Daktronics began in 1968 when Aelred Kurtenbach and Duane Sanders, electrical engineering professors from South Dakota State University, wanted to create jobs so their best students wouldn’t have to go out of state to find work. They peddled $5 stock to anybody interested -- shares now worth, after splits, about $2,700 -- and took years before finding their calling: scoreboards and video screens.
Now those 65,000 boards and screens across America turn sports into sound and light shows. The screens or scoreboards are in stadiums or arenas used by at least 85 pro teams and will be making an eighth appearance in the Olympics this summer in Athens. Sales are expected to reach $200 million this year, having more than tripled in seven years.
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Daktronics screens are also getting bigger. Jacobs Field has America’s biggest video screen for sports: 36 feet by 149 feet. Only the Nasdaq stock exchange video screen in New York’s Time Square is bigger. Such high-visibility projects, suggests Simet, will create a trickle-down demand throughout the sports world. “I really feel that within 10 years almost all high schools will have video replay screens in gyms and at least big high schools will have them for football.”
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And LEDs created sharper images than the TV-like technology that had powered stadium video screens. Sony, whose famous Jumbotrons were meant to help promote the company’s TV sets, installed its last giant video screen three years ago -- and is no longer in the business in the United States. Frank Kurtenbach, a Daktronics vice president as well as co-founder Aelred’s brother, understands that many people don’t know the Jumbotron will be extinct when remaining models wear out. But, he says, it can be annoying: “Frankly, John Madden says ’Jumbotron’ a bit too often.”
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