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TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine
— 01-02/2013
—
SATSON continued to focus more and
more on HDMI so that Stefaan Cornelis
can say today: “Our satellite products
today make up only about 10% of our
sales; our remaining sales are all HDMI
products.”
What does SATSON’s product assort-
ment look like? “We have products for
the end user as well as for professional
installations”, we learn from Didier De-
bey, the man responsible for technical
development and who just happens to
have a wonderful example of a product
that is only available from SATSON: “We
developed the concept ourselves but ac-
tual production has been outsourced.” It
has to do with a video processor that can
insert a secondary video source on top of
a live video signal. “In this way, for exam-
ple, a sports bar can show a live football
match while at the same time adding their
own ads or announcements.” The DSB-
0200 named device consists in principle
of a video generator and an HDMI distrib-
utor that takes the combined picture and
feeds it to multiple monitors in parallel.
“Another application area could be hotels
that, in addition to live TV, could blend in
their own offerings or add advertisement
pages for any operational purpose, that
is, ‘Digital Signage’ at affordable prices.”
Another product for use in professional
applications is the HDMI splitter with Eth-
ernet connection. Using a master device
and as many as eight 8-way splitters, up
to 448 (!) monitors could be connected
in parallel with one HD signal. Didier De-
bey describes one of these applications:
“Electronics stores that have many dif-
ferent TVs on display want to provide
each TV with the same signal. We have
the right splitter just for that purpose.”
Not only that: Stefaan Cornelis expands
on this by highlighting that SATSON has
already had great success with these
HDMI splitters in Belgium: many of the
country’s top electronics supermarkets
already use SATSON’s products.
But SATSON believes that the future is
not just in the professional sector. “The
distribution of HDMI signals is becom-
ing more and more important for pri-
vate users as well; many private users
don’t have just one TV, they already have
several scattered around the house.” As
long as the receiver and the TV are close
enough together, a simple HDMI cable
would be good enough. But as soon as
some distance is introduced between the
two devices, the problems begin to ap-
pear. “And we have two excellent solu-
tions for this”, reveals Stefaan Cornelis
to us, “And the first would be HDMI via
coaxial cable and the other is HDMI via
Ethernet.”
SATSON has numerous products for
both methods. “Our best seller is this
HDMI extender”, says Stefaan Cornelis as
he shows us two small boxes, “One is the
transmitter and the other is the receiver.
They can be used to span distances of up
to 40 meters (about 130 feet) with either
coaxial cable or with Ethernet.” The great
thing about this is the return-channel ca-
pability: “The remote control commands
are routed back to the receiver via an IR
return channel.” Quite often there are
two TV monitors connected to one re-
ceiver, for example, there might be one
TV in the living room and the other in the
bedroom. You can see where this is go-
ing: you’re sitting in the evening in your
living room watching TV. When you go to
the bedroom, you simply take the remote
control with you and continue to watch
there what you were watching in the liv-
ing room using the same receiver. Or, to
put it another way, instead of having two
separate receivers – one for each moni-
tor, the HDMI extender lets you use just
one receiver and its remote control. It’s a
very clever solution!
Before we finish here, we want to know
where you can find SATSON products.
“Distribution in Belgium and Switzerland
has thus far been very successful and
we’re in the process of expanding distri-
bution to other European countries.” For
dealers who, just like SATSON, see the
distribution of HDMI signals as the fu-
ture of digital TV, SATSON has the ideal
products that are perfectly suited for this
future. SATSON even has one more ad-
vantage: “We naturally repair all of our
products ourselves”, comments Didier
Debey, who also happens to be in charge
of repairs and technical service, “and we
also provide extensive technical support
such as the technical planning of larger
projects.” SATSON also provides techni-
cal training courses as well.
And this is how a small satellite compa-
ny managed to convert themselves into
a highly specialized distributor of HDMI
distribution products of the future. Satel-
lite professionals became HDMI profes-
sionals for the future of HDTV.
This is SATSON’s absolute best seller: the HDMI extender kit with transmitter and receiver. It takes HDMI signals and distributes
them via Ethernet. The same set is also available for signal distribution via coaxial cable.
