In our series of #CEDIAShares blogs, we’re talking with exhibitors about the hottest technologies and trends they’re looking to see at CEDIA 2018.
Q&A with Garth Lobban, Director of Marketing, Atlona
Q: Why CEDIA?
Garth Lobban: As we approach the end of our 15th anniversary, it’s important to reflect where we started. The formative years of Atlona were firmly entrenched in the residential AV business—it’s where we gained our reputation as a customer-first organization, and where we built the early industry relationships that have been paramount to Atlona’s growth. Even as our commercial AV business has experienced significant growth and attention, residential remains an important focus for the company. We continue to support that business with expanded sales teams, new channel partners and new product innovations. CEDIA remains the premier industry event to meet with our customers, and introduce the latest Atlona products built to move residential AV forward.
Q: What is the most exciting trend you expect to see at the show?
GL: Atlona is laser-focused on the transition from circuit-based systems to IP networks for the switching, distribution, and extensions of AV signals. In residential, this means moving 4K/HDR video content and whole-house audio over the network. There is little question that this will be an exciting trend to watch.
Beyond Atlona, we’re continually amazed at technologies that we don’t represent. Many of us, including myself, maintain a personal interest in audio innovations for the home. We will have our eyes on the expansion of IoT technologies and voice-activated controls. These latter two areas are quickly becoming important pillars of the professional custom installer’s future business.
Q: What will you focus on at the show?
GL: Our OmniStream R-Type Series continued to gain traction in AV over IP for residential and light commercial applications. Two key innovations in this area will be on display. The first is our video wall capability, which comes as a marriage of our OmniStream and Velocity IP-based control platform. Advanced video walls have never been as easy to configure.
Our biggest announcement for CEDIA is the addition of Dolby Vision decoding processing to our OmniStream platform. OmniStream will be the only AV-over-IP platform with the ability to support Dolby Vision. To date, no other competing networked AV-over-IP system on the market has the capability to stream and decode full Dolby Vision 12-bit 4:2:2 HDR Ultra high definition content at a frame rate of 60Hz over 1GbE or 10 GbE networks without video quality degradation. Of course, high-quality video with a cutting-edge HDR experience is not complete without high-quality immersive sound, OmniStream R-type supports full passthrough of Dolby Atmos to complement the Dolby Vision HDR experience We’ll demo this at Booth 3015.
However, Atlona is not quite ready to leave circuit-based architectures behind. Our new Opus Series of 4K HDR matrix switchers is a groundbreaker for multi-zone AV distribution, with integrated control, audio matrixing features and flexible routing options to HDBaseT and HDMI outputs that set it apart from previous generation systems. We see long-term opportunities for these products in both residential and light commercial applications. In residential specifically, Opus is the answer for custom installers that face increased end user demands to upgrade, or build new, AV systems that support the many High Dynamic Range televisions coming to market.
To learn more, check out Atlona in Booth 3015 at CEDIA 2018.
