How a Cat6 Video Distribution System Can Help Your Sports Bar The sports bar business has grown tremendously in the past few decades. But along with that growth has also come tremendous expectations from customers.Sports bar patrons no longer accept anything less than HD quality when watching their favorite games. In addition, a sports bar manager must always have multiple sports playing on different televisions in order to satisfy the customers’ varied interests. As a result, you, the sports bar owner, may have wrestled with the problem of how to install an adequate audio/video system that will satisfy all of your customers.
If one patron wants to watch an NHL game while another wants to see the latest NASCAR Sprint Cup race, it’s obvious that you can only satisfy both customers by having an additional satellite receiver. However, this does not mean that you need a separate receiver for each television, since not all customers will want to watch different programming. But you do need multiple televisions for each source so that customers in different parts of the bar will be able to see the programming they want without straining to see far away monitors. Implementing some kind of HD video distribution system, therefore, is usually the most effective way to satisfy all customers while simultaneously minimizing cost.
Cat6 video distribution systems. Luckily, new Cat6 video distribution systems are making this process easier than ever. In a Cat6 or “HD BaseT” video distribution system, all of the satellite receivers in the bar are located in one area and connected through HDMI cable to a central hub. This central hub, called a “matrix”, is then routed to the various sports bar TVs through ordinary Cat6 cable. At the other end of each Cat6 cable is a “receiver” that converts the signal from the matrix back into HDMI for output to the individual television.
The advantage of a Cat6 system for a sports bar is twofold: A Cat6 system allows televisions to be placed apart at much larger distances, up to 330ft., compared to only 15-30 ft. for straight HDMI systems. A Cat6 system allows the bar manager to control what is output to each television using a laptop, tablet, or smartphone located behind the counter. This does away with the need for multiple remotes that could easily be lost by employees.
Installing Cat6 systems. If you are interested in installing a Cat6 distributed video system for your sports bar, you will need an HDBaseT matrix that can handle as many sources as you have. This one, for example, can output up to four sources to eight different televisions (four through Cat6 and four through HDMI). You can also add an extra monitor by including an HDBaseT splitter, such as this one. In addition to the matrix, you will also need a receiver for each television, which can be found here. Whatever your particular sports bar video distribution needs are, a Cat6 system is worth considering.