Hearst Live - Technical Revisit

A year and half ago, in September of 2016, Activate The Space completed one its most complex projects ever. Spanning over 128' wide x 12' High on the corner of 57th and 8th Ave, in NYC, Hearst Live was conceived and executed in collaboration with Hearst Communications and Code & Theory.

The complex LED design concept called for the massive LED walls to mimic the iconic Hearst tower—designed by the renown architect Norman Foster.

The jagged glass tower on top of the historic Hearst Building, received the 2006 Emporis Skyscraper Award citing it as the best skyscraper in the world completed that year.

With obvious deference and reverence to the tower's design, the LED needed to be designed in such a fashion as to adhere to as much of the glass tower design as possible. This called for the walls to be angled in (2) directions creating a series of compound angles with no greater than 2.5mm between each compound section.

Each side of the LED walls required ATS to adhere to a tolerance of 2.5mm over the span of 60', which in of itself was no small matter.

The LED while challenging, proved to be fairly straight forward from a design standpoint, but execution was crucial to the final product. For more than a year of testing and re-designing, Mock-ups were built and taken down and re-built to test the design execution as well as the content.

Through this process several changes were made to meet the high standards of the Hearst Communications Team and as new ideas of how to use the walls emerged, the focus shifted to the design of the Media Headend that was needed to drive the content to this massive LED corner in NYC.

The Initial Media Headend Design

The initial design of the Media Headend had to encompass almost anything you can conceive of as Media. After all Hearst is a major media company with properties that cover Television, Newspapers, Magazines and the Web.

Everything from HD Video. Static Image to Live Streaming TV and Social Media had to be encompassed and connected to a Content Management Systems (CMS) that Hearst was already using.

The System that ATS designed in many aspects was doing things never achieved before for an LED Wall and to a large degree because of changes in scope and direction, evolved into a behemoth that ultimately led to many "glue" boxes and conversions that negatively affected the overall performance standards of Activate The Space in all of its Headend designs.

We could do better

In mid 2017, Chris Pelzar, CEO of ATS and Rod Revilock, ATS VP of Projects and Technology undertook a huge task of re-designing the Hearst Live Media Headend. During the development of Hearst Live and as new things kept being added and or changed, it became too easy to just add an additional box here and there to solve a problem.

"The problem as I saw it, while adding a box to solve one problem, another problem may arise. This was lazy engineering and development on ATS's part and I was furious about it. As such we made changes to our Design Criteria, Staff and Technical Review Process" Chris Pelzar CEO, Activate The Space.

We approached Hearst with our ideas and goals and accepted our responsibility that the current Media Headend was not up to ATS's standards. Chris Pelzar, CEO, ATS

We set out certain goals in the re-design. Simpler Design, Higher Reliability, More Capability. We took the approach of "knowing what we know now" and what other tools regardless of cost could help us achieve the re-design goals as laid out in our criteria.

Through the process we were able to eliminate 90% of "glue" boxes and convertors, improve the redundant aspect of the systems by using more powerful 4K LED processors and changed out some core computer interfaces.

We eliminated 65% of the rack space previously used and created a more powerful, more reliable and easier to maintain Headend System. All of this was done at no additional cost to Hearst Communications.

New Capabilities were added

Previewing Content on multiple walls this size was nearly impossible. Multiple media feeds are sent to the LED walls and then stitched together via the LED Processors. You could look at each Media piece, but there was no way to see the entirety of the Media Design by Hearst Creative as it would look across all of the walls, nor was there a way to look at what was currently playing on the walls for a critical eye. Outside cameras were not a viable solution for a wall this size nor could they provide the detail Hearst Creative was looking for.

To solve this problem, Brad Eisenhaure, President of Activate The Space set out with the ATS team to develop a cloud based steaming workflow that would capture all of the individual media components and play them back on a screen inside of the Hearst Creative Team offices with the content playing live as laid out on the walls as built, compound angles and all.

Hearst Live today

After a year and a half of operation, Hearst Live remains one of our most important projects to date in our 12 year history. Hearst Live challenged our Technical Engineering, Field Project Execution, Media Headend Design and Application Development in more ways than any other project ATS has completed.

Activate The Space manages the technical operations for Hearst Communications for Hearst Live and we continue to develop and improve the Hearst Live systems to better enable content production and trouble free operation of the these LED Walls. We are extremely proud of the result of all of the efforts put into this project from all parties involved and so very honored to have been chosen for this landmark building and the piece we were fortunate enough to add to it on the corner of 57th and 8th Ave. in NYC.

For more information:

www.activatethespace.com or Call 1-800-306-0620