Utah Valley University (UVU) began in 1941 as the Central Utah Vocational School and became a university in 2008. Its screens reach students, staff and visitors all over a large and busy campus.
The challenge: an aging, expensive system
UVU ran more than 250 displays on an on-premises enterprise signage system. It was expensive and heavy to work with. The content server was nearing end of life, moving the software to a new server would have been costly, and the yearly subscription and upfront player licences pushed the university to look for something else.
Rick Baldwin of UVU’s Audio Visual Services and Engineering department is responsible for the university’s digital signage.
The solution: cloud-based, with playlists inside playlists
UVU heard about Play from the University of Utah, whose team showed them its signage and the Play web interface. UVU then contacted Play through the live chat.
The university needed a platform for hundreds of contributors and players, with:
- local department playlists mixed with campus-wide content in fixed ratios (playlists inside playlists)
- playback conditions per slide
- playback analytics and player monitoring
- lower running and maintenance costs
UVU’s old system had three user roles: administrator, publisher and contributor. In Play, the team rebuilt that structure with separate teams per role and department and shared playlists between them. It works well for access control, though administrators switch between teams often. Rick is open about it: large organisations with complex hierarchies should give the setup some extra thought.
“Large organizations with complex team hierarchies will need to put some extra thought in during setup; after that, everything just works.” – Rick Baldwin
The result
UVU now spends a third of what the old system cost. Users like the playlist editor, the wide range of file formats, nearly instant publishing, the live playlist preview, and being able to work from off campus. Rick also highlights the fast handling of support questions and feature requests.
What other large organisations can take from this
- Ask a peer institution to show you its setup, as UVU did with the University of Utah.
- Map your roles and departments to teams before you migrate.
- Compare the full cost: servers, licences and maintenance, not only the subscription.
Read the full Utah Valley University case story, or see how Play works for schools and universities.
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