Distributing video over the network instead of over cable

Starting a film in one room and finishing it in another sounds like a small thing and is a good test of whether a system is genuinely distributed or just several independent setups sharing a house.

Using the network as the backbone for audio and video distribution is now the standard approach. It scales in a way that fixed matrix wiring does not, adding a screen later is adding a device, not rerunning infrastructure.

The system we rely on is Binary Media over IP. It sets up quickly, is straightforward to manage remotely, scales cleanly, and sits inside a Savant system so a screen is one more source rather than a separate remote.

It will pass 4K HDR at 4:4:4 over an ordinary 1-gigabit switch, which is the detail that matters commercially, earlier AV-over-IP designs assumed an expensive 10-gigabit backbone and priced themselves out of most houses.

On the lighting side, tunable white is the upgrade worth knowing about. Colour temperature that follows the sun through the day, brighter and cooler in the middle, warm and low in the evening, either adjusted by hand or left to run itself.