The Digital Signage Expert

As we turn on final and approach the end of the 3rd quarter, all eyes are on the future, the nearest of which is the 4th quarter. The main concern for marketing and sales is how to fill the pipeline, or better yet how to keep it filled. The speed-bump in the sales cycle has always been and will be in the future: content.

When the sun goes down, there is no dispute; the core element of digital signage is content. And there we have it, the enduring question; how, when, where and why? Every digital signage operator wakes up in the morning and faces that reality. I have no immediate answer and each application has a different need, for example a queuing system needs numbers, those numbers represent people, and without the people there would be no content.

Today’s creative director can honestly concentrate full-time on coming up with content. The technology has been taken care of. The human brain is the greatest computer in the world and the most creative, let it do the work. You only have to push the button. The rest is taken care of by an army of digital assistants. Recently one of my friends wrote to me how he used to work in the military with 8mm movie film. Those of you old enough to remember can recognise some of what he had outlined below. Shooting home movies 30/40 years ago was expensive and painstaking. Today almost anyone can afford a movie camera. Fact is most of us carry one around with us every day in our pockets and lay them out in front of us on the conference room table while we discuss content, your mobile phone. We have it easy, think back to the days of when a 4-minute reel of film cost a greater part of your salary.

Let’s let Chuck Lunsford, radio operator in the USAF relate to us the process of bringing content from the past to YOUTUBE.

Let em roll Chuck: “8mm Kodacolor film shot in a wind-up Bell & Howell single lens camera with manual aperture adjustments– actually 25 feet of 16mm with sprocket holes on both sides which Kodak processed and then split and spliced to give 50 feet–I would shoot half of it, and then had to open the camera (hopefully in a dark place) and reverse the two reels to shoot the other half. Kodak was the only place that could process the exposed film, and the cost of that and the return mail was included in the price of the film. The only way the film could be viewed was a pain in the ass–Splicing to other reels, winding it into a projector, set up a screen and hope the lamp didn’t go out or the film jam and ruin a few feet before it could be stopped. I would put my father’s return address on the box, send it to Kodak, they would process and return it to him, my parents would watch it and then he would splice it, not always in sequence, onto 300 ft. reels–12 of them.

I edited it in 1961, labelling the cans with notes what was in that can, but it was an exercise in frustration to try to find a sequence I wanted to look at and it was rare when the film was looked at– years went by between viewings. In the ’70s let my nephew take it home to view it, and while he won’t admit it, he must have had a jam because all the footage of my visit to the Louvre–including footage 5 feet away from the Mona Lisa when one could stand that close to it–is gone. The film sat in the can deteriorating for 30 years and then I heard movie film could be transferred to VHS. Did it through a company contracting to Walgreens in 1985–cost me $600, but now I could look at the film on the TV, and it was so much better than the screen I couldn’t believe it. I used a hand-held tape recorder to add a narrative while watching the film, then had to go to a firm with banks of big boxes and a thing called a flying erase head, to put the narration on the VHS tape in 1988. Hours and days of backing up the tape and running it to the exact point to start the narration–at $15 an hour. After that was done I could have the 3 VHS tapes copied for $9 each and send them to people who were interested. After I acquired a computer and DM was published, in 2001 it became possible to convert the tapes to DVD. Cost me $75 for the 3 of them, but now I could make copies on the computer for pennies. In the ’60s, I wrote to Kodak and asked if they could make a still photo from the 8mm positive, and they said they could not. Now, I have software that allows me to freeze a frame and make a passable photograph and even edit the DVD right here on the desktop in minutes.

For an old guy like me, how wild it that?? And what technological advances does the next 50 years hold? It’s mind boggling.

Can’t remember if I sent you this new video of an equipment drop — you’ve seen it in the movies.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Chuckradioop

I’m going to see if I can put one together of the troop-drop footage. Still amazes me that technology makes it possible for me to do this stuff. I remember when it was a colossal bother to set up the projector, thread the film into the sprockets, hope the damn lamp wasn’t burned out–and watch the fuzzy images on the screen and then have the film jam and ruin several feet of film before I could stop it. My dad spliced the 50 ft rolls onto 300 ft reels and put them in cans–12 of them. About 1961, I spent weeks going through the whole thing and made notes to try to have some idea what was on which reel.

Now all I have to do is either put a disc in the player, or go to the storage on the hard drive to find what I want in seconds. Amazing.”

Chuck was a radio operator and today is a novelist, what I am saying here is that he produced content, for himself and his family yes. But he outlined how difficult it was not so long ago to produce something worthwhile. He sums it all up in his last word, “Amazing”.

We are almost there, but not yet fully automatic. The queuing system with a news ticker could be considered fully automatic. It is still primitive. Once we tie up artificial intelligence and enterprise resource management systems with data mining into a closed loop, you will have something that goes beyond “Minority Report” and is truly useful. More and more consumers are pouring their heart out into Facebook, at the moment there are privacy issues, in the future there will be none. Inventive incentives will pry the lid on that can of worms keeping the lawyers at bay.

So come on in, the technology is fine and it’s in your pocket.

James van Etten, Editor CLIPPINGs