Japanese DOOH Firm, Broadcaster Partner On Live Content On Digital Boards Around Country

January 19, 2023 by Dave Haynes

A pair of Japanese companies have partnered on a service that can put live broadcasting on 75 big LED display boards located around that country – aiming to relay everything from live sports and concerts to press conferences.

There is, of course, no great technical leap happening here. It’s just a signal input. But the companies behind the partnership suggest real-time broadcast is an advertising trend for 2023.

The distinctly Japanese PR announcement:

LIVE BOARD, INC. (Headquarters: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Jun Sakurai; hereinafter, “LIVE BOARD”) and SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director, President & Chief Executive Officer: Eiichi Yonekura; hereinafter, “SKY Perfect JSAT”) announced that LIVE BOARD will launch a live broadcasting service, in cooperation with SKY Perfect JSAT’s “Media HUB Cloud*” technologies, on its owned DOOH screens in 9 prefectures (Hokkaido, Miyagi, Chiba, Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Aichi, Osaka, Fukuoka) across Japan, available from Thursday, December 22nd, 2022.

Looking at ad trends in 2023, “real-time” is one of the key drivers of the paradigm shift. LIVE BOARD and SKY Perfect JSAT enable a live broadcasting service on digital billboards by integrating SKY Perfect JSAT’s “Media HUB Cloud” live broadcasting technologies into LIVE BOARD’s DOOH screens.

Through broadcasting a variety of live content including press conferences, music and sports events, allowing viewers to capture and share key “moments”, LIVE BOARD would like to provide new marketing opportunities for advertisers using digital billboards.

LIVE BOARD has 75 owned screens in nine prefectures (Hokkaido, Miyagi, Chiba, Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Aichi, Osaka, Fukuoka) across Japan.

The announcement suggests a max of five screens in this group are available for live broadcasts at any time, and the max time for live events is a two-hour window. Audio is available at one location – the Shinjuku Nagano-ya Building.

We’ve seen more and more sports teams and big events putting up big LED screens that face into plazas adjacent to venues, so certainly there’s a known appetite and pattern of people referring to big public screens for major scheduled events and for breaking news.