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Clear Channel Plans To Roll Out Digital Billboards
Tree131 writes "Just in case you don't have enough distractions driving on the highway, Clear Channel is planning to roll out digital billboards. The new billboards will feature ads that depend on the time of day as well as the general area demographics.
I wonder how long before someone with lots of time on their hands hacks into the system and starts tampering with the messages."
We even have digital billboards in Salt Lake already..... I thought they had these everywhere..
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Will they have X-rated ads at 2 am?
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Are going to love this. Imagine the number of court cases which will litigate agains CC when they claim that the driver was distracted by the billboards. I wonder how this will relate to the laws which are being considered for banning in-car dvd players....
Everytime I drive by it, it displays a beer ad. How did they know??? RFID chips in bottles? WOW! Technology!
Hopefully it will be running on Windows Me. That way, most of the time we won't be distracted by the blue screens (of death). The color might even be soothing.
Electric Monkey Pants
It's about time the common man can let Clear Channel know how they feel.
I saw a site that had pictures of digital billboards with Windows Error messages on them. This is the picture I saw, although I can't remember the original site. It's not a crash but apparently, someone's missing a driver disk.
My dad's a truck driver and keeps a laptop with a 1xRTT card in but also uses his WiFi card when at truck stops. When he was drivng through Utah he kept picking up a SSID and since I setup his wifi equipment he calls me asking what the hell is this SSID he kept picking up and goofing his connections whenever he stoped somewhere to access the net.
Turns out it was a billboard company in Salt Lake who after I contacted them really didnt care that they're systems were out there broadcasting their SSID's and assigning people's laptops a friggin IP!!
I'm curious if someone's managed to redesign a few billboards out there.
Clear Channel can get a pretty good idea who's driving at any hour a day based on adding up the radio listening data... they can do supplemental surveys to subtract out at-work listeners so that they only count in-car listeners to figure out what the demographic that's going to pass their billboards at each hour of the day will be.
Their killer app will be to link together packages that promise to reach a certain number of impressions to a given demographic.. based on who's expected to drive by at the hours that the given ad is up. That's what ad buyers really want, is to only count the people who are likely to consider buying the product being pitched... everyone else doesn't count. Doing it this way, they'll be able to get more milage out of their existing boards.
If they use a regular FM broadcast (why pay a paging company) and it's subchannel to send the information to the billboard, then the protocol would be sniffable. The trick would be swamping the input on the billboard to get your signal into it. You would have to be pretty close to do it since you are competing with a 50KW station most of the time.
For more information on subchannels, Google SCA subchannel.
The truth shall set you free!
Boston's cabs have started sprouting Super(with a capital S) bright orange LED panels on top. They are displaying sports scores, or maybe very short news bits. Because of the brightness, they are virtually impossible to ignore, and exceptionally annoying. I'm almost positive I saw a Clear Channel logo at the bottom of the sign unit.
Screw Microsoft- there's plenty of competition these days. It's Clear Channel and the other super-huge media conglomerates that really frighten me.
At least the signs aren't animated. I give them about 6 months to figure that out. Personally, I hope someone takes Clear Channel to court over the existing signs violating some motor vehicle law.
Please help metamoderate.
an unlawful act.
But if you're going to do it anyway, take a video camera.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
To use Rush Limbaugh as an example, he would have been just as big had he been a militant liberal for the simple fact that he and his show were entertaining. During his peak period, I listened every morning...not because I agreed with all (any?) of his opinions, but because it was good listening. These days, when I get up early enough, I listen to Don Imus [in the Morning] and disagree with at least half of his rants (many of them leftist - he's on the Kerry bandwagon at the moment). But it's a good show, so I enjoy it.
It's not always (almost never?) content that makes people listen to radio shows. It's how the show is put together and the quality of the host(s). These media companies know that better than anybody.
The FCC imposed a half-million dollar fine, and more seriously threatened to cancel their license due to the repeated flagrant violations. That is a risk simply not worth taking for them.
You'll be too drunk to see that far anyway.
paintball
I recently came back to France and noticed that the country side drives seemed a lot... cleaner. It took me a while to figure out that there were no more billboard signs. Upon inquiry I learnt that they are now illegal outside of city boundaries. Very nice.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
If ClearChannel is going to insist pushing these digital billboards with "time of day" related messages, then I hope they will turn down the brightness of their billboards at night as well.
chongo (was here)