Strategic Sports Video Offerings Enhance an Environment While Entertaining Patrons

What do the baseball post-season, college football and the NFL have in common? They’re all undeniably great ways to get people excited about your bar or nightclub. You’ve gone through all the preliminary steps of having televisions installed, running all the right specials on game nights, and you have all the right posters of your local teams, but you’re still not satisfied with your fall profits? That’s OK, because you may be missing the one crucial element that will really put you ahead of the competition for the sports crowd.

The Computer Age
    As hard as it is for all of us to admit, the days of the traditional sports bar may be numbered.
    The hip crowd of today lives in a fast-paced world that isn’t always compatible with only showing a few select ball games at a time. Your clientele wants information about their favorite teams, and they want it fast.
    One solution is to shop around for digital cable and satellite companies that can make virtually any sporting event across the country available in your bar. DIRECTV offers several packages tailored to meet the needs of your crowd. Lots of baseball fans? You should look into the MLB Extra Innings package, which broadcasts 60 games a week. More into football? Consider offering NFL Sunday Ticket and ESPN Gameplan, which broadcasts up to 15 games every Saturday.
    There also are packages geared for hockey, college and NBA basketball, MLS soccer, and even a package showcasing European sports.
    With technology changing even faster than the seasons, more ways than ever exist for consumers to get sports information. For example, Ed Swaronski of Thesportspage.com promises his company’s new video monitor system will deliver the most up-to-date sports scores in a bar-friendly format? “It’s every sport, every team,” Swaronski says. “We’ll get it to you.”

Wired For Sound
    If you’re ready to go with your new sports television package, what’s next? Large crowds mean noise, making the broadcast audio hard to hear.
    Charlevoix, Mich.-based Sprox Inc., manufactures Sound Dog wireless tabletop speakers specifically designed for the bar environment. They are state-of-the-art audio machines, which create a conversational quality sound environment at each table by aiming the sound from the speakers downward instead of out where everyone else will be subject to it.
    They can tune into as many as eight channels of audio depending on the television selection around the bar (i.e., if you have three ball games playing on different televisions customers can toggle from one to the other).

Out of the Box
    So, perhaps you already have a sports television plan, but you aren’t satisfied with your sports promotions. It may be time to bring the sports straight into your bar.
    Kerry Namanny of Namanny Sports sells and leases stock car racing systems that are sure to bring the excitement of Bristol right into your club. “We make it possible to hold racing events right at the bar,” Namanny says. He suggests that local bars pool together to form a racing circuit, inviting patrons to make teams and hop from bar to bar to race their miniature stock cars.
    “A typical night would be open track time from 6:00 to 9:00 just for fun, then qualifying at 9:00 of up to 34 drivers, which would wrap things up about midnight.”
    And, of course, broadcasting video of these types of in-house races adds to the excitement and environment for guests, and your register receipts are the most telling scoreboard.          NCB