There are a number of ways to connect your digital signage player to the Internet and to your local network. The most basic method of connecting your digital signage player to the network is via a Network Interface Card on the player.  But what happens when you don’t have a local network setup or when there is no CAT5/6 cabling in place for your digital signage player?

If you’re in this situation then most likely you’ll either use a wireless network card or a 3G modem. In this post I want to focus on providing basic steps in setting up your digital signage player with a 3G modem. I will be assuming that your player does not have a SIM slot and does not support 3G modems so your only option would be to use a 3G modem router. You will need the following items:

• digital signage player
• USB 3G Modem – we used a pre-paid Vodafone modem
• 3G modem router – there are many brands and manufacturers but the one we used was a TP-LINK 3G/3.75G Wireless N router (Model TL-MR3420)

The first thing to do is setup the network settings on your digital signage player to use DHCP. This means that when it is connected to the network it will obtain a Dynamic IP address. If it’s a new digital signage player, it will most likely already be configured for DHCP but if not then simply change it’s network settings. Once you physically connect the digital signage player to the router via a standard network cable, it will automatically assign an IP address.

Now, before buying a 3G modem router you need to make sure it supports the actual 3G modem you’re planning to use. If it does, then once it’s plugged in the router, it will automatically use the correct modem drivers. If not either change the router or constantly check the manufacturer website to see whether the drivers has been released.

On the 3G modem router, you will need to setup the APN and Dial Number. An example is below:

Generally, the 3G Modem router will have preselected ISP settings but for us we spent a few hours trying to figure out why our Vodafone USB 3G modem would not connect to the Internet. After  researching and troubleshooting for almost 1 hour, we found the cause of the problem.  The 3G Modem router has predefined Mobile ISP settings e.g Vodafone (Australia) configured, but what we discovered was that since we were using a Vodafone Prepaid modem we actually needed to use vfprepaymbb as the APN value rather than using the standard value of vfinternet. After changing that value the router immediately connected to the Internet. That’s a gotcha!! So be careful with this. Once connected you should see something like this:

The best way to test to see if your digital signage player is connected to the network is to simply add a URL to your playlist item and display a website. That’s it, your digital signage player is now connected to the Internet  via 3G. One issue that I found is the inability to connect to the digital signage player from the Internet. I was not able to do so because either the ISP has a firewall and is blocking inbound connections or the ISP is using a proxy server for browsing. If someone has figured out a way to overcome this please let us know.

Category: Digital Signage Techie

I just came across this job advertisement which I found quite interesting. The job is based in the UK (St Albans) and its for a Business Development Manager in a AV company. The company is looking for a sales manager with digital signage experience. When I read this I thought to myself how many people had this type of experience and how much demand is there for such a position?

Well this role doesn’t pay too bad… 45 – 55,0000 (I’m assuming its in pounds)…. 55,0000 what the? + Benefits + Bonus. If you’re interested then check out the job description here and good luck to those that apply.

Category: Digital Signage Jobs

One of the challenges with splitting your VGA signal is the ability to maintain the video quality and aspect ratio of the original video source. There are a number of ways to split your VGA signal and the main purpose of doing so it to display the same video content across to multiple screens. This basically means a cost savings as you will only need to purchase 1 PC/digital signage player rather than having multiple players for each screen. The only limitation is distance, the VGA video quality degrades for longer distances.

Here, we will look at 3 ways of splitting up the VGA signal (assuming you just want to split 1 video signal to 2 screens):

For implementations of more than 2 screens then you will need to get a splitter that caters for more video output ports, there are many brands and model in the market but just make sure you test it before installing it at your clients sites.

Are there any other methods people have used to split the VGA signal?

Category: Digital Signage Techie

It’s official, after many years of blogging we have decided to open our doors and accept guest bloggers. After some discussions we decided to invite digital signage industry experts from all over the world to help us share their industry experiences and insights with the rest of the digital signage community.
It is an open invitation, however, we are selective on the content.

There are some guidelines that need to be taken into thought when producing each post.
We will NOT be accepting:

• Advertisements about your company
  We will include a short description about who you are and your company but we will not accept a post that is solely focused on advertising your company or your products.
• PRs that get splatted across the internet
  We want unique content so if it’s a PR that has already been submitted on the internet we will not accept it.
• Duplicate blog posts
  Please do not copy and paste content from your current blog, Unique content is what makes the digital signage blog different and we would like to keep it this way
• Posts that indemnify or scrutinise other people or companies
  As the title suggests, this part is pretty much self-explanatory.  Please keep your content professional.

