Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar Video Wall is a Monster

Jerry Remy's new restaurant features giant NEC video wall made of 32 46-inch panels.

When I talked to Jerry Remy about the audio/video game plan for Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill near Fenway Park, the former Red Sox second basemen and current TV broadcaster kept it simple:

“Our big thing was that we wanted to make sure we had the best setup in the city.”

The same game plan appears to be in place for the latest Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill, which opened in early March 2011 on the South Boston waterfront.

It features a 26.9-foot wide by 7.6-foot high 8-panel by 4-panel video wall comprised of 32 46-inch NEC X462UN ultra-narrow-bezel LCD monitors. It’s one of the largest video walls that can be found in a restaurant, according to Michael Ferrer, senior manager of business development for solutions sales at NEC Display Solutions.

“That’s a $1 million video wall,” says chef Todd Hall, factoring in hardware, programming and installation by Woburn, Mass.-based Custom Cable Services.

PHOTOS: $1 Million Video Wall

The return on investment, Hall adds, has been an extremely positive reaction from customers, many of who have filed in to watch multiple March Madness games on the wall. “The customers have just gone nuts for it.”

The content displayed on the wall can be split into many custom configurations, says Robert Soluri, principal of Custom Cable Services.

Those configurations can include watching one game on the entire wall, splitting it into two games or eight games at once on eight sets of 2-by-2 panels.

High-Tech Jigsaw Puzzle
Soluri says assembling the video wall was more difficult than programming the content distribution. It took some time to get the 46-inch panels to line up nicely.

“The tolerance in the wall and within the mounts create havoc for getting a nice smooth assembly,” Soluri says. “In this case, since we were boxed in on three sides, it gave us very little room to maneuver and to get at the adjustments.”

Assembling the individual panels, mounting and aligning them is generally the hardest part, according to Ferrer, who was there on the last night of the installation - “a long night,” he says.

Ferrer, a former integrator, advises integrators to plan extra time for assembling video walls. “Each mount needs to be perfectly aligned and you have to make last-minute adjustments to make sure they’re prefect.”

Many integrators are trying to get into the video wall category, according to Ferrer. He says he likes working with relatively small integrator companies, although NEC also does video wall work with very large integration companies. “What I particularly like about [Custom Cable Services] and integrators like them is their willingness to learn about technology and let us help them.

“Some integrators don’t need much help; they’ll just ask a couple of questions, but I’d rather work with installers of Rob’s size so we can grow with them. The conversations I had with Rob were really about mounting and how to handle cabling. That third-party info that we share with our integrators, that’s really the key for winning business in that [video wall] space.

“We do that with larger integrators, too, but they’re going to have their favorites. With Rob, I was able to essentially provide guidance and solutions. Being able to be involved from the very beginning not only helps manufacturers, but it helps the integrator and helps him satisfy the client and allows him to move on to the next restaurant.”

At Remy’s restaurant, an ICS Technology system controller is used to quarterback the video wall content, which is driven by DirecTV via HDMI cabling.

Soluri says that in addition to sports viewing, the video wall will be used for digital signage content and HD cameras will also feed content to the wall.

“We have the ability to have 12 inputs of HDMI, VGA and component signal.”

Beyond the video wall, there are 48 additional TVs in the restaurant.