Userful Helps UK’s iTV Group Impress Visitors and Executives

Artistic video wall mosiac displaying show posters, shows, and social media content at the itv Group Marketing office

About The Project

Unique artistic video wall is displayed prominently in the British giant’s HQ new reception area.

The Challenge

ITV was searching for a dynamic and striking video wall that would move away from the standard rectangular grid array. As a business, they have a lot of social media content, which lends itself to portrait displays, so a mix of screen orientations would be required.

Another key requirement for the project was that the video wall system had to be simple and easy to use, with a decent GUI and small in terms of server rack space. They had a lot of equipment being installed in their new server room and could not afford a great deal of rack space for the media wall equipment.

As the centrepiece of their new reception area, the video wall had to have impact and wow factor. The audience can be anyone from ITV talent to our CEO but on a day to day basis its the ITV Group Marketing teams based at Grays Inn Road, London

The Solution

Ryan Norman, ITV Creative’s Head of Post Productions and Operations Support, approached Scan Computers, a leading system integrator in the UK—and Userful’s partner—to deliver a solution to their challenge.

The team at Scan Computers quickly identified that the only solution that would be able to fulfil all the requirements of the project—unique video wall layout, small footprint, easy to install and use and supporting various types of content sources— was the Userful Visual Networking Platform.

A single server located in the server room, which according to Norman “is really compact for what it does” powers the 5-display artistic video wall—combining both portrait and landscape configurations—at the reception area, with a very streamlined finish (thanks to Userful’s software-based AV-over-IP approach).

The screens primarily showcase ITV Creative content, promotional material that the ITV Creative team produces to market ITV programming. This ranges from social media stills and gifs through to 60 sec commercials and video billboard content for upcoming shows.

Userful’s greatest benefit so far has been that it has helped us win some very valuable accounts because it is so visually impressive to prospects.

The Result

Within weeks of the wall being installed the team was already coming up with new and exciting content and ways to use it— including ITV Pride, World Cup and Love Island ‘takeover’ days.

Mr. Norman was very impressed with the whole process and the result, “The system is robust and extremely easy to manage. It just works. The setup and config of the screens is also very straightforward.

The impact of the video wall has been very positive, according to Norman, “everyone loves it. It catches the eye and interest of people passing by and provides a brilliant insight into the breadth of work we deliver”