There’s quite a lot of content out there on the Internet but this is the very first time I’ve actually stumbled across a Video Discussion on digital signage. I have learnt quite a lot just from watching these videos and I thought why not share it with our readers.

Now this discussion was organised/sponsored by Dynamax (thanks guys) and the companies involved included Dogobert, DigiCom, Stand Media, Imperative Group and Rocket Communications.

The main topic of the discussion was “Digital Out of Home is a multi channel multi touch-point communications medium. How should we design for the future to maximise viewer and user relevancy?”

The actual discussion was divided into several questions and there were:

PART 1 What do we mean by “multi touch-point” (devices/access points etc) in the context of Digital Out Of Home and what is it trying to achieve for viewers and/or users? (relevancy?)

PART 2 What does the existing Digital Out Of Home solution need to do more of to enhance the medium’s relationship with the end user? What – if anything – should we also stop doing?

PART 3 Does ‘multi touch-point’ mean ‘two-way’ communication? If so, how and where should this be designed into the medium to offer view & user value (however you choose to define that) when out of the home?

PART 4 How can multi touch-point digital media generate experiential value for users? Is this value easy to identify and reconcile commercially?

PART 5 What creative design elements are considered to be best of breed today and what trends are likely to emerge in the next 12 months?

PART 6 What physical design elements are considered to be best of breed today and what trends are likely to emerge in the next 12 months?

PART 7 What is the commercial challenge of delivering DOOH across multiple touch-points and how can this be best planned & managed?

Part 8 What challenges does the transactional nature of a multi touch-point model mean in terms of capturing, managing, storing and commercialising data?

PART 9 The collection of data means we can offer the viewer or the customer more value; what value does this offer?

PART 10 Which component parts of a multi touch-point proposition may offer the most commercial opportunities over the next 12 months and why?

PART 11 Does opening up the medium to users generating their own content necessarily make the medium more ‘relevant’?

Source: http://www.ddrmag.co.uk/links.php

Here’s the video of the first part of the discussion:

If you were present in the discussion, how would you have answer this question:
“What do we mean by “multi touch-point” (devices/access points etc) in the context of Digital Out Of Home and what is it trying to achieve for viewers and/or users? (relevancy?)”

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog Video, Featured Post

Image source from Zela

We wanted to remind our readers to take part in our digital signage polls. We want you to interact with us and our other readers and I believe this is what makes our blog so different and unique.

So he is a link to previous digital signage blog polls.

Now if you have an interesting poll you would like us to publish let us know.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Polls

Out of curiosity I decided to perform a Google trend search for the term Digital Signage – the exact term “Digital Signage” was performed to see what the trend has been over the years. From the image on the left, you can clearly see that the number of people searching for this term has increased over the years and I believe it will constantly continue to grow. But what I was more surprised from the information Google Trends provided was the regions that provided the highest searches. The majority of these regions where the Asian countries.

Here are the results:

Regions

1. Taiwan
2. Malaysia
3. South Korea
4. South Africa
5. Singapore
6. India
7. Canada
8. New Zealand
9. Australia
10. United States

From these results can one assume that there is a higher demand (based on search trends) for digital signage in Taiwan or Malaysia (I’m quite surprised to see malaysia being ranked second on the list) compared to countries like New Zealand, Australia and the United States?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Polls, Featured Post

Who are we?

We are a group of technology enthusiasts who are passionate with the uses of gadgets and nifty pieces of equipment.
When digital signage came into our picture, we got excited and decided to take it for a ride. In fact, with the tremendous popular rise of digital signage and its applications everyday, it has now become part of our profession.

Our first success was Advertise Me, an established digital signage company in Australia.
Through establishing many clients and partners, we created the Digital Signage Portal.
And if that wasn’t enough, we decided what the heck – let’s blog about it!

So what is this Blog about?

We have been operating in the digital signage industry since its birth in Australia, and have come across many experiences in this line of business.

Apart from working, we also obtain many useful sources of news and information that we think would be beneficial to the digital signage community.

So where else would we collaborate all our experiences and news? Right here of course!

Contributors

There are currently several contributors to the digital signage blog.

From time to time we like to invite others to write something or submit a topic to us, and we will post it on the blog.
Having said that, if you would like to share a post with us, feel free to send it to info@digitalsignageblog.com.

Don’t forget …

To visit our Digital Signage Portal to interact with the digital signage community from around the world or visit the Digital Signage Articles for a mix of different digital signage articles from around the world.

