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Some commercial displays on Times Square run on macOS
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Some commercial displays on Times Square run on macOS

·2 mins
sys admin devops

This could happen some system error which forced system reboot (error message in the middle). If you haven’t seen this message and you are mac user_…. you are lucky._

AnywayInteresting fact that some of these commercial displays are running on macOS. I mean you see BSOD image every showing blue screens aka windows death or linux kernel panics showing crushed comercial systems running on linux but hey there are system runing on macOS. I was personally so suprised that there are some comercials screen runing on mac that I need to know more. And after some diging I had find out some info.

There is actually ver simple reason for that. Take a look for another image:

My guess it’s same place but this image has terminal on the screen. And if you look closer you can see some data from the shell.

For example you can see the username inside terminal which is tigerparty.

Tigerparty is actually company that sells displaying  commercials on billboards. This company is using their own system called GoTiger. The system suppose to work as commercial advertising or retail digital displays. Shocking I know - comercial company. No one expected that! But wait I can finally explain why they use macs instead of the usual windows/linux solution like we see elsewhere.

Based on the information from their website:

  • Ultra High Quality Specs: Native 4K @60FPS with Apple lossless ProRes 422HQ or Uncompressed animation codec

…this company decided to sell their comercial sevices using mac computer based on their harware specs. Also note that this is US where apple is quite popular.

So yeah the reason is resolution, but still for me it was big suprised that even macOS be used for everyday commercial displaying.

Funny thing is that even though commercial for the advertised product failed (even though they apple should be happy), they still could somehow advertised them selfs. I sure I am not the only who was interesed enough to dig more about who they are. So yeah always name you username in shell by your company name. It could be someday very helpfull.