Digital signage: the picture is bright

The commoditisation of digital flat screens, improvement in touch technologies as well as faster broadband speeds have all helped to drive innovation and demand for digital signage solutions.

Over the past few years shopping malls, airports, hospitals and universities have seen the sudden arrival of sophisticated multimedia displays performing a range of functions from sales and marketing to information sharing and real time communications. 

For many traditional electronics companies the digital signage market represents an opportunity to essentially create a new product and solutions category that builds on their existing capabilities. Likewise, for resellers there is an opportunity to engage with customers to develop tailored solutions which directly address the requirements of their customers.

However, the market has grown much slower than many expected. The global digital signage market is only worth $US1.1 billion at the moment, according to Frost and Sullivan*, with the US contributing 44 percent of the pie. 

“The industry hasn’t taken off in a big way,” admits Audrey William, ICT research director with the analyst group. She blames the industry for failing to demonstrate for organisations why they should invest. 

“The biggest problem in the industry is demonstrating the ROI,” she says, noting that the retail sector has been especially hesitant.

A little over two years ago, senior Gartner analyst Mark Cortner predicted a surge in demand for network-based digital signage solutions, arguing that the business case for many organisations should be clear, especially when viewed in terms of better customer engagement.

At the time he compared this with the business case for UC (unified communications), which, he said, was comparatively opaque because of the difficulties in measuring the real benefits of improved internal communications.

Two years on, it appears the reverse has happened, with the UC market thriving while digital signage has languished. Yet with falling prices of digital signage hardware and solutions and growing awareness of their potential to improve the customer experience across key vertical industries from retail to government, education, health and others, it would appear the industry is poised to turn the corner. 

Consultative approach

William says there are exciting opportunities for Australian resellers in digital signage, particularly those able to take a consultative approach with their customers to determine their real objectives, fashion compelling content and ultimately help them measure the results.

“Content cannot be static anymore; it cannot be boring. It must be relevant and it must be updated regularly, even every couple of hours. Content creation is king.”

Another stumbling block for the digital signage industry is the lack of a mature system of processes and protocols connecting stakeholders such as advertising and media agencies, multi-media content providers, vendors and customers.

At the end of the day it’s all about user the experience and in industries such as retail where competition for customers is intense, businesses need to be innovative and creative to be stand out in the crowd.

Peter Maddison, founder and director of Melbourne-based Flash Photobition, has seen pretty well every technology and solution in the digital signage space. Not long before his company launched in 1986, the best example of “digital” displays would have been the walls of stacked CRT TVs beaming free-to-air TV stations through the windows of department stores.

He says many big companies are realising the power of digital signage to respond immediately to offers from their competitors. One of Flash Imation’s biggest customers is Telstra BigPond, for which it recently deployed a large multi-store solution for the carrier’s branded shops.

As Maddison explains, the signage solution currently operating in Telstra shops means that if, say, Optus, were to announce a special deal or offer of some sort, Telstra could quickly broadcast a responding offer to customers in its own stores.

Maddison notes one of the key drivers for the digital signage space has come from the gradual proliferation of more complex products over the years.

“Anyone with a complex product to sell wants to be able to show it on a video. You can’t always rely on an 18-year-old shop assistant to sell the story.”

But Photobition is mindful of the importance of keeping it simple and not over-stimulating the audience. One of the company’s signature techniques is to use moving dynamic content as a means of drawing would-be customers’ eyes to a static message (see image, left).

Maddison notes that while things are far from dire in the Australian digital signage market, it is well off the heights they reached some 6 to 7 years ago.

New picture

Michael Oltmanns, head of NEC A/NZ’s digital signage practice, says the local market has become a lot more sophisticated over the past few years. In 2004 the company started development of what would eventually become NEC Live, a software suite for digital signage aligned with NEC’s various hardware products spanning large format screens and PCs.

A focus of the product family is ease of network connection, with the rapid decline in bandwidth prices in Australia helping bolster the appeal of NEC’s offerings, Oltmanns explains.

However, he stresses that NEC has yet to explore the content streaming route, focusing instead on the ability to transfer content between dedicated storage devices serving specific locations.

“We’ve always been emphatic not to go down the streaming route. If there’s a network outage you end up with the situation where there’s no content.”

Sony offers a wide range of digital signage solutions but hasn’t made a huge effort to market the fact. The company did not respond to requests from CRN to take part in this story.

