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After more than a year of lockdowns, masking, and physical distancing, businesses are reopening and people are gradually returning to normal routines. Yet for many large venues, such as stadiums – poised to open to thousands with the start of NCAA and NFL football seasons this month – the great reopening comes with some pretty big challenges. Depending on where you are in the country, public health authorities may still be discouraging people from gathering in large numbers, which puts more onus on venues and event organizers to invest resources in crowd control and pedestrian flow. From an employer standpoint, workplace safety rules may also require more oversight to ensure employees and contractors are maintaining physical distance from customers. Maintaining a register to enable contract tracing in the event of an outbreak is yet another requirement that adds new layers of complexity as well. When you are managing a stadium that holds 50,000 to 100,000 people, managing pedestrian flow requires more than sticking a few arrows on the floor. Stadium managers must consider the whole customer experience, from parking their car, finding their seat, to bathroom breaks and snack bar visits, and develop new procedures to streamline getting from A to B while limiting lineups and crowds. Despite similar environments, customer needs and behaviors are not necessarily the same for all kinds of programming. Breaks may be at halftime, between periods, or between acts. Sports fans may get up more often to buy beer and hot dogs; families attending children's shows may make more trips to the bathroom. This means managers must create plans not just for their venue, but also for different types of events and/or audience groups. Most large venues have already deployed digital camera systems, access control systems, license plate readers and other technologies to monitor guest safety and secure sensitive areas. Those that have integrated all these systems into a unified dashboard are discovering these tools are handy for more than just security. Video Analytics Venues are looking at other ways in which they can combine data from a variety of systems to enhance and customize the customer experience. For example, rather than having people standing in line for 20 to 30 minutes while waiting to scan tickets and pass through security, some venues are using people-counting analytics within digital video surveillance systems to minimize wait times. The software can be configured to notify the appropriate staff person if the line exceeds the acceptable number of people, so they know to open another gate or redirect the crowd. Camera analytics can also identify the direction of foot traffic by the ratio of faces among the heads. This can be useful to alert staff if people are moving towards restricted or closed-off areas, for example, so that a security person can intervene. The camera can

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