CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — NSR has announced the release of its market research and forecast report: "Global Market for Digital Signage." Focused exclusively on networks consisting of digital displays used for third-party advertising, the report provides a study of the major verticals served by these networks across all regions of the world. Data from more than 200 companies forms the core of the research, and the report provides Excel models that allow operators and advertisers to calculate their return on investment (ROI) for digital signage networks.

According to NSR, the industry, which has the majority of deployments and revenues globally from retail, hospitality, healthcare and transportation verticals, is poised to grow from an estimated installed base of about 210,000 sites in 2007 to more than 850,000 sites during the period from 2008 to 2013. Though North America and Europe remain leaders in deployments, countries such as China, Australia and India in the Asia Pacific are witnessing tremendous growth and are estimated to reach the scale of their early-adoptive counterparts over a five-year period.

Revenues from advertising, though hard to come by initially, have picked up considerably with advertisers recognizing the impact of the medium on consumers, especially in retail locations such as malls and supermarkets. Here again, the global industry is expected to grow at a healthy rate of about 18 percent from its current estimated figure of nearly $1 billion annually in advertising revenue.

"We have all seen a screen outside of our homes at some point beaming advertising content at us with the idea that we make our decisions at the point of sale," said Prashant Butani, analyst for NSR and author of the report. "However, despite an ROI model that is yet to be proven, companies continue to deploy large networks, as advertisers that were once skeptical are now more apt to divert a portion of their huge advertising budgets to a medium that claims to be here to stay."

Butani says this acceptance of the medium will drive the industry past billion-dollar figures in revenues from advertising, sales of customer premises equipment and software over the next five years.