Blog

2011's first half: The winds of change ... for the better

July 21, 2011 by Jeff Hastings — CEO, BrightSign

The changes since the first of the year have been exponential, not linear, in the complete digital signage as companies and individuals use, refine and enhance/enrich the technologies in new and unique ways. In traveling around the country and globe visiting our own software teams, content developers, integrators and customers we've been seeing pockets of ingenuity in what I have to call customer engagement which are going to spread very rapidly in the months, year ahead.

Green, more energy-kindly implementation/installation is not just a checklist item; it has been the leading priority of our integrators and their customers. Manufacturers are more than meeting the demands with newer screen technologies that are significantly more power conservative than even last year, which was a dramatic improvement over "best efforts" two and three years ago.

Part of this is the addition of CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) control via HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connections to the digital signage controller. It enables users to power on/off the display to save energy. It is not only a necessary feature but is becoming widely available on displays and controllers. We and other controller/network solution providers have been asked to deliver products with improved feature/capability integration, smaller footprints and energy savings.

Combined with richer software those goals are being achieved, and as a result customers are upgrading/improving their installations more rapidly than they were in the past.

We've seen two trends that are not only reshaping the landscape but more importantly adding depth, breadth and enhancement in the customer engagement by smoothly meshing mobile media and in-store/facility digital signage.

Almost every customer we talk with recognizes that we (the industry) are in a unique position to deliver greater customer/viewer information and strengthen the relationship. Content developers/managers are finding/experimenting with the seamless integration of mobile device couponing, messaging with in-building information tailored to the mobile device "news" so that it feels both natural and logical to people.

What we're seeing right now is that people and organizations are almost tiptoeing in this area as they want to enrich that relationship but not be too intrusive. It is a fine line, but when you see organizations — and we mean retail, healthcare, house of worship, entertainment, general business — get it right there's almost an "Ah Ha" moment for both parties, message developer/provider and receiver, that is amazing.

The third area which is giving customers strong reason to upgrade their systems more quickly than they might have in the past is the use of the cloud to store/distribute content and messages.

New kiosk and free-standing units that are Wi-Fi connected are gaining in popularity as organizations take advantage of the power of the cloud to help them communicate with the individual more intelligently/effectively and increase the "owners'" knowledge of the users. The result is communicating in much richer ways.

In addition to video, the cloud is helping us all to deliver information to the endpoint devices — digital signs and mobile devices — in what almost feels like a real-time fashion. In the coming months we believe we're going to see organizations using the combined hardware/software solutions to provide much more intelligent information built around contextual and location-based information we're able to gather and process.

The seamless merger of always-connected devices people have with them and the digital signage network that is being implemented are really going to change the face of what we in the industry will be delivering and what people expect.

And that's just in the first six months of the year. It is almost rhetorical to say, but the combination of open system controllers, richer/more intelligent software and the cloud are changing the way we collect, transmit, analyze, distribute and use information/data on a massive scale.

We're going to see even more creative uses in the next year or two and when they arrive they will feel completely normal and natural.

About Jeff Hastings

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