Reflecting the diverse and evolving range of business needs and scenarios, the electronics giant has simple, user-managed solutions right up to highly automated, networking managed-services type offerings catering to high-end users operating across multiple locations. The company also markets a “custom video wall” solution allowing organisations to deliver dynamic and highly customised content.

Voided warranties

One of the most common pitfalls in today’s signage market is the temptation among partners and end-user customers to deploy consumer products, especially consumer TV panels, for commercial applications. For virtually all of the major flat screen panel vendors this invalidates product warranties immediately.

“As soon as you put it up on the wall that’s it,” says Andrew Upshon, head of Ingram Micro Australia’s digital signage group.

Locally, the distributor’s partners are seeing exciting opportunities, especially in helping to migrate organisations away from ineffective solutions built with consumer equipment.

“It’s not as simple as just saying here’s a big screen now create a display solution,” Upshon says.

Ingram Micro’s signage business operates under the company’s Vantex division and boasts a broad cross-section of partners spanning traditional systems integrators and audio visual (AV) companies moving to improve their IT capabilities to take advantage of demand for more sophisticated solutions.

“Traditional IT resellers are getting more involved with audio visual,” Upshon says.

Over the past few years, as the price of flat screens plummeted, it has become more common for resellers providing traditional IT products solutions to corporates or in education to receive enquiries about providing some sort of signage solution as an add-on.

“Companies getting into this market realise there is a margin opportunity,” Upshon says.

Australian PC maker Pioneer Computers has been one of the more successful vendors in the Australian digital display market.

Company director Jeff Li says the company has won a number of big local deals, including with Melbourne’s Crown Casino, Harvey Norman, Queensland TAB, the Department of Defence and Optus. Pioneer has partnered with Fujitsu to provide digital display solutions for Optus stores across Australia.

Li stresses that for resellers looking for advice about how to sell a digital signage solution, it’s all about the machine driving the content, whether it be called a PC or a media player.

“The business case is more on the PC side,” Li says.

But not everyone needs a lot of power. Pioneer markets solutions with low-end Atom-based PCs right up to quad core i7 machines. Pioneer is working with around 20 specialised digital signage partners in Australia helping it to manage some 100 customers.

But overseas companies are emerging as a key driver for the business, Li says, especially in Dubai, where the company recently won a major shopping centre contract in partnership with Nokia. While Li was cagey about the details, he indicated the project would involve the development of solutions enabling mobile integration.

Networked signage

Communications is also becoming a more important component of digital signage, particularly with increased demand for solutions that enable content to be constantly upgraded. But this development hasn’t occurred as quickly as some had expected.

Cisco has invested considerable time and money to develop its Cisco Digital Signage suite of solutions. The company says it has developed a “scalable network-based platform consisting of endpoints, management, and service”, the deployment of which is expected largely to be handled by partners.

German network hardware company LevelOne this year began marketing a range of solutions in Australia aimed at helping companies create better communications between various components of their digital signage fit-outs.

The company’s general manager A/NZ Elly Lin explains that the company’s flagship products in this space are aimed at helping organisations to share, transfer and stream digital signage content over IP networks.

“This is a new solution. We are trying to educate the market about it,” she says.

LevelOne works with several reseller partners in Australia which have helped it gain a handy foothold in the education and transportation markets.

Panasonic recently launched a new range of projectors that will reduce cabling costs for digital signage. Panasonic Digital Link – based on the HDBaseT technology – is the first technology to enable 5Play convergence, sending audio, FHD video, internet, controls and power over a single, long reach CAT5 or CAT6 cable and is gaining momentum as integrators’ preferred installation method.

Panasonic’s A/NZ product market manager for projectors Chris Maw says the new solution marks an important step towards advancing the sophistication of commercial display solutions, which were for many years hamstrung by largely consumer-oriented cables and other features.

“What this basically means is that there is going to be significant cost savings in cabling moving forward thanks to this technology.”

In the next 6 months Panasonic says it will come to market with projector technology sporting new LED/laser diodes, replacing conventional lamps.

“We’ve noticed an ongoing appetite for new technologies that either save companies time, reduce costs, or improve service offerings – generally through increasing brightness, quality and size.” 

Software

Earlier this year, many in the industry would have agreed the promise of advanced touchscreen capabilities with Windows 8 would have important implications for the digital signage market, especially as major panel manufacturers race each other to incorporate touch into their products.

Yet despite repeated requests, Microsoft declined to comment for this story, while none of its partner vendors, distributors or resellers expressed any excitement about what the operating system would mean for the signage market.

What appears to be happening instead is that digital signage specialists are increasingly engaging with third party software developers. However, Ingram Micro’s Upshon notes the market for digital signage software is quite immature at the moment with the most readily available products being those packages developed by the panel manufacturers themselves. 

“Major vendors have their own platforms for signage but they’re all proprietary,” he explains. “We’re looking at other software manufacturers offering dedicated signage packages but the market is very fragmented.”

Sydney-based Milestone Solutions started out 10 years ago as a traditional IT company focused, among other things, on writing software to support point-of-sale (PoS) solutions for Australian customers. Looking for ways to increase its capital buffer, the company decided to get into what was many years ago the very high-margin business of audio-visual.

“Back in 2002, a 50-inch plasma was going to set you back small fortune,” says Milestone founder and director Lawrence Bucciol. “At the time we got into rear projectors and from projectors into front-end screens.”

A few years ago Milestone came across Israeli media content software specialists Repromotions. It’s ITTV solution enables customers to upload and manage content with a simple set of keystrokes.

More recently Milestone engaged with Dutch company Net Display Systems. It markets an advanced content management system called PADs which has enjoyed widespread adoption, in particular at airports, where it has been used to support highly layered, complex signage solutions.

One of Milestone’s biggest customers in Australia is private health insurer HCF which makes extensive use of digital display technology across its network of 50 branches in NSW and the ACT.

“There is one centralised point in the office where the application resides,” Bucciol says. “Whoever is looking after it just sends it out.”

It also enables users to essentially derive more functionality from traditional media players. “The media player can be any machine you want it to be,” he says.

Power of partnerships

NEC’s Michael Oltmanns says creating effective digital signage is no simple task, and recommends that resellers contemplating the space should first partner with specialist companies. It’s something NEC encourages its partners to do.

NEC Australia has 10 partners which have attained the complete set of its certifications around digital signage, and Oltmanns says many of them have stepped in to work with less skilled partners that have found themselves asked to deliver solutions outside of their specialisation. 

“People look at the signage space as simplistic but it comes down to what are the user’s expectations,” Oltmanns notes. “Some people will call a DVD player running a loop through a mounted TV digital signage.”

But with the commoditisation of technologies spanning flat screens, media players and mini PCs continuing apace, as well as the availability of cheap bandwidth, those expectations are on the rise and resellers that don’t get their skills up to speed will quickly find themselves out of their depth.

“You have to have the right skills to ensure the right outcomes are delivered.”

Oltmanns notes that while digital signage would seem to be a no-brainer for retail organisations, the sector has been one of the slowest of the key verticals to actually embrace it. But as the battle for survival against the onslaught of online continues, savvy bricks and mortar operators are viewing digital signage as one of their key options when it comes to improving the retail experience.

“Digital signage has the potential to greatly assist retailers,” Oltmanns says.  

Watching the signs

Of course none of this means anything unless organisations are able to accurately measure the effectiveness of their signage solutions. Frost and Sullivan‘s William says this is something resellers can offer customers as part of an ongoing managed services-type solutions.

“Having the right metrics in place will be key for marketing departments,” William says. The cloud is emerging as an appealing route to offer digital signage solutions in a more affordable and easy-to-manage way.

“Cloud-based solutions will make digital signage more affordable,” William says.

Certainly among the more interesting technology developments within the digital signage market is the arrival of facial recognition and sophisticated sensor solutions capable of detecting a person’s sex as well as the size of crowds, among other things.

A number of companies have emerged with solutions in this area, including Media Sign Systems and Eyeris TV. NEC’s Eye Flavour facial recognition technology is able to determine the gender as well as the age of its audience. The solution is deployed widely throughout Japan. Using an embedded camera which transmits images at high speed to a central server offsite, Eye Flavour also boasts being able to recognise facial expressions and therefore human emotions including level of interest.

Old school

But while excitement brews over the latest technical developments in the signage space, Maddison says that in terms of the solutions that are actually being deployed on any meaningful scale, they have become simpler, not more complicated.

“Everything is getting simpler – the complexity of video players and formats – all those problems have gone away.”

One of the solutions currently generating excitement within Flash Photobition and among its customers isn’t actually digital at all.

The company recently received an Australian patent with a US patent pending for a solution it developed allowing for physical, magnetised ad posters to be quickly interchanged within a frame.

“Users can take the graphic down, put it in a tube, stick a new graphic up and then just change the video over.”

A perfect example of the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle.