Coming from an IT background I know how important it is to ensure your system is shut down gracefully otherwise you’ll end up damaging your operating system and application. This is where a UPS may come in handy. UPS stands for Uninterruptible power supply and is used as an emergency power source. It is typically used to protect computers, or equipment in data centres or other electrical equipment where an unexpected power disruption could cause injuries, fatalities, serious business disruption and/or data loss. Depending on the size of the UPS battery they generally provide about 5-10 minutes of power.

So my question to those techies out there is, do you need to use a UPS for digital signage? Are any companies out there using a UPS for their digital signage players or screens?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Category: Digital Signage Techie

Coincidently on my third trip back to Melbourne for a digital signage project rollout, I came across something that is too familiar to me.

Digital Signage gone wrong

Almost 9 out of 10 times when digital signage goes wrong through my observations, they are running Windows. There is no perfect system out there regardless what hardware, operating system, or configuration you may have, but according to Murphy’s Law, when something does go wrong how do control it? Does your software allow you to show an exception or alternate display?

Weirdly enough, these observations have now become second nature to me, whereby I notice all other people would just walk right past it. Not to mention the urge for me to take out my blackberry to snap it.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info

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