Sports & Entertainment Lobby Communication System
Customer: |
Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment Complex
New York City
|
 |
|
Goal: |
Build awareness of facility amenities and help people find their way |
Situation
Chelsea Piers, located between piers 59 and 62 on the Hudson River in New York City, is a 28-acre,
$100m sports and entertainment complex featuring state-of-the-art facilities for thirty different
sports. One of those sports venues is the Golf Club that occupies four stories and houses a golf
range, simulators, golf academy and various party and meeting rooms outfitted with the latest
technology products. The Golf Club enjoys a large amount of visitor traffic, especially on the
weekends, and the staff was looking for a way to help people find their way to one of the many party
and meeting rooms while educating people waiting in the lobby for their golf lesson or tee time about
the facility’s many amenities. Due to the large volume of events each day, Chelsea Piers needed a
digital signage application that could import the event schedule (Event name, time and location) from
Microsoft Access because manually entering each event was too time consuming. They also needed each
event to populate on the output display one hour before the event and to stop appearing when the
event was over.
Solution
Ferdinand Lleshanaku, Chelsea Piers’ Director of Technology, was tasked with identifying and
evaluating digital signage packages that could meet their demanding needs. Their goal was to wall
mount a 42” Panasonic display in portrait mode and use the upper portion to display daily events
and the lower portion to use text, images and movie clips to feature vendor partners, like Srixon,
Izod and JetBlue, as well as the many amenities of the Golf Club. After months of research Chelsea
Piers selected SceneStudio.
Mr. Lleshanaku and his team built a web page on the SceneStudio appliance that contains a script to
access their event schedule located on an Access database. In SceneStudio Editor a URL region was
created which points to the internal web page and is scheduled to refresh every few minutes,
resulting in an update to the event schedule. During times when there are no events, a general
welcoming message is displayed.
The SceneStudio appliance was placed in the back office and a standard VGA cable used to reach the
output display in the lobby. A VGA splitter is also used so the back office staff can monitor the
output at all times and more easily view new content as it’s developed, saving them the time of
walking to the lobby.
Benefits
The display has allowed visitors to more easily find their own way to meetings and parties by
simply viewing the output display. They have also increased awareness of the Golf Club’s amenities
and offer viewers an entertaining alternative while waiting for tee times.