Article

CETW11: Expanding digital signage boundaries, 'any content, any screen, anywhere'

A digital signage firm is concentrating on real-time visual communications across multiple screens and channels.

November 14, 2011 by Christopher Hall

At this year's fall rendition of the biannual Customer Engagement Technology World show held in New York City, a longtime digital signage company said it is spreading its wings to embrace content on any screen.

Canadian firm X2O Media showcased its new focus on "any content, any screen, anywhere" at its show floor booth, with displays ranging from LED boards to tablets to 3-D digital signage displays.

X2O President and CEO David Wilkins said at the show that, while the company still considers its digital signage solution top notch, it is focusing as well on expanding beyond digital signage to encompass content sent to nearly any kind of screen or display.

"Our whole story here at the show is that yes, we do digital signage and we have a really strong digital signage platform ... but we've now gone a lot further beyond that, and now instead of calling ourselves a digital signage company we're talking more about visual communications," he said. "We're starting to change the story because really what we do is we push visual messages to any kind of screen that you have."

That screen could be a normal digital signage screen, or an interactive touchscreen or a big outdoor LED display, he said, but the company could still distribute to that screen the same broadcast-quality content with sharp text and sharp animations that it always has.

Wilkins pointed out the company's "data visualization platform," which takes live content or multiple channels of content and displays it on multiple screens or on video walls, "like a giant virtual desktop."

X2O also showcased its partnership with Exceptional 3-D, featuring that firm's autostereoscopic (or "glasses-free") digital signage display; and its SharePoint TV channel that pulls data out of Microsoft's SharePoint program to be used for internal or corporate communications.

"A lot of what we do is enterprise communications, not necessarily out-of-home digital signage; it's internal, spreading messages to employees and customers for our big corporate clients, pulling all of our content out of SharePoint," Wilkins said, pointing to a SharePoint-generated dashboard displayed on several screens. "It's all coming out of SharePoint, and it's all live."

But apart from the content displayed on large digital signage screens and LED boards, X2O also is focusing on distributing the same content to mobile devices, from smartphones to tablets, he said.

Earlier that day, Wilkins had led a session at CETW entitled "Producing Content for Distribution across Multiple Platforms and Channels," and X2O's booth was an exemplar of that concept, he said, picking up a tablet device displaying the same SharePoint dashboard shown on nearby large-format displays.

"This is one of the things that I was talking about, is how you can take the same content you've got on your big outdoor screens or big corporate communications screens and then put it out to iPhones, put it out to, in this case, a BlackBerry PlayBook," he said. "It's all the same things that we've been doing for the last six, seven years as X2O, except now extending beyond that traditional digital signage boundary and calling it real-time visual communications ... It's a much bigger story that we're telling, but it's visual communications — any content, any screen, anywhere — that's what we're all about."

Read more about digital signage software and digital signage content management.