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Comment by infofarmer | Hacker News Reader

In Mainland China a multitude of tech and ad companies are working to ensure that every elevator in the country has a screen and audio for a never-ending loop of commercials. Depending on the city, the coverage of premium office and residential buildings is around 100%.

For older elevators that would not allow much modification, the hardware was a DLP projector mounted under the ceiling with a top portion of the doors covered in a reflective matte sticky film. All the new elevators come with some sort of flat screen pre-installed.

Hardware is cheap, regulations are lax, it's a decent source of extra revenue for the property management companies.

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The elevator in the apart-hotel I'm currently in (not China) has commercials playing non-stop on a screen. However, happily the property management has muted the volume.

I expect most property management companies will mute the advertisements, especially after complaints.

I must say that Billy Idol jumping around while mutedly singing "she cried more more more" gets more amusing every time I see it.

Elevators with a flat panel screen with ads in them were already commonplace in many downtown Vancouver BC office buildings 16-17 years ago.

I've never seen one in mainland Europe. But then again we don't have all that many highrises with regular foot traffic. It's almost exclusively office buildings.

I recently saw such an elevator in a hotel in Valladolid, Spain. It was just a 6 story building.

Hotels have a rather hard time behind them, plus competition with AirBNB, no wonder that they are looking for every income opportunity.

From my last trip, my hotel in Budapest didn't have a screen, but almost every square inch of the interior of the elevator was plastered with paper adverts.

My hotel in Luxembourg (8 floors total) had 2 screens on either side of the doors to select your floor from. There were static ads in place of floor numbers, to make the floor selection look longer. After the elevator starts moving, the floor selector collapsed to a condensed view with video ads playing on both screens and over the speakers.

Me neither, but then for last 12 years I live in country that tries hard to avoid any high rises (Switzerland) since cons often outweigh pros long term and those few situations where they make sense are not happening here. Those taller buildings already standing have mostly ancient elevators.

That being said, I am practically allergic to commercials on screens. If somebody would try to shove it down my throat on a regular basis, the first think I would look for is how to sabotage/break this system while not being caught on camera(s).

There is one place in our city (Geneva), in the very center some business has put a screen in their window facing super busy street. I don't mind short adverts running there that much. But between them, they put 1s very bright white light blinking done in such an intense way it steals your attention completely and is pretty horrible to your eyes if you actually look at it. Anytime I walk around I look for a stone to throw at it. Or some silenced .22, just to make it stop (I won't do it but only due to cameras and not having a silenced .22, otherwise I would have already done it and would even feel great). Mind you, this is 2m from very busy road and intersection, so I think its an accident waiting to happen because during nighttime its pretty bad.

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