As it goes, it’s usually not long before commercial-grade technology starts to find its way into luxury homes. Videowalls, AV-over-IP distribution, wireless HDMI, the list goes on, and it’s with that evolution in mind that brings us to BZBGEAR. Long known as a commercial AV brand, the company is using CEDIA Expo 2026 to highlight how its technologies fit in with the modern luxury home technology suite, and CE Pro spoke with Matt Richards, National Inside Sales Manager at the company to learn more.
CE Pro: BZBGEAR is known as a commercial AV brand. What brings you to a residential show?
Matt Richards: Two things. The first is that the line between residential and commercial integration has been eroding for years, and most CI firms are already doing the work — the client’s office conference room, the restaurant they own, the country club, the church down the road. What they usually don’t have is a product line built for that middle tier, where enterprise gear brings enterprise complexity and consumer gear doesn’t survive the duty cycle.
The second is more specific to us. A lot of what we build was designed for commercial reliability but is right at home in a house — AV-over-IP distribution, wireless HDMI, KVM, small-format switching. We’re not asking residential dealers to become commercial dealers. We’re saying they already are one, three or four jobs a year, and nobody’s building product for that.
CE Pro: AV-over-IP is well established in commercial but adoption has been slower in residential. What changes that?
Richards: The objection was never picture quality — it was that the network bill arrived before the value did. Ten-gig switching is a hard sell in a house, so a lot of integrators reasonably stayed with a fixed HDMI matrix.
Our XTREME line — the AV-over-IP side of our XLink-ONE platform — runs on standard gigabit: a managed switch with IGMP snooping and VLAN segmentation, which most well-built homes already justify for other reasons. What that unlocks is a different way to sell the job. A matrix is a decision you make once and then live inside — you size it on day one, before the client has moved in. AV-over-IP is bought one endpoint at a time. The client adds the guest house in year three and you add a box, not a chassis.
Nobody in this industry has ever accurately predicted how many zones a house ends up with. So stop making integrators guess on day one.
CE Pro: Which models should an integrator be looking at?
Richards: They’re all part of XLink-ONE, which is our AV distribution platform built around our own proprietary codec — the family took Best of Show at InfoComm 2026 from AV Technology. Within it, the BG-IPGEAR-XTREME is the volume model — it’s the one that goes in most jobs. The XTREME-PRO is for larger properties: 48Gbps, HDMI 2.1, 4K at 120Hz, and 170 meters over Cat5e. That’s 560 feet, and I’d argue it’s the most underrated residential spec we publish. A hundred-meter budget covers a house. Five hundred and sixty feet covers an estate — the pool house, the detached garage, the guest cottage at the end of the drive. Those are the runs that force a project into fiber, and they don’t have to.
CE Pro: You’ve built out a full 8K line, but there’s still almost no 8K content. Why should an integrator care right now?
Richards: I’d rather answer that honestly than sell around it. 8K displays exist and 8K content essentially doesn’t, and any manufacturer telling integrators otherwise is going to get caught.
The real reason to build a 48-gigabit chain is what it does for content that’s already here. Full 4K at 120Hz with 4:4:4 chroma and HDR does not fit in an 18-gigabit pipe. That’s the bottleneck people actually hit, and it’s what produces the call about text looking soft or the picture dropping out on a source change. The sources already output it. The chain in the middle is what’s behind.
This industry has spent a decade selling resolution when the frontier moved to refresh rate and color depth. Nobody should buy 8K for 8K. Buy 48 gigabits, because that’s what full 4K120 actually costs — and 8K comes along for free.
The other thing worth saying is that being ready is cheap. Our 8K switching starts at a two-input model that costs less than a decent HDMI cable, and it scales up through 8K matrix switching and 8K KVM long before you’re near enterprise money.
CE Pro: Wireless HDMI has a reputation problem in custom install. What’s changed?
Richards: Our AIR4KAST line has taken residential recognition at four consecutive show cycles, including CE Pro and Commercial Integrator’s own Top New Technology award in the residential wireless A/V category, and Best of Show at CEDIA in both 2024 and 2025. So something has changed. But I think the more useful answer is about where the category belongs, not how many awards it has.
