Companies And Digital Signage

During the past 10 years, digital signage seems to be taking the planet by storm. Close to everywhere you go you can find, for example, some form of digital signage in the San Diego area. In fast food restaurants, digital signage shows the latest value meals and “choices” for customizing the meal. Apparel retailers use it to show the most recent styles and how you’ll be hip or cool by wearing them. Even general places that aren’t selling a thing are getting in on the act with digital signage. Airports use these captive audience networks by showing animations that help get people to the correct gates. Workplace buildings or gas stations might use digital signage or screen media to give local news, events and weather. So, we see that digital signage is growing progressively popular, but how does it function?

Actually it is pretty simple. Digital signage can be broken up into two pieces: the hardware and the software that gets run on the hardware. The hardware is the physical display which can be an LCD (liquid crystal display), plasma TV, digital screen that uses LEDs, or even video projections. As technology has improved, prices for large LCD and plasma screens have plummeted rapidly. This has led to a growing improvement in the amount of installations for digital signage.

The software is what controls what is displayed on the display of digital signage. To make it simple, software is accountable to the content playback and management. Using software, the operator can play content on the displays that are a piece of a digital signage network. All they need is at least one media player. There are number of software (and hardware) options to choose from. It can be as easy as a portable media player that is non-networked and can output an elementary slide show or loop through mpeg video clips. The screen media can also be very intricate, consisting of a large network that has multiple media players of various types and servers that control a large number of displays at many locations, all from a solitary location. If the setup is simple, displays can typically be kept up to date via an SD card, DVD, CD-ROM, or USB flash drive. An example of a involved setup might be on a school campus where digital signage displays weather, campus events and class schedules. A complex digital signage network like that maybe controlled by a network operator who might send content to many players simultaneously or have each player pull the content it needs from servers. All of this being done from a lone, central location.

With the correct software and hardware, digital signage gives its user a good number of promotional and informational power that is very versatile. With some network infrastructure, changing information that is displayed can be carried out speedily and the hardware/displays can be updated at multiple local and remote locations. Even complex displays such as split screens can be straight-forward through the software used. This may allow an advertiser to display news or weather along side upcoming sales or occasions.

As technology continues to improve and drive down prices, digital signage is only sure to rise in popularity and users will find ways to use it to enhance our everyday encounters.

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