LED manufacturers are starting to get their collective heads around energy consumption levels becoming a deciding factor for some of their biggest customers, like media companies.
Consider the case of Clear Channel’s UK wing, which has replaced an aging-out LED spectacular billboard on the road to London Heathrow with a new one that uses roughly a third less energy – but is still capable of 10,000 nits (which is tanning-booth, visible-from-space bright).
The 72-meter long board – called Storm Cromination by someone who evidently likes to make people go cross-eyed – was a display from Ultravision. But it has been replaced by LED cabinets from Absen’s A series.
“The new Absen product we deployed has proven to allow us to reduce average power consumption by around a third compared to the previous installation,” says Marco Esposito, Head of Displays and Digital at Clear Channel Europe.
Energy consumption is a factor for two reasons:
- big LED ad displays are regarded as non-essential and therefore wasteful;
- even in jurisdictions like the US, where so-called green signage is not a major point of discussion, reducing power usage means reducing operating costs.
Clear Channel is replacing about 600 square meters of LEDs with newer display tech around its London DOOH positions.