The line is three models now, and they’re separated by latency and fan-out, not by picture quality. The base AIR4KAST is the retrofit workhorse — the display on the plaster wall you’re not allowed to open, the outdoor TV, the projector with no path to it. The MKX sends one transmitter to as many as four receivers, with range stepping down as you add them; that’s the game room or the bar with four screens and no home run to any of them. The AIR4KAST-PRO runs 16 to 48 milliseconds, and sub-50 is the threshold where a wireless link stops being playback-only and becomes usable for something a person is interacting with.
And here’s the part vendors skip: wireless is a fixed link for a display. It is not a backbone. It doesn’t answer a twelve-zone distribution problem, and the base model’s latency is right for content and wrong for anything interactive. That’s exactly why the Pro is a separate product rather than a spec bump. A category earns trust by naming its own limits — every integrator who got burned by wireless got burned by someone who wouldn’t.
CE Pro: Show floors are full of large matrix switchers. What are you bringing for the job that isn’t big?
Richards: Most residential jobs are over-specified, and it usually isn’t greed — the big products get the marketing, so they’re what comes to mind. The everyday reality is four sources and two or three displays, and there’s a whole ladder of product for that which nobody puts on a booth wall.
Our own residential distribution guidance points at the BG-MVS4X4-4KL — a 4×4, not a big processor. The one I’d put in front of someone building a serious media room is the BG-4K-VP44, because it’s three products at once: a seamless 4K60 4:4:4 matrix with no black frame on transitions, a video wall processor with seven modes, and a multiviewer that puts four sources on one output. Add EDID management, scaling, audio de-embedding, and control from the front panel, IR, RS-232, IP, a web GUI or our app. It’s a desktop box drawing 23 watts — and in a residential equipment closet, not needing a rack is the whole argument.
The most expensive mistake in a residential rack isn’t the wrong brand. It’s three times the matrix, because that’s what was on the show floor.
CE Pro: You’re also pushing KVM to a residential audience. That sounds like a data center product.
Richards: It sounds like one, and that’s precisely why it’s under-sold. The home office stopped being temporary. What’s in most of them now is two computers — a work machine the client doesn’t control and a personal one — and one good display they’d rather not duplicate. That’s textbook KVM, and most residential integrators have never quoted it because the category name sounds like somebody else’s business.
The specs are aimed at rooms residential integrators actually build. Our BG-8K-KVM21A does 8K60, 4K at 120 and 144Hz, and 1080p at 240Hz, with USB 3.0 for real peripherals — webcams, storage, printers, not just a keyboard and mouse — plus IR and RS-232, so it drops into a control system instead of needing someone to press a button. There’s a dual-monitor version, a four-port, and a four-port with built-in multiview.
Extension is where it meets the instinct that defines good residential work, which is that there should be no equipment in the room. We make a KVM extender that reaches 230 feet over Cat6, a four-port USB 3.0 extender that goes 330 feet with power over the cable, and a USB-C extender that carries video, USB, gigabit ethernet and 100 watts of laptop charging over a single Cat run. That last one is the cleanest desk you can hand a client: one cable, the laptop charges, everything works.
Every high-end house has a room where the client asked for the computer to disappear and was told it couldn’t. In a lot of those rooms, it’s a solved problem nobody quoted.
CE Pro: Bigger picture — what’s the mistake you see most often in residential installs right now?
Richards: Confusing recurring revenue with recurring truck rolls. Recurring revenue is the most-praised business model in this channel, and the fastest way to get a lot of service calls is to install a system the client can’t operate. Those aren’t the same thing, and mixing them up is how firms end up with service agreements that lose money.
The systems worth building are the ones where the client’s daily interaction is obvious and the integrator’s access is complete — a room anyone can walk into and use, sitting on top of a system you can reach and adjust without driving there. That means standards-based control instead of proprietary lock-in, remote access instead of a front panel somebody has to stand in front of, and documentation that survives the technician who did the install leaving the company.
The service revenue worth having comes from monitoring, updates and expansion. If your recurring revenue depends on the client not understanding the system, that’s not a business model.
CE Pro: Where can people find you at the show?
Richards: Booth C900, September 2–4 at the Colorado Convention Center. We’ll have the AV-over-IP distribution running live, along with the wireless line, KVM, switching, conferencing and our production and PTZ gear.
We’re also running a Mortal Kombat 1 challenge at the booth — play a match, win or lose you leave with swag and an entry into that day’s prize drawing. We’re giving away an AIR4KAST every day of the show. Drawings are at 4 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 1 p.m. Friday, since the hall closes early.
