Camino Brings Stats to Life for Gillette Stadium

When you’re at a live sporting event, there are loads of statistics and information for the event that you’re looking for during the game. How many yards does this player have? How many shots on goal does that team have? And with fantasy sports, many people may be wondering about other players around the league and their current stats.

Sometimes just having the stats show up and disappear isn’t enough. It doesn’t grab attention or get the point across in a nice visual way. That’s where Camino comes in. It is Daktronics’ real-time, non-linenar, 2D/3D template editor and playout server. Think of graphics and animations combined with the statistics you crave. Not only does it make it better for the viewer, but it also makes it easier on the operators to share these engaging, dynamic graphics and information.

To hear about Camino and everything else event production related, Matt Anderson and I sat down with Abbey Thistle, Director of Event Presentation and Fan Engagement, and Jen Gahan, Manager of Game entertainment and Fan Engagement, with The Kraft Group at Gillette Stadium.

Matt Anderson
So we got into the control room a little bit already, but I know there’s a lot of people that we’ve been talking to about Camino. Can you share a little bit about when you were first asking for something like this and then you saw Camino work?

Abbey Thistle
I think for us, we have this big board, right? And there’s so much real estate on it. It’s like, what do you do with it and we can’t just do what we normally did. Just because it’s bigger doesn’t make it better, so we had to figure out how to make it bigger AND better.

So, we wanted to make our stats and the way we presented a lot of our content more dynamic. We were talking to Daktronics and we saw Camino and were very impressed by it. We just loved the dynamic look of it and just how it was able to present the stats. It wasn’t just, “Here’s the stat.” There was movement. It wasn’t like before where you don’t see it update, it just scrolls through everything and the next time the stat is different. But you didn’t see that movement, you didn’t see the change.

So, when we saw Camino, even before we know what we were going to have and what we were going to be doing, we thought, “Gosh, look how great that looks. Wouldn’t that be great?” So, we when we knew what we were going to be having here and the ability to do that, we just said, “Hey, we need to have Camino. We’ve got to do this.”

And we fought for it. We did. We said we can’t display stats and information without doing it this way. We fought really hard and we won.

Matt Anderson
So was it in the video clips that illustrated it or why you needed to fight for it? Or was it more demos needed to whoever you needed to convince or how did that go?

Abbey Thistle
I think we had a few demos and we recorded one meeting, so we were able to show that to different people of the different ways that it could do things. And that did it. Then we had a meeting to say that this is what we want and this is what we can do this year.

It was a process. We had an iterative process where we’ll say we’re going to add this next year and this the next year, and so on. But we were able to get a ton for our first season. And it’s the one thing people comment on. We had someone here yesterday observing and said, “My gosh, your stats are so awesome!” It’s like, yeah, I know, right?!

Justin Ochsner
So you both have been around displays for quite a while, been different places, had different experiences – what was your first thought when you saw Camino? Did you know Daktronics had something that could do this or did it kind of change your mind a little bit about what we’ve had in previous control systems?

Abbey Thistle
Absolutely. I definitely think that the Daktronics I knew when I first started in this business and the Daktronics that I know now is different. I mean, you didn’t have a podcast. When they asked if I wanted to be on the podcast, I was like, “My Lord, you guys have a podcast now!?” So yeah, where Daktronics is now and what you’re able to do AND that it’s a one-stop-shop, which I love too.

And just being able to say that I want to do this. Okay, I can do that. I want to do that. Okay, Daktronics can do that. I think it’s pretty cool to see that evolution. Honestly, we didn’t have any ideas when we were at the IDEA Convention that Daktronics was doing a demo. I was like, “My gosh.” And the fact that we already have a Daktronics system and that it’s just easy to add in without a third-party has been tremendous.

Watch this video to see how Camino adds dynamic movement to stats being shown on the video board:

To read more from this episode, visit this blog post, watch the entire podcast episode here or listen to the episode by clicking here.