I’ve been watching a bit of the evenly-bilingual TransitTV content since I’ve been commuting on the Los Angleles Orange Line across the San Fernando valley. I seem to be one of the few who uses a laptop/EVDO combination on LA rapid transit.
The system cycles through a lot of short form content, weather, news clips and also shows a map (powered by Microsoft’s Live Maps) so you can see where the bus is. I believe the content refreshes over WiFi when the bus is in the station.
But it doesn’t always go according to plan. Last time I took the bus, the video was having stuttering problems. You could recognize the cause – it looks like some background process was flailing in the background, causing everything to stutter once every few seconds on whatever linux or windows machine was doing the playback. The period of the stutter was just long enough to let you get interested in what the talking head was saying, and then punish you by pausing painfully.
I build those same sorts of systems for cars and online, and I certainly sympathize, but I didn’t know how to let the TransitTV people know that bus number whatever was going to have an inaccurate count of ads served that day.
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