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.

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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.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News