The new Black Widow Touring System from Triton Visual Technology, formerly known as Oracle LED Systems, is setting a new standard in the manufacturing of video tiles. The System is a three-part full touring and fast rigging package built as a lightweight high resolution Black Widow CTS (Creative Touring System) LED Panel. These are currently available in 4.8mm, 5.9mm or 8.9mm (outdoor). The slim body features beveled edges for seamless 90° corners, as well as removable power data control and LED modules for fast maintenance and repair.
With that array of product benefits, it’s not surprising that a quality-minded company like Nashville, TN-based Moo TV would make a large investment and add lots of brand new Triton VT Black Widow CTS tiles to their rental inventory. But a closer look at the relationship forged between Triton VT and Moo TV reveals more than just a simple purchase of a valued product. Since its introduction to the market, the Black Widow system and the team behind it are forging new business models as well. Instead of just a buyer-seller relationship, a synergistic partnership is created to address industry challenges ranging from transport logistics to product design, life-cycle and longevity.
“Isaac [Campos], our CEO, and I were discussing doing a joint press feature with Moo TV,” says Joe Lapchick, director of sales for Triton VT. “When I approached Scott [Scovill, founder and owner of Moo TV] and Andrew [Burnett, Moo TV’s tour and special events project manager], they expressed their wish to talk about our relationship rather than the tours they have our Black Widow product on. I think that says not only a lot about our working relationship, but about the direction of the industry as well.
“Everything is such a commodity now, that it is no longer about just selling a product any more, but selling partnerships and service which creates longstanding relationships,” Lapchick adds.
Moo TV’s Andrew Burnett agrees. “The great relationship we have with Triton VT is as essential to us as the quality of their Black Widow product,” he says, noting that Moo TV invested heavily recently to augment their LED tile inventory. “The consistent quality of service, before, during, and after that purchase has proven to be next-level.”
The Black Widow product came out right at critical juncture for Moo TV, as they were looking for a new product suite to go with. Their hunt was predicated on facts from the period when video vendors and production houses were experiencing difficulties with the rush of LED tiles that were saturating the market.
“We had grown weary,” says Burnett, “because for a while the LED price point was getting so low, that everybody was buying high-res LED and touring it, even though it shouldn’t be toured. The life-cycle had become so short that, after a year-and-a-half or two, we were having major failures. It was causing a lot of trouble, not only for us, but for most video companies in the industry.”
Isaac Campos, CEO of Triton VT, who pioneered the Black Widow product, emphasized to Burnett the fact they had people from the company living in China, whose main focus and only job was to oversee every area in the line of manufacturing, making sure it passed proper QC standards.
During demonstrations at their shop, the technicians and engineers at Moo TV tried everything they knew to get the panels to fail by jumping on them and leaving them in the rain for two days to see what kind of pixel failure occurred. At one point, Burnett even took a hammer to a tile, “and they held up really well.
“The other attractive piece of information that became clear through this process was, you could tell the product had been designed by people over here, who were touring with it in the States, that knew the kind of application it was being used for,” Burnett adds. He cites the way different products were designed with truck transport.
“The most efficient way to truck this product, and most LED product that is in the 500mm range, is four-tiles-tall and five-tile-wide chunks. That is the longest section you can get on a truck ramp safely when it goes over the crest of the ramp, which is how we build our systems whenever possible,” Burnett says, noting that “Gallagher Staging in Nashville has been custom building our carts for a long time.”
Not all video tiles on the market have an equally tour-friendly design, however. Many that are sourced from overseas from China, for example, are built with header bars that are only a meter wide as a standard, which can only fly a two-tile wide screen. That, Burnett says, “is an indicator that the people building the product are not the ones deploying them in the field the way we do.” He points out that the standard at Moo TV is five-tile-wide headers, with benefits including “a more efficient use of truck space, fewer rigging points and faster deployment on setup and strike.”
Lapchick notes that, after buying two different resolutions of Black Widow panels, Moo TV used Triton VT’s cart design as a “mechanical canvas” and “customized it to meet their needs. Just using our panel and our touring frame, they have built five-wide and four-deep, so their touring cart holds 40 panels,” optimizing truck pack, setup and strike efficiencies. “We could push our carts, but their extrapolation fits their needs. And besides, I particularly like the design.”
This speaks to another aspect of this path to forging relationships rather than just generating sales. “We devote our efforts to what the individual client needs and wants, not what we think they have to have,” says Lapchick, adding that Triton makes a cart that is five deep and two-high, which holds 25 panels. Triton VT, he added, is now working on a new frame that promises to “revolutionize the touring market” in 2019.
Burnett has been with Moo TV for eight years now. “We are a medium sized company operating in a family-oriented atmosphere,” he says. “That environment surrounding our business philosophy and motto underscores the fact that our customers are not just hiring a vendor or supply house at Moo TV; they’re getting a collaborator.”
“The best part of working with Triton is they really think things through and know our work flow,” Burnett adds. “We’ve never had a relationship that’s been so good.”
For more information, visit www.tritonvt.com and www.mootv.com
