The Age-Old New York-LA Rivalry Starting To Include LED Boards

January 27, 2022 by Dave Haynes

We generally tend to think of the Times Square district in New York as the home of spectacular LED ad boards in the United States, but the downtown Los Angeles district surrounding the main sports arena and convention center are starting to give the Big Apple a rival.

A property owner, Lightstone, has started putting in a 50-foot high, wraparound 8mm LED display on a new mixed use tower development  rising up near the LA Convention Center, the Crypto.com Arena (formerly Staples Center) and the adjacent L.A. LIVE bar and restaurant area, which already has a whole bunch of sync’d LED displays.

The LA consultancy Consumer Experience Group (CEG) is managing the development’s digital and static signage elements on behalf of property owner, using SNA Displays for the display tech and YESCO for putting the units and infrastructure in. Branded Cities will sell the media.

Says SNA:

The LED screen will wrap a six-level, above-ground parking structure. The LED mega-spectacular is a continuous 15,000-square-foot video display that curves around the building façade. Despite its size, the screen sports a tight pixel pitch of 8.0 millimeters, giving the display almost 22 million pixels. The 50-foot-high LED mega-spectacular is as long as a football field.

“Moxy and AC Hotels Los Angeles Downtown required precise onsite management to make sure all supportive primary and secondary steel was properly installed,” says Rasool Sayed, senior project manager for SNA Displays. “This project installation is unique in that there are only two massive subframes, the bottom one being over 28 feet tall. Being able to custom-fabricate each element of the radius and minimize the number of picks on-site allowed us to avoid closing down traffic lanes in busy downtown LA, and the huge subframes translated to less seam alignment on-site. We have worked closely with the general contractor to properly sequence different portions of the structural steel installed and now the large LED sections.”

The project is targeted to be ready sometime in the next quarter. NY-based Lightstone’s investment represents a trend among property developers who are factoring in the “faces” of new builds and renovated properties as media facades that can generate revenue, making the technology investment themselves, and then using third-party media sales. That’s a departure from the more familiar approach of OOH media companies finding attractive space and doing deals to win the rights and then put in the displays on their own nickel, providing a revenue share or guarantee of some kind to the property owner.

Here’s a progress shot …