Commentary

Uncovering the hidden costs of PC-based digital signage

Sometimes you can pick what looks like the solution with the best price, only to realize there are hidden costs involved.

December 19, 2017 by Jeff Hastings — CEO, BrightSign

You know the drill – you go to book one of those surprisingly low airfares, but once you've paid to reserve a seat, check a bag and order food you realize the true cost of your flight is much more than the teaser fare that caught your attention. The same could be said for PC-based digital signage. Customers are often attracted by low hardware acquisition costs, only to learn the hard way that their low-cost PC-based digital signage solution is anything but affordable.

Case in point, we recently built up a Windows-based signage solution to perform some benchmark testing of our own players compared to commonly used PC-based signage equipment. The player was initially priced fairly reasonably, but there were some hidden costs.

To get the system up and running, we had to spend $49 for RAM memory, $60 for an SSD drive and nearly another $100 for the Windows operating system. By this point, the player's purchase price had went up by $219, and that was just to get the player up and running. And once we had a boot-ready player, it still lacked the necessary software to create and output content.

This example underscores why I feel so strongly about having a transparent approach to pricing. You should look for solutions that are priced competitively and come loaded with all the hardware and software needed to get up and running and create signage content. You shouldn't have to pay more than what's on the price tag.

I opened this blog post with an airfare analogy, so I'll close with an automotive one: when you shop for a car, you expect the purchase price to include everything you need to drive off the lot. You shouldn't need to separately purchase wheels, a gas tank and the transmission before you're on the road. The same should hold true for digital signage. Bear this in mind when calculating the true cost of your next digital signage installation.

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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