UniFest 2024: Immersive experiences, secure networks, and technology partnerships

[MattQuirk]

It was the Brazilian footballer, Pelé, who once said: “Great teams are made not by strength, but by unity.”

These words felt like an apt introduction to my recent headline keynote at UniFest, Uniguest’s first AV technology conference for channel partners and end users—and not just because the event was held at a football stadium.

Rather, the quote summed up what I thought was the day’s dominant theme: partnership.

After all, delivering captivating yet complex experiences for guests, residents, customers, fans, and all the other audiences served by the attendees at UniFest relies on an ecosystem of technology partnerships. Even the UniFest venue itself, Brentford FC’s Gtech Community Stadium, benefits from technology jointly deployed by HPE OEM Solutions and Uniguest.

Besides the running theme of partnership, the UniFest crowd could all agree on one fact: that the world of entertainment is evolving fast. Gone are days when fans would simply visit a stadium for a football match, then go home. Today, fans expect to receive personalized messages, stats, previews, special offers, and more, weeks in advance, during the event, and in the weeks following.

Meeting constantly evolving consumer expectations will always be a challenge for providers, but it does result in more immersive and memorable experiences. In fact, fans are more likely to return to a stadium that offers enhanced, technology-driven experiences such as immersive content or instant replays on personal devices.

Today, incredible experiences have become the new normal, and audiences are demanding more. They will find it, but the question is where. That next step is in your hands.

Delivering immersive experiences securely

While immersive audience experiences may sound simple on paper, successfully delivering them across vast user bases is an incredibly complex and technologically demanding undertaking.

Many of us are familiar with the frustration of getting low bandwidth in a stadium full of thousands of people, when congested networks make it near-impossible to experience real-time media at scale.

Similarly, in the world of hospitality, welcoming guests into their hotel rooms with curated content and recommendations is not easy. Coordinating this in one hotel is difficult enough; providing seamless experiences across hundreds of hotels in the same chain involves costs and challenges on a much larger scale, with no guaranteed return on investment.

And, with cyber threats mounting, securing visitors and venue data has never been more critical.

But with Uniguest, everything becomes possible, from reliably sending messages in a stadium (hitherto practically unheard of) to viewing immediate replays without delays—all within an extremely secure network and data repository. In addition, Uniguest’s modular approach means scalability is not an issue. Customers can easily add more services or replace old ones over time, enabling them to not only offer incredible real-time experiences for guests and fans now, but to keep innovating as consumer demands evolve.

Celebrating a longstanding partnership

HPE OEM partnerships are built to last. We’re proud to say that after 15 years of collaboration and innovation, our trusted partnership with Uniguest is still going strong. It is not just continuing to deliver global technology solutions, but also creating holistic, secure, and customer-centric ecosystems that are benefiting both venues and visitors alike.

HPE’s secure servers, storage and networking solutions are underpinning Uniguest innovation, helping the company make good on its ambition of delivering the world’s best digital engagement platform to prestigious venues such as the world-leading Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Now that’s teamwork, as Pelé might have said.