SACO Technologies is showcasing its groundbreaking screen tech at Vegas’s hottest new attraction, an arena featuring ginormous screens that display imagery in unprecedented detail
Music is a deeply personal subject. There are those who swear The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, but others who would consider that claim utter malarkey. Some don’t care about music at all, so they don’t stay abreast of who is currently hot or not, perhaps because they are too busy to kick back and crank tunes.
Fred Jalbout is a member of this largely non-musical tribe. An indefatigably cheerful entrepreneur, he came to Montreal from Lebanon in 1981 to study engineering. He didn’t know a soul in Canada, and neither did his younger brother Bassam, who joined him a few years later to also study engineering prior to the siblings co-founding Saco Technologies Inc. in 1987.
The small, privately held company would emerge as a big-time player in the decidedly un-rock-and-roll world of industrial control panel design and manufacturing. The Jalbout brothers did the panels for the nuclear power plant in Pickering, Ont., and they counted Hydro-Québec and a host of other utility companies across North America among their clients.
Saco’s panels were modular, easy to install and repair, but what gave the panels an edge over the competition was their programmable LED display screen. The screens could display any colour under the sun, and in a range of intensities, too. In the world of 1990s’ industrial control panels, this was revolutionary stuff.
Word got around, so much so that in 1997 the brothers were invited to Dublin to demo a prototype of an LED screen, measuring approximately two feet by two feet, for a famous Irish rock band that non-musical Fred had never heard of.
“I swear to God, and it is too bad for me to say this, but I wasn’t watching U2’s shows,” he said. “But Bassam, he told me, ‘Fred — this is U2 we are talking about — and if we can get U2, can you imagine the opportunity for us?’”
U2 today resides on the Mount Olympus of pop music deities, although lately the band has been hanging out in Las Vegas, appearing as the headline act at the Sphere, a US$2.3-billion, 18,000-seat spherical arena. It is the largest spherical structure on Earth, and a magnetic piece of eye candy in a desert town with no shortage of shiny attractions.
Photo by Greg Doherty/Getty Images
The Sphere’s wraparound, ginormous, fully programmable exterior and interior LED screens can display all manner of imagery, and in unprecedented detail. The moon, a tennis ball, a happy face emoji, the Rockettes, an eyeball, a luxury car commercial and more have shown up on the arena’s exterior — and gone viral on social media. The interior screen is even more awe inspiring, such that a writer for NPR could detect “the wrinkles in Bono’s forehead” during a recent concert.
He would be the same Bono the Jalbout brothers flew overseas to meet 26 years ago for a discussion that heralded the transformation of a Montreal-based industrial control panel manufacturer into a world-renowned, custom designer and maker of LED screens, including the massive ones key to Sphere’s appeal as a groundbreaking entertainment venue.
“We always knew that the LED displays would be among Sphere’s signature features, and that creating the world’s largest LED screen on the exterior, and the highest resolution media plane on the interior, would present unique challenges,” said David Dibble, chief executive of MSG Ventures, a division of Sphere Entertainment Group LLP focused on developing advanced technologies for live entertainment.
“Saco fully embraced the opportunity to push LED technology to new frontiers through Sphere, which is a testament to the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that Fred and Bassam have inspired in Saco since its founding.”
The annals of pop superstardom are lined with tales of unsung talents getting a big break, and making it count. Rod Stewart was a lowly busker with a bluesy voice when he was discovered on the streets of London; Sheryl Crow was belting it out as a backup singer for Michael Jackson, but dreaming of bigger things; Justin Bieber, the pride of Stratford, Ont., was just a kid when someone posted a video of him doing his thing on YouTube, and a star was born.
But Bassam wasn’t envisioning stardom when he purchased a U2 CD for his older brother to help bring him up to musical speed for that Dublin meeting held in a large studio space owned by the band. Following some polite talk with U2’s manager and concert production staff, in walked Bono and lead guitarist Edge to see what all the fuss was about. The Jalbouts programmed their LED prototype to display some cool images.
“As soon as Bono saw the screen, he said, ‘Where have you installed this before?’” Bassam recalled. “And Fred said, “Nowhere, it is brand new.’ And Bono said, ‘I love it. I want to be the first to use the technology.’”
Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The two-by-two-foot prototype became the basis for a 150-by-50-foot touring screen. It could be programmed to display images galore, but could also be broken down into smaller parts and packed into a single transport truck to ferry between concert stops. The Jalbouts and a crew of Montrealers spent six weeks on-site at an open-air stadium in Las Vegas in advance of the opening date of U2’s 1997 PopMart tour to finish building it.
