Wanted to share this interesting use case a co-worker and I will be attempting to use channels with.
His family has a large rec room near their cabin and are wanting to add several TVs to the space. They want the ability to to display the same input across all the TVs or different inputs on each TV.
Originally, he was looking at 8x8 matrix switches, but there were some complications:
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Its an older building with no existing cable runs.
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Size might mean HDMI runs are out of the question and HDMI to SDI and back for every TV would balloon the cost.
After talking with him a bit more, I suggested using a network encoder, such as the 5 port LinkPi, to capture the output of several streaming devices and feeding each input into a Channels Server instance as input 1, input 2, etc. Then the Channels app can be used on the Smart TVs as a receiver without having to run cable.
I did a proof of concept last night and it worked amazingly!
Best part is it is scalable. Need another display, add another TV. Need another input, grab another encoder box and feed it in. Only limitation is your network bandwidth.
(Also, I realize he could use native TVE support and suggested it. However his family also wanted content from the BTN+ app, which does not have an integration and requires a fire stick or roku device. This requirement also percluded using ADBTuner or A4HC to control the device automatically and why we opted to feed each input to Channels as a custom channel)