We will be limiting to publish 1 post per guest blogger a week.
We are looking for guest bloggers that have a passion about digital signage and are not purely looking for an avenue to advertise their company – we have a paid advertising section for this! So if you think you fit in this criteria and are interested to become a guest blogger for the digital signage blog then send us an email at info@digitalsignageblog.com with a short description on what you can offer to this blog and we’ll get back to you.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Guest Posts, Featured Post

This week we want to share with you another great Panasonic product we use for our digital signage installations. It is the Panasonic Embedded player ETX1312C1000 which can only be used with Panasonic Plasma screens with the Slot compartments. These units come with pre-installed Windows Embedded XP or Linux and are just like any other ordinary PC’s except that they allow you to hide these in the actual screens. The current unit only has 1GHz processor which can sometimes videos with scrolling ticketers to lag, although we’ve heard rumours that there is an new model being released which has much higher CPU specs. The embedded player actually takes up two slot compartments so you need to be aware of this.

continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Reviews, Featured Post

Last month we were engaged to install the digital signage Solution for the UNSW (University of New South Wales) Western Sydney Clinical Studies in one of the major hospital in NSW.

The South Western Sydney Clinical School (SWSCS) was established in 1990 and it is unique to the UNSW city clinical schools in that it embraces multiple campuses, allowing access to a broad and diverse range of health care services delivered to a large (approximately 800,000 people) and diverse population.

The SWSCS is centered at Liverpool Hospital (600 beds), a principal tertiary referral hospital for the South Western Sydney Area Health Service (SWSAHS). An active teaching and research programme is also run at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital (400 beds; the second principal referral hospital in SWSAHS) and at Campbelltown and Fairfield Hospitals, as well as a number of other facilities.

Requirements

The requirements for this digital signage project were:

• The large screens needed to be in portrait rather than landscape
• Screen needed to be mounted against the wall
• Display different content including websites, timetable, presentations, images, RSS uni news etc.
• Needs to be scalable and flexible
• A dedicated CMS server hosted at the main Hospital Campus
• Players needed to be embedded in the screen since there was no space to store these

The Solution

The solution we provided the University consisted of the following:

• CMS Dell Server
• PADS Digital Signage Software
• Panasonic Screens with embedded players
• Adtec wall bracket

As usual we worked with local staff and the IT network engineers to connect the players to the UNSW network. We’ve got more screens and players to install but for now have a look at the some of the below photos

[Show as slideshow]

View our portfolio here.

Category: Digital Signage Case Study, Featured Post

This was a video clip that one of our digital signage portal members Travis from Blue Pony submitted in the discussion forum and its about Augmented reality. This blew me away so I thought I’d share this with our digital signage blog readers so have a look at it yourself and let me know what you think.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Video

We just received  news that Flypaper Studio, Inc, has released version 3.3 of  the Flypaper digital signage software. According to Flypaper:

“The latest updates and new components included with this version support the growing demand in digital signage for faster, better quality content with a focus on touch-screen interactive experiences. The newest multi-touch features, including the ability to slide, swipe and flick at all components on a screen, allow companies to do cooler things with digital signage, and do them more affordably and in significantly less time.” continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Blog Products, Digital Signage Reviews

I was walking past one of the most popular locations in Sydney Australia and noticed the first digital menu board for EasyWay.  There were three large screens on the back wall and each had a different menu listing or image displayed. Digital Menu boards are now becoming more popular for take away stores and outlets.

Category: Digital Signage Klips

This is a great video of a Ray-Ban interactive shop window, the digital signage system allows the user to try on virtual ray ban glasses and then lets you take a photo… check it out:

Have you seen any other interesting digital signage implementations?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Video

We would like to hear from our readers “What are some of the biggest challenges the digital signage industry is facing in 2010?”

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Renting movies has become so much easier especially when you have a oovie kiosk. I saw one at a petrol station and thought to myself what a “great idea”. Basically, the kiosk allows you to rent the latest dvd movies and the process is really simple. All you do is select the movie from a touch screen at the front of the kiosk and then process the payment using your credit card. You then collect the DVD and return it the next day. The price of renting the DVD is $2.99 and it needs to be returned the next night by 9:00pm. I’m not sure what the late fees or charges are but according to their website you won’t pay any more than $36.00 continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Klips

We recently received the first digital signage magazine published by an Australia company (alchemedia publishing) and this is really a good sign of the growth of digital signage in Australia.
The great thing about the magazine was the case studies of digital signage implementations of local business in Australia. There is also the traditional advertisements of digital signage companies and manufacturers and this is really good to have as a local directory. We look forward to receiving future magazines and hope to eventually feature in an article.

digital signage magazine

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

I think it’s time for an upgrade if you’re still using a LCD screen with a DVD player. I noticed this whilst waiting at a queue at a bank. I couldn’t help myself and just take a quick snapshot of this implementation. Althought most of these have been replaced with a larger screen and a digital signage player, I found it quite effective having audio playing in the background. It actually caught my attention!!

digital signage with audio

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Inside-Retailing-Magazine-Digital-Signage

This week the Retail Expo was held in Sydney Australia from the 20 – 22 September 2010. Unfortunately we were not able to exhibit this year due to various projects and the workload, but we did decide to spend a bit of money on advertising in the inside retailing magazine which gets distributed at the expo and also to retailers all over the country.

Here’s a picture of our advertisement… it was right on the first page as soon as you open up the technology section.

It was also great to see our company name being mentioned in one of the articles in the magazine.

Hopefully through this ad we’ll generate more leads and sales.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News