New Software for Heathrow Airport

Lawrence and Andy took a 7 hour round trip to install some of our software at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5.

Some time ago we built a solution for Scarlet Motion who needed software which would allow them to load and change their advertising visuals on huge LED billboards remotely.

The software runs on a Mac Mini for each billboard and allows them to schedule campaigns so that minimal updating is needed. We also built a web app which detects if there are any issues with any of the displays and sends a text message should any of the billboards fail.

The bespoke technology that we designed and built for Scarlet Motion already works on huge billboards along the M5 so when they asked us if we could make it work indoors on smaller screens at Heathrow we knew it wouldn’t be a problem.

Lawrence (pictured hard at work, above) and Andy worked through the night from 8pm until 5am installing 8 Mac Minis in the First & Club Class lounges. They even got a cheeky peek behind the bar in first class!

Andy says ‘We only had a limited timeslot in each lounge because obviously there are flights coming in and out all the time. It took us a little while to figure out the first one, but then it was just a case of getting around the terminal as quickly as we could by foot and carrying out the procedure on every screen. We just made it in time and saw thousands of staff and passengers flocking in to the airport as we were leaving!’

The lounges have a combined footfall of over 155,000 every month – that’s almost 2 million people that will see the screens every year – so it’s one of our most widely viewed projects to date!