Background

RAC Arena is one of Perth’s major entertainment and sports venues, and its ceiling-suspended video wall had aged out.

The screens were dated to look at and no longer capable of getting information to a full house the way a venue at that scale needs. Focus AV was brought in to replace the wall outright rather than patch it.

The challenge

The existing wall had three problems, and they compounded each other.

The screens looked dated and no longer matched the rest of the venue.

Large gaps between panels broke up anything displayed across the wall, so announcements, event information and advertising were read as fragments instead of one image.

The old wall had no upgrade path. It could not take newer LED technology, which meant every year made it a worse asset rather than a maintained one.

The challenge — LED Screen for RAC Arena

The solution

We specified a 3.9mm pixel pitch LED screen from Aurora LED — roughly 80 square metres of display — chosen for image quality at the range of viewing distances an arena bowl involves.

The existing space was not built to carry it, so we designed and built a customised frame to hold the panels, keep alignment precise and close out the gaps that had been the main fault of the old wall.

Installation was carried out from a boom lift, positioning and securing each section overhead — the safest and most efficient way to work at that height without disrupting the space below. The finished screen was then commissioned into RAC Arena’s existing PADS digital signage system, so the venue manages content exactly as it did before — new hardware, familiar workflow.

The outcome

The wall now reads as one continuous surface. Announcements, event details and advertising run across the full screen uninterrupted, and the 3.9mm pitch holds resolution both close up and from the back of the bowl.

Visually it suits the venue rather than dating it. And because it is a current-generation LED product on a purpose-built frame, it can be maintained, serviced and extended as the technology moves on instead of becoming another fixed liability.