There was a new beacon in the Kent night skies Jan. 7,as the Seattle-Thunderbirds vanquished Kelowna in Western Hockey League action at the ShoWare Center.<\/p>\n
The center’s brand-new video marquee was a veritable light show to drivers passing the center on West James Street, with pictures of the T-Birds in action as well as other events coming up for the center.<\/p>\n
Crews from The Sign Factory of Kirkland installed the video display board Jan. 6. The full-color display is 9 feet high by 17 feet wide. Crews last month installed the 20-foot high base to hold the video display board.<\/p>\n
“All the passengers and drivers in vehicles driving by will have a whole new awareness of what’s happening in the building,” said Beth Sylves, ShoWare marketing director. “Whether it’s hockey, a concert or a Disney show they won’t be able to miss what excitement is happening.”<\/p>\n
The $190,000 marquee will run messages 24 hours a day to promote the 2-year-old arena. The Kent City Council voted 6-0 in August to spend up to $225,000 from the city’s lodging tax reserve fund to pay for the sign.<\/p>\n
Kent receives about $150,000 per year from the lodging tax. The Legislature approved in 1997 a lodging tax that directs 1 percent of city taxes collected on hotel room sales to be used to promote tourism.<\/p>\n
The sign in front of the center will display messages with video whenever possible.<\/p>\n
“We have great hockey footage we can put up,” Sylves said. “And we have video from the Globetrotters that we can put up there.”<\/p>\n
“It’s going to be very illuminating,” Sylves said. “The signs are angled so that you can see it while traveling east or west. It’s capable of crisp, life-like video imaging. You’ll get great visibility from far away and also when walking on the plaza you can see the messages from close up.”<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There was a new beacon in the Kent night skies Jan. 7, as the Seattle-Thunderbirds vanquished Kelowna in Western Hockey League action at the ShoWare Center.
\nThe center’s brand-new video marquee was a veritable light show to drivers passing the center on West James Street, with pictures of the T-Birds in action as well as other events coming up for the center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":9975,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-9974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9974"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9974"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=9974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}