Court Services at Odeon Cinemas

Our friends at Sparq and ODEON Cinemas approached us to support this unique initiative, helping to return High Court trials in Scotland to pre-Covid business levels with a socially distanced solution. Creating a UK first by running court sessions with a remote jury, the project is set up to allow up to 16 courts to run concurrently. ODEON Cinemas have adapted their spacious auditoriums to accommodate the trials and help tackle the backlog of cases, supported by £5.5m of Scottish Government funding.

The cinema auditoriums were perfect for jurors to be socially distanced, following all strict government guidelines. The big screen helped the process to be as immersive as possible, connecting the jurors to the main courts where the legal teams for both the prosecution and defence, witnesses and accused, are streamed live to the cinemas. The jury members are also streamed back to a video wall located in the main courts for the benefit of the lawyers and judiciary teams.

Our Solution

Simpli-Fi’s expertise enabled all of this to be possible by providing rapidly deployed enterprise-grade connectivity for the live streams. We installed 200mbps fibre internet connections to each of the cinemas and point-to-point backup links with full redundancy built-in to ensure 100% reliability. Projects like this would usually be built over many months, but the Simpli-Fi team designed and delivered this solution in an impressive four weeks!

As well as providing quality internet connectivity, Simpli-Fi was also trusted by the Scottish Courts to install and manage the local area network to enable the Sparq team to deliver crystal clear video and audio links between the courts and the cinemas. With reliability being at the heart of everything we do, the network was also designed with full backups to ensure no downtime in the unlikely event of hardware failure.