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New KFC Yum! Center serves up tasty digital signage

The IT director for the new arena gives us a look at the process of installing a state-of-the art digital signage system.

October 25, 2010 by Christopher Hall — w, t

This was a multimillion dollar baby.

The new KFC Yum! Center basketball arena in downtown Louisville, Ky., may well be owned by the Louisville Arena Authority and operated by the Kentucky State Fair Board (KSFB) — but it's KSFB IT director Alicia Dunlap's baby.

Dunlap spent years researching, planning and putting together the $238 million center's IT infrastructure, including its more than 400 screen-strong digital signage system.

"This is my baby," she said after leading a recent tour of the sparkling new 22,000-seat facility. "Its gestation period was just longer, but, yeah, it really is my baby."

Dunlap also knew she'd have several thousand sets of eyes looking over her shoulder or judging the finished project, which will serve as home to the University of Louisville's men's and women's basketball teams. The new arena is seen as another building block — perhaps one of the most, if not the most, important — in revitalizing the city's long-moribund downtown area.

"We had a big responsibility to do this and to make it good; to make it better than what people expected it to be," she said. "And that has been very gratifying. I have had a lot of people come up to me and say, 'Its even better than I thought it was going to be.'"

The Yum! Center features an integrated display system provided by Brookings, S.D.-based Daktronics Inc., incorporating large screen LED (light emitting diode) displays within the seating bowl, professional-grade Sony LCD screens and an IPTV control system that will deliver high-definition digital content throughout the venue.

Daktronics says the most unique among the many new features of the multipurpose arena is a venue-wide digital media display network. The next generation broadcast solution provides an Internet protocol television (IPTV) solution that delivers multiple live content channels to any display in the venue. The solution is built around a computer network structure, so it can be expanded to accommodate nearly any form of digital media.

At the center of the control solution is Daktronics' new Show Control system, with the ability to take in various video, scoring, timing, statistical data and out-of-town scores and even point-of-sale information and display it on select screens. With the Show Control system, a central operator can control all displays across the network, turning them on or off, controlling their volume or changing the channel so all the displays show the same piece of content.

The screens also are providing a significant new revenue stream for the center, through advertising, Dunlap says, but getting to this point took, literally, years.

Dunlap says she and others involved in the arena's planning started visiting arenas around the country four years ago, including the new Dallas Cowboys stadium, the new Yankees Stadium in New York City and the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey.

"We spent a few years researching ... We wanted to do the best we could with the money we had and put forth the best," Dunlap said.

And along the way the IT director talked to her opposite numbers on many other similar projects, asking question after question, all the way down to which project managers were the best to work with and which company's IPTV system it was best to stay away from.

"I asked a lot of questions," Dunlap said. "I asked about manufacturers and everyone: 'Have you worked with this one?' We asked for references, and we called, and they were honest. Luckily we're not calling the PR people, we're calling the IT people, and asking them 'What was your Hell with this particular thing?'"

That's also how Dunlap knew to avoid one manufacturer, because its system frequently made it necessary to re-boot all the displays in another arena.

"Re-booting all the displays, when you have 411?" she asked. "Uh, no."

(Keep that in mind, integrators/installers: These people talk to each other.)

The crowning piece of the arena's digital signage system is its huge, center-hung scoreboard, featuring four LED displays. The scoreboard can be raised out of sight into the arena's upper rafters, or lowered to the arena floor for maintenance.

The arena also has four corner-hung LED displays for highlights and game statistics, and the scorer's table also incorporates an LED display.

All the arena's concession stands also feature digital menu boards, with the information displayed drawn from the MICROS point-of-sale terminals' database.

Unlike some other basketball and sports arenas, the people running the Yum! Center are at least for now refraining from making the center scoreboard displays crowd-interactive — but not because they can't.

Dunlap says the arena's operators have looked into enabling the displays for text messaging or mobile interactivity — the capability is already there — but decided to table it for now "because it is so intense to have to keep up with ... The public is very creative with their texting." But if they can find a software system they can trust to keep inappropriate texts off the screen, they might reconsider, she says.

"We're just not going to exercise that right now, but in the future if we can find something that we're comfortable with that we feel like we're not going to end up with something on television that we don't want, I think we would, yes," she said.

The arena does sell advertising space on its displays, and it already is a significant revenue stream, Dunlap says.

"A lot of people, I think, didn't realize the power of this," she said, gesturing to the screens hung throughout the arena's bowl. "And the sheer number of televisions ... The bathroom is the only place with no televisions. People hadn't seen it in our community before ...

"Now we're making a lot more friends who are very interested in being in this building."

Of course, there have been, and continue to be, pain points along the way, Dunlap says. Whether it's learning how to group the displays to have a certain number show one channel while the rest show another or just going back to fix problems that weren't anticipated, there will be issues, she says.

"You're going to have to go back and tweak some things, and we're doing that now," she said. "And no matter how many televisions you put in, someone's going to want more televisions ... And we're doing that as well."

Also, all the LCD screens in the arena are actually 3-D capable screens — Dunlap says she asked Daktronics to keep the 3-D glasses because she didn't have anywhere to put that many pairs — and by using Vyvx-provided technology the arena staff can send 3-D game broadcasts and webstream video out in standard- or high-definition as well as in 3-D.

Arena planners were careful to make the facility's technology suite as future-compatible as they could, Dunlap says.

"We wanted to be forward thinking," she said. "We don't want to get to a point and have someone say, 'Can you do this?' and have to say no. We want to be able to tell you, 'You know what, as a matter of fact, yes, we can.'"

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