I stumbled across this job advertisement on elance.com and it appears a company is planning to development their own digital signage player/system. Based on the description below it looks ordinary – ie. there’s already quite a number of players that does exactly what they want so why spend more time developing your own?

I guess the main reason why anyone would develop their own system would be for flexability and satisfaction. By developing your own custom application you can design and build it the way you want it and eventually customise parts that need improvements. There’s also the satisfaction factor, knowing people are using your application gives you joy and satisfaction. Below is the job that was advertised on the elance website:

Network Distributed Media Player

The SIGNWAVE DIGITAL MEDIA PLAYER will be able to playback full screen 1920 x 1080 compressed video in the .MOV/M4V format. The user-friendly playlists can be managed by any web browser on the network. The playlist duration will be 24 hours. Scheduled spots will have the ability to playback at pre-defined times within the 24 hour schedule. All playlists are based on a 1 hour schedule. For instance if a specific spot needs to play back at 9:50am the base schedule can be interrupted to play the unique scheduled spot. Once the spot has played the original playlist will resume normal playback. Playlists can be auto-populated by selecting how many times per hour a spot will play. When a schedule is getting close to 1 hour the remaining time can be filled with content from a fill directory that contains appropriate fill content until the next hour starts. A system may consist of many playback devices (Mac Mini). The management software will have the…

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

I stumbled across a video that I wanted to share with you all and in particular to the tourism industry. A company in the US has done a great job in getting passers by to interact with their wall by using twitter. The Canada tourism industry obviously knew what they wanted and how they could strategically use social media to their advantage. Now why don’t we see that in Australia, in particular in Sydney where most of the overseas tourism companies are based?

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Sometimes being a digital signage solution provider can be a tough and challenging job. Not only do you have to represent the company you’re selling the product for but you’re also consciously looking after the best interest for the client and here’s a typical dilemma:

One of our clients requested a feature to a digital signage software component which wasn’t that much of an issue except we required the services of the digital signage software company and there was a cost associated with this feature (the client was happy to pay for this). But all this came with  a little  unanticipated catch – the client was required to upgrade to the latest version of the software before the modification patch would work. Many of us might be thinking,  “That’s easy, there’s no harm in doings so as the latest patch will resolve and fix previous bugs”…. Ummmmmm…. WRONG!!!

By upgrading the software we found quite a number of bugs and spend quite a number of hours investigating and then reporting the issue to the manufacturer whilst the client had to workaround the problem. Fortunately, we provided the client with a test environment and didn’t upgrade the development system with the latest software.

I’m not sure whether many of you have experienced this but upgrading to the latest version can actually introduce new bugs. What’s worse is that a considerable amount of time can be spent investigating the issue and the  time for this may not be chargeable – who do you charge for this type of work…. the client who has already paid for a working solution ? or the digital signage company who supplied the dodgy software?

This is a tough one and I’ll like to hear from anyone who has been through this experience.

So there are a few lessons that I have learnt from this:

1. ALWAYS make sure you test the upgrade or software patch on a test unit or environment

2. ALWAYS back up your content or system before applying any patches as you’ll  never know the state of the unit after the reboot

3. PLAN for any changes you make to the system and carefully provide detailed rollback plans in the event the change failed

4. TRUST and have some faith that the developers have done their testing but acknowledge that they cannot test all the different scenarios

5. Make sure you charge someone for your work or include this as part of your Maintenance and Support costs… or even better get the manufacturer to conduct intensive testing with your configuration before applying any patches or upgrades

6. IF IT’S NOT BROKEN LEAVE IT AS IT IS… sometimes making a simple change can break the entire system… but if you’ve done the above point 2 & 3 correctly then this shouldn’t be an issue.

Have you been in this situation? Tell us what you think.

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News