Canada's premier theme park uses Omnivex software to manage digital signage system
Customer overview
Canada's Wonderland, located just outside Toronto, in Vaughan, Ontario is Canada's largest theme park. The park sits on 379 acres of land and boasts North America's greatest variety of roller coasters, with 13 in all, more than 50 rides in total, plus Splash works, a 20-acre water park, with 12 attractions and almost 2 million gallons of water.
Canada's Wonderland is owned and operated by Paramount Parks Inc. Paramount Parks is a leading developer and operator of world-class theme parks and location-based attractions, entertaining more than 13 million guests annually.
Paramount Parks is a unit of Viacom. Viacom is a leading global media company, with preeminent positions in broadcast and cable television, radio, outdoor advertising, and online properties.
Scope
Canada's Wonderland is constantly looking for ways to enhance their guest's experience. They identified the ride queue lines as a potential location for placing plasma screens and television monitors that would run entertaining content and reduce perceived wait times.
Doug McBoyle, Wonderland's Manager, Technical and Event Services was responsible for researching the available technologies, procurement, and implementation of the system. "We considered this concept years ago and discovered that the technology wasn't there yet.
We wanted a solution where we could manage the entire system from a central location, including updating the content and remotely managing the display devices throughout the park. Sending instant messages to selected screens was also a requirement," stated McBoyle.
"Our parent company, Viacom is a world leading content provider, so we are fortunate to have an abundance of great content at our disposal. Our sister company, Famous Players Media assembles the playlists and has introduced the idea of selling selected advertising on the screens. All of this placed an increased importance on the remote management and content updating," added McBoyle.
The initial implementation of the QTV system called for monitors at 15 rides throughout the park. These locations did not have network connectivity, so McBoyle proposed using the Motorola Canopy system for TCP/IP connectivity.
Omnivex solution
Canada's Wonderland chose Omnivex Corporation to provide a complete software solution for managing the overall program, including content, device and data management for instant messages.
The central management applications - Omnivex Display Director, Omnivex Control Director and Omnivex DataPipe Server and Client are situated in Wonderland's central control room. The Omnivex system was able to communicate wirelessly, using the Motorola Canopy system without any modifications to either system.
Omnivex Control is used to monitor the plasma screens and remote PCs as well as the network connectivity to each ride location. "The plasma screens are automatically turned on and off around our operating schedule and the player PCs are automatically rebooted in the middle of the night all using Omnivex Control. It is a very powerful application and we are looking at incorporating into the management of some of our existing audio visual systems", added McBoyle. "There are some significant cost savings we can realize by doing so."
Another valuable benefit of Omnivex Control is the ability to increase and decrease the brightness and contrast levels of the plasma screens. This function is scheduled within the software so that the levels are set higher during the day and are automatically turned down during the evening, thus increasing the life cycle of these valuable investments.
Content updates are done at the central control room using Omnivex Display Director. The content loop is over 1 hour long so the data transferred when updating is rather large, usually over 1.5 Gigabytes.
"With the Omnivex Display Director, we simply group the screens based on the content set they are showing, multi-select the players to be updated, and the software does the rest. I don't have to tie up a resource for hours when updating content", added McBoyle.
Having the ability to display instant messages is invaluable in a venue like Canada's Wonderland. There is a scrolling text zone across the bottom of the screens and these messages are updated using Omnivex DataPipe.
The Omnivex DataPipe Client can reside anywhere on the network and Wonderland personnel can type their messages into the allocated cells within DataPipe. As soon as they are done and hit the enter key, the messages instantly appear on the screen.
Omnivex DataPipe is also used to trigger content. In case of emergency, the regular programming can be interrupted from anywhere on the network using Omnivex DataPipe and an emergency message can be displayed.
Results
Customer surveys indicate that Canada's Wonderland guests are realizing shorter perceived waiting times for their favorite rides. Famous Players Media is having success in selling advertising on the network and generating revenue that will offset, if not recover the cost of the investment, while enabling Wonderland's sister companies to promote their content and products.
"Overall it's been a winning situation for all involved", remarked McBoyle, "operationally, my staff are able to manage this new network without the addition of any resources, primarily because of the powerful tools within the Omnivex software."
