Consumer-focused VITEC signage solutions

Article posted by Coliseum, February 9^th, 2024

Image: Coliseum GSVA

Andy Wagner firmly believes that the venue operators or for that matter people working in any entity should be all ears for the end users and try to solve the problems they face. Wagner looks into the sales part of VITEC and says that the digital signage solutions company believes in lending an ear to the consumers and be a part of their journey through a series of interactions.

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Wagner jumped into the tech field right from the football ground. He spent 10 years with the National Football League (NFL), 11 years in college football and then joined the tech-driven company VITEC in 2019 and looks after their Sales business. He has added lot of value to the company.

Andy Wagner, Sales Manager, Sports and Entertainment, Venues, VITEC, US, tells ‘Coliseum’ in an exclusive interaction that it is very important to have the right persons in the room when engaged in conversations and at VITEC the end users holds a lot of significance for them which helps the tech firm to ultimately provide pack-a-punch services.

VITEC

Châtillon, Ile-de-France (France)-based VITEC is the market-leading provider of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), Video Streaming and Digital Signage Solutions that help organizations harness the power of video to engage, empower and evolve. VITEC is a pioneer in the design and manufacture of hardware and software for video encoding, decoding, transcoding, archiving, and streaming over IP.

IPTV

The Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded media, IPTV offers the ability to stream the source media continuously.

Andy Wagner began by stating that there are a lot of fan-facing elements that IPTV and digital signage can offer and “it doesn’t necessarily have to start with the fan-facing elements of menu boards, concourse TVs, it can start in other areas too.”

He added, “Different venues have college campuses and they have so many different elements making up small pieces to cover this sport to that sport – whether its lacrosse, football, men’s and women’s soccer. Sometimes, one sport does not know what the other is doing. The IPTV systems in general can help consolidate that.”

The challenge he said a lot of times with these use cases is that the IPTV systems typically come along in the later stages project – “So, it can be a challenge whether one is talking about fan-facing screens or screens that help teams out is kind of coming in at the end and the budget cuts and other elements can factor into that and positioning yourself is quite a tough task.”

Success Factors

VITEC has always pushed with its customers Flexibility, Scalability and Reliability.

Case Studies

Flexibility (Texas Athletics)

Added Wagner, “From the flexibility standpoint, the use case of the University of Texas in Austin (US) was challenging. They needed to do a retrofit in the growing age of recruiting. They really needed to push their facilities to be something apart from the teams that they were recruiting against. For us, the focus was the Moncrief Building/and the 100,119-capacity DKR Texas Memorial Stadium, the area where the Longhorns football team resides. During renovation, they created some premium seat areas and they created zero sidelines in those premium seat areas to the main videoboards. So, our task was how could we use IPTV and use our mobile solution potentially to fix some of those to smaller pictures and give those fans not only access to see what’s on the videoboard but potentially switch over to other games.”

Scalability (LSU Tigers)

The LSU Tigers football program, also known as the Fighting Tigers, represents the Louisiana State University in college football.

Informed Wagner, “In the scalability deal, we worked with the LSU to primarily bring IPTV originally to their residence – the 102,321-capacity Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (US) and as they started to use that vision they started to grow. What started off as a couple of 100 displays now has morphed into 1400+displays that are spread out across eight different facilities on the campus. And the student-athletes while watching football, basketball, volleyball go through the same enriching experience which the swankiest big facilities offer.”

Reliability (Jacksonville Jaguars)

Working with the NFL team Jacksonville Jaguars, Wagner and his team was tasked with ensuring that the “VITEC system had to be reliable enough for some of the simplest things like communicating to the players when the next team meeting is or when is the lunch schedule all the way down to the minor details of creating 100+dynamic menus. All that stuff is something that was again being pushed out from a signage standpoint and we also ensured that on a gameday they are not sweating the minor details. We had to ensure that everything went off without a hitch whether in the Jaguars practice facility – the Miller Electric Center or in their 67,838-capacity EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida (US).”

Sum-up

Lessons Learned

Andy Wagner wrapped up by stating that, “The biggest lesson that we have learnt while working on different projects at VITEC is everything is constantly changing. Workflows – whether it is in the stadium or it is in the areas in the stadium back of house, we just have to continuously listen to what our customers’ needs are and try to figure out a way so that we can work as one with the team – be it the student-athletes or anybody else.”

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