Kent County Cricket Club is streaming live televised and customised video content to more than 40 networked displays at its recently re-developed pavilion and corporate hospitality centre, following the installation of Cabletime’s Cabletime’s MediaStar and MediaManager IPTV solutions.
Housed at The Spitfire Ground, St Lawrence in Canterbury, the club – which is in the top flight of English cricket – underwent a £9 million redevelopment to create a major conference venue. This not only hosts international cricket matches but is also used for a wide range of corporate events. The roll-out of the MediaStar solution, which incorporates digital media encoders and decoders, plus a number of DVB-T LAN-Casters, is enabling the club to distribute and manage content across multiple screens on its network and has had a significant effect on the Club’s ability to keep visitors informed and entertained.
“We manage a variety of different streams in different parts of the club to over 40 screens,” explained Pat Mellsop, commercial director at Kent County Cricket Club. “If cricket is being televised live, particularly if our own match is being broadcast, we will stream this widely across the ground; but we also show other matches live; we create presentations on Powerpoint and convert them to video files and we also use pre-recorded video content and information on upcoming events in specific corporate suites.”
Kent Cricket has been able to perfect its control of live and recorded content since installing the MediaStar MediaManager System Control Software, to such an extent that it has now become part of the package that it offers to sponsors.
“MediaManager was the game-changer for us in terms of getting real commercial benefit out of the MediaStar system,” continued Mellsop. “We schedule our content to have the right impact at the right time and reach the right audience – just when they are most receptive, and this knowledge is very advantageous to sponsoring clients.”
Also being used by Kent Cricket is the MediaStar ticker function, with RSS feeds that show live scores from matches taking place at other grounds, plus welcome messages and the current time.
