Case-Study_Air-Canada
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Air Canada Centre Private Cable System Page 1
Case Study
Air Canada Centre
Private Cable System
There are over 300 flat panel TVs in the Air Canada Centre, and Dwayne Brown wanted to upgrade them
all… but not by replacing them. Instead, he wanted to do the one thing guaranteed to make them look
better: feed them HD video.
Air Canada Centre is the home to the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team and the NBA’s Toronto
Raptors, and Mr. Brown is the Director of Venue Services. The flat panel HDTVs he was targeting are in
the common areas, luxury suites, meeting rooms, and dressings rooms; they’re everywhere, and before
the upgrade they received standard definition video over a coax cabling network installed by Rogers
Cable TV. The goal of the upgrade was to deliver to the sets live in‐arena game footage in HD. The trick,
as Brown saw it, would be to send that HD video to the TVs without having to run new cables to each of
the sets. Rewiring would be an enormous task in a facility that large.
As he searched for solutions, he got a suggestion from Westbury National Show Systems, a leading
entertainment technology company—they recommended ZvBoxes. These HD encoder/RF modulators
are designed to turn any HD video source into an HDTV channel and broadcast it over the existing coax
network to all connected HDTVs—eliminating the job of rewiring. The new channel would simply be
tuned in by the digital cable (QAM) tuners built into each HDTV.
Brown had some experience with HD encoder/RF modulators in the
$10k to $15k range, and was surprised to find that the ZvPro 250 had an
MSRP of just $2499. When asked why he ultimately chose ZvBoxes, he
said, “It was a combination of the price, the fact that they were
recommended to me by Westbury National, and my experience with a
demo/loaner unit provided in advance.”
Brown did the installation himself. The existing Rogers Cable TV system
is a two‐trunk cable system, with four analog modulators accepting
source inputs using composite video connections. The ZvPro 250
became the fifth modulator; it features component video and VGA
video inputs, as well as digital and analog audio inputs. Output is an
HDTV cable channel through a coaxial cable “F” connection.
Since the live game feed is in HD/SDI form, Brown first ran it through an
HD/SDI‐to‐component converter (Aja FS/1 ) to deliver component video
connections to the ZvBox. The ZvBox’s coax output connects to an
existing RF combiner, which allows the Zv channel to run out to the flat
panel HDTVs over the existing coax network.
Retail store head‐end.
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Air Canada Centre Private Cable System Page 2
Case Study
When asked what challenges he faced, Mr. Brown said, “The output of the ZvBox was low relative to the
other sources, so at first I had difficulty receiving the Zv channel at all the displays. The fix was to add a
25dBmV distribution amp to the output of the ZvBox, and that solved the problems.”
Final system tweaking was accomplished by setting the encoding rate and frame rate for the ZvPro
250’s, using ZeeVee software. Brown recommends that first time users familiarize themselves early on
with the various configuration settings, as they allow fine‐tuning of picture quality as well as selection of
a broadcast channel, signal strength, and even naming of the new ZvBox channel.
With the initial installation working well, Brown bought two more ZvPro 250s to distribute HD video in
the company’s retail store across the street from the arena. A mix of DVD players and cable boxes make
up the sources in the store; the sources are run through a matrix switch and then into the ZvPros for
distribution over the coax network in the store.
With the last of the 300+ flat panel TVs receiving HD video, the system upgrade Mr. Brown set out to
achieve was complete—no rewiring required.
