Sports & Entertainment Lobby Communication System
Customer: Chelsea Piers Sports & Entertainment Complex
New York City
Goal: Enhance the ability to locate meeting rooms and build awareness of
the property’s bar & restaurant
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.