Features
Video Technology: SoFi Stadium’s Videoboard A Feast For The Senses
Video Technology
SoFi Stadium’s videoboard is a feast for the senses
(Courtesy SoFi Stadium) – Oculus SoFi Stadium
“I’ll tell you exactly when,” said Skarpi Hedinsson, SoFi Stadium’s chief technology officer, upon being asked when the venue’s standout technological marvel, its torqued center-hung videoboard, first blew his mind. “It was our first game, ‘Sunday Night Football,’ Rams versus Dallas. I went to a section of the stadium and just sat down. I said, ‘OK, I’m just going to be a fan and watch football for a quarter and take it all in.’ It was absolutely stunning. You have the action on the field, the sound, the graphics — it attacked the senses, it was a feast.”
The smorgasbord videoboard, designed by stadium architect HKS with an audio system created by WJHW, is the largest videoboard ever created in sports at 2.2 million pounds and 70,000 square feet of digital LED by Samsung. It also features 260 speakers with the wattage equivalency of 1,500 home theaters and with 5G antennas that add limitless possibilities.
“It’s really endless, Hedinsson said. “We have 80 million pixels on the board and can program each and every one of them. We look at the surface of the videoboard as a blank canvas and we can do whatever we think is innovative, interesting to fans and how we tell the story for our teams and our sponsors.”
Recently, the videoboard was transformed into something beloved by most Americans: a sport bar. “Our brilliant production team figured out we can present every single early game on the videoboard by basically segmenting it,” Hedinsson said. “We have the ability to take in 20 simultaneous games and put them up on the videoboard. The thinking is that when we open early doors to the stadium, fans can pile in, take a seat, watch football and enjoy the stadium and concessions. The experience is not very different from sitting in your living room.”
But there are higher purposes, too, with the videoboard’s sonic and visual capabilities. “We have a number of Van Halen fans on staff,” Hedinsson said. “When Eddie Van Halen passed, we created a tribute. We textured the entire board with Eddie Van Halen’s trademark graphic look with the red and the stripes and played his music and posted it on social media. It gave you goosebumps.”