Snapshot Media Web Design Leeds

Over the last 6 months or so we’ve been working on a video content distribution application for a company called Scarletmotion. Scarletmotion own LED Billboards of various sizes and our brief was to create a web application that managed scheduling, transcoding, distribution and display of adverts.

Our responsibilities went further than just writing a web application – we also built a full-featured display client running on Apple Mac Minis embedded into the LED Billboards. The Minis connect back to the web application over ADSL lines to check for new advertising content. We even did all their branding for them – we’ve been involved in pretty much every single aspect of the creation of this new media advertising company.

It’s a monster application – one of our most complex to date and incorporates a variety of different technology that we’ve developed in-house, including real time messaging and status protocols as well as other cool technologies. In short, we’ve learned a lot.

The application also contains automatic monitoring features – if anything should happen to an LED Billboard (hey, computers go wrong) we are immediately notified via text message, iPhone push alert and Twitter.

There’s currently one billboard live above Gatecrasher in Leeds, and a second one will be going live above Fiveways shopping centre in downtown Birmingham. Some of these screens are huge – the one in Birmingham is 8m wide and 4m high. We spent quite a lot of time up scaffolding as a result which was an interesting change of scenery from sitting in front of a computer as we usually do – those of you who know members of our team well will find the notion of us wearing hard hats and high-visibility jackets quite amusing.

We even built a web page in the application that shows, live, what each screen is displaying. You can take a look at it here if you like, it looks awesome – it even reports CPU temperatures for the Mac Minis in the screens!

It’s a great feeling when a huge project like this reaches completion, and it’s awesome being able to put our name to something so prominent. Having our logo displayed on a huge screen doesn’t hurt either!

Scarletmotion currently have two screens up and running – one in Leeds (above Gatecrasher), one in Birmingham (above Fiveways Shopping Centre), with another two screens due to go up on the M5 this autumn.

If you’re interested in advertising on any of Scarletmotion’s screens the agency selling the advertising space is called Super-Novae.