November 2012... I was a newish bar owner with 2 other partners. I'm in a theater watching Lincoln (the Spielberg movie), and my phone is buzzing in my pocket. I swipe to ignore it, but it buzzes again and again. I finally walk out to see what is so important that they have to call over and over: we can't figure out how to put on the game. Ugh, it's a remote control people! Stand on a chair, point the remote behind the TV, and scroll... 15 minutes later, we can't find the game... then open the DirecTV guide on a computer, find the channel, key it in... 5 minutes later, buzz, customers cant hear the game... turn up the volume in the DJ booth on channel 2.. . 5 minutes later, the people on the pool table side are complaining they can't hear the Touch Tunes. Fast forward to 9pm, the KJ didn't bring a monitor and wants to use a TV. Good grief.
I did some research and found some systems, all rather expensive, with no EPG, no control over devices except DirecTV, and expensive support contracts.
I set up a pretty simple matrix using VGA cables and figured out how to create a simple web page that controlled DirecTV boxes and thought, "Surely this is easy enough," but no, bartenders and servers are busy; it's unrealistic to expect them to understand this maze, so I built a little more, and then more, and then before I knew it, it was a web server with a nice GUI and shortcuts, and the calls stopped, but now the fire was lit.
There has to be a better way, and that's when I discovered MiraBoxes and other ways of feeding video over VLANs, and now it was a commercial-grade true HDMI matrix. That was enough to where our past and present employees would go to new jobs and talk about how easy the system was to use. I'd reluctantly install a few more systems on a sort of, "it's not really a product", but I'll help you out. Eventually I decide that maybe I'll just start selling it.
That's where the story of the legacy system comes from, so why this whole new system?
- Non-proprietary hardware: use off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi's as encoders
- Wireless option: while ethernet cabling is best, the system can run wirelessly over Wi-Fi.
- Retrofit into the existing system; leave what you have in place for easy reversal (but you won't want to)
- Smart TVs, dongles, projectors, and tablets as displays: install our app, and you now have a "decoder."
- Built-in EPG with click-to-tune for many sources
- On screen remotes for most devices
- IR blasters for non-programmable devices
- Use anything as an input: HDMI, video files, streams, tuners, dongles, URLs
- Easy for busy servers, bartenders and stressed-out managers to get what your customers want on any display(s)
- Runs locally; the system will run without internet but the TVs will require a connection once per day but will simply show a watermark if they dont get internet
- Overlays, mixins and other over-image options
- Real-time video preview, no more guessing what is playing on what
- Our system is free to install and free to use; if you want to remove the watermark, you can buy as many display licenses as you need. No commitment, no contracts, and no hidden costs.
