Sports Bars Rival Ballparks, Stadiums, Arenas in AV Experience Sports-themed pubs and restaurants are often seen as better places to watch the game By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Monday, December 18, 2023 - 11:31 am
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In the mid 1960s, Bell Telephone Co. - forerunner to today's AT&T - came up with a catchy slogan for its long-distance service: It's the next best thing to being there. Today, that could be slogan of the sports bar. Listing cable, satellite, and broadcast sports coverage designed specifically for sports-themed restaurants and bars, online service SportsTV Guide describes sports bars as places where guests are typically fans who don't have tickets to the game. However, they would demand an experience that is almost on par with watching the match live in a stadium.
It's a tall order but one that an increasingly large number of upper-tier venues vie to fill, using AV technology that's nearly on a par with that in the trucks at the venues.
Happy's Sports Lounge in Murfreesboro, TN, features 26 video screens managed by a Key Digital AV-over-IP system.
Big Screens Rule In some ways, sport bars are becoming better places to see the game than the stadium or the arena, observes Brian Elwell, senior consultant, Salas O'Brien, a Dallas-based engineering- and technical-services firm that has designed AV systems for such venues as the Seattle Kraken's Climate Pledge Arena, the Minnesota Vikings' US Bank Stadium, and Austin FC's Q2 Stadium. It's the one place you're going to get every camera angle for every game on television, all of the commentary, and experience it on a screen much bigger than you could ever have at home.
Salas O'Brien's Brian Elwell: It's the one place you're going to get every camera angle for every game on television on a screen much bigger than you could ever have at home.
He cites the 716 Bar in Buffalo, NY, for which Salas O'Brien designed and had installed a 38-ft. video screen and 70 HDTVs around the space. Display placement has become important in the design of these types of facilities, he says, to ensure that virtually every game can be seen from every seat in the house.
That's not something that you can get even at the stadium or the arena for just the one game, he says. You may be coming to the bar to see a particular game, but, once you're in a place like this, you're immersed in sports.
That said, he adds that the massive central screen is windowed, allowing other events and ticker-type information to share the display with whatever the main game is. There should be a focus, even when there are a number of other events taking place.
An Industry Born in a Bar Broadcast television created the sports bar. On a June evening in 1947, a New York Times reporter noted men squeezing into Hussey's Bar & Grill on 47th St. and Ninth Ave. in Manhattan an hour before a Brooklyn Dodgers game, angling for seats near the bar's newly installed 12-in. black-and-white TV set. The crowd reportedly stayed late, too, watching boxing matches while others gathered outside the windows hoping to catch a bit of the action.
Since then, the concept has evolved to one that can rival the experience in guest suites in some stadiums and arenas. In fact, some bars market themselves as essentially less-expensive versions of those elite niches. Others have taken on the accoutrements of specific sports, such as the new 8,500-sq.-ft. Flanker Kitchen & Sports Bar at Las Vegas's Mandalay Bay resort, near the walkway to Allegiant Stadium (where the 2024 Super Bowl will take place), where an illuminated ceiling offers a nighttime rendering of the city's Formula 1 track.
We wanted to do the sports theming in a clever and refined manner rather than putting up sports memorabilia everywhere, Carver Road Hospitality CEO Sean Christie told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Diversity in sports is extending to sports bars, most notably in the form of Jenny Nguyen's LGBTQ-friendly Sports Bra in Portland, OR, the world's first sports bar dedicated to showing only women's sports.
Today, one database estimates that there are more than 18,000 sports bars in the country, defined as pubs and restaurants that promote multiple screens for games and matches, often integrating key sports events into their regular marketing. After watching stadiums and arenas become media and hospitality centers and the rise of the luxury sportsbook in the wake of a change in sports-betting regulations nationally, the neighborhood sports bar is rising to the challenge.
The Big Picture
Logic Integration's Dylan Cassagnol: It's all about giving everyone everything. Everyone can view [the action] from essentially anywhere in the restaurant or bar.
What we're seeing, especially with the legalization of sports gambling in a number of states, is a big push toward very large video walls, the kind you'd see in Las Vegas sportsbooks and even in stadiums, which can be segmented into multiple sections to show multiple games simultaneously as well as [ticker] information and other content, says Dylan Cassagnol, executive administrator, Logic Integration, a Colorado-based AV-systems integrator with a number of high-end sports bars in its portfolio.
He sees the video trend as toward larger LED displays and away from multiple flat screens, each with their own cable boxes, that once characterized the category. This is, in part, because there is often now so much sports to choose from at any one time.
It's all about giving everyone everything, Cassagnol says. Bars pay that extra dollar with the cable company so that they have NFL Sunday Ticket or NFL RedZone and don't have to choose. It's all up there on one large, accessible, str
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Sports Bars Rival Ballparks, Stadiums, Arenas in AV Experience Sports-themed pubs and restaurants are often seen as better places to watch the game By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
