Home Of Montreal Canadiens Expands To 100s Of Digital Signs Around Venue

November 29, 2016 by Dave Haynes

Here’s a look inside one of pro hockey’s most famed venues, the Bell Centre in Montreal – home to the Montreal Canadiens.

The club now has 100s of digital screens around the venue, all running off Navori Labs QL Professional digital signage engine. The network runs messaging and targeted advertising across concourse displays, concession menu boards, and video walls for experiential signage. It also drives a massive LCD display at the main venue entrance.

Says a press release:

“I wanted a digital signage solution that could live on our central network but remain operationally independent from the IT department,” says Pierre-Eric Belzile, vice president of information technologies and communications, Montreal Canadiens hockey club, evenko, L’Équipe Spectra. “It needed to support multiple users with multiple different layers of access, support targeted playout by display, and leverage a variety of media players.”

The network does targeted and sync’d messaging around the venue, and runs off a blend of Windows and Android players. One interesting aspect of the installation is live messaging, tied to iPads:

During many events, Bell Centre employees walk the concourse with iPads to offer 50/50 raffles. The iPads are connected to a common Avaya network that hosts Navori and other IT and AV systems, including Matrox encoders and decoders that extend Navori content distribution over the network. As employees enter new information into the iPads, Navori QL automatically updates the raffle information, including winners, on various displays every 15 seconds.

The Navori players also feed audio related to event, security and other important visitor information to callers; as well as to standalone sound systems at the box office and around the concourse. That cut out the need to purchase a separate audio play-out system.