They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and the newest Concrete Cowboy location in Frisco, TX, certainly lives up to that adage. It sits on the 91-acre campus of The Star, the world headquarters of the Dallas Cowboys.
To match the larger-than-life nature of the stadium and its surroundings, owner Rico Taylor wanted the feature displays in this prestigious Concrete Cowboy location to be grander than those at the restaurant's four other locations. Frisco wanted guests coming to The Star and Concrete Cowboy to be awed, and after having worked with system integrator XYZ Innovative Design, co-owned by Xavier VanHaasen and Abraxas Baker, on the entertainment systems at the other Concrete Cowboy locations, Taylor knew they had the expertise and vision to take those systems above and beyond while retaining their ease of use.
To give Concrete Cowboy Frisco’s guests a “wow factor” befitting the grandeur of the location, XYZ Innovative Design installed seven video walls—for a total of 53 ultra-slim-bezel LED displays—in addition to a Vivitek high-performance, large-venue laser projector. Three 3 x 3 video walls can each function as one big display, nine individual displays, or five individual displays with one 2 x 2 wall. A 24-display, four-sided video wall is centered over the main bar in a rectangular pattern, with a 3 x 3 configuration on each long side and a three-display column at each end.
Feeding the video walls are nine DirecTV receivers, an Apple TV digital media extender, music videos and clips from a video DJ, and a Vivitek NovoDS digital signage solution. When displaying digital signage, the rectangular bar wall can be used in a wraparound 8 x 3 configuration, creating the illusion of text and video scrolling around all the displays in unison.
For video distribution, XYZ Innovative Design installed 59 3G+ Ultra HD-over-IP platform transmitters and receivers from Just Add Power (J+P). All 53 displays and the projector are equipped with a small J+P receiver on the back, while sources are connected to J+P transmitters. Designed with a modular approach to video distribution in mind, the J+P platform allows for the easy addition of displays, sources, and even emerging formats in the future. As Concrete Cowboy’s needs change, it’s simply a matter of adding another receiver for each additional screen and a transmitter for each additional video source.
The transmitters and receivers are connected to two stacked Luxul XMS-7048P 52-port Gigabit managed switches and one Luxul ABR-4500 Gigabit routers, which control the J+P video sources and displays and distribute power over Ethernet to the J+P equipment, respectively. Employees control the switches and manage display content, in addition to the LED lighting systems and a Sonos CONNECT network audio player, using iPad devices running RTI’s RTiPanel app with a custom interface created by XYZ Innovative Design.
“From an integration perspective, we’ve used the Just Add Power/Luxul/RTI setup in complex systems for years because we know the equipment not only works very well together, but it’s a breeze to install—almost plug and play,” said Xavier VanHaasen, co-owner of XYZ Innovative Design. “After having success with this setup at other Concrete Cowboy locations, Rico asked us to take it up a notch at Concrete Cowboy Frisco. Because of the reliability, functionality, compatibility, and ease of installation, we were confident knowing we could build a high-quality, user-friendly system for Concrete Cowboy Frisco despite all the design challenges.”
“The Concrete Cowboy Frisco installation was much more elaborate than at the other locations, but the combination of Just Add Power with Luxul and RTI made it easy to do away with the complexity of a traditional matrix and deliver exactly what our client wanted—an elaborate system that was simple enough for just about anyone to use,” VanHaasen concluded. “Rico couldn’t be happier with how user-friendly the system is, and the bar’s guests couldn’t be more impressed by the spectacle.”