Now if you’re looking to exchange links visit the Digital Signage Experts.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

It’s been a while since we last distributed our digital signage newsletter but our excuse is… we’ve been busy. I know it’s a lame excuse but we’ve been seriously inundated with businesses contacting us for quotes, responding to emails and we’ve also been involved in digital signage installations.

We recently posted in our forum what people wanted to see in our newsletter and one of our digital signage portal members suggested we should discuss about issues installers face during digital signage rollouts. So thanks to Jon for your feedback, we always value everyones feedback but more importantly we take action!

Lets quickly summarise some of these issues and recommendations:

Physical Security – we have talked about this in the past in one of our blog entries titled Does your digital signage solution pass our security checklist? point number 7 – If you can’t recall what was discussed you can read the article and refresh your memory. Just make sure you physically lock your monitors to prevent thieves from stealing the units.

Use smaller pipes/brackets for monitors -Jon advises the following: “when hanging monitors from ceiling joints, that some companies are using very heavy pipes to hold the monitors. The monitors are getting lighter and lighter and a pipe that is heavier than the monitor is not necessary. Cutting back the size/weight of the pipes can still hold the monitors, reduce costs for shipping and cutting them to length is much easier as well”.

Use pre made Cat5E cables – it makes it easier for installers. “That way you can just connect to the box in the ceiling and to the back of the monitor instead of having one long cable that runs from the PC or rack straight to the monitor. This also helps with replacement of cables, so you don’t have to run an entirely new cable, just replace the bad one and drop it thru the pipe.”

Be green – try to help the environment and try to use equipment that does not need power. For example, there are several Video extenders in the market that do not require power. Some are hard to find but let us know if you run into trouble.

Backup plans – always have a backup plan and NEVER rely on just 1 single supplier. Make sure you have a backup plan for everything, otherwise if you hit a wall during your installation you will still be able to get the job done.

Costings – From jon’s professional experience: “One of the cost saving measures I use for my clients is flat rate billing. It includes travel, time on the job and materials used. There is a little more cost if there is a concrete ceiling as opposed to a tiled or drop ceiling. This way everyone involved knows the costs up front and there are no suprises on the back end for the client” Once again Jon, thanks for your tips. We have created a forum thread on the digital signage portal forum, so that you can all discuss this further. Click here to continue the discussion.

To read past newsletters click here.

Want to automatically receive the newsletters? Join the digital signage portal.

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Newsletter

I just finished reading an article from TechDirt and was shocked to find out how much the yearly licensing fees are for playing music in a nightclub or a restaurant. Here is a short extract from the article:

“It wants to increase licensing fees in a 120-seat restaurant to $19,344 a year — up from $125. Small cafes would be slugged with a 4729 per cent yearly increase from $124 to $5860.”

Source: http://techdirt.com/articles/20090615/0329305236.shtml

For those digital signage businesses who provide their clients with a digital signage solution that plays music in the background, have you considered what legal implications are involved and what the licensing requirements are? Even if your client has paid for the music clips or videos!

In Australia, retail stores that play music – whether from the radio, purchased CDs, computers, digital signage are required to pay a licensing fee otherwise it may be considered breaching copyright laws and eventually be fined thousands of dollars.

Now we all know that music can set the mood and atmosphere in your store, nightclub, restaurant or cafe but did you know that you may have to pay a licensing fee for playing music in your business environment or anywhere in public areas? Basically, if you play music in your store you need to have a PPCA public performance license to play protected sound recordings and an APRA public performance license to play musical and literary works. For more information about this visit https://transactions.business.gov.au/BLIS/musiclicence.aspx

All I can say is, just make sure that if you’re running a business or if you’re installing a digital signage solution with audio for one of your clients make sure you mention these licencing requirements to your client otherwise they (or possibly your business) may end up paying a hefty fine – so don’t risk it.

After thinking about this situation, do you believe a license is required for playing videos of unsigned artists playing original songs from Youtube in your store or business environment?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that because these artists are unsigned (i.e don’t have a label) the PPCA, or APRA won’t be paying them one cent so why should you pay for the license fee if all you’re playing is songs from these unsigned artists. For example, here’s one of my favourite Youtube R&B groups called LEGACI playing an original song. Keep it up boys.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Featured Post

digital signage At Its Best!!!

In the past two months advertise me has been busy providing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) with an innovative digital signage solution for their new concept shop in Westfield’s Bondi Junction.

The new ABC shop opened its doors on 15 May 2009 with a fresh new look but more importantly it introduced digital signage.

The three main reasons for introducing digital signage to the ABC shop were:

1. to draw additional customers into the store;
2. to increase overall sales; and
3. to showcase some of the other broadcasting services that the ABC provides e.g. ABC news, ABC TV, ABC radio and the ABC website.

