[related]Often, especially recently, HDBaseT is pitted against AV-over-IP. For a lot of reasons, that perceived HDBaseT vs. AV-over-IP competition doesn’t make sense, says Daniel Shwartzberg, director of customer experience, HDBaseT Alliance.
“HDBaseT is the de facto standard in AV connectivity right now in terms of convergence and distance replacing all of the cables that an installer has in his work, in his installation and replace them with a simple category cable that can go very, very much farther than any of those individual cables actually could,” says Shwartzberg in an interview with Commercial Integrator.
He points out that HDBaseT Alliance boasts more than 200 members and an ecosystem fed by thousands of certified HDBaseT products. “It’s been a huge success,” he says.
So What’s the HDBaseT vs. AV-over-IP Controversy?
“In the last maybe 18 months there has been a lot of hype, a lot of discussion, a lot of activity around the field of AV over IP,” Shwartzberg says. “In other words, whereas HDBaseT is its own protocol, AV over IP, of course, uses standard Ethernet and standard IP protocols in order to transmit audio or video in installations.”
“You don’t have to just do HDBaseT. You don’t just have to do AV over IP. It’s important to try and understand the use cases where each,” Shwartzberg says.
Somehow “a lot of misunderstanding in the market” emerged in the AV marketplace, he says. “There seems to be this battle royale going on between HDBaseT in one corner and various AV over IP solutions in the other corner.”
The thing is, Shwartzberg adds, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. “HDBaseT is not AV over IP. The confusion gets even greater when you bear in mind that even AV over IP itself is broken down into a number of different camps. You’ve got 10G. You’ve got 1G. You have different 1G solutions from different vendors that themselves don’t know how to interoperate together. There’s a lot of confusion.”
At HDBaseT Alliance, AV-over-IP and HDBaseT isn’t an “either/or game,” he says.
“You don’t have to just do HDBaseT. You don’t just have to do AV over IP. It’s important to try and understand the use cases where each and every one of those solutions is applicable.”
Watch the video for much more from Shwartzberg on the HDBaseT vs. AV-over-IP battle royale.
