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Market evolution or 'marketing hooey'? Intel's open specs for digital signage players

Intel's released a new open pluggable specification for digital signage media players with Windows Embedded 7. So what?

November 1, 2010 by Christopher Hall — w, t

The idea is to make digital signage media players as interchangeable as car stereos, says Intel director of retail and digital signage Jose Avalos.

And while some in the digital signage industry laud Intel's latest big announcement, its development with Microsoft of a new open pluggable media player specification, some aren't so sure.

Intel recently announced that it had created an open pluggable specification (OPS) using its Intel Core microprocessors and Windows Embedded 7 that it says will help standardize the design and development of digital signs — and that is supported by digital signage industry leaders such as Microsoft, NEC Display Solutions and the Taiwan Digital Signage Special Interest Group.

"You can think of the open pluggable specification as a specification that defines the size of the pluggable and the connector and the electrical interfaces for the connector for the specification," Avalos said in a phone interview.

"The analogy that I use is that it's very similar to the way the stereo form-factor works in an automobile. If you want to change your stereo in your automobile you pull the stereo and you plug in another one. Now because both of them have been designed to the same form-factor, it's very easy to swap stereos from different manufacturers."

A prototype demonstration design for the OPS was developed based on an Intel Core processor running Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 7. The OPS features Intel vPro Technology with keyboard-video-mouse redirection capabilities that allow an IT administrator to run diagnostic tests, install upgrades and view and control the digital display content remotely.

Intel says that installing digital signage equipment based on its architecture, such as the prototype demonstration, creates scalable digital signage applications that can easily network with other equipment for interoperability or be upgraded to fit each customer's digital signage requirements, future-proofing technology investments.

Intel has been working with the Taiwan Digital Signage Special Interest Group, which includes numerous ODMs, Avalos says, meaning that panel OEMs will be able to go to various hardware vendors in Taiwan and be able to procure media player solutions that they can plug into their panels.

That is one key advantage, Avalos says, and another is that panel OEMs can now create one panel that will work with different levels of media players.

"If you look at Intel's product segmentation for digital signage, we segment media players into three categories, or a three-tiered set of requirements," he said. "Because we have these three sets of platforms, if you're a panel OEM, and you're developing a panel for the industry, now you have to go develop and qualify three different panels to support three different platform solutions from Intel that have different thermal characteristics and different performance characteristics.

"So what we're trying to do here is eliminate that complexity and saying to the panel OEM, 'You just have to design a slot for the open pluggable specification, and then you can swap in entry-level, mainstream or high-end modules for the pluggable,' and it reduces their total cost of development and the cost of manufacturing."

The OPS also will lower cost of ownership, Avalos says, because it makes it easier for network owners to swap media players if a failure does occur in the field.

"The service person can just come in, pull one of the modules and just plug in another one just like we do with our car stereos in an automobile," he said.

From an industry perspective, Avalos says, Intel made this move because of something it saw when it first began to move into the digital signage space. When it first started getting strategic about this segment and really invested in it at the beginning of last year, he says, one of the key gaps that Intel saw in the industry was a lack of standards around hardware and "that there were really no high-quality, high-reliability players in the marketplace.

"In fact, a number of the large media companies, people like CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux, basically came to Intel and said, 'Hey, guys, help us develop and deliver a high-quality and high-reliability media player open standards architecture to the marketplace because everything is so fragmented," he said. "So this open pluggable specifically addresses a lot of the needs in the industry around hardware standards, around the issues that come up with fragmentation."

But if someone wants to change their car stereo, they can buy a stereo from Pioneer as well as one from Blaupunkt; they aren't forced to buy one from Alpine. Does this mean everyone has to buy a player with Intel Core processors?

The OPS has been optimized for Intel architecture, and numerous ODMs from the Taiwan Digital Signage Special Interest Group are providing industry support for the OPS, Avalos says.

"So we expect that, if you're NEC for example, NEC will be able to source these pluggables from different ODMs in Taiwan, and they can swap for example something made by Caltron for something made by Emerson," he said.

"But there's nothing that precludes somebody from using a processor from another company other than Intel to try to develop to this open pluggable specification. Clearly, that hasn't been our focus, and we haven't optimized around that, but there's nothing preventing them from doing that, so from that perspective it is an open pluggable standard."

