The lower level is devoted to casual dining, craft beers and cocktails with a large dining room, booth seating, an open kitchen line with Chef’s tables, the signature “Horseshoe Cocktail Bar” and a pair of outdoor patios with a 2×5 video wall of 47″ screens and a 2×3 video wall using 55″ screens providing dedicated areas of focus among the multitude of individual screens.
The upper level is given over to the main betting area with premium booth seating, the “Winner’s Circle” 360 degree Clubhouse bar and Parade Ring East and West panoramic balconies and features Striders’ largest 3×5 video wall comprising of 47″ screens.
The second floor also contains the four individual racks used to house system components.
Two centrally located racks contain all sources devices, including Dish cable and DirectTV boxes, AppleTV, WD media player and Samsung Blu-ray player and a bank of 20 mini preview LCD monitors to enable Striders staff to keep track of content being transmitted.
A second pair of central racks is proudly displayed in the bar area in full view of customers and houses Cisco networking and the Ashley amplifier used to distribute the high quality audio to the QSC speakers over both floors so important to creating the live atmosphere demanded by sports fans.
This central rack is also home to WyreStorm NetworkHD and Enado components, with NetworkHD comprising of 200-Series encoders and system controller installed within 5U rack mounts to provide a clean installation for up 12 NetworkHD components allowing for all required devices to be installed securely in a single rack location.
The NetworkHD 200-Series system itself is a scalable multi-format HD Over IP AV solution using H.264 compression technology for high quality low-bandwidth AV distribution and matrix switching over a network using standard category cable.
NetworkHD support of PoE for remote powering of encoders and decoders from a single power source, in this case from each of Striders’ six Cisco 52-port PoE switches, further simplified installation.
Gallery: WyreStorm Helps Create The Ultimate Sports Bar
Due to flexibility required by Sportech, the scalability of the system, combined with its ease of expansion via plug and play connectivity and Bonjour auto-discovery of devices were all deciding factors for Lance in specifying NetworkHD for the Striders project.
Lance explains: “The scalability of NetworkHD was one of the key selling points as we have upwards of 30 inputs and 150 outputs at this current time and we really liked not being locked down by a standard 8×8 matrix or 16×32 when tomorrow we might want to add 10 more outputs and next week 5 more inputs etc. So we love that the NetworkHD system allows us to do this on the fly.”
In terms of system capabilities, NetworkHD’s support of resolutions up to 1920×1200@60Hz with virtually instantaneous source switching, CEC commands to all connected screens, bi-directional RS-232 and 4×4 video wall functionality over LAN also hit the target and provided the customer and staff experience demanded by Sporttech.
The flexibility of the NetworkHD system supports any number of video wall layouts within the maximum 16 screen 4×4 configuration capacity and, in the case of Striders, the system enabled a variety of video wall sizes and customisable scene variations within them to be created.
Both individual and combined screens were used to create engaging, adaptable video wall displays, such as the largest 3×5 video wall in the second floor horse race betting area.
This video wall was designed to display a variety of different multi-screen wall and individual screen configurations with each pre-set configuration stored in the rack-mounted NetworkHD controller and able to be recalled instantly from anywhere in the venue using triggers set in the Enado control system.
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All of which tied in to the central concept of providing unsurpassed sports entertainment and hospitality experience that could essentially be individualized for each customer.
Of course, power is nothing without control and thanks to the intuitive nature of the NetworkHD platform, once devices were connected it was simply a matter of naming them and programming device information into WyreStorm Enado to control the system from anywhere in the venue on any web-enabled device.
