What is Digital Signage system
If anyone is just searching for methods to display content on one or more monitors in an able and reliable way, then this tip is for him.
This guide is written to highlight the most questions we have been answering since 2015, when we started Sysview, our cloud-based Digital Signage software. Questions may not related with our service, but with digital signage application in short.
Either for one display or a thousand, this guide contains useful information for newcomers. We made an effort to keep this document vendor-agnostic, but a few products are mentioned as examples. We are not affiliated with any of them, besides our very own Sysview.
What is Digital Signage system?
Let’s analyze this define.
At present, showing content on a screen is extreme simple. You can use a computer or laptop connected to a screen. Or you can implement the Media Player function that almost all TVs have, with a USB flash disk.
However, what is about device stability? Playback should always reboot automatically after a power cutdown . The media playback device should be stable and not shut down as often as a computer or a laptop. Almost all DIY solutions have these types of questions. In addition, almost all can support only full-screen videos and pictures; no other document types or combined information are supported.
Then there is the issue of digital signage presentation management. With a single screen, a Do-it-yourself solution may seem good enough. However when multiple screens come into show, taking everything up to date begins becoming tricky. In addition, when we are discussing about different sites, this solution don’t fit for it.
So, Digital Signage platform has been designed to handle all of the above issue. It enables you to display rich signage content, consistently and with much less playback shutdown. It enables you to cope with everything centrally (in general via the Internet), no matter where your display screens are situated , with content that far beyond just videos or images.
And if you suppose Digital Signage isnot designed for your small business that just requires dozen of screens, you are wrong. Costs have reduced greatly and you can find professional digital signage solutions that you certainly can pay for. At Sysview, our direct clients have an average of 8 screen displays for signage each (used to be 6). Eighty-five percent of them have no more than 4 screens.
Digital Signage is not only for the big companies with thousands of screens. Even one signage screen can do just fine and small enterprise will largely benefit from digital signage.
Various digital signage System
Various digital signage systems are available and let's analyze the advantage and shortcoming of each one.
Some people prefer for a Do-It-Yourself option since you can’t wrong with a free approach, correct?
Wrong.
At first, let’s analyze the difference between them. There is the Do-it-yourself Digital Signage internal project for up to 5 to 10 screen display within a corporate. Also then there exist the DIY Digital Signage integrators who want to save cost for projects with hundreds of displays. These are two completely different cases. But both are calculated incorrectly.
The only one advantage of DIY Digital Signage is zero software cost. However are there any hidden costs or drawbacks?
Let’s check what the most used DIY choices are.
USB digital signage system
The poor-man’s signage option . All most all modern consumer TVs have build-in Media Players designed for home entertainment. The easiest way to show content is to prepare a USB disk with the video and pictures needed, plug it to the TV, and use the remote controller to start playing back your documents. Although this is easy and cheap, this goes with a few potential risks.
• If the television is powered down (e.g. due to a short power failure, powering off at mid-night or caused by an energy-savings timer), it cannot not come back on automatically and playback does not reboot by itself. It required to turn on the TV, navigate the menu and begin playback.
• Refreshing content means that a) you have to stop playback, b) take away the flash disk, c) update the contents on it, d) plug it into television, and e) restart playing back your contents. Doing that for more than one display can be a real chore. And consider of the mess it will bring if you require people at long-distance locations working that on your behalf. People just will not work it.
• Switching are far from normal. It might require 1-5 seconds to transit from one video to the another. Professional Digital Signage solutions do instant transitions, free from black intervals.
• (Not nice) informative news are shown on screen when handling from one document to the another. These include things such as files names, files duration as well as progress bars. Things that no one wants to be seen on a signage display.
• You have no feedback on play status. You never know if remote screens are working normally, neither do you get playback record.
• Media files (mostly video) are required to be compatible with the Media Player on the television. This is hardly a problem because most modern TVs support common formats. However, it might happen that your files will require manual encoding to be compatible with each television.
Computer/Laptop Without Digital Signage System
The really bad issues with standard PC or laptops is that they trend to break often. Almost everyone has experience with their PC or laptops malfunctioning; think a computer working 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. In additional, you waste more electricity power than using a specialized media player, either build-in in the TV or an external player.
Centralized Digital Signage System
Of course, not all can do above. This is usually a method taken by integrators who are doing a single signage project. It may workable and save them money. Or not.
At Sysview, one of our first clients had previously build their own software. It proved that their customized solution was a failure, consuming them a huge amount resource in aspects of on-site support and customers’ dissatisfaction. While their lack of additional features didn’t affect any distinct changes on their sales revenue. It was a bit more profitable for them to transfer all of their clients to Sysview, a market-proven Digital Signage solution, rather than keep using their own customized solution.
About Sysview digital signage system