Everything changed with a call from Best Buy, which was looking for 4K video test equipment. It was around 2011. Best Buy couldn’t find one, because it didn’t really exist yet.

AV Pro Global Holdings, then known as AV Pro Alliance, was a distributor of AV equipment, founded by the Murray family in Sioux Falls, South Dakoka—Jeff, his wife Debbie and their son, Matt. The company was mostly distributing video calibration and testing equipment to the ISF customer base. Jeff had been an engineer at Sencore previously, and knew connectivity. They had been already been thinking about a new video generator when they got the news about the Best Buy RFP.

“We had this idea for a generator. So we wrote a whole spec for the product for Best Buy and branded it Murideo … That literally is just the combination of our last name, Murray and video, and put together in one,” said Matt. That’s how Murideo, one of AV Pro’s subsidiary brands, was born. But it was a big risk for the small company.

“We responded to an RFQ with a spec and a design, and we’re really small family company, so it was like, OK, we don’t have much to lose here … we felt that we could get it done, and we actually won the bid before we even had a prototype. So the clock started ticking. We had about eight months to do it. So that was 24 hours a day for all of us designing this product, getting it through the R&D phase and the testing phase,” Matt said. “We had brought in our whole family, my grandma and grandpa and cousins and everybody to test these things … And then we loaded them up in the back of a sprinter [van] and drove them from here to Minneapolis. So we hand delivered ’em ourselves. We made the deadline by I think a day.” The risk paid off — the product was sold in Best Buy under the Magnolia Home Theater brand for years, and a much smaller version of the generator is still sold under the Murideo brand today.

Around the same time, the Robert Zohn’s famous TV Shootout was also in need of 4K generator. Robert had called a bunch of other connectivity companies without luck before he tried Murideo. In a couple months, the team cobbled together an 8×8 4K matrix for the Shootout. Matt said, “And it wasn’t even a for sale thing. We were just doing a favor for Robert, hopefully going to get some press for Murideo because they were using [it] there. And that’s where the CNET editor, David Katzmaieri was there. And he was like, ‘You guys need to sell these things. Where can we get one of these? I got to have one of these for my lab’. And he was our first salel. We sold him a prototype.”

Another defining moment for the company was when they met their Shenzhen, China-based manufacturing partner at an ISE show in Amsterdam and later ended up making an unusual arrangement. “They had [their company], and we had AV Pro, and that’s when we basically did all the paperwork and we have a 30% stake in that company and they have 10% in AV Pro Global. And we did that because the idea was, well, we want to behave as one company,” Matt said. Today, AV Pro now also has manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. that allows them to do rapid prototyping and offer TAA-compliant products.

Top-notch engineering is a key differentiating factor for AV Pro, and they have multiple FPGA specialists on their team. They also prioritize having a pipeline for good engineers. “A cool part of our story, [one] we hope to replicate this in the US here soon, but over in Shenzhen, there’s a university there north of the city, and we have classes there that are actually engineering college classes, and they get to work on live projects … And then we have an internship program where they come to work for the company … So that’s a big, big focus of what we try to do is make sure that we have a steady stream of engineers, make sure that we have good engineers, and we have people who can not only develop new things, but ways to fix things if we have issues,” said Matt.

Vertical integration has also been an important part of their ability to be nimble and react to market demands quickly. They aren’t just designing the products from the ground up, but they’re also able to take requests from dealers and customers and integrate them right away. Matt said, “One of the biggest things I think that helps us get trust with our customers is when they go in to install something, maybe there’s some new technology or some compatibility thing or something that is not there that they might want to see. We’re able to turn around and do firmware and make our products really shine because we’re in full control of it. So if customer says they want something, we can typically deliver it. And that’s been the strategy.

“…The dealers tell us what they want and what they need. And our biggest job is just to take ’em seriously and listen … my philosophy on it is if one person is telling us there’s a problem or something they’d like, then that means there’s probably 20 or 30 others that have the same issue, but they’re not telling us. So even if one dealer tells us they need some obscure corner case feature, we will get it added and we’ll get it added fast.”

For the immediate future, AV Pro is continuing to grow its US-based manufacturing, in particular so it can offer TAA-compliant products to the market, and to listen to and support its dealers. Jeff says, “We solve problems all the time that really … don’t have anything to do with our product. That’s how we’ve been doing it since day one. And I think that’s that’s why the dealers will come back.”