Advertise Me understood the significance of what the ABC wanted to achieve and ensured that the digital signage solution that we provided was not only able to meet the requirements of the ABC but could also be easily adapted to other ABC shops.

The Digital Signage Solution

From a visual perspective this is what the Advertise Me’s digital signage solution looks like:

Digital Signage Behind the Counter to show promotions

Digital Signage Live ABC News and RSS News Ticketer

But to really understand how the digital signage solution was tailored to the ABC requirements is to understand the audio and content challenges faced in the integration of digital signage with ABC’s audio and visual equipment. This is because providing a digital signage solution is more than just connecting a PC to a display screen.

The Audio Challenge

The ABC required that the digital signage solution enable it to switch audio between songs, store announcements, advertisements, ABC radio and audio from live ABC news.

This meant that the Advertise Me’s audio solution would require the overhead speaker system to be connected to an audio switching tool that allowed the switching between the CD player, the digital signage player and the set top box.

The result was a digital signage solution that ensured that live ABC news, product videos, advertisements, announcements, music and much more was heard in the ABC shop.

Digital Signage promoting JJJ by streaming audio and ABC streaming news

The Content Challenge

The ABC required that the digital signage solution to easily manage content from one central location.

This meant that the Advertise Me’s content solution would require a dedicated Content Management Server to house the content and playlists.

The result was a digital signage solution that ensured that all content scheduling was performed at ABC’s head office with the use of a PC software tool to schedule the playlists in a calendar view so that staff could easily manage the content. The digital signage solution also ensured the ability to display live ABC TV, in store advertisements, RSS news and products by using zoning.

Digital Signage displaying product releases

In addition, the digital signage solution enabled the ABC marketing staff to update content, schedule items to display on the screens and manage the overall solution from one central location without having to physically be onsite.

Results

Advertise Me’s digital signage solution met the ABC’s technical requirements and has already resulted in an increase in the number of customers walking into the store and an increase in overall sales.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Case Study

I came across this video and thought I’d share this with the rest of the digital signage community. It’s about an upcoming product from Nanolumens that will make screen installations a lot easier and potentially more affordable (I question this statement as most new technologies are generally more expensive).

Have a look at the technology yourself and let me know what you think.

If you had one of these screens, where would you install it?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Products, Featured Post

Just recently I read an article about the upcoming Microsoft Xbox Motion Sensor that allows the users to control games with our bodies. Unlike the Wii, this means that you do not have to hold anything to interact with the console and game.

This new product is being called “Project Natal” and is basically a sensor for the Xbox 360 which tracks movement, listens and executes commands from the console… don’t know what I’m refeering to? then watch this trailer from Youtube:

If you’re from the digital signage industry you’re thinking to yourself “The future of Digital Signage interaction?”. If you’re like me, when something catches your attention you start brainstorming on how this can be applied to the digital signage industry.  If I was working for Microsoft I would recommend and provide directions to the management team to push this product out to businesses to use as a digital signage console…. and not just a gaming console. Let’s think about this, most digital signage players out there in the market are using desktop PC’s, embedded PCs or some form of a PC – fundamentally that’s what the Xbox 360 is – and soon it will have a sensor. In my eyes,  I can potentially see this used as a digital signage player and not just a gaming console.

In the past, many top digital signage gurus predicted that the next “big thing” in digital signage was going to be interaction and guess what…. they were right.

Lets imagine this scenario:

• You walk into a clothing store and you’re having trouble picking a dress for the night out with the girls.
• Now like in the example in the trailer, you walk up to the dsx (digital signage xbox) and you contact your best friend to get advice on which dress you should wear.
• In the application, you have the virtual product catalog of all the dresses available in the store.
• The application takes a picture of you (measuring your body size, height etc) and you start trying out the different dresses (virtually).
• Along the way you and your friend discuss whether the dress is suitable or not.
• When you found some of the dresses both of you like  you add it to you’re favourite list.
• You then press the “TRY” button or say “Let me try these” and the shop assistant brings in the dresses for you to try.
• All the transactions and  information end up being recorded online so that the next time you visit a store that has the dsx you can retrieve this previous information.

This is one of the many applications I can see working for the digital signage industry and I can’t wait till we trial one of these units.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Products, Digital Signage Blog Video

Today we thought we’d run a poll to see how many people who visit our blog are actually from the digital signage industry. So if you have 2 spare seconds we hope you can participate in this poll – yes it literally just takes 2 seconds.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog News