March Madness Content

To make it easy for our clients we put together standard templates with and without live TV and provided them at no charge so users could switch from their day to day content to the basketball tournament results.  The feedback was very positive and a few dozen companies and universities took advantage of our templates.

Just goes to show how flexible digital signage is – one moment you can be communicating key sales and support metrics and the next you can give your employees a perk to make being trapped in the office a little more exciting.

If you want to see an example check out this 45 second video of the content running in our office lobby.

In those early days, we (as Remote Media) and others provided every piece of the pie and where we did not have the products or services in house, we would contract them in to provide a turn-key solution to those brave enough to deploy the very first Digital Signage networks. PC’s used for playing back digital signage content were called ‘media devices’ to protect and hide the fact they where standard PC ‘s.  And running a digital signage network was a black-art performed by only the most skilled and expensive people typically from Global IT and TV production companies.

Fast forward 16 years to today and for those companies truly dedicated to the global possibilities of digital signage, the world is a totally different place. The pie of opportunity in the digital signage sector has grown from a cup cake to a huge world record breaking pie of opportunity. As the pie has grown, so to have the pieces that make up the different components in the digital signage sector.

As Remote Media we used to manufacture and supply LCD displays with integrated PC technology, then along comes Samsung and others who spot the opportunity to offer this slice of the pie. We also used to manufacture PC’s as Digital Signage players, then in steps AOpen with the Digital Engine range to offer a mass-produced and optimised product for use in digital signage applications.

The above two examples can be replicated across all of the components of a digital signage network from syndicated news content to specialist media sales software. So, with the movement towards a growing number of companies providing their own piece of the pie, offering great choice for resellers and customers, we made the decision to focus and specialise solely on providing the software platform (signagelive) that connects all of the segments together to provide resellers and customers with the tools to manage their digital signage networks from a web browser.

Today, unless you have a clear focus and proposition within the digital signage sector you will drown in the tidal wave of companies shouting ‘me too’ and in most cases these will be either major companies looking to enter the sector or companies high on O.P.M. (Other People’s Money) trying to demonstrate to their investors that they can force the market their way by shouting the loudest and spending the most on marketing.

The segmentation of the digital signage sector is great if you are in a position to embrace and not fear it. An example of this has been our move to support non-pc devices, such as the SMIL open standard player technology developed by IAdea and OEM’d by several major manufacturers. Initially, we developed support for SMIL devices to provide a network managed option for lock and load compact flash devices that make up 80% of all digital signage displays in Retail. However, after seeing the road map for SMIL and other non-PC technology, 2010 will see devices the size of a pack of playing cards offering the same functionality as full blown HD PC’s at a fraction of the price.

In support of our commitment to SMIL and to offer our customer total freedom of choice, we have also developed a SMIL software client that enables signagelive to manage digital signage running on any operating system including Linux, Mac OSX, Windows and Android.

Our decision to concentrate on what we are good at and work in collaboration with others offering their own part of the digital signage eco-system was a great move. We can look forward to the emergence of new industry standards and technology and embrace them to ensure our partners and customers can choose the best technology for their needs without restrictions.

• Displays will no longer be passive one-way dialogue devices, within the next year or two it will be rare that you can’t touch and interact with a display, they will become two-way dialogue portals, communicating in all directions, all at once.
• Everyone will have a physical and digital life; a digital presence on one or more social networks that compliments their physical place in the world and the message needs to reach them in both places.
• The personal display, or what we are currently calling mobile devices, will dominate and the large public format display will become a beacon seeking to draw our personal devices in to whatever message they want us to participate in.
• The software and hardware to drive all of this is a commodity, those of us who make a living in digital signage will need to adopt products that provide a platform from which to create unique value for our clients, otherwise we are just order takers, creating nothing innovative, left with only one tactic to win business – fight on price.
• The days of locked in, long term, heavy cancellation fee contracts are gone, no one in their right mind will accept this anymore. Users want to come and go as needed, ramp up or contract on a moments notice.
• Integration partners need the freedom to extend solutions with no restrictions so that they can move as fast and as nimbly as they possibly can – resellers need open source solutions with extensive API’s that provide them with the ability to create what they want, when they want.
• Integrators need a forum to bring their innovative wares to market, the means of creating and selling their intellectual property on a mass basis rather than one-off customizations.
• Simple is the order of the day. If there is demand for crazy complexity by 20% of your market that causes the remaining 80% to spend all of their time trying to remember how to use your application then don’t do it. Make simple, easy to use and eloquent products. These are the web apps that will dominate tomorrow.
• All innovation is happening on the web. Okay, maybe not all, but what is left is such a small fraction it isn‘t worth considering.
• The sky is the limit for digital signage. Our market is growing by leaps and bounds and our partners need the tools to scale their businesses in an unlimited way, with no restrictions or capacity worries.

Given these inevitable trends we don’t think this is about digital signage any longer, we feel the market is even bigger than we all thought and we refer to this opportunity as a digital display convergence.

Ryan Cahoy is Managing Director of Rise Holdings, the parent company of Rise Vision(web app provider for digital signage management) and Rise Display (complete solution provider of LED Tickers, Video Walls, and Interactive Technologies). Follow Ryan’s posts on both company blogs at www.risevision.com/digitalsignageblogandwww.risedisplay.com/blog.

“When are you going to release x feature?” is a reasonable question, just make sure to treat the answer as an estimate.  In most cases the date a software provider will give you is based on their rough analysis of the requirement.  Software development is unpredictable, with many moving parts and small tweeks that turn into major projects.

As development progresses we learn that doing a feature as originally designed may require changing the core infrastructure.  Maybe it’s not worth it any more because the added complexity or changes to other areas aren’t worth the benefit of the small feature request.

Whether you are a client or an AV integrator don’t be afraid to ask questions and understand the direction of your software partner, but don’t get too caught up in the detail and demand to see proof of everything coming.  By the time you see that feature a new one will come up that you want to see, then another, and another.  It is a never ending cycle and a good software partner will NEVER be done.

If you ever find out the software is done with no future plans start looking for a new partner, while what they have may be good today they certainly won’t be following the technology curve and going to where you need them to be tomorrow.

Ryan Cahoy is Managing Director of Rise Holdings, the parent company of Rise Vision (web app provider for digital signage management) and Rise Display (complete solution provider of LED Tickers, Video Walls, and Interactive Technologies). Follow Ryan’s posts on both company blogs at www.risevision.com/digitalsignageblog and www.risedisplay.com/blog.