Hudson Yards Digital Content System

Located across approximately eight square blocks of the Chelsea neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City, the Hudson Yards site comprises several state-of-the-art office buildings, 14 acres of open public space, around 4000 residences and several other facilities including a hotel, shopping mall and cultural centre. 

Pulling this together as a single destination is an infrastructure of over 100 digital screens in a variety of sizes and configurations. These are in seven different formats including 40-foot LED screens and portrait-format interactive ‘totems’ placed around the public spaces of the complex. These units are a great opportunity for Hudson Yards and advertisers to connect with visitors to the development in a visually-engaging way. 

‘The team at Hudson Yards called on us to provide our unique creativity and expertise,’ said Jonny Dixon, Framestore’s Global Head of Production, Labs. ‘For Framestore, Hudson Yards’ infrastructure of screens presented a really interesting challenge that would see us work with the team and its partners to deliver information in the most dynamic and visual way.’

Framestore's bespoke solution now in operation throughout Hudson Yards has been designed to deliver content to people within the development and lets media be played out on some or all of the screens across the campus. 

‘It has been an honour for Framestore to work on the Hudson Yards development and be a part of the changing New York City skyline,’ said Sir William Sargent, Framestore’s Chief Executive Officer. ‘The concept and scope of the project shows how Framestore has raised the bar for what a creative studio can deliver, using an increasing number of means to connect with consumers through visually-engaging imagery.’

The creative studio took inspiration from the architectural shapes around the development to design a wealth of stylish, high-end assets that display on the screens around the development – all set in templates for each of the different screen configurations. Alongside these are a number of dynamic transitions so that displays can change between different types of content in several visually-interesting ways. Each of Hudson Yards' buildings has its own logo which Framestore created animated versions of to provide the content management team with different versions to use and provide variation in the rhythm of daily messaging.  

‘We’ve created a system that makes it easy for Hudson Yards’ team to continually create content with a series of templates’ says Dixon. ‘And the bespoke cloud system’s easily-configurable nature means that users can upload and schedule content to avoid a repetitive programme of content. It’s a system that we’ll continue to maintain, develop and adapt to make sure it continues to deliver relevant information in a beautiful and engaging way.