How do LED billboards work?
An LED billboard is a grid of tiny light modules playing video files in a loop. The number after the "P" in its model name is the gap between pixels in millimetres — P5 means 5mm — and that single number decides how close you can stand before the picture breaks into dots.
Strip away the jargon and an LED billboard is a very large, very bright screen made of modules bolted into a grid, each module packed with clusters of red, green and blue lights. Your file plays on it. That is genuinely the whole thing.
The interesting part — and the part worth understanding before you book — is the spacing.
Pixel pitch, and why it is the only spec that matters
When you see a screen described as P5, P6 or P10, that number is the distance between the centres of two neighbouring pixels, in millimetres. Smaller number, tighter grid, finer picture.
There is a rule of thumb the industry has used for years: roughly one metre of viewing distance per millimetre of pitch before the dots stop being visible. It is an approximation, not physics, but it is a good one. A P10 screen wants to be read from about ten metres and beyond. A P3 screen holds up at three.
| Pitch | Comfortable from | Typically used for | In our network |
|---|---|---|---|
| P3 | ~3 m and beyond | Indoor panels, entry gates, close approach | 2 sites |
| P4 | ~4 m and beyond | Indoor and covered locations | 3 sites |
| P5 | ~5 m and beyond | Mid-sized street-level faces | 15 sites |
| P6 | ~6 m and beyond | The workhorse — most junction screens | 28 sites |
| P10 | ~10 m and beyond | Large faces read across a junction or from a flyover | 3 sites |
Pitch, viewing distance and where each one belongs
What "resolution" means on a billboard
Most of our screens run 1920 × 1080 — the same shape as a television, which is convenient, because it means artwork built for a video edit usually adapts without a redraw. A handful are portrait: 1080 × 1920, or 1152 × 1536. Those want a different composition, not a rotated version of the same one.
The loop
Your file does not play continuously. It sits in a rotation with the other advertisers on that screen, coming round every minute or two depending on how the loop is built. What you buy is total minutes per day — sixty on most of our sites — and those minutes are distributed across the on-air window.
Every screen also has an on-air window and, on most sites, a short maintenance break in the afternoon. Both are on each site’s own page, because "24 hours" is a claim that does not survive contact with a real electricity supply.
See the actual sites
Every screen has its own page with a photograph, the size, the direction it faces and the hours it runs.
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