Remarkable Media wants its Heli-D business to become the next entertainment media channel with its helicopters that fly immersive billboards in the sky.
Heli-D is a programmable, cinematic 200-square-feet LED screen hovering above the world’s biggest cultural moments, such as the upcoming Super Bowl and the upcoming FIFA World Cup, said Simon Powell, CEO of Heli-D, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“The Super Bowl is definitely happening for us, but I can’t disclose anything more than that,” Powell said. “It’s the next massive beat for us and it’s very exciting.”
Heli-D wants to transform the sky into a distribution platform for short-form storytelling, world premieres, advertising, and real-time fan experiences. As you can see in the videos, a helicopter can carry the huge billboards at a slightly tilted angle and move over giant venues like a sports stadium. It’s a step up from airplanes flying banners or even the Goodyear Blimp, and it can even show off live video games being played.
Sandy Climan, Hollywood producer of hits like Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, has now joined to help scale what many insiders see as a new creative frontier.
“Heli-D is unique in its ability to make out-of-home marketing a super-sized event! It’s an entirely new canvas,” said Sandy Climan, in a message to GamesBeat. “The scale, the visibility, the immediacy. This is a platform built for cultural moments. With the continuing growth in out-of-home entertainment and the significant number of global events coming to the U.S. over the next several years, the opportunity could not be bigger. I’m excited to help guide Heli-D during this next phase of growth.”
A new kind of entertainment media
This year, Heli-D will reveal plans for the Super Bowl and other major events in 2026.
HELI-D is building a new entertainment layer above major cities, one that studios, streamers, gaming publishers, and live-event producers are already beginning to tap. The company’s collaborations with Netflix, Xbox, and global franchise partners have shown that aerial content can create the kind of spectacle audiences look up to experience, shifting attention back to shared cultural moments rather than personal screens.
Climan’s decision to join Heli-D’s advisory board reflects how seriously Hollywood is taking this emerging medium. With a career spent at the intersection of storytelling, technology, and industry transformation, from CAA to Universal, he recognizes that aerial media unlocks something Hollywood hasn’t had in decades: a new, high-impact canvas for creative expression, promotion, fan engagement, and world-building.
As the U.S. approaches a blockbuster year of global events, FIFA World Cup, major franchise releases, gaming launches, and election-year cultural peaks, HELI-D is positioning airspace as a new stage for entertainment. Think: citywide premieres, synchronized sky moments across multiple markets, airborne short-form content, and real-time fan experiences that merge digital culture with physical spectacle.
Origins
Powell is a veteran of aerial media for well over a decade in the U.S. He started with static helicopter-borne banners in the sky and then moved to projection helicopter banners over time for the VMAs and MTV back in 2016. When the pandemic hit, the the team began working on projection screens that could be viewed in the night sky.
So it turned to LED-based signage that could be as light as possible and aerodynamically stable.
“This is the major challenge that we solved because anyone could try and lift up a flying screen, but it’s just going to spin around,” Powell said. “Without it being aerodynamically stable, you don’t have a product. So we have worked on multiple iterations. It’s not something that you just behold and it’s perfect in one go.”
During lockdown in Australia, Powell said the team couldn’t leave the country and so it focused all of its attention on this problem. They did a big activation for Netflix where we launched their first children’s animated movie.
“For us, that kind of proved the concept. It proved the frame rate because obviously this was designed to be captured on people’s phones, and obviously there are different frame rates, and it will flicker on traditional screens,” he said. “we got the frame rates right. We got everything right to prove the concept, and then we did a massive activation in Australia at the largest sporting event.”
The team ran a QR code in the sky and it got in front of 100,000 people per day. It became clear that key details were the resolution of the screen, the pitch and aerodyanmics.
Heli-D is self-funded and the cofounders are Powell and Ryan Osborne.
The Xbox activation
Among the things Heli-D already did was a debut of Ninja Gaiden 4 with Microsoft. The company’s Xbox division wanted a content moment that felt genuinely new. Something that would break beyond the traditional gaming audience and earn widespread cultural attention.
The brief was clear: create a high-impact, highly shareable spectacle with the power to ignite PR and social coverage across gaming, entertainment, tech, lifestyle and mainstream news.
Using Heli-D flying LED screen supported by a second helicopter equipped with zero-latency transmission technology, the team delivered live gameplay beamed across the Miami skyline. Transforming the airspace into a real-time, immersive stage.
This world-first execution set a Guinness World Record for the largest flying computer game screen, redefining how audiences experience content and cementing the launch as a global cultural moment.
Simon Powell, CEO of Heli-D
The Xbox results
The display carrying the live Ninja Gaiden 4 gameplay score more than 100 PR hits and 25 million views. It had 490,000 worldwide engagements and one billion impressions. It had a 628% return-on-investment, and 80% of the coverage came from non-gaming media, proving the campaign transcended gaming and delivered true cross-vertical impact.
The company said the launch was built for the attention economy. High spectacle,
high shareability and high cultural penetration.
In addition to the Xbox, the company did a 3D display for Smirnoff vodka showing a flying vodka bottle above Miami. The sign is flown by an AH-125 or AS350 B3 helicopter and it’s designed to fly for 60 minutes to 90 minutes. The team has two helicopters now and it is adding more over time.
The Ninja Gaiden 4 demo took place in October 2025. The requirement was to have zero latency between the controllers in the second helicopter that was flying alongside the screen with less than a millisecond delay.
“We achieved that, and once they saw the tech in play with the most experienced Ninja Gaiden gamer, they were blown away,” Powell said. “This is absolutely incredible. So we took it to Miami for the world record attempt.”
It set the world record for the world’s largest flying gameplay display, he said.
While it took two helicopters to pull off the Xbox demo, only one helicopter at a time can carry the big screen. The screen is tilted forward when the helicopter is moving forward.
The tech
The Super Bright screen uses the worlds brightest LED panels (8,000 Nits) that shine
bright, day or night. Heli-D has Federal Aviation Administration to fly as close as 250 feet from viewers, if needed. It has ultralight weight as it is built tough with a carbon fibre engineered frame. The firm has a 10-year 100% safety record, and now it is getting started with flying immersive entertainment. For now, there is no sound in the demos.
And the panel is double-sided, so the 10-feet by 20-feet panel is visible in HD video specs on either side of the panel. The company is targeting 10 times the reduction of its operational emissions through verified programs.
“The U.S. is the most mature aerial advertising market in the world. You’ve had the plane banners since the 1960s, and given all of our breadth of experience doing large aerial media activations, every learning that we had went into LEDs,” Powell said. “And from a gaming point of view, it was exciting to be able to partner with Xbox for the launch to add a whole different twist to the capabilities of the screen, showing live gameplay flying through the sky above Miami.”