Just like how the Chinese turned drone displays into an art form when they used thousands to create shapes in the sky, sports companies have elevated the notion of digital signs in some of the world’s craziest jumbotrons. Before you sign up for your Kitcast account and start buying up digital signs, here are some examples of “Next Level” digital signs.
The Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta
With a capacity of 83,000 and at a cost of $1.6 billion, it is notable because it has the world’s largest LED video board. You have to remember that it isn’t push projected images onto a panel, these are With a capacity of 83,000 and at a cost of $1.6 billion, it is notable because it has the world’s largest LED video board. You have to remember that it isn’t pushing projected images onto a panel, these are massive jumbotron LED video screens that curve and connect in a way that makes it seem like one large video screen. Imagine the precise engineering that was required to both ensure all the panels fit together perfectly, but also that they create a perfectly smooth image. Plus, the content itself needs to account for the various angles the jumbotron rests at. The video would be off-screen if they tried to run flat images and videos on the jumbotron. In essence, this jumbotron is a marvel of both hardware engineering and software engineering.
The Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium
To put it into perspective, you can see there that the screen takes up a large portion of the football field. In fact, if it were to fall, most of the Dallas Cowboys players would be gone forever. Though it is hard to judge its size within the boundaries of the picture, look at the group of people on the left and right, there are over 100 people on the pitch in this image, which should help you understand how large this jumbotron is. It is the largest jumbotron in the NFL and was the highest definition screen in history until the Texas Motor Speedway jumbotron was built. This is 160 feet wide and 72 feet tall, and the weird thing is that the electricity cost is not its highest expense. The biggest expense is cleaning it. This is because cleaning it without doing damage is very difficult (no power washers), and even when the sign is on the floor, its cleaners still need extra insurance cleaning it from the top going downwards.
The Texas Motor Speedway
Their screen has a 20,634 square feet of HD display. That is almost half an acre of screen. Its dimensions are 218 feet wide and 94.6 feet tall, which makes it the world’s largest HD video board. The sign is packing 4.8 million pixels and 281 trillion colors into that massive display. In addition, the screen weighs more than 108 tons, which is roughly the same as suspending five fire trucks up 125 feet. Perhaps not the sort of thing you want to be sitting under if there is an earthquake.
George Washington University
Perhaps the craziest jumbotron on this list is the one that wanted to play basketball. The jumbotron itself is made up of four screens, each one pointing towards the seating, which is arranged in a North, East, South, West setting. In what was originally a very suppressed incident, eventually became national news when the people sent in to move it started to report it to the authorities.
The sign itself dropped during the day when the stadium was closed and nobody was around. At first, the college tried to hush up the incident. When pressed, they told people it happened during routine maintenance. They also staged photos (like the one above), with mats and equipment everywhere to overly highlight that the area was not in use at the time. This photo below is how it really looked when the secret cleanup crew (a contract building firm) entered the scene. Perhaps of all of them, this is the craziest jumbotron of them all, the one that had hoop dreams.
