In 1982, Andy Streitfeld took a $30,000 loan from his grandmother and founded AMS Productions in the spare bedroom of his Bedford, TX, home. More than four decades and a name change later, AMS Pictures continues to offer video production and studio rentals in the Dallas area, while also producing original documentaries and unscripted TV programs. Since 2010, Apantac has been a force behind all that the company does.
The full-service production company has attracted clients like Texas Instruments, Ross Perot, and ABC Radio over the years, and its original programming has been featured on Reelz, Showtime, History, Velocity, Bio, HGTV, Food Network, and The Cooking Channel. In 2010, AMS Pictures reached a turning point as it began its switch to HD. Having the right gear is imperative—and the first big change was converting to KVM systems, a trend that continues to grow in production houses in 2025.
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Bret Harrell, COO of AMS Pictures, called KVM "essential to the operation" of his team's HD productions. "All of the PCs and Macs in our TOC and control rooms are on one large KVM system," explained Harrell. "We have about 15 terminals and 16 computers on our KVM. This allows us to be very efficient and use any PC from any position in any [of the three] control room."
Next came the multiviewers, which established a relationship with Apantac that continues today. "We saw the advent of multiviewers become popular in the 2000s, with many facilities upgrading to multiviewers during renovations," Harrell recalled. "When we fully upgraded AMS to HD in 2010, using multiviewers was really the only economical and practical option.
"I remember our research back in 2010 to select a multiviewer system for our facility," Harrell continued. "We knew that once we selected one, we would be committed for many years to come. I didn’t realize that it would still be going strong 15 years later in 2025, but here we are. We selected Apantac because it had the best picture quality when scaling the source video. It also had an open API to integrate with custom software."
Harrell said the only maintenance that's been performed on the Apantac TAHOMA multiviewers has been "taking each one apart to clean the dust from the inside and replace some fans. They’ve been extremely reliable. Over the years, we’ve added additional Apantac TAHOMA frames to our system to expand our capabilities."
Today, the heart of AMS Pictures TOC and three control rooms on the live production side use nine frames of the Apantac TAHOMS multiviewers in various configurations, together providing about 100 multiviewer inputs feeding 25 multiviewer monitors.
"Between 2010 and 2016, [AMS Pictures] acquired a total of eight multiviewers," said Thomas Tang, founder and president of Apantac. "Going through our service and spare parts sales records, I found that over the past 15 years, [AMS Pictures] has incurred only $830 in maintenance costs. This case exemplifies how our technologies have enabled significantly extended equipment life, demonstrating the value of investing in reliable, future-proof solutions.”
[The Integration Guide to KVM 2025]
Harrell pointed to the Apantac customer support as a primary reason this collaboration continues a decade-and-a-half later. He recounted a time that Tang himself worked with him and his engineers to revise software.
"I will say that this level of support makes it an easy decision to continue to purchase and use their products," Harrell added. "I have found that most vendors want to close out customer support cases as quickly as possible with the least amount of work. Not the case with Apantac. They seem to understand that if they listen to their customers, they can actually improve their products and make them better for everyone."
