Does your digital signage player allow you to automatically power on when it’s connected to power?
Have you been in this situation: Your digital signage players are powered on and are happily running the content on the screens. Then your building has a power outage and all of digital signage players lose power and end up being switched off.When the power comes back on and all the digital signage players are still switched off. You then have to walk around to all the players and switch them back on.What a waste of time right?

Now if you had the Wake On LAN feature enabled on your players you may be able to switch them back on using this feature but what happens if your using wireless? Wireless doesn’t have this feature. One alternative is to use the PowerOn Function Feature “Restore on AC Power Loss” in the BIOS. This feature basically turns on the player when it detects there is power.

Obviously your digital signage player needs to support this feature in the BIOS. If it does, follow these instructions to turn the feature on:

1. Turn on the player and press the DELETE button (or the relevant button to get into the BIOS) and go to the Advanced Tab.

2. Select Power Management Configuration

3. Enable the PowerOn Function

4. Select Retore on AC Power Loss

5. Make sure the Restore on AC Power Loss is selected to Power On

Category: Digital Signage Techie

We were proud and honoured to have been involved with the implementation of a digital signage solution for Bach Real Estate.

About Bach Real Estate

Bach Real Estate was established by Le and Nina Bach in a quest to provide a personalised and genuine level of service to vendors, buyers, landlords and tenants alike in the residential property industry.

After years of running their own successful businesses, it has always been Le and Nina’s intention to get into the property industry. Through their own experiences in dealing with various real estate agents in buying and selling properties, they saw that there was great room for improvement in the standard of delivering property services.

After a few light discussions on the ordinary services provided by real estate agents, serious research was conducted to establish if there was such a gap in the industry. This was the driving force that led the establishment of Bach Real Estate – to fill the gap in the quality of services that exist.

Bach Real Estate’s mission is to provide integrity in their services – that is being Committed in doing what they say. In working with their clients, they are Determined to understand the needs and achieving the Results that the clients want.

The requirements

Being a young and innovative business, Bach Real Estate wanted to stand out from their competitors and use the latest digital technology to their advantage whilst being very conscious on the environment. Instead of using the traditional static paper based property listings at the front of their office, Bach Real Estate engaged advertise me to install a digital signage solution that would engage and attract attention from people walking past. The solution needed to display property listings, advertisements and marketing materials.

The solution

The solution we provided is simple, affordable and scalable. Two 46″ LED screens with a built in ad player was installed at the front of their office and this solution allows the business to eventually expand to an enterprise network down the track.

The ad player allows the business to play videos, text and images in zones or as a full screen. What makes this solution different is the ability to have PIP (Picture in Picture) as one of the zones and also gives the ability for an external video source (using HDMI, VGA, Svideo) to be connected to the screen.

In addition, the ceiling poles were customised to suit the location of the screens.

We wish Bach Real Estate all the best with their business and their future ventures.

Here’s some fun and interesting images of the opening day:

Category: Digital Signage Case Study

Routine maintenance is a critical task for all digital signage operators but how often should you do this and what type of maintenance tasks would you perform?

Some of the maintenance tasks that I could think of are:

Digital Signage Players

• Rebooting the digital signage players so that memory and running system files are flushed – this should be performed at least once a day to ensure smooth operation of the players. Some players can be scheduled to perform this task automatically at a predefined schedule. However, make sure you at least monitor the players to ensure they are still operating after a reboot
• Depending on the location of the digital signage players you should also physically wipe down any dust or clean the fans once a year. If it’s located in a rack with adequate ventilation then you won’t probably need to do this that often but it would be good to check.
• Sometimes we forget to delete old content that we store on these players, so depending on the size of your storage space then you should at least once a week just go through and delete any old content that you may no longer use. The only thing you should be careful with is not to delete any content that may be used reused in the future. There are several tools that can be used to manage the content better by setting expiration periods.

Display Screens

• The instruction manuals that are packaged with these screens have quite detailed information about how to maintain the screens. Sometimes we forget to realise  how important it is to ensure screens are operating and maintained for full optimum usage especially if your viewers are looking at these.
• Some of the tasks would be to physically clean the screens, who likes to look at a dirty screen and this may potentially will reflect back on your company.
• To remove or reduce screen burns try to avoid using bright colours and run some of the functions built in to the screen.

Can you think of any other tasks?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Techie

Blackberry Storm v5

For those of you with a Blackberry in Australia did you notice the Blackberry App World icon and v5 of the OS? On Saturday morning I restarted by blackberry and whilst browsing the icons on the home menu I noticed an new icon…. it was the App World Icon. To be honest I initially didn’t know what it was but after pressing on this icon, my jaws dropped. I then checked the Blackberry Desktop Manager and noticed v5 was available – this is where i jumped out of my seat and did the “dance of joy”.

I spend the next hour or so installing and browsing through the applications available on the App World and upgrading to v5. I was surprised to see most of the applications were FREE. I ended up installing and testing some of these applications and found some to be very useful.  I was however disappointed to the number of applications, in particular the number of games available.

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Wirespring is currently running an interesting survey called: How much should digital signage cost and I’ve just completed it. The survey basically looks at how much different digital signage hardware and services cost – now I assumed that the survey was in US$ and not local AU$.

Bill Gerba explains in his post that participating in this survey is worthwhile because:

1.  demand-driven pricing estimate is a great way to check the accuracy of all of the supply-driven pricing estimates out there.

2. it’s easier than voting with your wallet: by choosing the fair-value price for each item, you get to (anonymously) tell everybody who receives the survey data what’s on your mind.

So let’s get to it, complete the survey here. I’m very interested to see what the results are but we’ll have to wait until the end of August when the survey ends.

How much should digital signage cost?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News