Are You Watching America?
I just went down to Oxford Circus to see some new tech being demoed. As you might know, London Underground recently started replacing some of their traditional billboard advertising spaces on the train platforms with video screens (at some stations), which up until now have been showing pretty much what you’d expect (read: ignore): short commercials for beer, holidays and movies. But I got wind of this new project being run, where they are transmitting live video from New York City in realtime, across the planet, to the Central Line platforms at Oxford Circus. Check it out:
Of course, it was just another Thursday afternoon on the London Underground, so there wasn’t much to see until you got to the platform.
That’s the live video you can see of New York, under the watchful eye of the CCTV camera (do you feel safer?).
There were plenty of people on the platform. Most took a moment to realize what they were seeing (it wasn’t overly obvious that it was live video, apart from a tiny “LIVE” marker in the top corner of the screen — but how hard is that to fake?)
Some people were more engrossed in the free tabloids than the technology (to each their own).
Some people were rapt.
And some just wanted to get home.
The video feed shut off as each train came in, and reactivated once it had left the platform. Maybe I’m the only one who noticed (because I’m geeky enough to go down there to take pictures), but at 4pm there are a whole lot of trains coming and going, on average every 90 seconds. Of course when you’re in a hurry, they space them out a bit more.
(previous 3 pics courtesy of QuadCamera, a most excellent iPhone app!)
My favorite little touch was the print ads between the video screens, showing a perspective glimpse of people on the New York subway platforms:
I kinda wish the video feeds were more like that; 2-way live views onto the NYC subway platforms would have offered a truly surreal experience, as commuters could watch and react to commuters on the opposite side of the world, stuck in the same situation. I can only hope that this brief campaign, which runs for just a few days, is some kind of test-run for something more ambitious like that. At the very least, the sponsors should take away the lesson that the technology is ready.
