Microsoft Teams Room Systems front of room displays — can I control them?

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So you purchased a Microsoft Teams Room system and you want the front of room displays to turn on and off with the system as this is one of the requirements of the conference room systems. Whats the answer and how do I figure this out?

WHAT DOES MICROSOFT RECOMMEND?

Microsoft does reference CEC (Consumer Electronic Control) on their Microsoft Teams Room documentation, that it has put out and you can find that blurb here.

A consumer TV used as a front of room display needs to support/enable the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) feature of HDMI so that it can switch automatically to an active video source from standby mode.

So it does say that the front of room display need to support/enable CEC, but the truth is that there is not CEC control in any of the Microsoft Team Room system hardware currently.

The bottom line is there are 2 limitations that exist currently at the time of writing that prevent CEC from working with the room systems.

1. CEC is a hardware item as seen below that it needs to be on pin 13 and the current hardware does not support this feature.
2. CEC is a “best effort” technology that exists and although it had potential, display manufacturers have not always had the same interpretation of that…