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posted by martyb on Saturday November 22 2014, @03:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-for-apple-to-upgrade-it-to-retina® dept.

The NYT reports that the largest and most expensive digital billboard in Times Square stands eight stories tall and is nearly as long as a football field, spanning the entire block from 45th Street to 46th Street on Broadway and contains nearly 24 million LED pixels, each containing tiny red, blue and green lights. At a going rate of more than $2.5 million for four weeks, the megascreen ranks as one of the most expensive pieces of outdoor ad real estate on the market. A digital art exhibition by the critically acclaimed Universal Everything studio collective will animate the screen until November 24, when Google will take over as the exclusive, debut advertiser with a campaign that runs through the New Year. Size matters in Times Square,” said Harry Coghlan. “Sometimes it just comes down to wanting to stand out, and it comes down to ego.”

One of the oldest forms of advertising, billboards are attracting new attention as digital displays allow for new levels of real-time interactivity. Each day, more than 300,000 pedestrians are estimated to enter the Times Square “bow tie,” where Seventh Avenue intersects with Broadway between 42nd and 47th Streets. “People go to the Grand Canyon to see the most visually stunning natural canyon in the world” says Tim Tompkins. “They come to Times Square to see the most digitally striking canyon in the world.”

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @04:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @04:59AM (#118695)

    GOOGLE SEZ "CONSUME"
    LISTEN, AND OBEY!

  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Saturday November 22 2014, @09:41AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Saturday November 22 2014, @09:41AM (#118727) Homepage Journal

    Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, but...what is it with Times Square? It's not a square, it's just an awkwardly shaped intersection. There's not really any sort of plaza, it's just an unpleasantly skinny triangle of space where a road forks.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:52PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Saturday November 22 2014, @07:52PM (#118887) Journal

      From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_square#United_States [wikipedia.org]

      In some cities, especially in New England, the term "square" (as its Spanish equivalent, Plaza) is applied to a commercial area (like Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts), usually formed around the intersection of three or more streets, and which originally consisted of some open area (many of which have been filled in with traffic islands and other traffic calming features). Many of these intersections are irregular rather than square.[2]

  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 22 2014, @12:01PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday November 22 2014, @12:01PM (#118744) Journal

    To put the number in relation:

    A 4K screen has roughly 8 million pixels. So the times square wall has about as many pixels as three 4K screens.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday November 22 2014, @06:30PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Saturday November 22 2014, @06:30PM (#118856)

      When it gets hacked, that's gonna be one heck of a Goatse.

  • (Score: 1) by cellocgw on Saturday November 22 2014, @03:49PM

    by cellocgw (4190) on Saturday November 22 2014, @03:49PM (#118787)

    1) is that European football fields or USA handegg fields?
    2) How many Libraries of Congress are in those pixels?
    3) What's the car analogy?

    BTW, hot from a Google page,
    an open (typically four-sided) area surrounded by buildings in a town, village, or city.
    "a market square"
    synonyms: market square, marketplace, plaza, piazza
    "a shop in the square"
    an open area at the meeting of streets.
    [for those who are whining that it's not a geometric square piece of land]

    --
    Physicist, cellist, former OTTer (1190) resume: https://app.box.com/witthoftresume
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @11:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 22 2014, @11:35PM (#118959)
    Such amazing technology!

    Aww... used to display yet another fucking ad we don't want.
  • (Score: 1) by xorsyst on Monday November 24 2014, @09:38AM

    by xorsyst (1372) on Monday November 24 2014, @09:38AM (#119361)

    Hyphens exist for a reason, use them please. As a non-USA person, it took me 3 goes to parse that title.