If you’ve ever been to a sports bar, you’ve probably encountered “the dilemma”: There are maybe 20 different TVs on, but none of them are playing your game. So, you ask the bartender to switch one of them. Before you know it, you’ve both spent 10 minutes trying multiple remotes, pointing at all different TVs, finally turning the game on!…but on the other side of the room, and so on. Wouldn’t life be easier if there was just one way to manage all of those screens?

Centon Corp., a provider of digital cable tuner solutions, offers the ATX Ucrypt 2.0, a 60-channel bulk transition solution for hotels and sports arenas in the U.S. and Canada. Ceton also previewed a new technology platform for delivering digital cable HDTV to multiple screens in restaurants, sports bars and health clubs at The Cable Show 2012.

“While Ceton is best known for our pioneering multi-tuner CableCARD solutions for the home PC, we also have a thriving commercial business that we’re demonstrating here at The Cable Show,” said Gary Hammer, president and CEO, Ceton Corporation.  “The UCrypt family developed in partnership with ATX Networks and our new solution for restaurants and sports bars demonstrate our engineering innovations for consumer and MSO solutions, bringing digital cable services to a range of scenarios, devices, screens and establishments.” 

The six-tuner device uses a cable card which brings in cable TV from any of the cable operators. Since it multicasts, users are able to send that content to lots of TV sets. The problem is, how do you control all of those devices? Ceton developed a mobile app, supporting smartphones and tablets from Apple, Android (News - Alert) or Windows. The app provides a program guide, and can actually change all of the TV sets to the same channel or individual TV sets to various channels. It also has the capability to be pre-set up for a time for all TVs to change.

Both solutions are built on the award-winning Ceton digital cable tuner platform popular with Media Center PC users and hundreds of leading hotels and hospitality establishments.

The solutions also work in homes, where users have complete control of all DVR functionality, remote control of the TV itself, and can integrate content feeds from multiple services, such as HBO DVR or Netflix accounts.

“Here we’ve aggregated broadcast cable TV along with all the IP sources so you can just basically find the movie or find what you’re trying to play,” said Hammer.

The media center PC based on Windows Embedded has six tuners running simultaneously, which means users can record six HD channels at once or stream up to six live channels to six different TV sets or any combination thereof. The media center extender offers a true whole home experience: watch a movie in one room, pause, and then resume in another.