Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, one of the top 10 most prestigious U.S. law firms, specializes in corporate, litigation, regulatory and tax law with 1,200 lawyers located in 20 offices around the world. Recognized as leaders in their respective fields, Weil attorneys are consistently top-ranked by the most authoritative legal and financial industry directories. In order to continue the law firm’s excellence, Weil adopts cutting edge technologies to ensure its attorneys communicate more efficiently and have the best access to continued education.

Challenges

Headquartered in New York City, Weil’s offices feature a large boardroom where corporate meetings and continued legal education (CLE) sessions are held daily. Accommodating more than 65 people, the farthest attendee sits more than 70 feet away from the presenter and presentation display screen, which makes content on the projector screen difficult to read from the back of the room.

The room’s large size became increasingly distracting for presenters as well as the audience, who had to constantly turn in their seats to view the presenter and projector screen located at the front of the room. The law firm wanted to make the boardroom feel more intimate, optimize meeting interactivity, and minimize distractions. They needed a solution where all attendees see the presentation slides regardless of where they were seated.

Solution

The firm wanted a solution that could stream the presentation content directly to an iPad in the hands of each meeting attendee in the boardroom. While investigating solution options, Weil found many applications that could stream from an iPad to a projector, but could not find a solution that would stream from the main presentation screen directly to the tablets. Weil turned to systems integrator Video Corporation of America (VCA) to implement an enterprise communications system for the executive boardroom.

Partnering with video technology provider Haivision and visual display solution provider Primeview, VCA created an integrated system that could synchronize the presentation slides from the presenter’s laptop to a Primeview video wall and iPads in the boardroom. VCA implemented Primeview’s premium visual display solutions including a virtually seamless plasma video wall, featuring an anti-reflective surface combined with incredible brightness and contrast to best capture the audience’s attention.

Using Haivision Makito HD encoders which support up to 1080p60 resolution with extremely low end-to-end latency, and InStream Mobile players running on the tablets, the presenter’s content can be viewed simultaneously on the iPads and video wall. This low delay ensures that when the presenter clicks through to the next slide, that same slide appears on the iPads and video wall with virtually no delay.

The source – a laptop running the PowerPoint content – is connected to Haivision’s Makito DVI encoder which sends a multicast Transport Stream using Forward Error Correction (FEC), controlling any errors in thetransmission over the wireless network. That stream is then sent to two Aruba Network wireless access points where the iPads receive the content and play the stream via Haivision’s InStream Mobile players.

InStream Mobile is designed to bring high quality, low-latency HD video to iPads, iPhones, and Android devices, with playback of unicast and multicast video. InStream Mobile takes advantage of Transport Stream multicast to deliver the highest performance media experience to many simultaneous mobile viewers throughout a facility or campus without a dedicated streaming server and also supports HLS streams for Internet sources.

Results

With presentations readily visible and accessible on their iPads, Weil attorneys’ can now benefit from a state-of-the art boardroom that is inclusive in design with technology that is unobtrusive and does not disrupt the main focus in the room. Leveraging low-latency streaming to mobile devices, Weil attorneys can collaborate and communicate more effectively in corporate meetings and continued legal education sessions and are no longer distracted by not being able to see presentation content up close.