In-cab LCD craze comes to South America

A LOCAL FIRM has announced the roll out of LCD screens on some of Buenos Aires city taxi cabs, offering passengers video reels with 'entertainment' and advertising.

The advertising company, dubbed Spotlight, wants to bring this new trend of in-cab advertising to South America's taxi passengers. It will begin by installing its LCD screens into 200 taxis in Buenos Aires as part of its initial service roll-out. That is a small number, given that the city boasts around 39,000 registered cabs, but the firm says it will select the two hundred lucky ones on the basis of "quality of service" supplied.

"Enjoy your video reel while I honk my horn"

Veronica Ortega, president of the firm said that initial 200 units will be installed by March. She described the audiovisual programming as a mix of cultural, musical, and sports information with, of course, adverts thrown in for good measure... all delivered in a 10-minute reel, which is the average length of a taxi trip in the city.

Passengers will be able to mute it

Seven-inch colour LCD screens are installed in the back of the front seat headrests, and the video begins playing automatically, alerted by a sensor when passengers enter the cab. The system is described as "fully automatic with no driver intervention".

Two hundred cabs -out of 39000 - will be part of the initial roll-out

About half of the programming will be commercials, says Ortega. A mute button lets passengers turn off the sound if annoyed or when they want to start talking on their mobiles to in turn annoy the driver. Turning off the whole screen requires some button pushing by the driver, local press reported. The firm says that they're evaluation providing internet access through similar means.

Sportlight's president Veronica Ortega

It remains to be seen whether this version of modern cab info-screens mean the beginning of the end of the sometimes amusing, sometimes annoying driver-to-passenger conversations that are the norm on taxi cabs here. µ

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