers are, in the regulator's own language, individually accountable and financially responsible for collecting and reusing, refurbishing or recycling their products when consumers discard them. Display devices, including professional display monitors, are listed among the equipment covered.

The definition raises an interesting question for modular installed AV. Regulated equipment must weigh no more than 250 kilograms, and it must not be intended to be used permanently as part of a building or a structure at a predefined and dedicated location. A video wall can consist of multiple individual display cabinets that may each fall below that weight limit, assembled into a much heavier installation. RPRA's published guidance does not specify how those two conditions should be applied to a modular commercial video wall, whether cabinet by cabinet or as a completed system.

One detail in the framework connects cleanly to how equipment like Rosich's actually moves.. Refurbished or repaired ITT/AV does not need to be reported as supply under the regulation. Ontario's system also has its own defined role for a refurbisher, someone who prepares used ITT/AV for reuse. The regulation recognizes repaired and refurbished equipment as distinct from newly supplied equipment.

A piece of equipment that no longer makes economic sense to sell as a complete unit may still retain value through its components. Another piece may be in full working order but still make little sense for a reseller to take on once freight, refurbishment, storage, and the size of the buyer pool are weighed against its likely sale price. In the secondary AV market, whether equipment still works and whether it still has recoverable value are two different questions.

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