Commentary

Let's get real about hardware reliability

We are now seeing player roll-outs of 10,000 or more end points. Traditionally in the AV world, 99 percent reliability — where 1 percent of players might need to be reset or swapped out in a year — is an acceptable failure rate. But this way of thinking doesn't scale to fit today's market.

February 28, 2019 by Jeff Hastings — CEO, BrightSign

The elephant in all fifteen halls of the biggest-ever ISE in Amsterdam was hardware reliability. Cloud-based tools now make it possible for network administrators to manage vast signage networks with thousands of end points spread across a large geographic area. Cloud-based tools with remote provisioning and management greatly simplify oversight of these networks. But even the most robust networks are only as strong as their weakest link.

This is why hardware reliability is so important, and this is why issues of hardware reliability and stability were such hot topics at this year's ISE.

I recently visited a customer with more than 1,000 PC-based players deployed on a single site. He was in the habit of rebooting all those players nightly to ensure stable playback the following day. And every night, some of those players would fail to come back up, and he would need to restart them manually. It drove him nuts!

We are now seeing player roll-outs of 10,000 or more end points. Traditionally in the A/V world, 99 percent reliability — where 1 percent of players might need to be reset or swapped out in a year — is an acceptable failure rate. But this way of thinking doesn’t scale to fit today's market.

 For example, if you have 100 players, then only one per year might need attention. That's manageable. If you have 1,000 players, then 10 may fail — that's a nuisance. But if you have 10,000 players, 100 might fail — that's unacceptable.

Consider this: If those players are on average a ten-minute walk way, you might spend 100 hours or nearly 15 working days each year resetting or swapping out players. If those players are on average an hour's drive away, you would spend more than 30 working days a year running around after them — that's a significant drain on your time.

And if the players are dotted around the globe, you'd have to delegate the task to a maintenance team which dramatically drives up the cost of maintaining that network. This scenario illustrates why 99 percent reliability is no longer acceptable.

To achieve a higher level of performance, reliability needs to be baked into player and operating system from the outset. Desktop or laptop PC users are used to having a browser freeze occasionally and having to restart it. An unattended player needs to recognize this issue and restart itself. This is just one of multiple situations that can arise and that players need to resolve autonomously in order to avoid a blank screen.

As always, I left ISE excited at the new developments I've seen and the progress that we are making as an industry. But how will this technology, which looks so amazing when demonstrated on the show floor, survive in the real world? Our collective success hinges on our ability to deliver signage solutions that not only impress for their visual impact, but also for their ability to function reliably over time.

To fulfill our potential and truly demonstrate that we can scale to roll-outs of not just 10,000 but 100,000 players, we need to squarely address the issue of reliability. The telecommunications industry works to five nines: 99.999 percent. With my illustration above, I've shown that for roll-outs on the order of 10,000, two nines (99 percent) isn't enough. You need at least three nines (99.9 percent). That's the kind of territory every player manufacturer needs to be in now. I'll lay it on the line: If the industry aspires to even bigger roll-outs, then we, too, need to move to four and even five nines.

Image via Istock.com.

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BrightSign is the global market leader in digital signage media players, offering the most reliable, secure and sophisticated solid-state media players on the market today.

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