The Digital Signage Expert

Greetings from the morning before the opening of Screenmedia Expo in London. Just a few first impressions and thoughts before the doors open to the (hopefully) flood of visitors.

Still under the impression of DSE in Vegas (I wrote about it in February), where I felt the market is going through a transition and becoming more mature, with a new mix and breed of visitors attending, I do hope that this trend will continue here in London. There is hope.

First of all, an encouraging trend I noticed is that we see more and more purely content-focused companies which do nothing else but digital signage content. New concepts evolve, such as databases full of templates, online content services, etc. This proves another step of evolution and will be very helpful in reaching the masses of smaller retailers and users.

There is a healthy mix of exhibitors, really showing the full value chain of DS – a good way of visualizing is by the way our supply chain diagram:

More measurement and recognition technology available – yet another step to make the DOOH media more accepted, also scientifically. Also, looking at the registrants of the official Expert Tour (you still can register here), there is a very healthy mix of visitors, coming from all angles, including a lot of endusers.

There are quite a few shared booths – a clear trend of the season to share and reduce cost. talking of cost, Samsung is definitely not in this trend. Their castle in the middle of the hall is all-dominant. I tried to count the number of displays and stopped at 50. Very impressive, as always. and very expensive, as always. But very hopeful, as always, too, even though they look like from another planet in this show. Let’s hope they will be able to carry all of us to the orbit…