Founded in 1948, Lotte Corporation is one of South Korea’s largest multinational conglomerate corporations operating today. Headquartered in Seoul, Lotte consists of over 90 business units and employs 60,000 people in diverse industries including candy manufacturing, beverages, hospitality, financial services, and electronics.
Employee training and attracting top talent is critical to the company’s culture and ensuring the company’s future. With the goal of ‘nurturing innovative talents preparing for Lotte’s second leap’ and propelling the company forward, it opened the Lotte Academy in Osan, South Korea in 1993 as a venue to train its employees.
After 25 years of operation in the first campus, the company decided to build a new facility to expand its education operations. Audio and video would serve an essential role in the facility once opened, and the company chose NDI® as the foundation for its campus AV system and a selection of Vizrt hardware solutions to produce and deliver broadcast quality content.
After nearly four years of construction, Lotte opened its state-of-the-art Lotte Academy in 2022. The newly constructed Osan Campus sits on almost 14 acres consisting of three buildings including the Learning Center and two accommodation buildings. It is now a massive 495,000 square feet (nearly eight full size football pitches!), which is double the capacity of the previous facility.
With 49 classrooms, the campus can accommodate up to 1,475 students at any given time while the accommodation building has a capacity of 482 people with 286 rooms.
Opting for dependable, future-proofed AV technology
The facility hosts and trains employees in classrooms and auditoriums on campus, and broadcasts training sessions to remote locations. At times, the company also invites guests from remote locations to lecture virtually. Considering the amount of audio and video technology equipment required to facilitate onsite and remote training, one of the biggest challenges for a facility of this size is creating a dependable AV infrastructure.
The CCTV monitoring method used in the previous facility had poor image quality, inconvenient connections, and a massive amount of older-style cabling. Whenever the team needed to add new pieces of equipment, it was difficult to install and maintain given the varying cable types and protocols used. After a long review, Lotte Information and Communications, who served as the system integrator on the project, reviewed all options to connect and supply video equipment for the classrooms and chose the NDI® protocol to help deliver audio, video and metadata.
NDI® utilizes the same IP-network as the rest of the campus uses to deliver Internet and Wi-Fi to employees during training. Systems and devices connect to a LAN through NDI® using a standard Ethernet cable. With more than 300 NDI®-enabled devices in use at the campus, the ability to connect all devices through the same Ethernet cabling simplifies the installation and helps avoid costs and complications that would arise by adding other cable types.
Using the NDI® network, the facility’s team now can transmit a broadcast from its auditorium, the largest space on campus, to each classroom. Conversely, with NDI installed throughout the classrooms, lectures in progress can be screened immediately in other classrooms or in the auditorium. NDI® made flexible, bi-directional transmission possible.
“Each classroom is both a place where educational content is created and a place where content is consumed. And through the COVID-19 pandemic era, we realized that we must conduct education anytime, anywhere, regardless of infrastructure. NDI® was the best choice for us. If the network is connected, we can transmit educational content by connecting cameras and converters anywhere in the training center through NDI®,” says Dong-gil Oh, director of the Lotte HRD Center.
Vizrt + NDI® = perfect match for corporate AV learning
The Information and Communications team chose Vizrt Spark Plus 4K NDI video converters for every classroom to convert video signals from certain products such as HDMI or SDI to NDI®. The Spark Plus 4K makes it convenient to change video output from a camera or laptop into NDI® to be used as a source for the video workflow on campus.
In the training administration rooms on every floor, the team uses Vizrt TriCaster Mini 4K video production systems to easily switch between NDI®-connected cameras in each classroom and broadcast graphics and playback media. Additionally, the Lotte Osan Campus built a separate studio to produce online lectures and used the TriCaster Mini as the main production equipment.
“We knew that we needed AV tech that would work in a large campus and attend to high volumes of content in the form of online lectures. The structure provided by Vizrt and NDI®, along with the high quality of video and audio, and the immediate and simple connection between locations, is exactly what we needed. Now, there are no headaches in trying to get tech to work, it just works,” says Dong-gil Oh.
With the installation of NDI® to provide the AV backbone for the Osan campus, and the use of NDI®-enabled Vizrt production equipment to produce content, the Lotte Corporation built a more modern, reliable, and scalable production infrastructure to support its needs for years to come.
