Atlona

The AV signal transmission specialist noticed it could weave a narrative in its booth around the ability to do increasingly larger solutions while implementing AV-over-IP to maintain consistency and simplicity. The booth progression from single room to medium-size house, to large-scale house and then commercial video applications presented challenges that Garth Lobban, Atlona director of marketing, could respond to the ways the company’s solutions overcome them.

“As we move up from a small home to a large one, we’ve got a situation where customers maybe have a 4K screen in one room and a 1080p screen in another room, how am I going to deal with all the scaling and everything, and we have scaling receivers that will allow us to do that now,” Lobban explains, of the Atlona’s JunoX downscaling feature that enables previous-gen displays to keep native resolution. Plus the family of matrix switchers doesn’t need a receiver at each display because it will switch up to three additional HDMI 4K sources with a remote HDBaseT input from the main switch; essentially a subswitcher that provides multiple sources at the destination.

Beyond the matrix switching, Lobban highlighted Atlona’s scalable OmniStream AV-over-IP and Velocity control-over-IP product (for RS 232, IR, contact closure devices) families, noting that the combination of everything gives dealers all they need for designing commercial AV and control system. “We’re seeing a trend that with all the DIY stuff that’s happening, dealers are needing to move up to the next thing, so if I can help them understand how to do more business with conventional matrix switching, introduce them to AV-over-IP, then I drop the bomb and say, ‘What if everything I just told you about Velocity and OmniStream will let you land a Dave & Buster’s or a lobby of a hotel or even a casino,” Lobban says.

He used a video wall for demonstrating the instantaneous switching abilities from the network switcher for a particular zone selection, and the ability to easily maneuver what source is shown on what TV. “It switches as fast as any conventional AV switcher, except we’re using a Cisco switch,” he says.