Times Square Live Cam
Live Times Square Webcam, New York City, USA.
United StatesStreamed by: AE SignageAbout 220,000 people walk into Times Square on an average day, and on the busiest ones the count climbs past 330,000. This Times Square live cam puts four of their views in one player, from street-level billboards to a high angle over the traffic, at the crossing of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Switch between the tabs to watch Times Square live from Duffy Square down to the NASDAQ tower on 43rd Street. It sits with the other New York webcams on the site, and it is the one to open on New Year’s Eve.
Four views on the Times Square live stream
The Duffy Square view is shot in 4K from the steel framework behind the American Eagle billboard, at the northern end of the square. It looks straight down on the yellow cabs on Seventh Avenue and Broadway and across to the screens on the opposite side, which makes it the best tab for a live view of how crowded the plazas and sidewalks are right now.
The 1560 Broadway view looks along the wall of screens near 46th Street. The building at 1560 Broadway once held the Embassy Theatre, which the Times Square Alliance turned into a visitor center from 1998 to 2014, and the stretch around it carries some of the tallest stacks of LED signs on the square.
The 1515 Broadway view stays close on one giant screen, between 44th and 45th Streets, so the ads fill the frame. It is the tab to keep open when you want to catch a specific ad or a message booked on a Times Square billboard.
The NASDAQ view faces 4 Times Square, where the NASDAQ MarketSite wraps a seven-story curved sign around the corner of 43rd Street. This is the street-level Times Square webcam for watching the market open, company listings and the tickers running across the building.
If you would rather see Manhattan’s skyline than its billboards, the NYC live cam looks across the East River from Brooklyn Heights at One World Trade Center and the Financial District, at the other end of the island.
Why Times Square never goes dark
The lights on the Times Square live cam are not just marketing; they are the law. Since 1987, New York City zoning has required buildings in Times Square to carry illuminated signs, the only district in the city with that rule, and it sets a minimum level of brightness rather than a maximum.
The square itself got its name on April 8, 1904, when Longacre Square was renamed after The New York Times moved into its new tower there. It is shaped like a bowtie, because Broadway cuts diagonally across Seventh Avenue between 42nd and 47th Streets. In 2009 the city closed Broadway to cars along that stretch as a trial, and the pedestrian plazas you see on the stream became permanent in February 2010. The Times Square Alliance’s pedestrian counts put everyday traffic at 200,000 to 250,000 people.
At the north end, Duffy Square holds the statue of Father Francis P. Duffy, unveiled in 1937, and a statue of George M. Cohan dedicated in 1959. The red steps behind them, added in 2008, are the roof of the TKTS booth, which has sold same-day discount Broadway tickets on this spot since June 1973.
Times Square ball drop live
The busiest night of the year on any Times Square webcam is December 31. The first ball dropped from One Times Square on December 31, 1907, and the tradition has continued every year since, except in 1942 and 1943, when wartime blackouts replaced it with a minute of silence. The ball that welcomed 2026 is the largest ever: the ninth in the event’s history, 12.5 feet across, more than 12,000 pounds and covered in 5,280 Waterford crystals.
The drop starts at 11:59 p.m., while the crowd counts down the last 60 seconds. On the Duffy Square tab you can watch the plazas fill through the evening, so the Times Square live webcam is a good way to follow the countdown from home if you are not one of the people standing in the pens on Broadway.
Getting to Times Square
The Times Square–42nd Street subway station, together with the connected 42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal station, handles more than 200,000 riders a day, one of the busiest stops in the New York subway. Less than two blocks east, the Bryant Park live cam watches the park behind the New York Public Library.
The best time to watch the Times Square live cam is the hour after sunset, when the sky goes dark behind the towers and the screens take over the whole frame. When it is late at night in New York, our live webcams from around the world cover the cities where the day is just starting.
