Bartow County School System, located in the rural foothills of Georgia’s Appalachian Mountains, recently opened a 7,000-square-foot Esports Arena on the campus of Cass High School. It was designed with seating for 500, specialized esports furniture, high-powered gaming PCs, professional arena lighting, and audiovisual features that include a 220-inch LED video wall and 56,000 watts of sound. Not only will students be competing in Georgia High School Association and PlayVS sanctioned events from this arena, but they will get hands-on experience in game development, play-by-play sports announcing, theatrical lighting, and sound design. Extron AV signal switching, distribution, control, and audio technology help to make the Esports Arena a dazzling experience for players and audiences alike.
[AV Technology Manager’s Guide to Esports 2025]
“The Extron team went above and beyond to ensure the success of the project," said Dalton Jones,
director of esports at Georgia-based education solutions company PowerUpEDU, which had overall responsibility for pulling the education technology elements of the project together. "Extron’s extensive experience outfitting esports venues with effective AV systems smoothed the way for our project. NAV Pro AV over IP is working well in the Bartow County esports arena, providing reliable AV distribution and switching."
The arena's NAV Pro AV over IP network distributes 4K video over 1 Gbps Ethernet with visually lossless quality and near zero latency, so audiences experience the gaming action right along with the players. High-end gaming PCs and tracking PTZ cameras feed AV content into the network via NAV E 121 compact encoders. NAV SD 101 scaling decoders send the gaming action from the AV over IP network to multiple displays, including the giant videowall above the stage, and to an Extron streaming media processor that streams to Bartow's esports channel on YouTube. The arena's powerful audio system includes a DMP 128 Plus audio DSP processor to condition the audio and apply acoustic echo cancellation. TouchLink Pro touchpanels with intuitive custom graphical user interfaces control the AV system through an IPCP Pro xi control processor working with a NAVigator System Manager.