I stumbled across a very interesting marketing approach by Crestron yesterday. I’d heard rumors of its existence, but it took some looking to find it.

On Crestron’s website under the RESOURCES section of its site, there are side-by-side comparisons or Shoot-Outs, if you will, posted of the company’s Digital Media line of switchers to both Extron DXP Series and the AMX DVX (Enova) switchers. Both Extron and AMX are given their own video:

To view the videos in full 1080p, make sure you select that resolution in the player’s lower right-hand corner.

Here’s the Crestron vs. Extron video:

And, here’s the Crestron vs. AMX video:

Primarily, the shoot-out between the switchers focuses on switching performance. In case you have lived under a rock for the past few years and haven’t noticed, switching between sources is a big deal. Sometimes the image blanks (goes black), sometimes there’s video noise, sometimes there’s flashes of video “garbage” and sometimes you see the image switch, go black, flash up again and then go blank before finally stabilizing and showing the new image. Over the years, technology has progressed and switcher manufacturers have helped in source switching. Where the plethora of on-screen switching anomalies between a Blu-ray player and a cable TV set-top box via the TV’s inputs barely gets noticed in the home, when that flashing, blanking and video-noise occurs on a large projection screen in a an on-campus auditorium or in a high-end boardroom, it’s seen by everyone and can be distracting.

So, switcher manufacturers have employed all sorts of creative ways of not only speeding up the switching time, but they’ve also delayed the switching (while blanking the screen themselves) so that the on-screen video flashing is dissipated or not even noticed — but, sometimes, that delays the switching time.

And, with this new generation of hybrid analog/digital switchers, this problem gets worse because not only is it dealing with resolution changes on-the-fly, but the switcher is also dealing with processing input signals that can be analog, digital or a mix of both — not to mention the complexities of switching a source that also has HDCP (high definition content protection), EDID (extended display identification data) and/or DDC (Display Data Channel) data embedded into the signal. All of these signal characteristics make for a complex switching situation that can make or break a switcher’s performance if not dealt with properly. The cheaper the price of the switcher, the less likely it deals with these complex switching issues properly — thus, the more on-screen garbage you’ll have to deal with (and, in some cases, if not dealt with properly, the signal being switched, may not show up at all).

So, that brings me back to the videos at hand (posted above). Crestron is staking a claim that they do it better than anyone. And, they demo that with what they say is a true side-by-side comparison.

So, what do you think? Is the market ripe for a new type of Shoot-Out at InfoComm? A Switcher Shoot-Out?

I think this is a bold, but potentially risky, move by Crestron as it not only calls out the competition, but they document it via video in full-1080p resolution — so all the world can see. Good marketing move, or not? In college, Marketing 101 teaches us to never mention our competition by name, but that all changed with the success of the “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” ads from Apple. The success of those ads pitted the Mac directly against the Windows PC. Is this Crestron’s Mac vs. PC moment?

What do you think?

Update: Extron has responded, which we write about here. AMX has also responded, which we write about here.