I often talk about products or manufactures being audio only in an audio/video world. If you’re installing whole house music systems and ignoring distributed video, you’re selling your customer short and hurting your bottom line.
We sell these systems, as “Distributed TV Systems” the idea is to take the simplicity of your home theater and extend it to the entire house. Whether they want to admit it or not, most people's home entertainment is TV centric. Allowing people to watch their Tivo or use the on screen interface to their music server at any monitor in the house is a very powerful thing. For the dealer, you get two big benefits, you sell more control (and make more money) and your client’s use the system more and tell more of their friends just how cool it is.
Moving along.
The Sonance Video Matrix is an 8X8 matrix video switcher that feeds up to eight video sources to eight monitors. The sources can be component, s-video, or composite. It supports resolutions up to 1080i, making it perfect for whole house HDTV. Control is via RS232, sorry no IR. Distribution is via Cat5, very much like the Crestron PVID, this switcher it uses one pair for composite, two for s-video, and three for component. Unlike the PVID it converts composite to S and vice versa. The front panel includes a USB connection that's for local control with a laptop. There's also a series of lights that indicate what source is routed to each zone.