Times Square Has A New HD Big-Screen
Walgreen's, ABC New Media team on giant billboard
By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 11/20/2008 12:52:00 PM
New York City’s Times Square will get a large dose of high-definition video tonight, when pharmacy chain Walgreen’s lights up a giant, LED-based electronic billboard atop its new flagship store at One Times Square.
The 30-story-tall video display, which Walgreens president Greg Wasson calls the “biggest point of purchase display in the world,” ascends some 341 feet above street level and encompasses the east, west and south faces of the building, which is set on an island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue and 42nd and 43rd streets. It will display high-definition video advertising both from Walgreen’s and its suppliers.
ABC New Media Sales, which already sells space for the ABC Super Sign across Times Square, is handling sales to outside firms. Major brands that will start advertising on the sign tonight include L’Oreal, Johnson & Johnson, Colgate and Kraft.
“It provides advertisers a creative way to showcase their message,” says Teresa Rix, VP of ABC New Media Sales.
The 125-ton mega-billboard, which was conceived by branding firm GilmoreGroup and designed and built by video billboard specialist D3, represents a full-fledged broadcast facility in and of itself, complete with a control room located on the 9th floor of the building and 16 miles of data cable. It includes some 11,000 electronic modules, each containing 1,024 to 1600 pixels. That equates to 12 million light-emitting diodes spread over 16,000 square feet, which are controlled by 20 computers. It also includes 13 street-level plasma displays, which are synchronized to display the same image as the LEDs.
The LED displays themselves are arranged into three tiers of different resolution, with the resolution going down as the sign gets higher. D3’s specialized software dynamically scales images to the different resolutions to create a seamless picture.
“There are 29 different faces that are all synchronized together to deliver one seamless image,” says D3 managing partner Jason Barak.
D3 makes the LED modules for the Walgreen’s sign as well as the proprietary computers that render the images displayed on them. It plays uncompressed HD video, created with graphics and compositing software like Adobe After Effects, off a server. It then runs it through a system it has created which takes the high-resolution DVI output and converts it to gigabit Ethernet, allowing it to be sent over an IP-based network consisting of Cisco switches and Ethernet cables. D3 then uses 12 Vista Spyder multi-image display processor systems to control the placement of video across the displays.
In all, D3 is pumping 150 gigabytes of information to the giant billboard every 30 seconds, making for a staggering amount of data that needs to be stored and managed on four RAID disk arrays.
“It’s like a small network,” says Gilmore Group president Arthur Gilmore. “There are a heck of a lot of screens to run.”
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What an awesome LED Sign! I hope to be able to get my comany involved in a project of this magnitude someday!
LED Displays and LED Signs are fast becoming a standard in outdoor advertising! Check out my website if you want to learn more about Outdoor LED Signs: www.icatchdisplays.com
Eric Stevens - 2/8/2009 12:06:40 PM EST
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