Los Angeles International Airport
The Customer
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is one of the busiest international airports in the world, serving more than 63 million passengers annually. With such a staggering amount of foot traffic, it's imperative that the airport runs smoothly at all times and that passengers have up-to-the-minute information regarding their flights.
To help facilitate this, LAX recently opened the new Tom Bradley International Terminal, giving passengers a unique travel experience with new video walls called the Integrated Environmental Media System (IEMS). A massive engineering feat, the IEMS project was commissioned by Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) and took over two years to create. This dazzling display opened in September 2013 and pro-vides passengers with a host of entertainment and information.
The Challenge
Massive in size, the IEMS is located in the 150,000-square-foot Antonio Villaraigosa Pavilion (Great Hall). It consists of seven media features, including Welcome and Bon Voyage walls, a four-sided Time Tower, a Destination Board, a Story Board and two portals that usher passengers to their departure gates. The seven media features boast a mix of cutting-edge hardware such as high-resolution Daktronics LED screens and tiles, as well as LCD monitors from Planar. Grass Valley provided seven K2 Summit transmission servers, which act as one of the main playback systems within the IEMS. The entire system is controlled by Medialon Manager control software, which triggers the K2 Summits, as well as additional content delivery hardware from Moment Factory's X-Agora media engines.
The Grass Valley Solution
Within the IEMS, seven K2 Summit transmission systems with redundant servers and a SAN for video content storage. The outputs are then sent to an HD/SDI matrix switcher and then get processed for display on the LED features.
"This architecture allows us to use the K2 Summits as a dynamic bank of playback channels, which we can route anywhere in the system by means of the matrix switcher. It's a really flexible, reliable setup, which is crucial to the smooth running of a 24/7/365 operation," explained Alan Anderson, Co-Founder of Smart Monkeys, Inc.