The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first spoke with industry lifer IV Dickson about his move from software to the managed services firm SageNet, the company was still in the relatively early days of getting itself organized to chase and then service digital signage opportunities. Five years on, digital in e…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company c…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays. In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises.…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach. That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS so…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed. Screens are sync'd, and content is …

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are lots of reasons why digital signage and digital out of home ad networks don't have audio - the biggest reason being that the majority of people (especially staff who are in that environment all day) don't want to hear messages over and over. Many speakers have been stab…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I'm not really joking when I write about needing to find my decoder ring if I am going to write something about an announcement from a digital out of home ad tech company. There are exceptions, of course, but more often than not, I read this stuff and I just go cross-eyed. So I w…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When Terminal C was opened at Orlando's sprawling main airport, I was intrigued from a distance by the experiential digital features integrated into the new space. They got my attention because they were genuinely interesting, but also because they were put together by a company …

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK startup PassageWay operates with the interesting mission of using technology that nudges people to make well-informed and more sustainable decisions about how they get from A to B. That's done by thinking through and developing the presentation layer for Real-Time Passenge…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system. I…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a po…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have written and blabbered away about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it is becoming a design consideration for architects and the people who create the look and feel of built spaces. But that thinking always assumed that clever creative could make the black surf…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When cannabis started being legalized in US states like Colorado, and more recently across Canada, it struck me that it was a very interesting new vertical for digital signage companies to chase - because it was a greenfields industry that had retail environments offering up prod…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Dise is an acronym for Digital In Store Experience, and that nicely sums up what the Swedish software firm Dise is all about. Around for 20 years now, the company is heavily focused on a retail-centric communications platform sold through solutions providers and other partners in…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Everybody who is active and experienced in the digital signage space knows the big evergreen challenge for solutions providers and end-users is content production - keeping programming on screens fresh and relevant, but also attractive. A lot of companies in the ecosystem - and n…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Bars and restaurants have long been a targeted venue for digital OOH media start-ups, the attraction being scale, dwell time and lots of products and services that could be put in front of people sitting around having a drink or three. But there's been a lot of roadkill through t…

I bumped into Gil Matzliah at a conference this summer, and told the software executive we were long overdue to do a podcast about what's happening with his company, Novisign. We finally nailed down a date and time, and as it turned out, it was just days after the horrendous violence that broke out in Israel - where Matzliah and his company are bas…

The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at S…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant? That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform. Using computer vision and machine learning, th…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen. I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen …

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Jason Ault was working in the traditional sign business back in the late 2000s when a customer contract came along that required a digital sign. He had an IT background, so he stuck up his hand and took it on. He caught the bug, so to speak, and has been in digital signage ever s…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT We've seen a noticeable rise in the last couple of years of visual illusions and other trickery on big digital OOH screens and other surfaces presented as real screens, when they're not. There's enough of it that observers have started giving it names, like virtual out of home, F…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Germany's Lang AG is a family-owned and run business that has developed through the years into one of the larger and more influential players in the pro AV market - operating as both a supplier for rentals and staging market, as well as a distributor for systems integrators. The …

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Austrian firm Umdasch refers to itself as The Store Makers - designing, building and kitting out retail stores at scale both in Europe and globally. About seven or eight years ago, the company looked at the shifting state of retail and realized that staying relevant meant add…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Lifers in this industry have been watching the slow but steady evolution and maturity of electronic paper products. and are now seeing them get to a state that they start to make sense for certain display applications, while also looking good enough to satisfy marketers. Taiwan-b…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Italy's M-Cube has quietly grown into one of the larger and more pervasive digital signage solutions providers on the planet - with deployments in more than 100 countries globally, across some 60,000 retail stores. It does mainstream retail and QSR, but the sweet and lucrative sp…

In this special episode, I chat with Balthasar Mayer and Antonia Hamberger of invidis Consulting, the Munich-based firm that has for many years produced an annual yearbook that takes a deep dive into the digital signage industry. The new yearbook for 2023 is out, with versions in German and an international one in English that includes quite a bit …

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Using existing network infrastructure has long been talked up as an efficient way to manage and deliver digital signage solutions in large companies, but the concept has been clouded by concerns - like the cost of additional AV hardware and the impact of all that video on the com…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Things are changing - and both buyers and sellers are getting more knowledgeable about how to design and execute digital signage projects. But it's still nice to have a chat with an AV solutions company that resolutely insists on establishing the objectives behind a job before ev…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When a big LED video wall gets populated with fresh creative, the creatives and the people operating a display are likely going to have a conversation about the size of the finished file and how to move it – because there’s a good chance the rendered file is huge, and not somethi…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The Swiss technology firm SpinetiX has evolved its go-to-market approach through the years - positioning itself much more as a software solutions firm than as a manufacturer of very nice media layout boxes ... that also came with software. The company has end-point devices that h…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The out of home media company Intersection is probably best known as the operator of that network of smart cities display totems - called LinkNYC - on the sidewalks of Manhattan and New York City's boroughs. But the company has a much bigger footprint around the United States - m…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT If you are going to the big InfoComm pro AV trade show, coming up very soon in Orlando, you'll undoubtedly see a very busy BrightSign stand, and a crowd around CEO Jeff Hastings. I've spoken with Hastings a couple of times now for this podcast, but it had been a while ... and I w…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A lot of digital out of home media is marketed mainly on the basis of reach - essentially the scale of the aggregated network and the audience reach that's realized. It's more about math than science. But the UK out of home media company Ocean Outdoor is very much interested in t…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT AVI-SPL is one of the largest pro AV integrators on the planet, but for the longest time, if I was asked if I knew anyone at that company specifically on the digital signage file, I'd say "Nope." As far as I knew, and the same for a lot of people involved in digital signage, AVI-…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Tools that fast-track or reduce the costs of video production have been around for many years - often based on templates that can be brought into design software or extended to cloud platforms. These kinds of tools make it possible to produce a professional-looking video spot qui…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT In the early years of digital signage networks - particularly those that were ad-based - operators would often describe how their medium was captive. The proposition was that people stuck doing something - usually waiting - would pass their time looking at a screen. Then smartpho…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are a lot of screens at sports and entertainment venues, and when it's possible to buy a 4K TV the size of a bus for a few hundred bucks, team owners and venue operators are having to work harder than ever to compel people to get off their sofas and come to games. Whether i…

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Technology tends to improve as it matures. That's certainly the case with LED displays marketed as being transparent. The first generations looked okay from the front, but the back sides were big metal grid arrays that often looked like hell. That's improved a lot with newer gene…