Football LED software
The match-day timeline.
Warm-up, line-ups, kick-off, the rotations, added time, half-time. What the software has to do at each point, and what goes wrong when it cannot.
Match day, step by stepLED boarding software
LED boarding software drives the advertising boards around a pitch: the perimeter run, the fascia above the stand, the ribbon under the upper tier. This is what that job actually involves, what separates one product from another, and how USM Boarding does it.
The job
An LED perimeter is not a screen in the sense a television is. It is a long, thin, physically awkward surface, often 19584 pixels wide and 144 high, built from cabinets that were installed by different people in different years and do not all have the same pixel pitch. Artwork arrives from a sponsor agency at whatever size that agency felt like exporting. Something has to get one onto the other, at the right moment, without anybody in the stand seeing the seam.
That is the whole job, and it splits into four: lay the artwork onto the wall, queue it, fire it at the right second, and afterwards prove it ran. A product can be excellent at one of those and poor at the next, which is why demonstrations look alike and match days do not.
The fifth thing, the one nobody asks about until it happens, is what the system does when the playout PC dies at 20:41 with a sponsor contract still running.
Before you buy
Every product in this market demos well. These are the questions that separate them, and any vendor should let you try all five on your own wall with your own artwork.
How USM works
The model is deliberately small. An operator who understands these four can run a fixture, and there is nothing else to learn before they can.
The artwork as the agency delivered it. A picture or a video file, imported once.
That artwork laid onto the wall: scaled, cropped, spanned across panels, saved and reusable next week.
A queue of sequences for one screen. The rundown the operator watches during the match.
Which playlist runs on which wall. One key press coordinates several screens at once, in sync, on a single frame.
Measured, not claimed
The same thing, six names
The trade has never agreed on a word. In Belgium and the Netherlands it is boarding. In Germany it is Bandenwerbung and the software is Bandensoftware. In the United Kingdom it is often hoardings or perimeter advertising, in the United States ribbon boards and fascia. Agencies say banners; broadcast says the perimeter.
They all describe the same surface, and the software problem is identical in each: a long strip of LED, sponsor artwork that does not fit it, and a rotation that has to hit its second. If you arrived here searching for one of those words, this page is about the thing you meant.
What differs by market is the contract behind it. UEFA fixtures bring their own rules about redundancy and about what may appear. Domestic leagues bring their own about how long each sponsor holds the wall. Both come back to the same two capabilities: a backup that genuinely takes over, and a log a rights holder will accept.
Read next
The match-day timeline.
Warm-up, line-ups, kick-off, the rotations, added time, half-time. What the software has to do at each point, and what goes wrong when it cannot.
Match day, step by stepWhat the sponsor is owed.
Every banner that reached the wall, to a hundredth of a second, exported as a report an agency can audit rather than a screenshot they have to trust.
How the log worksIs it us or the wall?
USM reads the NovaStar processors behind the boards, so when part of the perimeter goes dark you know within seconds which side of the DVI cable the fault is on.
See LED monitoringWho else does this.
Cortex Cast, LEDVIZ, DELTA-stadium, LDSperimetral and us, with what each one is genuinely good at and who should pick which.
Compare the optionsSend us the geometry of your perimeter and a sponsor file that has given you trouble. We will tell you what it takes to get it on the boards, and whether we are the right answer for you.