This is pretty amazing – an 80-foot, 13K, fine-pitch LED video wall running custom ambient content in the lobby of the new Netflix building in LA.
Vast video walls in lobbies is not all that uncommon anymore among well-heeled companies and property owners, but the content in many to most of those cases is meant to please and entertain and engage. In the Netflix lobby, the content puts visitors on the sets of some of the online streaming network’s most popular and iconic shows.
Guests walk in and find themselves in the jungle scenes of Narcos or behind bars in the women’s ward of Orange Is The New Black. Rather than doing the predictable by running trailers or clips from the shows, the 1.9mm LED wall shows mostly static scenes with only subtle movements and supporting audio.
It’s pretty fantastic, and something I now want badly to get out to LA to see some time.
The technology set-up is all the work of the NY and LA-based D3, which sells a range of LEDs but also a very high-end server and software that drives these kinds of experiences. The company has been quietly building up an impressive book of business, a lot of which they can’t formally talk about.
I got a briefing on the Netflix project from the company, which had a small booth last week at DSE. CTO Meric Adriansen gave me the technical rundown, but rather than trying to write that up accurately, here’s what the case study says:
To appropriately support a display of this magnitude, D3 engineered the LED display mounting system, including the base wall below the display. A 1.9mm display installed in a 12’h x 80’w wall with double glass doors cutout and a 90 degree angle required precise tolerances to avoid alignment issues during installation and visible seams after. D3’s engineers designed a base wall and mounting solution from commercially available materials to minimize cost, but with alignment precision to fractions of a millimeter.
Finally, the client wanted an easy-to-use User Interface from which the receptionist could control some of the more commonly used features, like interrupting scheduled playlists to quickly welcome new high-profile guests, edit content schedules, pause playback and adjust volume and brightness.
Solutions
Starting with an easy-to-use User Interface for remote control of common features, and using less than one rack of server space, D3’s AEPIMS Pro was the only single-box device on market with the capability to control this entire A/V system.
- 23,000,000 pixels (46,000,000 with 2nd Layer)
- 13K layered motion graphics at native resolution
- 12’ x 80’ state of the art 1.9mm LED display
- 8k projection image mapped flawlessly onto 110 individual devices
- Audio playing autonomously or along with video
To drive all of these features, comparable competitive solutions would have cost substantially more money, generated inferior image quality and taken up far more precious server room space. D3 tapped their years of evolutionary engineering and new product development to develop this intricate technological solution from their commercially available 100,000,000 pixel control system.
In conjunction with world-class software engineering, D3’s in-house structural engineers successfully addressed all the physical challenges this installation posed. The same engineering team that designed the modules and final display also designed the structural base wall and display supports. This continuity of design and development insured that the structural integrity of the mounting structure perfectly aligned with the physical characteristics of the display modules. Clean, precise seams, cutouts and angles insure that impeccably displayed video content will be viewed as intended by Mirada, the award-winning studio chosen by Netflix to develop the amazing content being displayed.
Dave Haynes is the founder and editor of Sixteen:Nine, an online publication that has followed the digital signage industry for some 14 years. Dave does strategic advisory consulting work for many end-users and vendors, and also writes for many of them. He’s based near Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Canada’s east coast.
