I am a little skeptical of this application of e-ink. Is this really cost effective or environmentally friendly? Compared to an LED or OLED panel, sure, but how does it compare to ye olde poster behind glass? If you're willing to give up on snazzy animations anyway, how many times would you have to change the poster before the color e-ink is cheaper?
Having a connected display gives advertisers a huge amount of control that they desire.
Being able to control the time of day that your ad is shown is a pretty big deal. Being able to edit or take down a poorly considered ad campaign very quickly is also a pretty big deal. Coordinating paper ads and other media is tricky, because the companies that manage the advertising display inventory only have so many workers and therefore only so much capacity to do changes.
Yes. E-ink doesn't need electricity to show an image, it only uses small amounts of electricity to change the image. Technically, if it ran on batteries, you could pop in some batteries, change the advertisement image, and then take the batteries out and the image would stay like that permanently.
