News

Museum uses Cstation for digital video kiosks

November 18, 2002

LAS VEGAS -- Avocent Digital Desktops, a division of Avocent Corporation (Nasdaq:AVCT), says it has deployed three of its Cstation C1000s at the Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.

The Cstation with Digital Extension Technology gives the museum the ability to display video-on-demand film footage of past Kentucky Derby events to kiosks in the museum's permanent display, according to a news release. Cstation enables the museum to centralize PCs in a data center while extending digital video to multiple kiosks.

According to the release, a key component of the contract, awarded to Somerset Group, Inc., required that the Kentucky Derby Museum retain the ability to preserve its original exhibit and leverage its existing networking infrastructure. Somerset completed the installation of Digital Desktops' Cstations in each of the Kentucky Derby Museum's three kiosks this fall.

With Digital Desktops' technology, each remote PC system bus is digitally extended over standard copper or fiber LAN cabling to the Cstation inside the kiosk, which can be as far as 800 meters away. According to the release, this strategy increases PC security and uptime while reducing IT costs. Cstations enable computing resources to be upgraded, maintained, repaired and replaced from a single location without interrupting the end-user's computing experience.

According to Jeff Kennedy, audio/visual manager at the museum, the primary purpose for the enhancements was to enable the remote location of CPU hardware to a controlled environment in the museum, and still provide playback of the more than 120 two-to-three minute high resolution video files, each of which exceeds 150 megabytes. Some of the clips of races and post race interviews consist of digitized footage dating from 1918.

"The systems are performing flawlessly with no video frames or sound being lost in the transmission," Kennedy said in the release.

Don Dickey, chief creative officer of Somerset Group, said in the release, "The museum's specific requirements were well within our creative and technical capabilities, but the remote location of the hardware presented particular challenges. (The Cstations) were the best solution. They provide fantastic support for the current hardware and provide the ability to push large, robust files without dropping frames or requiring massive CPU power."