In building Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta, the ownership of the NFL’s Falcons and MLS’s Atlanta United understood the comfort of a living room couch in front of a flat-screen television and endeavored to compete with that appealing proposition.
Certainly no one’s home theater can compete with the stunning visual arrays at Mercedes-Benz, which include the largest LED display in sports (a 1,075-foot-long, 58-foot high, 360-degree Halo video board with some 63,000 square feet of video real estate) and a 101-foot, four-sided video column. In fact, there is no static or concrete signage anywhere in the building.
Eighteen hundred wireless access points and nearly 4,000 miles of fiber optic cables will power every fan’s second-screen experience, even if they all stream video. Despite the enormous technological infrastructure, integrated by IBM, the venue became the first North American professional sports stadium to receive a LEED Platinum certification for environmental friendliness.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which also has a novel eight-panel retractable roof, has hosted the SEC championship and is already slated to be the venue for January’s college football national title game, the February 2019 Super Bowl and the 2020 NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s Final Four.
“We were shooting for the stars from the very beginning — not just to be the next best, but to redefine the benchmark,” Steve Cannon, CEO of the Falcons’ parent company, told SportTechie.
The nominees for the SportTechie Award for Most Innovative Venue were: