72 IN BRIEF - T H E AMERICAS
Photo © Ben Hunt
Sports bar, ElevenFifty, enlisted Atlona to update its audiovisual systems.
Like many businesses today, restaurants have a healthy network infrastructure to accommodate internet, point-of-sale systems, and increasingly, audiovisual systems. With this backbone in place, restaurants are gradually taking a closer look at how transitioning audiovisuals switching, distribution and control to the network can bring greater flexibility and more scalable architectures to fruition. ElevenFifty, a social lounge and restaurant in north San Jose, California, is one such restaurant that is blazing this trail. In addition to specialising in family-style Vietnamese cuisine, ElevenFifty boasts a lively sports bar with four large displays mounted above the liquor shelves. An additional 11 displays are spread through the restaurant, ensuring that all patrons can catch the game of their choosing. However, like many sports bars and restaurants of its kind, the system was far from flexible and easy to operate. Channel changes coming from the cable set-top boxes were manual, with all signal switching driven through a
standard eight by eight matrix switcher. Hai Tran, a partner at ElevenFifty, and his colleagues worked closely with All State Systems Integration of Wilton, CA through the equipment selection and systems design process. Upon evaluating options on the market, the team quickly gravitated toward Atlona’s OmniStream R-Type solution. R-Type is a streamlined version of Atlona’s OmniStream audiovisual over IP platform for light commercial applications, providing the same core components - encoders, decoders, audio interfaces - and general value proposition for facilities with limited sources and destinations. Its architecture is also ideal for typical restaurant architecture with an imbalance in sources and destinations, which removes the need for distribution amplifiers. In addition to the operational benefits of audiovisual switching and distribution over the network, OmniStream R-Type also enabled a first for
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