The importance of NTP in digital signage

First of all, Happy New Year to all our readers – we hope you had a relaxing break and are energised for another year of digital signage. To kick off the year, we decided to engage our techie community and discuss about the importance of NTP.

NTP stands for Network Time Protocol and is commonly used to synchronise a computer’s/digital signage player‘s date and time with a specific time source server. It can be a hardware based  GPS time source server from Symmetricon which I’ve used in the past, an Internet NTP server – see ntp.org for more information, or even your local Windows Active Directory Server can be used as a time server. The most challenging part when using NTP is ensuring that your actual source server has the correct date and time.

Most digital signage businesses should know what I’m talking about since ensuring the Content Management Server and digital signage player’s date and time are all in synch is crucial for any large digital signage network especially when used for scheduling content.


Do you think NTP is important in a digital signage network?


View Results

Loading ... Loading ...



registered on the digital signage portal http://www.digitalsignageportal.com have you registered #digitalsignage

About Our Sponsor: Advertise Me

Advertise Me www.advertiseme.com.au Request a Digital Signage Quote

Advertise Me is a privately owned Australian company specialising in all aspects of digital signage solutions.

Our team of highly skilled professionals is able to introduce innovative ways for businesses to communicate with their intended audiences for a variety of purposes including informing, educating, entertaining and selling.

You can expect us to:

  • offer the most affordable and cost effective solutions tailored to your specific business needs.
  • provide you with concise and accurate information and will ensure that you understand and are comfortable with our proposals.
  • strive to make our clients happy and successful.

We have partnered with a number of key reputable organisations and will continue to build further partnerships to deliver the most effective solutions for our customers.

Visit our website at www.advertiseme.com.au for more information.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,


5 Responses to “The importance of NTP in digital signage”

  1. I work in both the time synchronisation and digital signage industries and it never occured to me there was a place for the NTP server in digital signage. It does seem a little overkill to synchonise a signage system to UTC (coordinated Universal Time) via an atomic clock but the more advanced some of these digital signage campaigns are becmoming I can see the relevence – nice article thank you.
    For digital signage enclosures please visit LCD-Enclosure.com For Network Time servers please visit www.ntp-time-server.com

  2. I agree with the other commentator, great article. I thnk the importartance of synchronisation will become increasingy more important as digital signage gets more sophisticated. I can imagine people downloading content directly from live streams and distributing around a signage network – I also think more interaction with digital signage will be the way forward and I can imagine NTP servers and other time synchronisation tools becoming more important.

    LCD enclosures are also available from Armagard

  3. Thanks for your positive comments richard and robert. I see digital signage moving towards or even potentially replacing broadcast TV and having worked in this industry, I definitely know “time is of the essence”.

    We’ve had situations whereby the player’s time was not synched or did not have the correct daylight savings setting and this really messed up the content scheduling for our client. I’m sure other digital signage businesses must have experience the same situations we have.

  4. Great article.

  5. Well in our experience when you are dealing with companys that have a global digital signage network they need NTP servers – to control their displays that are in multiple countries.

    We have supplied LCD enclosures all over the world to many of these companies who are now using NTP servers.

    Graham Gallagher
    CEO
    LCD Enclosure Global

Leave a Reply

 

Request a Digital Signage Quote

RSS

Or subscribe via email:
 
Digital Signage Blog Sponsors

Advertise Me Sponsorships available here!

Digital Signage Articles

Sponsored Links



Recent Comments: