Digital signage: the picture is bright

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.