HD Video Distribution for your Sports Bar
The sports business has really become a big business. Along with or because of that, it is important that on the weekends especially bars and restaurants to be able to offer their patrons the ability to see their favorite teams.
The quality and expectations have risen immensely over the last 5 years. First there was HDTV and the signal more than doubled the quality of what we were used to seeing on the old tube TV’s. Along came flat TV’s and not only do they look much nicer behind a bar but they also are able to produce a much better picture. That is if the bar owner buys good product and stays away from the price oriented brands.
The big question now is how do you want to get your content to the displays? Assuming you are a sports bar with a lot of displays you are going to need the NFL Sunday Ticket from Direct TV as well as other sports programming packages. If you are a small bar or restaurant you can probably get away with having the TV receiver boxes mounted around or behind the displays. However if you are a large establishment, that can get costly as you are invoiced on a per box basis.
So for those larger establishments you are going to need some kind of HD video distribution system. There are several varieties of this type of switch. Let’s take a quick look at them.
- HDMI/DVI Matrix switch, this switch allows any input to be switched to any output. For a sports bar you would want at least 8 but more likely 16 inputs and outputs are usually offered in 8, 16 and 32.
- HDMI Matrix switch with CAT5/6 outputs where the HDMI signal is converted back to HDMI from the CAT5/6 cable at the display with a “balun” or HD receiver.
- Just Add Power makes a system where they route video over CAT5/6. The System uses a managed Ethernet switch to route the video over IP after it has been changed from HDMI to a signal that travels on the network. The advantage is that you can create any size switch you like. This is a great value because you won’t need likely ever need 16 inputs but you will need more than 8. As you grow or add on you can “stack” switches to give you more output capability.
With a larger establishment you will save money on cable or Direct TV box fees. You also can have a cleaner install because you don’t need to account for the DTV box at the display. Especially with flat panels you can now get them very close to the wall.
You are going to need some type of system to control all this. Now that you have a clean installation you can add a touch panel so the selection of sporting events is easily handled without a lot of training of your staff. We often use Crestron or URC for smaller venues.
Another advantage of the Just Add Power System is that you could build a video wall of multiple flat screens and you can change the display to either be one large screen for a game or several different games in each of screens that make up the video wall. Another way to do this is with a video processor. RGB is one company that makes these processors. The advantage of the video processor is that you can make any the screen display anything you want. You could have two games side by side, or put one game on top of another and then fade it away. With the processor the number of screens you have is no longer important. It is the processor that creates the image and sends it to the display.
No longer are you limited to one game, one box per TV. You could even take advantage of the distribution system to put ads for your “specials” up using the processors.