As a member of a technological industry, you’ve undoubtedly heard of ‘planned obsolescence’ – it’s the process of designing and building a product with a limited lifespan, forcing users to regularly upgrade.

Of course, very few companies will admit to the practice (apparently they’d prefer us to think they make rubbish product), but whether they call it planned obsolescence or not, it is increasingly a fact of modern life.

Just Add Power president and founder Ed Qualls, however, doesn’t subscribe to that school of thought.

“These days it seems like most technology companies are coming out with revolutionary new products every 90 days. The message to the user is ‘throw out the old one you bought from us not too long ago and get our latest and greatest today’,” he says.

“This message is delivered by a sales force that fully intends to tell you to do the same thing again in the not too distant future. In our eyes, this dedication to revolutionary product design just doesn’t make sense when you are trying to build a video distribution infrastructure.

“At Just Add Power, our design and manufacturing philosophy is evolutionary, not revolutionary. For example, customers who invested in our 1G HDIP solution in 2009 can still purchase new transmitters and receivers in 2014 to expand and maintain their system.

“Most companies would be embarrassed to be selling the exact same hardware several years in a row, but not us. We take pride in having designed an infrastructure that can be sustained and manufactured reliably for many years. While our 2G solution does more today than it did when we launched the line in 2010, the exact same 2G transmitters and receivers can be bought today. We just keep making them better through free firmware updates.”

Most recently, the company released its third-generation 3G Ultra HD over IP transmitters and receivers, which work in conjunction with a standard gigabit managed Ethernet switch to distribute 4K/UHD and HDCP 2.2 encrypted content, as well as 1080p and lower content, from any number of source devices to any number of displays over a local area network.

The comprehensive feature set has been tailored for custom installers to include HDCP 2.2 support, a built-in 4K/1K up/down scaler on the receiver for the distribution of HDMI 2.0 sources to non-HDMI 2.0 screens and vice versa, enhanced support for video walls, support of uncompressed lossless multichannel audio formats including Dolby Atmos, USB over IP and Dolby down-mixing to stereo analogue audio.

“With our product design, 4K is an evolution not a revolution. We just don’t believe in telling people to toss out what they bought last year, or four years ago. Same switch, same cabling, same control system drivers, more features and better performance,” Ed says.

Unlike other IP-based video distribution products, with 3G there is no mandatory upgrade to 10Gbps managed switches and costly fibre optic cabling, though fibre can be used if desired. Otherwise, use standard Cat 5e/6 cabling and a gigabit managed switch with the 3G Ultra HD over IP transmitters and receivers to create an HDCP 2.2-compliant, UltraHD video matrix of any size, from 2×2 to 4,000×65,000 with support for video walls (up to 16×16) and a built-in 4K scaler (on 3G receivers) that facilitates the distribution of HDMI 1.4 devices and HDMI 2.0 displays and vice versa.

“We also recently released a video wall app. Overnight, we sent out a firmware update and everyone who owned one of our systems had a video wall app. For free,” Ed says.