16:9 Podcast with ANC COO On How ANC Uses Data To Program The Visual Experience In Built Environments
David: So,anybody if you meet at a cocktail party or a neighborhood party or whatever,says, what do you do? And more to the point, what does your company do? What doyou tell them? Because it’s quite involved.
Joe Occhipinti: The loaded question. Hopefully they have like two drinks like one in each hand or something. But basically, the ANC consists of four business lines, we like to call it. So, the kind of the moneymaker, the thing that gets the most press is LED Technology installations and that could be the things that catch everyone’s attention is obviously the large format LED displays but we’re really a technology integrator, throughout the entire venue.
We have installed IPTV, we’ve installed TVs, we’ve installed full control rooms, things of that nature. And those are the apps which have a large format. I keep going back to that but the main video center hungs and arenas, center field boards and baseball. We have a 280 foot display at Westfield World Trade Center.
Some of those marquee kinds of displays that you guys have heard and seen. Then we also have a Services department or our Venue Solutions we like to call it. After which all the pretty lights go up, we have to then maintain it and make sure it works for the life of that display or until the next renovation happens.
We actually have a fleet of operators out in the field who are going on pregame off days and making sure that modules are fixed and things are corrected. The proper content’s loaded into the software and they’re ready for the game presentation or for the next event or for the next change in scheduled content that’s going to happen in an out of home venue. We do a ton of that as well .
Then we also have our Ad Agency business. So that goes back to when Jerry Sr. started the whole business of TV visible signage, where we are acquiring inventory from teams that we work with or we go out and purchase it and then we also represent brands. So we’ll place a Discount Tire behind home plate at a specific market that they would like to see or a number of different advertisers that we’ve been working with for years that really want to have that TV visible signage in sports our ad agency is mostly on the sports side we do some and out of home but obviously those are kind of owned by the properties and things like that so it’s a little bit different.
Then what ties it all together is our software business. It’s called LiveSync now. It started as FasciaSoft, VisionSoft, vSoft and now it’s LiveSync and it’s all in the name. We specialize in syncing all your displays throughout the venue.
So, somewhere like Westfield World Trade and Fulton Center, they’re kind of one venue to put together, I think they have upwards of 75 or 80 displays between LCDs and LEDs and we have a constant stream of scheduled content. That’s looping every 10 or 20 seconds 24*7 and you can sit there and watch in one area 5 to 10 displays all changing at the same exact time, frame to frame, everything running pixel to pixel.
But the beautiful thing about LiveSync is what it does is wide open, open API, open source. If you want to play ball with everybody else that might be in the control room and we want to be able to trigger whatever else you might want to trigger with that piece of content.
If you wanted to run a home run graphic at Fenway park and you want to get your LED lights for a night game to flicker, you know when the guys around the bases. ANC Live Sync can trigger that software and it can all run synced and simultaneously. So, we really like to say that we can be the quarterback of the venue like somewhere like Wells Fargo Center. We trigger an IPTV program to have a goal animation run in sync through your suites over whatever TV broadcast is being shown.
So, we’ve really come a long way in that regard. The software has come. Leaps and bounds, probably even from six years ago when you talk to Mark and we’re really proud of the software that he’s developed with his team.
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