>> We have more pre-show announcements from Macworld and CES, plus the close up look at the technology built-in to New York City billboards. It's Tuesday, January 6, I'm Natali Del Conte and it's time to get Loaded.
^M00:00:12
[ Music ]
^M00:00:15
>> It's Macworld day and the big announcement from Phil Schiller is -- actually, I don't know. When Schiller takes the stage, myself and the Loaded crew will be flying somewhere over Kansas on our way to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. CNET TV does have a crew going to Macworld though, so you wanna tune in today to check it out. Amazon announced a partnership with Roku which will bring streamed movies to the Roku box. Amazon Video on Demand will let users stream over 40,000 titles to their TV sets if they have a Roku box. This is a significant addition to the movies Roku already offers through Netflix. In case you haven't noticed, video streaming is huge and I'm sure you're gonna be hearing a lot more about it this week. One thing we do know that will be coming out of Macworld is the new Eye-Fi iPhone application. Eye-Fi is the company that makes web-enabled memory cards. Of course the iPhone doesn't accept flash cards, so this is a whole new thing for Eye-Fi. The iPhone application will let you manage all of your photos from your iPhone and your digital camera into folders on your Mac or PC. You can also upload them and share them on your favorite online photo sharing site like Flickr or Photobucket. The application is free, but as of the time we're filming this show, it hasn't launched just yet. You can check for the launch status yourself at eye.fi/macworld. You may soon get Flash video on your television. Intel and Adobe both announced that they're working on that. More specifically, Adobe and Intel are collaborating on developing Flash for the Intel media processors CE3100 which is a chipset that's optimized for home entertainment systems. The CE3100 will soon be able to bring a more seamless web-based and video viewing experience to Intel-based cable set top boxes, Blu-ray players, digital TVs and retail connected AV devices. These chips will start shipping some time in the first half of this year. Millions of people packed into Time Square every year just to see the big lights and billboards. Those displays are getting more and more complicated and higher definition. Randall Bennett got a behind-the-scenes look at the bright lights big city technology. Take a look.
>> 340 feet over New York 7th Avenue is a brand new billboard that wraps around the Walgreens building, 17 different displays take up 17,000 square feet and that's not the only display here in Time Square. Over my right shoulder is the new JVC billboard. The first fully 720p display, its high definition. So what does it take to run all these high tech displays? For starters computers, lot's of them. Thirty different machines perform different functions from storage to playback to database engines and of course some actually control the output of the signs. These aren't your typical pieces of off-the-shelf hardware though.
>> Computer companies make great computers for business, to make great computers for your home. They just don't make great computers for signs.
>> Meric Adriansen is one of the creators of D3LED, the company behind the signs. He and his team took about a year to create the Walgreens sign from start to finish.
>> Just before the Walgreens project we thought we had done the craziest project of it all which was the ABC project that dressed down the street. I was just bragging to everybody how complex this walls and how we did these incredible things and how much data we're pushing through it and literally three weeks later we're sitting in a meeting to try to figure out how to overdo it by the factor of eight to ten.
>> For the new project the company created a custom control room, which powers all 17 outside displays, 3.7 gigabytes of data per second is pushed out through models of cable to connect the computers to smaller seconds of each sign.
>> These are the -- the modules that drive the display and Walgreens is a combination of about 12,000 of these modules.
>> Each module has the same basic parts, which are red, green and blue LED's, but every module isn't made the same way.
>> As the sign goes higher up in the air, the ones that are 340 feet in the air, just placing is further apart whereby you save on the number of dyes that you put in there as you get closer to the ground you have a lot of dyes in there to get a resolution.
>> Down the block the JVC sign uses many of the same concepts, or be it in a more traditional approach.
>> The JVC sign, it's the highest resolution, outdoor sign than we built. It's 720p and it has these nice curves and a lot of different surfaces, so it's a fun, beautiful, little sign.
>> Both signs were installed within weeks of each, but that doesn't mean D3LED can sing around and celebrate.
>> Actually, it's one of those places where your best shot is only as good for 6 months and then you have to prove yourself over again.
>> For CNET TV, I'm Randall Bennett.
^M00:04:41
[ Sound effects ]
^M00:04:44
>> Those are all your headlines for today. Starting tomorrow we will be broadcasting Loaded from the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Viva Las Vegas. Don't miss it! Also stay tune to CNET TV because we are gonna help you see everything and anything on the show floor and I do mean everything. You wanna check back all week for first looks and news stories galore and of course you can follow my twitters about the whole thing at twitter.com/natalidelconte. I will see you tomorrow from Vegas. Thank you for watching. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you've just been Loaded.
^M00:05:16
[ Music ]