They worked through the night to escape the desert heat, a nocturnal schedule that included some intrinsic perks. Bono, a night owl, often materialized at 3 a.m. to serenade the workers. The catered food on offer was prepared by five-star chefs, and the screen itself provided some dramatic tension, befitting its rock-and-roll purpose, since it was not fully functional until the night of the first show. As the clock ticked toward curtain time, Bono bumped into the older Jalbout, or so the story goes, and gave him a pep talk.
“Bono had this big confidence in us,” Fred said. “He told me he believed it would work and to just keep going.”
The screen worked, and it went on global tour with the band thereafter, often with one of the Jalbouts in tow just in case any glitches arose. Saco branded its LED technology Smartvision. Bono even thanked Fred onstage for his new, performative toy when U2 rolled into Montreal for a performance.
“After U2, all the big stars started coming to us,” Bassam said. “It was a big switch for the company. But we thought entertainment would be a better market for us than control panels.”
Bon Jovi wanted a screen. The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Celine Dion, Elton John, Michael Bublé and others did, too. It isn’t all about the music, though. Saco’s LED technology has any number of applications. Rockstars may have been the first to incorporate the technology into their acts, but NFL stadiums, NHL arenas, Olympic venues, hotels, airports, corporate headquarters and the Nasdaq display screen in Times Square have all relied on Saco, as did the developers behind Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper.
“After U2, all the big stars started coming to us”
Bassam Jalbout
Saco now operates on a project-to-project basis. There is a core of 60 full-time staff that scales up in number, depending on the requirements of a job, say, outfitting the facade of a guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla. But it’s all designed in a low-slung manufacturing facility not far from Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.
Many of Saco’s full-timers have been around for decades. The keys to their loyalty are a combination of the nature of the work and the nature of the Jalbouts.
“Fred is literally the happiest person I have ever met,” said Jonathan Labbee, a 30-year Saco veteran, who shares the chief executive role with Fred. “Both brothers are incredibly cheerful people, and family oriented.”
They are also smart. The elder Jalbout was recently in Toronto as a finalist in the 2023 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. Top prize wound up going to a nutritional gummy maker, but there were no hard feelings. Fred answered the door to his room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel the morning after, pumped the hand of a guest and settled into a comfortable chair for a conversation.
His affability was outwardly obvious. His outfit, down to his sneakers, was entirely black, while his comic timing was bang on. Asked at one point for his age, a lengthy pause ensued.
Photo by Peter J. Thompson/Financial Post
“Who me?” he eventually replied, pausing again. “I am 92.” Yuks aside, he’s 67, and, according to his younger brother, he is the “closer.” That is, the guy the sales team calls in to clinch a deal.
“Fred has always been a people person,” Bassam said. “He is funny. He is very open, and even if he has all the problems in the world on his head, he’ll still be smiling and laughing.”
He is a don’t worry, have faith, we got this kind of entrepreneur. It is not a new trait. Fred told a customs officer way back when he got off the plane in Montreal from Lebanon that he didn’t know anyone in the city and didn’t have any idea where he was going to stay. The officer told him to sit tight for an hour, and then she helped find him a room at the YMCA downtown.
“It cost me $9 a night,” Fred said.
Bassam possesses equal daring, but he admits to being shy and most comfortable as the background player to his elder sibling. He is the company’s technical whiz, charged with banging away at whatever nuts-and-bolts challenges a particular job happens to present.
The biggest challenge with the Sphere, which is owned by an offshoot of James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp. empire, was its sheer scale.
The exterior screen is the largest-ever LED screen. It consists of 1.2 million LED “pucks,” set 20 centimetres apart, with 48 individual LED diodes each. If that’s a little hard to imagine, imagine the pucks as individual Lego pieces. Each piece is a self-contained unit, so that, horror of horrors, if a single LED diode burns out, a puck can be accessed via interior catwalks, popped off and replaced without requiring special tools.
But what’s truly “mind blowing” about the Sphere, Fred said, is its interior screen, with an image resolution that is about 120 times sharper than the average high-definition television.
“We have been working with LED for decades now, we made the screen and even we were surprised by it,” he said. “It is unbelievable.”
Photo by James Schaeffer/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP
Equally amazing is the story of how a former industrial control panel maker became a player in Vegas. What the brothers saw as VIP guests on opening night at the Sphere on Sept. 29 was their old friend Bono giving it his all, right down to the wrinkles in his forehead.
At points during the performance, the indoor arena appeared to fall away, and a crowd that had walked inside an arena to see a concert had the experience of being at an outdoor stadium with the sun rising over the desert.
The former industrial control panel guys had come full circle, with no pep talk necessary, and their phones have not stopped ringing since.
“We’d love to do another iconic-type project,” Fred said. “It doesn’t matter what it is, or where it is, we’re ready.”