• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 3, 2007

Clear Channel Outdoor's Spectacolor division unveiled a high-definition billboard in the heart of New York City's Times Square that lets consumers play video games and interact with ads.

The sophisticated billboard, branded Spectacolor HD, debuted Monday running advertisements from CNN, New Line Cinema, and Pioneer. News, weather and sports from CNN stream live across the lower third of the Mitsubishi screen supporting 2016-by 1984-pixel resolution. Tests are also being done with Broadway shows "Grease," "Farnsworth" and "Seafarer."

The billboard stands at the corner of 47th Street and Broadway at the W Hotel, a division of Starwood Hotels and Resorts, towering directly above the entrance to Blue Fin restaurant in Duffy Square.

Technology built into Spectacolor HD lets consumers tap into free public broadband wireless access to download audio and video clips from the billboard to any Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. Passersby also can interact with the ads through text messages, as well as play video games via short code, or listen to CNN audio broadcasts by dialing a toll-free number.

Gloria Morgan passes the intersection several days per week on her way to work from her home in Queens. A concierge at the Millennium Hotel in Manhattan's Times Square, where she has worked for the past eight years, Morgan describes the ad messages streaming across the new HD billboard as colorful. "The advertisements really attract you more than the billboard," she says. "The problem is there are so many billboards and flashing lights and electronics that sometimes you get overwhelmed."

Maybe, but Clear Channel Spectacolor's Michael Steinberg, vice president/sales and marketing, argues that tourists travel to New York City for the sights and the sounds. Now they will get a chance to take a piece of the Big Apple home to share with friends and family.

Steinberg says Spectacolor will sell advertising on the billboard in eight-minute spots per hour that can be subdivided. Companies that want to run both ads and games can allocate a portion of the hour time slot for each. For instance, the chocolate maker Godiva could buy eight minutes of ad time per hour, allocating four to run a Valentine's Day promotion on the billboard. It might choose the game Tic-Tac-Toe, with Xs and Os, as the promotion to offer a free piece of candy to the winner.

The game sounds simple, but the hardware and the software, which took more than 10 months to build, proved challenging to design and install, says Anthony Sinodinos, vice president/operations at Clear Channel Spectacolor.

"We needed to go four levels under The W Hotel to survey the type of equipment required to run the screen," he says. "It turned out we needed a 600-amp, three-phase service that would power up the display."