Imagine’s Infocaster Makes Super Bowl Debut

Super Bowl 50 marked the first time that the Infocaster digital-signage software and hardware system from Imagine Communications drove game video and digital advertising to more than 2,200 monitors throughout Levi’s Stadium. Joe Ashba, Imagine Communications’ solutions engineer, was on hand to oversee operations for the big game, capping off a season-long effort with Levi’s Stadium that began with the installation of the system prior to the 2015 season.

Imagine's Joe Ashba was on hand at Super Bowl 50 to make sure Infocaster's Super Bowl debut went off without a hitch.

Imagine’s Joe Ashba was on hand at Super Bowl 50 to make sure Infocaster’s Super Bowl debut went off without a hitch.

“It was a mad scramble to get everything done in time, and the quality is outstanding as the San Francisco 49ers have done some really fascinating things with it throughout the season,” says Ashba. “For every client, there is always the next idea they want to accomplish, and part of the fun is trying to figure out how to do it.”

The 49ers, for example, wanted to have the statistics in the L-bar change depending on what advertisement was on the screen.

The Imagine Communications system also include Imagine Selenio encoding for in-house channels, data connectivity to the Daktronics All Sport character generator, data connectivity to the NFL’s GSIS stats system, connectivity to the VenueSmart TV system, multiple control surfaces, and content delivery to all the concourses, suites, press box, and back-of-house operations.

The Infocaster system includes a number of elements, including a Player, which delivers the content; a Creator, which can be used to build and edit digital-signage projects; a Manager, handling permissions and scheduling; and a Traffic system, which manages advanced scheduling and placement of advertising and promotional content to multipoint digital-signage networks.

“The Infocaster system continues to evolve. Our software-development team is great in seeing an actionable item and taking it to the next level,” Ashba points out. “We recently built in the support of the All Sport system, and our clock is accurate to the frame with the game clock, but, when you encode for the TV signal, it adds a second of latency. So the engineers had to figure out how to basically wind the clock back a second to match the game action. That’s a cool feature.”

 

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