Long Island Video Named Exclusive AV Provider, Melville Expo 2026

The Melville Chamber of Commerce Business Expo is a hundred businesses talking at once on a hotel floor, and a stage program that has to be heard over all of it. On October 27 both of those jobs belong to the same company for the second year running. Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE, Inc. will return as the exclusive audio-visual provider for the Chamber's largest event of the year, and the exhibitor floor it is building for has already sold out.

The Business Expo runs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Tuesday, October 27 at the Hilton Melville on Broadhollow Road. Admission is free and open to anybody, member or not. Every exhibitor table for 2026 is gone, with more than a hundred businesses expected on the floor, although the Chamber is still taking sponsors and still has room on Restaurant Row.

"Bringing Long Island Video back was the easiest decision we made about this year's Expo," said Ted Macaluso, Executive Director of the Melville Chamber of Commerce. "They did it last year and the day ran without a single moment where anybody in that room had to wonder whether they could hear. When something works that well you do not go shopping. You call them in January and you get it in the diary."

Two events in one room

An expo is a harder production than its floor plan suggests, and the reason is that it is really two events happening in the same air at the same time.

On the floor, a hundred exhibitors are in conversation at arm's length, all at once. On the stage, remarks and recognitions and a keynote have to reach a room full of standing people who are mostly facing the other way. The floor wants the room as quiet as it can reasonably be kept. The stage wants to be heard over it. As Long Island Video puts it in its own piece on what the floor and the stage each need, that is a coverage and placement problem rather than a volume one, and it gets solved in the room plan weeks out or it does not get solved at all.

Turning the stage up is the instinct and it is the wrong answer. Do that and every conversation on the floor raises its voice to compete, which raises the floor, which means the stage goes up again. Anyone who has stood in a trade show at two in the afternoon with a headache has been standing inside that feedback loop.

The thirty seconds that has no second take

The 2025 Expo filled the same ballroom on October 28, and the Chamber's gallery from the day runs past two hundred photographs. The program opened the way it always does, with the national anthem sung live from the stage, the flag on the screen behind the singer and a house flag standing beside him.

It is a useful thing to look at, because it is the whole problem in miniature. Thirty seconds. One microphone. One piece of content on screen. No rehearsal, no soundcheck with the singer, no second take, and a room that has to fall silent and then come straight back to life. It sits between a welcome and a keynote in a schedule with no slack in it, and the audio and the screen both have to be right the first time.

"That is the moment I watch every year, and I am not watching the singer," Macaluso said. "I am watching the room. If the sound is wrong for those thirty seconds, four hundred people feel it and the day starts on the back foot. Last year it was perfect, and nobody noticed it was perfect, which is exactly what you are paying for. Good AV is invisible. You only ever hear it when somebody got it wrong."

What the 2026 production covers

The company's announcement sets out the scope. The main stage gets sound for the room, screens and content playback, staging and lighting, microphones for the podium and for anyone speaking from the floor, and a production engineer running the day from front of house rather than a rack left to look after itself.

The floor gets its own design, which is the part organizers tend not to expect. Distributed sound at a level that lets a hundred conversations happen without escalating, announcements that cut through without shouting, and a system arranged so the stage program is clear to the people in front of it and as unobtrusive as it can be at the far end of the hall. That is event staging work rather than equipment hire, and the distinction is most of what the Chamber is buying.

What the company does the rest of the year

The Expo is one Tuesday. Long Island Video has been doing this from Glen Cove since the late 1980s, and the business has two halves that mostly do not overlap.

The first is live event staging, which is what the Chamber is buying. The company keeps a Long Island warehouse of current digital audio-visual equipment and a staff of production engineers to run it, and it puts on events for audiences from a dozen executives in a boardroom to thousands in a hall, in person, virtual or hybrid. The capability list is the one an event planner recognizes: video projection, displays and videowalls, from a single screen to a multi-display wall; event sound systems scaled to the venue's own acoustics; lighting and rigging designed to direct attention and hung safely; and staging, backdrops and trusses, from a plain corporate backdrop to a built stage. The company's line about its own reach is that you should name a venue in the New York metropolitan region, because it has probably worked there.

The second half is permanent system design and installation, which is a different business with a different clock. Nothing gets struck at the end of the night. That work runs in four stages: design against the room and what it is for, procure and install through its supplier network, commission and test under warranty, then train the people who have to use it and support them afterward. What goes in tends to be live-streaming and virtual conferencing rigs, interactive displays and video walls, smart sound and PA, and projection and lighting. The rooms are boardrooms, schools and universities, hospitals, government agencies and houses of worship, which is a fair description of a chamber of commerce's membership with the retail taken out.

