Hockey fans follow the action on the large screens at Co-op Place during a Medicine Hat Tigers game.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
The ice has been installed once again at Co-op Place, which can only mean one thing: summer is almost over, and a new season of entertainment is almost upon us.
One visit to a Medicine Hat Tigers hockey game, or a concert or other special event, is enough to appreciate the complexity of hosting events at a venue of that size. However, the sheer scale of the underlying technology and infrastructure is perhaps even more impressive.
When talking about technology at Co-op Place, the obvious place to start is with the scoreboard hanging above centre ice. Measuring 18 feet tall and 26 feet wide, it contains over 1,000 individual LED panels among its various displays. In fact, if one enormous screen was assembled out of all the LED panels at Co-op Place, the result would be a video wall measuring 44 feet wide and 25 feet tall!
The infrastructure required to run the various technologies throughout the building is truly immense. Because of the long distances involved, video signals need to be transmitted over fibre-optic cables (as opposed to typical copper cables).
In total, more than nine kilometres of fibre-optic cable runs throughout the building – that’s enough to reach from one end of Medicine Hat to the other along the Trans-Canada Highway!
As incredible as that is, there is even more audio signal cable distributed throughout the venue. In the control room alone, there is almost 6 kilometres of audio and video cable just to interconnect all the equipment – in a room that is less than 500 square feet.
The public address system is also built to a massive scale. With almost 200 individual speakers distributed around the venue using thousands of feet of cabling, the audio system is implemented with a state-of-the-art processing system, which allows the sound to be controlled and monitored with exceptional precision throughout the building.
If you find yourself at an event at Co-op Place, take a minute to appreciate the amount of technology that makes the building run. But don’t forget to enjoy yourself while you’re there; after all, that’s the whole reason it exists.
Visit coopplace.ca for information about the facility and events.
Garret Johnson is event technology specialist at Co-op Place
