The problem wasn’t the TVs
A few months after the venue opened, we came across a video from the GOAT team talking about the difficulty of controlling the screens in their new sports bar.
They had invested in a large number of displays so that customers had a proper view wherever they sat. That is the right instinct for a sports venue. What is easy to overlook at design stage is how those screens will actually be run on a busy Saturday.
GOAT had 13 screens, many of them the same brand, and staff were using the individual remotes supplied with each set. Changing the channel on one television could affect another elsewhere in the room. Finding the right remote for the right screen became a headache, particularly when several events were on at once.
Rather than treating every screen as a standalone device, we helped GOAT move to a centralised AV system.
One rack, fourteen screens
ONEAV supplied the equipment. HDA designed the system. Inhome Media Solutions carried out the installation.
At the centre of the rack are MHUB S units distributing video over HDBaseT. Three Sky sources feed 14 displays: 13 indoors and one outside. Football can run in the main room, golf in another area, boxing in the booths or all mixed across all TV’s. Nobody has to walk the floor with a remote.
Staff manage sources, channels and volume from uControl. The system also has three independent audio zones and automation, so the venue can set up different states for ordinary service and match days with a single button-press.
The person behind the bar does not need to know how the signal gets from the rack to the screen. They need to know that when they select a game, it appears on the right television.
Why HDBaseT in a sports bar
There are several ways to move video around a commercial space, and AV-over-IP is part of that conversation. Not every venue has the same requirements.
For a mid-sized hospitality site such as GOAT, we wanted an architecture that was straightforward to deploy, predictable in use, low latency, and independent of the venue’s data network. On a match day the last thing anyone should be doing is troubleshooting IP before kick-off.
That comparison (signal determinism, network dependency, latency, compression, picture fidelity, control and total cost of ownership) is set out in HDBaseT’s technical paper HDBaseT vs. Network Video Distribution in Commercial AV Hospitality and sports bars sit firmly in the mid-market use case for HDBaseT. GOAT is what that looks like in a working room rather than a lab.
The technology is only one piece
It is easy in this industry to talk about hardware. Customers at GOAT are not there to admire an MHUB. They are there to watch sport with their mates, have a drink and stay for the atmosphere and the amazing food.
On 23 September 2026, GOAT was named Best Pub to Watch Sport, sponsored by TNT Sports, at the Great British Pub Awards in Leeds. We were there when the team collected it.
We are not going to claim an AV system won that award. It didn’t. The venue, the team, the food, the drinks and the way they treat watching sport did that. After only about a year of trading, co-owner Gary Evans said the win “blew us away.”
Fourteen screens are only useful if you can control them. Three Sky boxes are only useful if the right content lands in the right place. A sports bar only works when the technology supports the people running it.
That was the problem we set out to solve when we first replied to that video. The result is a centralised MHUB and HDBaseT system that lets GOAT show more than one sport at once, and lets staff run it from the bar. Best Pub to Watch Sport in the UK is now part of the same story.
We’re proud to have played a small part in it.