That second list is also why the company knows this particular room. Its clients are the organizations that fill a chamber, and the Expo is the one day a year a large share of them is standing in one place. Its galleries run to 132 photographs across events, installs, videowalls and staging, and its client list includes Xerox and KFC. It works across Long Island, the five boroughs and the wider tri-state region, and has done for more than 35 years.

The exhibitor who is also the crew

There is a wrinkle in this arrangement that is worth pointing out, because it is unusual and it is genuinely useful. Long Island Video is a Chamber member itself, and it exhibits at the Expo alongside the businesses whose day it is producing. It will be standing at a table on the floor it designed the sound for.

The company's own line on this is that it is easier to design a floor once you have spent a day standing on one, which is hard to argue with. Most AV contractors experience an expo from behind the console and go home.

"They are members, they exhibit, they know half the room by name," Macaluso said. "That matters more than people think. When an exhibitor has a problem at their table at eleven in the morning, they are not filing a ticket with a vendor. They are walking twenty feet to somebody they had coffee with at a Chamber breakfast in March. That is the difference between a supplier and a member, and it is the whole argument for using the businesses inside your own organization."

What is on the floor

The Expo is the Chamber's flagship. It is free, it is open to the public, and you do not need to be a member to walk it, eat on Restaurant Row or talk to anybody exhibiting.

Restaurant Row is the part regulars come for: twelve Long Island restaurants serving through the day, including Casa Stellina, Uncle Giuseppe's, Fogo de Chao, TOA Asian Fusion, Anthony Scotto, Gregorys Coffee, Tropical Smoothie, Sweet Spot Shoppe, Chiddy's, Avianna's, Rocco's Tacos and Shea's Bistro. It doubles as the networking area for the plain reason that it is where people actually stop moving. Free admission covers the floor and the Row both.

The tables are gone but the day is not closed. Sponsorship starts at $1,995 and is booked and paid for on the Chamber's site, and restaurants can still ask about a place on the Row, which fills earlier than the rest of the floor. Of everyone signed up so far, 48 are Chamber members with a listing you can read in the directory before you go.

"Sold out in September is not something I take for granted, and it is not really about us," Macaluso said. "It is about what a room like this is worth on Long Island right now. Four hundred people who all decided that the useful thing to do on a Tuesday was stand in a hotel ballroom and meet each other. Come and walk it. It costs nothing, nobody checks whether you are a member at the door, and I have watched more real business start on that floor than at any other thing we run all year."

If you are going

The Expo is on Tuesday, October 27 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Hilton Melville, 598 Broadhollow Road. Admission is free and registration is on the Expo page, which also carries the sponsor roll, the full Restaurant Row list and the exhibitors signed up so far. The Chamber's other events are on its calendar, and membership starts at $250 a year.

Long Island Video is at 110 Pratt Oval in Glen Cove and can be reached on 516-759-5483 or through its contact page. Anybody planning a conference, a trade show or an expo of their own will find its journal more useful than most vendor blogs, particularly the piece on what to rent and what to hire.

About Long Island Video

Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE, Inc. is a full-service audio-visual staging, rental and installation company that has served the tri-state corporate, healthcare, educational and not-for-profit community for more than 35 years. It designs and produces live events for audiences from a dozen people to several thousand, in person, virtual and hybrid, covering video projection and videowalls, event sound, lighting and rigging, staging and backdrops, and live streaming, out of its own Long Island warehouse and with its own production engineers. It also designs, installs, commissions and supports permanent audio-visual systems in boardrooms, schools and universities, hospitals, government agencies and houses of worship. It is a member of the Melville Chamber of Commerce and the exclusive audio-visual provider for the Chamber's Business Expo.

Long Island Video Enterprises LIVE, Inc.
Web: longislandvideo.com
Address: 110 Pratt Oval, Glen Cove, NY 11542
Phone: 516-759-5483 (516-759-LIVE)
Email: [email protected]
Event staging: longislandvideo.com/event-audio-visual-staging-technology
Systems design and installation: longislandvideo.com/audio-visual-system-design-installation
Work and galleries: longislandvideo.com/galleries
Areas served: longislandvideo.com/areas-we-serve
Contact: longislandvideo.com/contact-us

About the Melville Chamber of Commerce

The Melville Chamber of Commerce represents businesses across Nassau and Suffolk from its office on the Route 110 corridor, with more than 400 businesses in its member directory. It runs a year-round calendar of networking events, committees its members sit on, and certificate of origin services for members shipping abroad, and its largest event of the year is the Business Expo each October. Membership starts at $250 a year. Its directory, member portal, member feed, events and advertising all run on a platform launched in September 2026, which made it the first chamber of commerce in the country running on that software.

Disclosure: Long Island Wave is published by Wave Agency, which is a platinum sponsor of the Melville Chamber Business Expo and built Long Island Video's website.

Long Island Video Will Run the Melville Chamber Expo Again. Every Exhibitor Table Is Already Sold Out.