The need to move away from DVD players and start using Digital Signage Players

Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 10:20 pm by DigitalSignageBlog, 0 Comments »

Today, I entered a large retail store and surprisingly I noticed several small LCD screens and an old CTR TV scattered around the store. I believe these screens were used to promote products from various manufacturers but it was hard to tell because the majority of these were turned off.

I’m assuming that the arrangement between the retail store and the manufacturers is that the manufacturers would pay for the installation of the LCD/Monitor/CRT screen. The manufactures would then be responsible for displaying their promotional content by using a VHS or DVD player. When they have new products or promotions, they would be required to redistribute their content via a DVD or VHS to all their retailers. This is not only a time consuming process but the postage and distribution costs can also become very expensive.

Funnily enough, the CRT TV located in this store had an old VHS tape player connected to it and I was surprised to see this early adoption of digital signage as this should have already been phased out with the introduction of digital signage players. Basically, connecting a VHS or a DVD player was a very early method of implementing digital signage. The current method of implementing digital signage is to use dedicated digital signage players which are either embedded or small form factor PCs.

With the introduction of dedicated digital signage players, the process of distributing, scheduling, centralising and monitoring content via a local area network has enabled manufacturers to have more control of what and when their promotions are seen.

In many cases, I have seen DVD players displaying their screen saver rather than the actual DVD content – here is an example:

I have also seen situations whereby the LCD screen is obstructed by other marketing material or the screen is not even switched on. Many current retail stores in Australia are still using DVD players to drive content to their screen. These retail businesses need to start realising the true benefits that digital signage players can bring to their stores and to their customers. Some of these benefits are:

they remove the need to have staff update content as this can be done remotely via the LAN or the Internet
increase sales
play live content from the Internet (news, weather, stocks, etc)
monitor the status of the digital signage player, content and screen. The player and screen can be remotely managed via the LAN or the Internet
content at different locations can be updated and centrally scheduled via a Content Management Server
information to customers can be targeted at different times of the day

The benefits of digital signage players are endless, and it’s up to the retail businessÃ‚ to start realising the ROI and urgently make the switch from DVD players to Digital signage player NOW.

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Tags: digital signage content, dvd players, manufacturers, players, vhs players