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If you've ever been to a sporting event or concert, you've undoubtedly enjoyed watching

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an instant replay or an awkward kiss on a Jumbotron. And if you're a great big nerd,

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like me, you've probably wondered how exactly they make those things.

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Great question, fellow nerd. Because they're engineered to be so massive, Jumbotrons are not

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just super-sized versions of the kind of TV that you would find at the local Walmart,

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and they are in fact built quite differently than regular TVs or monitors.

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To find out how, we reached out to some manufacturers of these displays and ended up

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hearing back from Daktronics, who weren't able to tell us any proprietary information,

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but definitely helped us out. So, early Jumbotrons from the 1980s used cathode ray tubes or CRTs,

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similar to what you'd find in old-school home televisions. But, unlike normal TVs,

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which used only one cathode ray tube, these Jumbotrons had many of them,

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with each one only being responsible for a handful of pixels instead of the thousands

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of pixels that were produced by standard TVs at the time. This meant that early on,

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even large Jumbotrons had pitifully low resolution. In fact, one early Jumbotron model with a diagonal

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size of 30 feet had a resolution of 240 by 192 pixels. That's well below even a VHS tape,

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not to mention that it was extremely heavy and thick,

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making mounting it above an arena very difficult. Oh yeah, and it consumed thousands of watts of

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power. Now, one intermediary solution was to use plasma displays, but they too had issues with weight,

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and they were prohibitively expensive. Now, in hindsight, the solution to all of these

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problems seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Why don't you use lightweight, cost-effective, compact,

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red, green, and blue LEDs? Then you can have your full-spectrum color cake and eat it too.

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But unfortunately, blue and green LEDs, particularly bright ones, were much more

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complicated to manufacture back then due to complexities with the required chemicals.

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Now today, those problems are mostly solved, and most Jumbotrons work by using exactly that

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principle. So, they'll have one LED module per pixel, with each module containing proprietary

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wiring, so not like an HDMI connection, and then a number of red, blue, and green LEDs along with

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a certain amount of video processing hardware depending on the manufacturer in order to make

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fine adjustments to the image quality. Now, some screens use through-hole LEDs with reflector cups.

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This makes them brighter and helps them deflect sunlight for outdoor and long-distance applications.

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Others use surface-mounted LEDs without the reflector cups giving them better viewing angles

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for places that don't have to contend with the sun, like indoor arenas for instance.

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These modules then can be up to several centimeters across for larger screens,

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meaning that at typical HD resolutions, modern Jumbotrons actually end up being really big,

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which they can get away with because most of the viewers will be sitting far enough away from the

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screen for the picture to still look pretty darn sharp. Many venues are actually more interested

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in upgrading their Jumbotrons to HDR versus 4K, because at typical viewing distances,

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greater contrast and dynamic range is believed to make a bigger difference to the perceived

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image quality. But back to talking about size. The largest indoor Jumbotron covers nearly

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65,000 square feet. It can be found in Atlanta at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and its ring shape is a

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great example of how the modular construction of modern Jumbotrons out of these little LED modules

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can make them highly customizable. But being huge and modular aren't the only ways that

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Jumbotrons are different from smaller screens. They're also driven differently from an entire

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control room that has to have equipment powerful and flexible enough to change what's on the screen

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quickly and accurately, depending on the display's aspect ratio. Hence all the little buttons that

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you see on a typical Jumbotron control board. This enables the right camera feed or visual

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effect to be displayed at the right time. And because Jumbotrons have to be visible from far away,

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as well as in bright outdoor conditions, their brightness goes far beyond what you'd see on

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a regular display. It's not uncommon, in fact, for Jumbotrons to have thousands of nits of available

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brightness, like the scoreboard at TIAA Bank in Jacksonville, Florida, which can get up to 9,000

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nits. To put that in perspective, the average home TV will output around 300 nits, with a fancy

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HDR home TV doing about a thousand nits and change. So this requires a special grade of LED

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that can even require special cooling due to its immense power draw. Even though modern

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LED-based Jumbotrons are much more power efficient than 80s and 90s technology, the screens are still

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notorious power hogs due to their sheer size. The well-publicized sideline displays at AT&T

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Stadium outside Dallas each require 635,000 watts of power. That's roughly a thousand times more

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than an average gaming PC. Good thing that Jerry Jones still has enough money to pay for that power

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bill. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out our other videos, and leave a comment

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if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible. Oh, and don't forget to subscribe.