At least now you'll have something to look at besides the bumper in front of you.
On Tuesday, Fox Sports South will start incorporating live-streaming data on 10 digital billboards across the Atlanta area. The outdoor advertising will have live Atlanta Hawks game scores, starting with the Lakers game on Tuesday, as well as Atlanta Braves spring training headlines directly from FoxSportsSouth.com. Live scores from Braves games will stream on the boards when Major League Baseball's regular season begins.
Die-hard fans probably have their teams' schedules on the refrigerator. But Fox is trying to hit casual fans from as many angles as possible.
"People are bombarded with messages in their day-to-day walk through life," said Michael Brouder, director of marketing and network presentation for Fox Sports South. "We're just trying to make it easier for sports fans to catch their teams."
The network says it is the first in the Atlanta market and first among Fox's 18 regional networks to use the technology, which will blast scores for about 18-24 seconds per minute on 40-foot billboards. An eleventh billboard is coming near the merge of Ga. 400 and Interstate 85.
"Fox has tons of sports products here in Atlanta," said Brouder. "But it's also a lousy traffic town. Our goal here is to have people as they're driving home and let them know the game is on."
Fox worked with billboard companies including CBS, Clear Channel, Lamar Advertising and Olympus Media to design the streaming program. "Each of the vendors that we're dealing with have been so cooperative," Brouder said. "They've made it very easy."
Digital billboards are eye-catching, but they have been controversial. A number of cities have banned them to try to force drivers to focus on the road.
The Outdoor Advertising Association of America says high-tech digital billboards do not raise the risk of accidents. The trade group said an engineering analysis of three years of accident data in the Cleveland area showed no statistical relationship between digital billboards and accidents.
In a 2009 study, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials said digital billboards "attract drivers' eyes away from the road for extended, demonstrably unsafe periods of time."
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