The event solutions team from Swisscom supplied venue-wide digital signage located throughout public areas of the Postfinance Arena at the recently held European Figure Skating Championships BERN 2011. The digital signage system was powered using SpinetiX HMP hyper media players supplied by John Lay in Switzerland.

Opened by Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the event welcomed thousands of skating enthusiasts from every corner of the globe. The hyper media players streamed live television, television highlights and programme content as well as live tickers with the latest news and sponsor information. The content was delivered to over 100 screens throughout the venue and in several satellite hotels in Berne that hosted the skating families.

Swisscom used a mix of technologies for feeding the content to the screens — from low-bandwidth GPRS routers up to DVB-T.

Arist Volger, project manager of the business development team at Swisscom, explains why SpinetiX was used: “We wanted spectators and visitors to have up to the minute broadcast information whilst attending the event. The combination of tickers, live broadcast footage and information managed through the SpinetiX hyper media player made this possible. It was crucial for us to enable the local organisation committee to feed the content fully on their own — with minimal training and support requirements from ourselves. Our specific integration work made it possible to work with standard tools for feeding the content directly to the screens. The system was designed to be failsafe — the organisation committee and our Swisscom team were delighted with the results.”

Serge Konter, marketing manager, SpinetiX adds: “This is an outstanding example of how Swisscom are putting our hyper media player through its paces. It truly demonstrates how easily it is to deploy for this type of large-scale international event. The staff on the ground don’t even have to be have specialist skills to update the content live. The players are also flexible enough to have video streaming and the system is failsafe. For large-scale digital signage at events, why go further than SpinetiX?”