Late last year, in our ‘Trends and Predictions for 2008′ we wrote… “Digital Street Furniture. We will see more and more digital street furniture, and we are not just talking about standard’ish indoor and outdoor 6-Sheets or bespoke other sheet-sizes - we have already seen parking bay meters, toilets and bus shelters with digital screens. We will also see giant two sided screens indoors and outdoors. Digital Street Furniture will be the biggest market for those involved with the Outdoor Media folks. More and more, when an outdoor media owner wants to make an impact they are THINKING DIGITAL FIRST.”

Since then, we ourselves have seen half a dozen proposals for new ‘digital bus shelters’ (even solar powered air conditioned bus shelters in the UAE).

Wherever they are proposed, it’s good to see the traditional media / outdoor / promotional folks being the ones THINKING DIGITAL.

In the UK, Clear Channel have a few bus shelters (no more than half a dozen we believe) and although it has STILL not been officially announced (there must be a stock market RNS coming soon) we do know that Clear Channel will be selling advertising on Vision Media Group’s Iconic Pod - a form of street furniture of course for use inside their Shopping Malls (doesn’t look out of place and complete with maps, screens and interactivity).

We see that Outdoor Promotions in the US are preparing to launch a digital network in Las Vegas (on the Strip) and that their 70” LCD bus shelter was on display at MRI’s booth at last week’s DSE.

Their approach to the market is a reconfigured Samsung LCD running at 4,000+ nits. Alex Belenson, VP Business Development, Outdoor Promotions tells us “it is spectacular, and remains fully and clearly viewable under a variety of light/shadow combinations including the most intense sun conditions of Las Vegas”.

We don’t disbelieve him but as always it is one of those things you would have to see for yourself AND turning up the brightness to deal with ambient sunlight is not necessarily the best way to deal with the issue we believe - these devices can also run hot and when placed in an even hotter, sunny environment - well only time will tell!

Outdoor Promotions are selling advertisements in 15 second increments, their mock-up that they used to demonstrate the system, showed:-

Eye Corporation when they are aiming at pedestrian traffic in airports, use 7 - 10 seconds. We assume that their is some industry magic number for a Bus Shelter that caters for pedestrian AND vehicular traffic?

Either way the Digital Street Furniture trend is definitely happening.

By: Adrian Coterrill

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