I received a link to this video on Alexandros Maragos' blog through our internal work e-mail and it's now doing the rounds on Twitter.

Sadly it's a fake and here's why.

First of all, if you've ever used an iTrip or similar FM transmitter, you'd have probably encountered one of their major flaws straight away - they have a very limited range if you want a clear signal. Even a few metres away from each other and sound quality starts to drop significantly. If you try to use this setup on the same frequency as a broadcast radio station, you'd best be indoors and have the transmitter right on top of the receiver to have any chance of it working otherwise the strength of the broadcast radio signal will massively overpower the tiny output of a handheld transmitter. I didn't see any large batteries attached to Alexandros' transmitter or "repeater", so I find it hard to believe it would have the strength to overwhelm the signal sent to the screens. Think about the hardware required to run a pirate radio station and then wonder if it could be successfully miniaturised to the size of the circuits shown in the video.

This assumes that the video screens in Times Square use some form of RF or wi-fi signal to receive the signal they display. RF seems unlikely as they would need individual streams for each screen that shows a different signal. Wi-fi is even less likely as it can be slow, prone to interference and susceptible to hacking. I work in advertising and although it's predominately web-based, there are certain principles that are the same across the industry - if you've booked advertising space somewhere and your ad doesn't go up when and where it's supposed to, someone's in deep shit. Judging by these figures that would involve an awful lot of money and so I can't see a competent tech team implementing wi-fi as it's just too unreliable. Even taking into account the costs of digging up bits of New York City to lay it, cables would be cheaper, faster, and less likely to be tampered with than wi-fi. Considering that the screens at Times Square have been around longer than wi-fi technology has, I'd wager that it'd be easier to upgrade the existing infrastructure instead of replacing it with a new system when wi-fi came out. I've had acquaintances that have investigated the feasibility of hacking the screen adverts and announcement boards in the London Underground and they didn't get very far purely because practically everything was cabled for security reasons. I'd be very surprised if Times Square was any different.

Most importantly, judging by information from Apple themselves, no model of iPhone can output video from the headphone socket. To be on the safe side I looked on-line for any third party peripherals that might be able to achieve this but so far I've not found anything of worth.

Unless the next update is an independently verifiable circuit diagram, his hack is all just bluster. And probably the result of an afternoon spent in After Effects.