Sports entertainment venues continue to improve how fans interact with their favorite games and players with the first-ever sportsbook to open within a US sports arena, built in the nation’s capital by McCann Systems. Working with Caesars Entertainment, William Hill, and Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the two-story space checks in at 18,000 square feet and boasts new technology.
Over 1400 square feet of LED wraps the facility, more than 100 screens fill the nooks and crannies, 30 betting windows and kiosks with live odds, and an LED outdoor LED ticker invites fans to the new experience. The signature piece is a custom, full-LED scaled scoreboard–modeled after Capital One Arena’s main scoreboard. It suspends from the second-level ceiling and provides crystal-clear live content in the round.
Capital One Arena Sportsbook
The new William Hill sportsbook at Capital One Arena in Washington DC has been described as a casino that meets a Buffalo Wild Wings. It is a total fan experience between the street-level foot traffic and the stadium itself. The DC sportsbook comes with traditional bells and whistles like LED video walls and mobile betting, including some new twists, all while providing a full-service bar and restaurant.
Through a custom user interface, preset layouts allow sportsbook staff at Capital One arena to route and distribute live television feeds and betting odds anywhere in the space. Although there are designated areas for odds and wagering, bettors can place bets on their phones using an app, freeing up the rest of the custom, direct-view, fine-pitch LED for live sports action.
William Hill and the Capital One team invited McCann to help design and engineer the entire section of this city block and were excited by the first iteration. Because of McCann’s trusted vendor partnerships and non-exclusivity, the first quote was aggressively priced and completely turnkey.
There is a hint of familiarity when building this book for William Hill. McCann Systems, while vendor agnostic, can use some of the proven hardware and software solutions at other books to give the Capital One Arena team a product they know how to use and troubleshoot. These typicals allow the design teams to push the limits in other innovative ways, not worrying about the back-end or LED functionality.
