Here's what I posted elsewhere:

I received the same email and was curious about it, as the description indicated that it was much more than a simple signal booster. I dug into it a bit to see if it was something I might be able to help beta test. While it doesn't appear likely that I could be of any meaningful help in testing it, I did learn some cool stuff while talking to Outlaw's partner Transformative Engineering (the designers of the device), and they have told me that I can share what I learned from them.

According to Transformative, their HDMI conditioner/splitter is not the same thing as a line amplifier. The conditioner/splitters do have an amplification component, but there are a ton of additional things happening. The common HDMI line amplifier is designed to compensate for signal level loss over a long length of cable due to resistance within the wire. Quite literally, it is just a signal amplifier, sort of like a phono pre-amp. Transformative's conditioner/splitter is an active product that reads the HDCP signal within an HDMI transmission. It uses that information to compensate for certain common problems. The problem that they focused on in our correspondence as being particularly important was insufficient stretch–timing. Stretch-timing is a protocol within HDCP that allows for the source device to communicate with the sink device and determine if it is a valid, legal connection. HDCP allows for a specific time for this “handshake” to complete. If the handshake is not completed within a pre-determined interval, the connection is deemed illegal and no display is allowed. Unfortunately, with long cable runs, and with the use of many HDMI Extender units, more time is necessary than some HDMI hardware is programmed for. Transformative's device is able to recognize the timing error and present the EDID at the "short" side of the connection, thereby allowing the HDCP handshake to be completed within the shorter time limit.

There are other features involved in these products that didn't fit with my needs (one reason I wasn't well-suited as a beta tester) but could be hugely important for members of their target audience. The conditioner/splitters provide multiple outputs (two on the HDS-12, four on the HDS-14) to simultaneously drive multiple displays with proper EDID transactions. They also provide signal amplification to compensate for signal loss just like a line amplifier, which becomes particularly important on long cable runs. So while they contain line amplifiers, that particular feature is actually secondary to their primary purpose of fixing HDCP errors between HDMI devices. Those errors are most commonly encountered by people with long cable runs (thus making the amp portion so useful) but are also an issue for some more typical cable lengths when dealing with problem equipment combinations.