Glory Days Delivers High Definition Viewing Experience with ZeeVee ZvPro iSeries
For over 20 years, Glory Days sports themed American grills have provided an award-winning menu of freshly prepared appetizers, desserts, and entrees with entertainment appealing to all ages. Each restaurant has an abundance of televisions to watch the big game, news, cartoons or just about anything that’s worth watching, along with the latest interactive tableside games.
Challenge
With the opening of their newest and largest grill in Ellicott City, Maryland, Glory Days wanted to expand upon their traditional goal of offering a public house where friends could gather and have a cold brew while watching sports on flat screen tvs to providing the ultimate high definition viewing experience for their customers. The Ellicott City Glory Days Grill is almost 8000 square feet and features 50 IP, 2 way controllable TVs.
Glory Days wanted a cost-effective way to show high-quality video to their guests without the problems that can arise with typical HDMI installations. The solution needed to be user-friendly, guest friendly, and look great. Using a modulated system where any TV can see any source presented a unique challenge. Since a single source was no longer tied to a specific TV, they could not number the TV’s to match the sound channels on the tabletop speakers. Additionally, they wanted to be able to have audio at each table with the ability for an overlay on the screen so they old see what channel they were watching.
Solution
Glory Days turned to their partner of 15 years, Nards Entertainment, to come up with a solution for this new facility. Nards Entertainment took on the challenge to deliver this new AV system and presented the requirements to ZeeVee (Zv). Within two weeks Zv came back with a solution for Glory Days Grill which customized a brand new product to include a small video watermark overlay in the bottom right-hand corner of the TV. This feature added scoreboard style numbers that matched each modulated channel (virtual channels), to a DTV receiver, to the video overlay, to the channel on the speaker box.
The new Glory Days Grill AV system operates like giant matrix, for a fraction of the cost of a traditional matrix solution, featuring 15 high definition DirecTV channels and 2 wireless presentation channels where any TV can see any source presented.
As the environment has a mix of TV outputs using coax cabling, two ZeeVee products were used for video distribution. The ZvPro iSeries 610 handles HD video distribution from the component or VGA HD sources while the ZvPro iSeries 810 handles HD video distribution from the HDMI sources. Both products also offer Glory Days Grill simultaneous IP streaming over their network with no performance compromise enabling customized content to be delivered to their networked IPTVs.
A huge cost savings in this installation was realized by using each TV’s built in QAM tuner, which eliminated the need for cumbersome, expensive set-top-boxes or media players at each display. Management of the IPTVs can take place either locally through the actual screen or remotely through ZeeVee’s web based management solution.
Result
The result was a completely harmonious system that is easy to use and more importantly improves their guest’s experience. ZeeVee stepped up to the challenge presented by Glory Days Grill and were able to create a new feature in their new iSeries product that did not exist before and delivered the solution within 2 weeks.
“Zv’s ZvPro iSeries has provided us with an extremely reliable, and cost-effective solution for Glory Days Grill,” said Ric Seaman, director of entertainment, atmosphere and technology, Glory Days, Inc. “Glory Days is growing fast and plans to build several more restaurants over the next few years. We are looking forward to continuing to use Zv products. With the Zv customized video overlay piece guests never have to guess what channel they are watching.”
The benefits of the Zv based high definition modulated system included lower costs than typical HDMI installations, fewer points of failure, a faster and easier installation and better management and control of all aspects of the installation.
“We spent a great deal of time researching possible solutions, and ZV was the only company willing to build a customized solution to meet our needs,” said John Carroll, design & project manager, Nards Entertainment. “This innovative solution received a bronze award from Universal Remote Control, for the Best Total Control Install of 2015,” he added.
Zv and Nards Entertainment delivered a compelling, cost-effective video solution that will be the model for all Glory Days Grills in the future. The customized watermark overlay to all programming matching video with the audio on the tabletop speaker provides a unique feature unrivaled in the restaurant industry.
ZeeVee's ZvPro iSeries has provided us with an extremely reliable, and cost-effective solution for Glory Days Grill,”
Ric Seaman, Director of Entertainment, Glory Days
The benefits of the ZeeVee based high definition modulated system included lower costs than typical HDMI installations, fewer points of failure, faster and easier installation and better management and control of all aspects of the installation.
We spent a great deal of time researching possible solutions, and ZeeVee was the only company willing to build a customized solution to meet our needs,”