Digital Signage Forum: The Comcast Experience

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The Comcast Experience in Philadelphia has become one of the top tourist attractions in the city, drawing more visitors than the Liberty Bell. This extraordinary digital signage installation is 25 feet tall and 80 feet wide. The world's highest definition, 10 million-pixel LED screen dominates the lobby of the Comcast Center, which was designed by architect Robert Stern. The Comcast Experience is the creative vision of David Niles, founder and president of Niles Creative Group in New York City. He and his staff managed all aspects of the project for their clients, Comcast and Liberty Property Trust. This included the engineering and design of the infrastructure, production of all of the content, and development of a unique content delivery system.

One of the particularly impressive things about this installation is the incredible quality of the images: the content is designed to be photo-realistic, which meant that it had to be high enough resolution to suspend disbelief and yet also bright enough to compete in broad day-light. Connected Barco NX-4 LED screens make up the Comcast Experience display surface.

Furthermore, it soon became clear from the outset that creating content that would be ever-changing and evergreen would be extremely time-consuming and financially difficult: it would be impractical and even unrealistic to produce 18 hours of 10 million-pixel content 365 days a year. So, instead the content is generated automatically from set scenarios and activities, like the clock motif. Content is created from a number of interchangeable pieces to create an enormous number of permutations from families of content that are ever-changing.

David Niles, who will present this case study at the Open Digital Signage Forum, explains why this installation has been so eye-catching: "The industry looks at this as a groundbreaking thing because it doesn't look like digital signage; it's not just screens. This whole idea of photo-realism and blending into the environment and making kinetic ideas, a lot of people seem to be interested in that.

"The second thing is having this content delivery system that is able to update itself and it's not cost-prohibitive. It can be budget-conscious without losing any quality. The third thing is that there is an enormous movement in the world of architecture to create kinetic spaces. The idea is that there's plaster, steel, and glass but now there also are display technologies that allow you to look at surfaces and spaces in buildings that are not static but they are kinetic; they become alive."