3 Questions: How WyreStorm Plans to Make a Name for Itself in the Sports Bar Market

CI spoke with Hal Truax, VP of sales and marketing at Wyrestorm, regarding the company’s interest in the sports bar and bars and restaurant vertical and discussed how the company stays focused on the highest priorities with all the developments in AV distribution.

CI Staff

Wyrestorm may have made its bones in the residential integration market, but now it’s focusing most of its product development on commercial spaces. More specifically, the AV distribution solutions provider sees itself as a great fit for sports bars.

VP of sales and marketing Hal Truax talks about how WyreStorm likes to position itself as a “solutions-based” manufacturer, one that is comfortable providing HDMI, HDBaseT or AV over IP solutions. In other words, WyreStorm doesn’t see itself as a one-size-fits-all product maker, but it says it has products for all scenarios.

Truax chatted with CI editor Tom LeBlanc about WyreStorm’s focuses.

With all the developments in your category with the merging of AV and IT, the advent of higher resolutions and the proliferation of video, how do you stay focused on the highest priorities?

We kind of cut our teeth in the CEDIA market here in the U.S. and within the last year allocated about 80 percent of our R&D and product development to the pro AV space.

Related: WyreStorm Slots 80% of Product Development to Pro AV and Is All In for InfoComm 2016

We’ve really assessed the market and looked at the opportunities and in doing so are keenly aware of the whole AV and IT merging so we develop products to fill the biggest voids in the market and make the end user and integrator experience a little bit easier. We’re really a solutions-based company looking to make the end user’s life a little bit easier and to make a world of difference in integrators’ markets.

Hear more from Wyrestorm’s Hal Truax in this video or continue reading below.

There are a lot of companies in the AV distribution space. Are you carving out a niche in the bars and restaurants market?

We’ve identified a couple of key niches that we’re pursuing aggressively. One is the sports bar and bars and restaurant vertical. There are so many displays and opportunities to distribute content in these venues.

We just completed a project [in San Diego] and it’s about 35 sources and 184 displays with multiple video walls in there. We chose our Network HD solution, which is the AV over IP solution. You run everything through a managed network switch, and the cool thing is it’s totally scalable.

Conventional matrix [setups] are 16 x 16 or 32 x 32. In this solution we were able to accommodate the sources and the displays exactly. You need one transmitter per source and one receiver per display, so it’s totally scalable and customizable.

Then on top of that we added our control system, that’s a browser-based control system. So everybody in the space — the servers, the management — has certain rights or permissions in the control system and we could tailor it to what they needed. We do have some products and expertise in that vertical, so that’s one of them that we’re really putting a lot of effort into.

I’ve seen your tagline on some of your product videos, “Because the Technology Matters.” Do you spend a lot of time talking to integrators about what matters to them when it comes to AV distribution?

The way that we perceive it is that we’re in the signal distribution arena. We support and embrace HDMI technology, HDBaseT and AV over IP because we feel strongly as a solutions-based provider that it’s not one-size-fits-all.

HDMI is not the perfect technology for all solutions, meaning that HDMI is best utilized in smaller footprint applications and medium-to-large deployment situations. Then you need to change it up to HDBaseT to get reliability in longer lengths and then we go to AV over IP for totally scalable, limitless solutions.

So we really do try to match the technology with the best application or solution. Our hope is to provide the most reliable, fulfilling experience both from the integrator’s standpoint making the installation go seamless and in providing the best end-user experience.

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