OK, the Solent is not quite the mid-atlantic, but it's still a challenging environment to try and show the World Cup in. Over at our favourite ferry company - Red Funnel - they're making sure passengers on their car ferries don't miss out on a minute of World Cup action by showing matches on the Digital Signage screens in the bars. Sounds simple, but it has taken a bit of engineering to make it happen!

All three of Red Funnel's car ferries - Red Eagle, Red Falcon and Red Osprey - have just undergone a major upgrade of their Navaho MediaCAT Digital Signage systems. Each ferry now has a screen in the cafeteria and three screens in the bar seating areas, all of which show a mixture of news, advertising and real-time positioning.

To provide the real-time positioning maps on all screens, we installed an MC100 MediaCAT player on the bridge where it could be close to an external GPS antenna mounted on the mast. This bridge unit serves dynamic web pages to all other players on the ship, showing the current position, speed and bearing.

When Red Funnel first asked us if we could show the World Cup on the bar screens, we initially thought about running aerial cables to each of the bar area MediaCAT players and providing each one with a freeview tuner. Running cables on a ship is not easy at the best of times, but coping with the interference from all of the other equipment on board, with long cable runs is even harder, so we looked for a way of using the existing infrastructure to do the same job.

Since we already had a MediaCAT on the bridge, close to the mast where a TV aerial would be mounted, we decided to look into streaming the Freeview signal from this bridge unit across the network to all other players on the ferry. A nice little open-source application, imaginatively called dvbstream, really helped here - you can provide it with all of the details of the Freeview multiplex channel frequency and settings, the video/audio program IDs and it encapsulates the DVB-T program streams in RTP packets and sends them out across the network using multicast.

The media player on the MediaCAT is already RTP and DVB aware, so all we have to do is point it at the correct multicast address and all players on the ship can show the same TV channel at the same time, all via one TV aerial and the existing network infrastructure.

As we're in the middle of finalising the MediaCAT 4 build, we decided to make a few last minute tweaks to the build to automate the whole process - some extra configuration settings now allow you to turn a standard MediaCAT player into either a DVB stream transmitter, or to always use DVB stream receiving for displaying TV.

That all turned out to be the easy bit - picking which matches to show and working out when BBC/ITV are actually showing them is proving to be a bit trickier!

The World Cup is officially under way now and the Red Funnel ferries are showing football matches in the bar areas to regular commuters, tourists and the thousands of people making their way too and from the Isle of Wight festival. If you are one of those passengers, take a picture of the screens showing the football (or anything else) and email it to sales@navaho.co.uk (along with your contact details) and we'll enter you into a prize draw to win a solar powered phone charger - perfect for the start of the festival season!

Prize Draw Rules

1. Entry to the competitions is restricted to one entry per person please.
2. Multiple entries will be disqualified.
3. Automated entries, bulk entries or third party entries will be disqualified!
4. Competitions are open to UK residents only unless otherwise stated
5. Prizes can only be sent to a valid UK address unless otherwise stated.
6. Winners will be chosen at random from all valid entries.
7. Winners will be contacted via email names displayed on our website.
8. The Judges decision is final and no correspondance will be entered in to.
9. The competition will run from 11th June 2010 until 11th July 2010.
10. Navaho is compliant with the data protection act. Our policy is such that we will not pass on your details to any third party without your prior consent.