: Photo: Jesse QuinnNew York City is hard at work getting ready for the countdown to 2009. About 1.6 million people shuffle in and out of Times Square every day, but on Wednesday night, they'll all be there at the same time, along with Ryan Seacrest and over a ton of confetti.
Wired.com took a behind-the-scenes tour of the preparations.
Left: Close-up of Billy Elliot sign above Times Square.
Manhattan's Theater District came to be known as "The Great White Way" because of all of bright lights on the area's theater marquees. Today, most signs are powered by LED lights, which are both brighter and more energy-efficient.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnA video feed of the night's events, sponsored by Countdown Entertainment, will be beamed onto the many screens in the square. Each sign will display different advertising spots during commercial breaks.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnControls for the Spectravision sign sit atop the ninth floor of the W hotel on 47th Street. Clear Channel owns the rights to the space above the building, which explains why the structure is accessible only by a series of ladders and sits on concrete blocks to avoid directly touching the W property.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnTogether with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Disney Corporation helped turn Times Square from a rather shady part of town into a major tourist hub. New buildings facing the square are now required by law to boast illuminated signage, and the density of neon in the area rivals the Las Vegas Strip.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnSpectravision has been experimenting with interactive games, live feeds and Bluetooth all year. The company also coordinated a live broadcast of CNN’s election-night coverage into the square, which ran into trouble when President-elect Barack Obama’s acceptance speech ran past midnight. “We lost the feed for three minutes,” says Dale Langdon, systems engineer at D3 LED. “When we got it back up, I could hear the cheers from the street up in the control booth with the door closed.”
: Photo: Jesse QuinnThe first LED billboard was installed in Times Square in 1999. It was composed of mostly red and green lights, because blue bulbs were then prohibitively expensive. As the price of LED lights has gone down, their efficiency and resolution have increased exponentially. Today's signs have 25 times the resolution of that first billboard.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnEvery day, the Spectravision HD sign on 47th Street displays a live video feed of the opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange. That video feed is monitored on this 3-by-5-inch screen in the control room.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnThis year, Mars Snackfood is promoting its 3 Musketeers Mint brand by collecting "wishes" that will be written on pieces of confetti and showered down on Times Square at midnight. Individuals can submit wishes in person at the Times Square Information Center or online.
: Photo: Jesse Quinn“No advertiser in Times Square wants to be an also-ran,” says Meric Adriansen, managing partner of systems and engineering at D3 LED. Each new sign in the square has some form of bragging rights, he says. The Walgreens signage, completed in November, is the largest outdoor-advertising space in the world. The sign wraps three sides of the building where the ball drops every year, featuring a 17-story continuous display of video and animation produced by 12 million LEDs and numerous giant plasma video screens.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnA 30-second animation takes about 150 gigabytes of bandwidth to deploy on the signs outside. "That's like emptying out five iPods every 30 seconds," says Jason Barak, managing partner of sales and marketing at D3 LED.
: Photo: Jesse QuinnThe 2009 ball is double the size of last year's, weighing in at 11,875 pounds. It is covered in 2,668 Waterford crystals and powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDs. For those worried about the energy efficiency of an illuminated, 12-foot geodesic sphere, this year's ball uses more than three times the number of LEDs of the 2008 ball, but will be 10-to-20 percent more energy efficient.
