AV-over-IP Matrix Switching

Nov 5, 2018, 14:17 PM by Black Box

Control rooms serve as the operational heart of an enterprise, be it in the broadcast, public safety, industrial or defense industry, and optimal 24/7 functionality and efficiency are critical in these environments. For any control room build or upgrade, the planner’s goals are to improve safety, increase uptime and reduce maintenance costs while also enhancing the operator experience and workflow, improving situational awareness and decision making and enabling greater collaboration.

Control rooms serve as the operational heart of an enterprise, be it in the broadcast, public safety, industrial or defense industry, and optimal 24/7 functionality and efficiency are critical in these environments. For any control room build or upgrade, the planner’s goals are to improve safety, increase uptime and reduce maintenance costs while also enhancing the operator experience and workflow, improving situational awareness and decision making and enabling greater collaboration. 

In pursuing these critical goals, planners face the challenge of using new technologies and solutions to give operators the tools and information they need in the most efficient and user-friendly manner. A great deal has changed in the past five, 10, 15 or more years since many control rooms first were built. Today, their design and infrastructure must accommodate greater numbers of data and AV sources and streams, new media formats with higher bandwidth and storage requirements and significantly different types of networks, interfaces and devices for handling all of this information. 

While many control room facilities are undertaking an ongoing digital transition with respect to their signal switching and extension systems, others are considering the move from analog AV infrastructure to IP-based control room infrastructure and possibly the use of virtualization to reduce equipment costs and overall control room complexity. In all these instances, resilience, plug-and-play interoperability, future-proof scalability and ease of use are top priorities for the installed control room solution. 

Black Box’s new white paper, How to Future-Proof Connectivity for Tomorrow’s Control Room, explains how to overcome these concerns and challenges, first by describing a complete solution built on a unified KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) connectivity and signal distribution system and then by explaining how all components in the full solution work together to address the requirements of modern control room applications. The paper concludes with a discussion of key system considerations and of how best to move forward with a new build or upgrade while minimizing costs and downtime. 
 
You can download the white paper for free here.