If you haven’t heard, in Australia the Federal Government is planning to spend 43 billion dollars to upgrade the Australian network infrastructure. What’s been interesting is the fact that the government did not award this project to any of the major Telcos – it will all be in house. Well this may potentially mean the infrastructure will not be monopolised by any of the Telcos. This is definitely a good thing for consumers.
Now if you’re a digital signage company you may be wondering how this may impact you. The first thing that popped into my mind was “more bandwidth…. means more bandwidth intensive applications can be used on the digital signage system”.

Here’s a list of things that popped into my mind when this was announced:

• stream or cache high definition videos to the screens – this includes live TV,  Foxtel, and even live events (Youtube has already introduced the Live Events program)
• develop real time applications on the digital signage systems
• shorter waiting times for content synchronisations
• integrate the digital signage system with wireless hotspots
• integrate with the upcoming digital radio services
• develop interactive applications that require low latency and high bandwidth
• real time monitoring of digital signage networks and quicker troubleshooting/response times

Seeing several opportunities, advertise me will hopefully launch several innovative solutions in the next couple of years so watch this space.

What innovative digital signage applications do you see taking advantage of high speed networks?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

We’ve been pretty busy working on a project and slacked off in posting blog entries. We’ll hopefully post information about the project that we are working on at a later stage but we thought we’d mention how digital signage is everywhere. We recently walked in the busy streets of Bondi junction Australia and noticed how common it was for businesses to have display screens in their stores. The majority of these shop were displaying content from a DVD player, or showing live TV whilst others were actually displaying in house advertisements.

One thing that I noticed was that even thought Mothers day was approaching, not many businesses had any relevant messages relating to this event. Even today, being mothers day, businesses were not using digital signage to their advantage. Oh well maybe its just Australia… My thinking is that maybe one day, businesses will be educated and skilled in the digital signage technology to update and stay connected with their audience.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info

Today is Melbourne Cup day in Australia – for those of you who don’t know what this event is about have a quick wiki read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Cup
You may be wondering “what is all the excitement about a horse racing event”, but like the “Superbowl” and any of the “World Cup Events” at approximately 3:00pm almost the whole nation stops to watch this event. Mind you, the event is also about dressing up for the glamour, drinking, gambling but more importantly, bringing people together to celebrate an annual horse race.

So just before the start of the race, millions of people in Australia have their eyes glue to screens to watch the event. If you’re a pub owner or a shop owner have you thought about ways of promoting your own products during this event? If not, then you’re obviously missing out on making money.

With the current digital signage technology out in the market, you will be able to display Live TV feeds whilst displaying your own advertising. Have a quick read of this previous post for more information about this technology.
Good luck to those who are placing bets!!!

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog News

As you may already know, digital signage is rapidly becoming “the” advertising medium in Australia and around the world.

There are quite a number of digital signage players and digital signage software tools out in the market which allows the screen to be partitioned into different zones. The SMP-WEB3 and NDSP-500 are two great products which perform this very function.

One of the main reasons for creating zones, is to enable live TV, Foxtel, DVD, CCTV or basically any video input source to be displayed on the screen with surrounding advertisements or any type of content. The main advantage of having this setup, is to entertain your audience with live video content whilst at the same time engaging this very audience with advertising material and other information. That’s the beauty about digital signage!

Having said this, there is some speculation whether displaying live video content eg. Cable TV, Foxtel etc. with other content around it is a breach of copyright. Is this the case in Australia? What about in other countries?

When we queried one of the digital signage manufacturers about this, they provided us with the advice that as long as the actual live video content is not modified ie. there is no other content that overlays the live feed, we should be ok. Which seems to make sense to me. I mean, most of the latest LCDs, Plasma Screens and even Set top boxes have a feature called Picture-in-Picture, so what implications are there if we use this very feature to split the screen in half. As an example, we can use the Picture-in-Picture feature to split the screen with FOXTEL showing on one side of the screen and the other half we can display Sales advertisements driven by a local PC. Isn’t this almost the same setup as what a digital signage player does?

We are more than happy to hear you comments about this issue on our forum.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info