Digital signage industry blogger and Real Digital Media CEO Ken Goldberg, though, called the announcement from Intel "pure marketing hooey"* on his "Broad thinking. Narrowcasting." digital signage blog:

Intel and Microsoft continued their marketing blitz and exploitation of industry voids in leadership and standards to announce the Open Pluggable Specification (OPS). Read the release if you wish ... but here is the summary. You will only be successful in digital signage if you run media players with Intel's highest-priced (Core) processors, Microsoft's newest embedded OS, and NEC displays. This is pure marketing hooey, and I am trying hard not to use stronger words, since this is a family-oriented blog. Intel makes great products. We sell media players based on Intel chipsets. We and many others have proven that a digital signage network can scale without premium-priced processors. The market demands lower costs over higher performance. Advanced controls can be achieved through software. The OS has little to do with scalability. Again, huge networks run on both Linux and older Microsoft embedded products. The displays are not worth discussing. All of the bigs have given up on differentiating their products and have gone to pricing, software and financing to attract deals. But money talks loudly, and people will listen, at least until they get the price quotes. Let's be clear: digital signage success will be dictated far more by applications, content and execution than by choices of chips, OS and displays. Press releases and prototypes do not change reality. 

Industry observer David Weinfeld, of the Obscura Digital Retail Solutions Group, though, seems to have a different take. It appears that Intel is taking a much-needed leadership role in the space, he says.

"I think that industry standards are a definite positive. They push the industry toward working in concert as opposed to pursuing different solutions (to the same problem) that make seamless integration an impossibility," he wrote in an e-mail. "Intel understands that the industry must pursue solutions rather than thinking of digital signage as a nuts and bolts problem. Open standards eliminate the barriers and roadblocks to technological development. The more we can focus on developing solutions rather than fixing operational hardware problems, the greater the digital signage industry will be."

Weinfeld also pointed to an article produced by IAdea that he says has "done a terrific job of articulating the benefits of the OPS. The company has also made strong recommendations on how to improve it in the future. It is a must-read for companies interested in pursuing Intel's OPS."

And A/V consultant Alan Brawn, of Brawn Consulting and the Digital Signage Experts Group (DSEG), says that, on the surface at least, the OPS could be good for the industry in helping with the scale and scope of standardizing digital signage installations.

"The OPS will reduce the time and complexity of large scale projects if it is accepted and deployed industry-wide," he wrote in an e-mail. "This begs the real question which is the need for industry wide standards in several areas. We are interested in and supportive of these efforts at the DSEG and will include them in our certification programs once they have been vetted in the real world of project rollouts."

Finally, Avalos says that the OPS should have a far-reaching impact in the digital signage industry.

"I think it's a natural step; it's a natural evolution for the industry to go to not necessarily industrial designs but to designs of hardware that are somewhere in between a consumer-grade level product and an industrial-grade level product that can provide much higher quality levels," he said. "It's a natural evolution for the industry to develop standards. I'm a big proponent of standards for digital signage."

The adoption of standards will go a long way toward addressing some of the fragmentation seen in the digital signage and digital out-of-home markets, Avalos says, but he adds that the digital signage space probably should keep a healthy balance of its fragmented nature.

"It's not to say that the fragmentation that we have today in the industry does not have any benefit," he said. "There are certainly some benefits to having a fragmented industry. One of the key benefits is that we get great innovation in digital signage, because there are so many players and there's a lot of great ideas being implemented.

"The issue that we have is we have some great ideas, but we don't have the infrastructure to scale them, to make them really meaningful. So hopefully as we move forward and as the multinationals come into the space, hopefully we'll get a good balance of innovation coming from the smaller players and then the ability to scale that innovation because you get the increased investment from the multinationals."

(*Editor's note: Goldberg recently took issue in his blog with the characerization, above, of his comments:

Mr. Hall incorrectly asserts that my post “called the announcement from Intel pure marketing hooey”. Had he read it carefully, he would have seen that what I said was that the implication that “…you will only be successful in digital signage if you run media players with Intel’s highest-priced (Core) processors, Microsoft’s newest embedded OS, and NEC displays” was hooey. And it is. I did not say that OPS was hooey.

-ch)

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