The Cage Aux Sports is a sports bar restaurant chain in Canada, offering great food and drink, and AV entertainment systems oriented toward sporting events for an engaging atmosphere. To remain ahead of their competition, the Cage Aux Sports recently began a project to further enhance their sporting event entertainment systems throughout their restaurants. The Cage Aux Sports turned to Cablâge Expert (CES) a reputable system integrator located in Canada to oversee the project, and has been mandated to select and integrate the best technologies available. A pilot project was successfully completed at a select Cage Aux Sports site. The solution allows Cage Aux Sports to instantly select, via a wireless tablet interface, any AV source and send it to anyone of a number of TV displays distributed throughout their restaurant. The tablet offers a graphical floorplan representation and color coded icons reflecting AV sources and distributed TV displays, including a giant 18 TV videowall display matrix, consisting of 6 TVs wide by 3 TVs high.
Cage Aux Sports can instantly and wirelessly direct AV content to any TV or videowall display to suit the time of day and available sporting events.
The integrator chose MuxLab products to manage switching between AV source equipment and displays, including the management and rearrangement of video signals to create the 18-display videowall system. MuxLab specializes in the design and manufacturing of AV connectivity products to extend AV signals over Cat-5e/-6 cable, including the ability to create virtual matrices and videowalls over an IP network. Matrices and videowalls can easily be created of varying sizes supporting up to 16 sources and 200 TV displays. Multiple virtual matrices and videowalls can co-exist on the same IP network, plus these flexible systems can be scaled up or down at any time. Matrix switching and videowall screen reconfiguration (including creating sub videowalls from within one larger videowall) can be managed remotely under software control via smartphone or tablet.
In addition to all the added versatility and control that AV-over-IP technology provides, customers can create these systems at a lower cost than was previously possible with older technologies. “We see this as a validation of the superior flexibility and cost effectiveness of AV-over-IP solutions versus more traditional approaches,” said Daniel Assaraf, president of MuxLab.
Feedback from customers has been extremely favorable and the Cage Aux Sports is planning to expand the solution throughout its network of restaurants.
