Fenway Park Installs Video Board to Help Fans Figure Out Public Transportation

The Boston Red Sox have been entrenched in the offseason for about two months now, but their fans are excited about a big new addition that will change the gameday experience.

No, we’re not talking about Chris Sale, the ace left-handed pitcher the Sox acquired from the Chicago White Sox at the Winter Meetings. This could actually be something that has a bigger impact on the millions of fans who come to games at Fenway every year, especially using the MBTA public transportation system.

TransitScreen and Orange Barrel Media partnered on the creation of a 14-foot-by-48-foot video screen outside Fenway Park that’s already started to show real-time arrivals. The board features subway, commuter rail, bus and Hubway bike-share information.

TransitScreen, a Washington, D.C.-based startup, uses data from transportation agencies and services in more than 30 U.S. cities to display transit information. The transit information outside Fenway Park is displayed for about 20 seconds of every minute, sharing the space in a rotation with advertisements.

The company has been active in Boston since 2014, with about 50 displays in bars, apartment buildings, and public facilities in the area, including Cambridge City Hall. Some of its displays include wait times for Uber rides.

The Fenway Park display is by far its largest and also its first outdoor billboard display in the country, says co-founder Ryan Croft.

“If you go to a baseball game and you’re drinking, we want to be able to promote mass transit,” he says.

Fenway Billboard Represents New Business Opportunity

TransitScreen’s usual customers include real estate developers and businesses who want to include public transit information inside their buildings. Bostonians can also find TransitScreen in a handful of Boston bars, including Boston Beer Garden, J.J. Foley’s and Beantown Pub.

The Fenway billboard strategy represents a new business opportunity for TransitScreen they hope to replicate elsewhere, Croft says.

Orange Barrel Media is paying TransitScreen to use its transportation display, with a goal of increasing the number of eyeballs on the board by offering non-advertising content along with its product ads.

“What we’re trying to do is add value through content on the screens, such that people want to look at them,” says Pete Scantland, chief executive of Orange Barrel Media. “Think of it like television: if there was no program between commercials, there’d be a lot less viewers.”

TransitScreen expects to launch a service in 2017 that allows users within 200 feet of any its displays to access the same information on their smartphones. That system will also allow the visually impaired to receive the information audibly, Croft says.

 

This article was originally posted on sister site Commercial Integrator.

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