Choosing

Every one of them demos well.

There are perhaps a dozen products in the world that put sponsor advertising on stadium LED perimeter boards, and on a projector in a meeting room they look alike. These are the questions that separate them on a match night, and what to make any vendor prove on your own wall before you sign.

Talk to us What the software has to do

First, the words

Perimeter advertising software, and five other names for it.

The category has never agreed what it is called. Vendors sell perimeter advertising software, perimeter digital signage software, stadium LED playout, LED content management for live events, and digital perimeter systems. In Germany it is Bandensoftware. In Belgium and the Netherlands it is boarding. In the United Kingdom it is hoardings or the perimeter, in the United States ribbon boards and fascia.

They describe one job: a long, thin, physically awkward LED surface, sponsor artwork that does not fit it, and a rotation that has to hit its second. If you arrived here typing any of those phrases, this page is about the thing you meant.

The words matter for one practical reason. A vendor who calls it digital signage is usually selling you a system built for shopping centres and airports with a stadium mode bolted on. A vendor who calls it playout is selling you something built for a clock, a rundown and a live show. Those are different products, and only one of them has to survive added time.

On the demo

Six questions, and make them show you.

Any vendor worth buying from will let you try all six on your own wall with your own artwork. The ones who will not are telling you something.

Give it your worst sponsor file. The JPEG at the wrong aspect ratio, on a run whose cabinets are not all the same pitch. Count the clicks until it is on the wall and looks right, and note who had to be in the room to do it.
Pull the network cable out of the main PC, mid-demo. Then watch what happens and, more importantly, watch whether anybody had to decide. A backup that needs a person to notice is a spare machine, not redundancy.
Ask where content is prepared. At the venue by the operator, or off-site in a browser by the people who own the sponsor relationships. This single answer rules half the market in or out for you, and it decides whether a late change is a phone call or a login.
Ask for last week’s report. Not a screenshot: the file a sponsor would accept. There are three different things sold as reporting, and they are not interchangeable. See below.
Ask who tells you the wall is broken. Most of this market stops at the video output. Ask what happens when a row of cabinets dies at 20:41, and who is supposed to notice.
Ask what a second screen costs, and a second PC. Grounds grow a fascia or a ribbon. Whether that is a licence change or a new quote tells you what the next three years look like.

The real fork in the road

Transform it live, or prepare it first.

Underneath the feature lists, these products split into two camps, and the split explains most of what you will notice in a demo.

One camp transforms content live. You drop artwork into a zone, the software scales and tiles it as it plays, colour is graded on the fly, and an operator can nudge it mid-rotation. It is flexible, it suits a room where somebody is working during the show, and it asks more of the machine doing it.

The other camp, which is where USM sits, prepares content against the wall’s real geometry before it airs. A sequence is fitted once and reused all season. Playout is then cheap and predictable on ordinary hardware, and a change is something you prepare rather than something you nudge. We think that is the right trade for a fixture that has to be identical to the rundown, and we are clear that it is a trade.

Neither is better in the abstract. Ask which one you are being shown, because the demo will not tell you: both look effortless when the artwork was made for the wall.

The word that hides three products

Three things are sold as "reporting".

A rundown: The list of what was meant to run, written before the match. It knows nothing about the goal that interrupted a rotation or the screen that went dark.
A playout log: What the software actually put on the wall, recorded as it happened. This is what an agency can audit. USM records it to a hundredth of a second, per screen, and exports the fixture as PDF or Excel.
Exposure measurement: How much of it was visible on the broadcast, measured from the television picture by a third party. A different and useful thing, sold by different companies, and not a substitute for either of the above.
What to ask for: Which of the three you are being shown, and whether the second one survives a failover mid-match.

And us

Where USM Boarding is the wrong answer.

If one system has to drive the big screen, the ribbons, the scoreboard and the house lighting, we are not that system. Our big-screen product is in development and not on sale, and a venue-wide media system from a broadcast company will cover ground we do not.

If your perimeter is a patchwork of different pixel pitches that has to be corrected live, there is software built specifically for that, and it does it better than we do today.

If your show is run from a lighting desk and you expect the perimeter to be a fixture on that network, ask us about it before you assume: we drive cues, a Stream Deck and an HTTP API rather than DMX and Art-Net.

What we would put on our side of the scale: the fixture is built in a browser so it does not need anybody at the ground, the failover happens without a person, the proof-of-play log is built for an auditor rather than a screenshot, the wall itself is monitored down to the cabinet, and the price is on the website.

And the part no page can argue you into: USM runs the perimeter at Aberdeen FC, Wrexham, Heerenveen, Anderlecht, OH Leuven and Ludogorets. Ask us to put you on the phone with one of them.

Bring us the awkward one.

Send us your perimeter geometry and the sponsor file that has given you the most trouble this season. We will show you exactly what USM does with it, and if the honest answer is that another approach suits your ground better, we will say so.

Talk to us