Since quite a number of companies are focusing on being “green” and environmentally friendly, I was wondering whether there was a way to reduce the amount of power an LCD screen uses based on the colour of the content being displayed.

So here’s an interesting question for those techies out there who may be able to shed some light into this question. Moving forward, if black does use less power, the content providers should focus on using this black rather than the others bright colours and screen manufacturers should develop a technology to disable pixels use based on colour.

Does black pixels on an LCD screen use less power than white?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Techie

We’ve all heard the saying “content is king” and the success of any digital signage business is dependent on what content is  displayed. In this particular post we won’t go into too much detail on how important content is… we all know that without content, a digital signage network becomes useless – not many people like watching a blank screen.  However, I decided to raise the question whether businesses have a system in place for backing up their content from their digital signage players.  Would you be able to reproduce the same content from scratch if you didn’t have a copy of the content somewhere?

I guess this is something businesses operating a digital signage network should think about. In the past, experiencing a hard-drive failure can be quite devasting and often quite expensive if you count the number of hours it would take to reproduce the same content. From the top of my head, I could only come up with several ways of backing up the content and these are:

1. Centralise and store the content onto a dedicated server with RAID configuration harddrives. In addition to this, have the files scheduled to be copied to an external storage such as a USB external HHD.
2. If you cannot afford a dedicated server, have the harddrives on the digital signage player set up in a RAID configuration – most operating systems are able to have this function but it will mean have at least two physical hard drives. Otherwise you could always copy the files onto an external medium (CD, DVD, Memory card, HHD, etc).
3. Have files distributed across multiple servers or across an external site (e.g. data center)

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For those techies out there, what is the best backup strategy?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Techie

It is surprising to see what how different businesses apply their content in the retail digital signage market. Not surprisingly, a very high percentage of digital signage applications focus on advertising – how to best create the most impact on promoting a sale. Depending on the nature of the business, the location of the screens and the intent of the campaign, this can prove to be a very effective strategy.

The other day I walked into a department store looking to pick up some outdoor gear. In the heap of trying to figure out what is best to buy, a digital signage screen in the middle of the aisle was playing short clips on some of the gear on how to use it, as well as offering useful outdoor tips. It was just like watching one of those “Infomercials” on outdoor travel.

It wasn’t till a few minutes later that it hit me – user experience. A strategy for making customers feel assured in their decision and comfortable of what they are buying, and bringing them back to the store. Now this is a different feeling that you walk away with compared to that of “I just scored a bargain!”

It will be interesting to find out what measures the store has in place for tracking sales made against the duration of the digital signage being played.

What will be even more interesting is to be able to track the number of sales made against the number of people entering that aisle looking for outdoor gear. In the wake of technology today, there are many tracking systems out there that do just that – track people’s presence, eye motion, and even human behaviour. But that is a different topic all together!

By the way, I ended up walking out of the store with over $200 in gear!

Discuss this topic here on digitalsignageportal.com.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Events