In November 2017, the Concrete Cowboy bar and restaurant opened at The Star in Frisco, Texas. A popular destination for football fans across the world and hub for Frisco nightlife, The Star is a 91-acre campus that hosts the world headquarters of the Dallas Cowboys, complemented by a state-of-the-art indoor football stadium, hotel, medical center, entertainment district lined with restaurants, shops, and more.

In keeping with this prestigious location, owner Rico Taylor wanted to go beyond the displays that entertain patrons at other Concrete Cowboy bars in Texas and Chicago. He was looking for something on a larger scale that would deliver a serious “wow factor.” To get it, he called on his friends at integration firm XYZ Innovative Design, co-owned by Xavier VanHaasen and Abraxas Baker.

To dazzle Concrete Cowboy Frisco’s guests, XYZ Innovative Design installed seven video walls, in addition to a Vivitek high-performance, large-venue laser projector and multi-color LED lighting systems for the liquor display and main bar. Three separate 3x3 video walls can each function as one big display, nine individual displays, or five individual displays with one 2x2 wall. That’s impressive enough, but the real jaw-dropper is a 24-screen display, four-sided video wall centered over the main bar in a rectangular pattern, with a 3x3 configuration on each long side and a three-display column at each end.
Sources for the video walls include nine DirectTV receivers, an Apple TV, music videos and clips from a video DJ, and a Vivitek NovoDS™ digital signage solution. When displaying digital signage, the rectangular bar wall can be used in a wraparound 8x3 configuration, with text and video scrolling around all the displays in unison.

With so many content sources, and so many possible configurations for displaying them on a total of 53 ultra-slim-bezel LED displays, providing simple switching between sources for Concrete Cowboy’s staff was imperative. To deliver it, a video distribution and switching system was required that could send sources to any of the displays, as well as an easy-to-use interface that would allow any of the bar’s employees to operate the system with minimal training.

For the video distribution system, XYZ Innovative Design installed Just Add Power’s (J+P) 3G+ Ultra HD over IP platform transmitters and receivers. Each display, and the projector, is equipped with a small J+P receiver on the back, while sources are connected to J+P transmitters. The transmitters and receivers are connected to two stacked Luxul XMS-7048P 52-port Gigabit managed switches and one Luxul ABR-4500 Gigabit router, which controls the J+P video sources and displays and distribute power over Ethernet to the J+P equipment, respectively.

“For such a sophisticated setup, we paired Luxul and Just Add Power with RTI because the solutions from all three manufacturers function extremely well together and yield a high-quality, user-friendly system,” said Xavier VanHaasen, co-owner of XYZ Innovative Design. “For employee control, Rico likes what we’ve done in his other bars, which is to create an interface for the RTiPanel app on an iPad that staff can use to control every display with a push of a button. With RTI’s Integration Designer APEX programming software, it was really quick and easy to create a control experience perfectly tailored to the Frisco location.”

Concrete Cowboy’s entire control system is powered by two RTI XP-8s control processors loaded with two-way drivers for DirectTV, J+P, and Sonos. The two Luxul XMS-7048P switches — which control the J+P video sources and displays — are connected to the processors via two-way RS-232 ports. Employees control the switches and manage display content, in addition to the LED lighting systems and a Sonos CONNECT network audio player, using an iPad running the RTiPanel app with the custom interface created by XYZ Innovative Design.

With the RTiPanel app, staff can easily send any content to any display — or the projector — by simply tapping a destination and source, change video wall layouts on the fly, dim the LED lighting, or start a playlist for background music. Even the video DJ can use the app to play music videos. On the iPad, employees can view what channel and program each display is tuned to, current display configurations, as well as song metadata and volume levels for background music.

“The distribution and control system at Concrete Cowboy Frisco has been a huge success,” adds VanHaasen. “The vast number of displays, sources, and other systems look intimidating, but the staff is in complete control. And it’s all done from a single app, whether it’s just changing the channel or creating a wraparound 8x3 digital signage display. Rico is extremely pleased with how user-friendly the system is and the bar’s guests are floored by the spectacle.”