Artistic Video Walls Welcome Tampa Bay Lightning Fans to Amalie Arena

An important goal of the 2015-16 upgrades was ensuring a premier fan experience. The management team at Amalie Arena wanted to make sure that everyone who came to the arena had an exciting and unforgettable time in a one-of-a-kind venue. Part of that vision was an upgrade to the fans' digital experience. The team created conceptual renderings for some mosaic-style video walls--unique artistic layouts they wanted to deploy in key points around the arena. They wanted to turn standard video walls into pieces of art to showcase stunning views of the city and other local content, all of it in 4k UHD resolution.

Unfortunately, all the solutions the team reviewed that enabled mosaic-style video walls were either too expensive or limited in their capabilities, and for a time it looked like there was a risk they wouldn't be able to complete the project.

After consulting with the team at Amalie Arena, Sean Miller, Director of Technical Operations from Pro Sound, a Florida based AV Integrator that has worked in sports venues across the United States, recommended Userful Network Video Wall. The solution addresses all the arena's requirements: A cost-effective and flexible solution that allows users to create non-traditional, artistic wall layouts, with any angle rotation of individual displays. It allows displays to be set anywhere on the image canvas ad of course supports Ultra HD 4k content. Userful is unique in that it turns a standard Core i7 PC into a video wall controller that connects to zero client devices through the network, one on each screen. Userful can display video, real-time content feeds, HTML5 and 3D graphics with very high performance. After a product demonstration that wowed the Amalie Arena team, Pro Sound proceeded with the full installation.

“One of the things we like best about Userful, besides being able to fulfill all the unique requirements of this project, is that it's a very simple solution,” said Miller, who led the deployment of the art walls, “the learning curve was about 5-10 minutes. Userful kept offering technical support, but it wasn't necessary. It's a very easy platform to use.”

Miller and the Pro Sound team deployed a total of 32 displays, a mix of 55-inch displays and 22-inch square displays, all from Samsung. The displays are distributed in 4 video walls, all strategically located throughout the arena. Each video wall is powered by a standard Core i7 PC, for better performance.

"One of the things we like best about Userful, besides being able to fulfill all the unique requirements of this project, is that it's a very simple solution. The learning curve was about 5 to 10 minutes. Userful kept offering technical support, but it wasn't necessary. It's a very easy platform to use"

The new video walls are a hit. They display stunning 4k content in such a unique way that visitors constantly stop to look at them. The content is frequently updated which is easy to do with Userful. The ease of use of the solution makes day to day tasks more efficient. "The product's been great," says John Franzone, VP Game Presentation. "Userful allowed us to implement these uniquely shaped video walls to enhance the club and suite level of the Amalie Arena. We were able to go live quickly by virtue of its configuration console [Userful Control Center]. The Userful platform definitely took our headaches away by its means of mapping content for the video mosaics. Now when we create new content, we know the system will support it."