New HDBaseT Alliance president Tzahi Madgar hopes to continue the growth and expansion of HDBaseT into new market segments and the advancement of the standard, supporting new features and capabilities while maintaining our interoperable ecosystem, “which is our great strength.”
“Our place in the market is to advance competition, not to avoid it,” said Madgar in an exclusive interview with CE Pro sister publication Commercial Integrator‘s editorial director Jonathan Blackwood at ISE 2020 this week, regarding talk of an industry war between HDBaseT and AV-over-IP.
“Competition is a very positive thing. I don’t see AV-over-IP as a competing technology. I see it as a complementary technology. There’s a lot of room in the AV market for HDBaseT and AV-over-IP,” he says, noting there’s room for a hybrid ecosystem that incorporates both technologies.
“There are use cases where AV over IP can bring a lot of value, but HDBaseT is the king of uncompressed video,” says Madgar, calling HDBaseT “the only solution on the market that can deliver uncompressed 4K60 video as far as 100 meters” through the Alliance’s new Spec 3.0, unveiled this week.
“Interoperability is a key element,” he says, noting Spec 3.0 also supports 1G Internet, compared to 100MB internet in Spec 2.0, and USB2 for enhanced bandwidth. “We are really taking HDBaseT to the next level.
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“We invest a lot of efforts to ensure interoperability,” says Madgar, including an HDBaseT Alliance certification program and ensuring integrators can access certification-related information.
The Future of the HDBaseT Alliance
Each HDBaseT-certified product with come with a QR code that installers can scan to go to the HDBaseT Alliance website to learn more about it, he says.
The 2019 HDBaseT Alliance plugfest in Japan put more than 40 products through thousands of tests, with more than 99 percent of the test showing the products work as they claim and are interoperable with others in the HDBaseT family.
“We really invest in making the ecosystem very accessible to the installers and giving them the flexibility to choose whatever product they need to use,” says Madgar, who’s looking to the alliance’s future after 200 products were certified last year and the Alliance topped 200 members.
“My main ambition is to continue the growth and the success of the standard both from the technological aspect and also from the perspective of growing our ecosystem and our technology into new segments of the market,” he says.
“We have already been very successful in the educational market, where you see a growing need for more connected devices inside the classroom. We’ve also made a lot of advancement in the medical field, where there’s very high demand for ultra-high-definition video,” says Madgar.
This article originally appeared on our sister publication Commercial Integrator‘s website.
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