Transit TV lighting up again?

August 11, 2009 by Dave Haynes

A commenter posted a little teaser note suggesting Transit TV, the screens on public transit systems play, is rising from the ashes.

I poked around and found the Transit TV site is up and there is indeed a splash screen suggesting the system will be back soon. The domain is now under the control of a Sun Valley, California-based company, TEZO Systems. That company does ticketing systems and has a transit offer:

TEZO systems software and hardware solution brings together bullet proof protection to stop abuse and fraud while giving both rider and provider important information that is not available in any Fare systems today.  We’ve combined GPS technology, internet technology, scanning technology and tablet PC technology to make the system user friendly to all that use it.  

I worry about any company that is based on software and hardware engineering and suddenly becomes a media company, but at least the ad targeting system they have in mind is interesting (though a doozy to sell and manage).

Using GPS, ads will be targeted by bus position:

If the bus is driving West, then the vendors on the south side of the street will have their advertisement appear.  If the bus is driving East, then the North side of the street vendors will have their advertisement appear.  You get the idea?

Vendors will have a website they can go to and update their advertisement as they see fit.  Since, this is real time, the ad will automatically be updated and immediately change as the bus is on that route. 

My suspicion is that it will be much easier to go to the technical colleges and language training schools that seems to advertise heavily on transit systems and focus on them, as opposed to a lot of grunt work doing a Yellow Pages model.  

This was a system bound to light up again, and while I suspect the TEZO guys will learn the hard way about the challenges of selling media, they are at least not saddled with all the capital burden that the orioginbal Transit TV people took on to put multiple screens in some 4,000 buses in a few US cities like LA.

The original Transit TV declared bankruptcy and turned off in Feb. 2009. 

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