But a bigger market beckons, one that Daktronics has scarcely begun to exploit: LED billboards.
Daktronics' sales to sports venues jumped 20% in 2005 but barely budged in 2004.
Last month Daktronics opened a 100, 000-square-foot plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. to make digital billboards.
And just in time: Daktronics has spent the last year and a half running at full capacity.
Easily the fastest-growing segment for Daktronics lies in the commercial market, which now makes up 35% of sales.
Last year, to prepare for the expansion, Daktronics hired 600 new employees, a 37% jump in the workforce.
Daktronics had to be good to go in 4: Opening day for the national champion Longhorns was Sept. 2.
Since 2001 Lamar Advertising, the third-largest billboard operator in the U.S., has been a big customer of Daktronics' digital signs.
Mark Steinkamp, a marketing director for Daktronics, the company that designed the Staples Center timing system, said the clock doesn't recalibrate itself.
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Daktronics went on to make displays for dozens of stadiums, as well as for the venues that hosted the Olympics and the World Cup.
Daktronics still sold a respectable number of the systems, but it had to partner with the giants from Japan, thereby missing out on 50% to 75% of the total take.
Since 2001 Lamar Advertising (nasdaq: LAMR - news - people ), the third-largest billboard operator in the U.S., has been a big customer of Daktronics' digital signs.
By adapting the technology to 1-by-1-foot modules--each containing 16 rows and columns of red, blue and green pixels--that could be loaded on to circuit boards, Daktronics could finally compete in the same ballpark as Sony and Mitsubishi, offering a video-ready scoreboard.
They used incandescent lamps to display stats, the same technology Daktronics relied on for the next 25 years, through an exclusive contract to provide the scoreboards for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, large displays for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and an electronic voting system for the U.N.
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