News

Digital View 'greening' its ViewStream media players

October 17, 2010

Digital View announced recently that it is concentrating efforts on providing maximum value to owners — and making its products more eco-friendly — by increasing the operating efficiency of its media players.

Energy prices are one of the biggest operating considerations for digital signage network owners, and inefficiency in energy consumption can soon mount up making signage costs difficult to absorb, the company says. Digital View has announced its dedication to the development of greener, more efficient technology with the recent launch of the ViewStream 500 HD digital media player.

Digital View says it is committed to reducing energy expenditure through efficiency, following its commitment to the recent adoption of step six of the Screen Forum U.K.'s Green Initiative that requires computing power to be kept to a minimum. According to ViewStream, its family of media players offer businesses extra value by using up to five times less energy than a typical PC running the same HD content.

Digital View cofounder Richard Cobbold, who also serves as director of the Screen Forum, has said that it behooves the digital signage industry to work proactively to get ahead of the curve on becoming more environmentally friendly, or "greener."

"As you know, The Screen has been working hard to get the 'green' message out to the digital signage industry," Cobbold said in a recent e-mail exchange after the announcement was made. "A key part of the GreenScreen initiative and the '12Steps' was to provide a platform for companies in the sector to talk about their own developments in this area — whether in product development or project case studies. With companies like CBS Outdoor, NEC, Harris and Magenta getting behind individual steps, at Digital View we were very pleased to put our name to Step 6 — that on reducing computing power."

The Screen Forum's GreenScreen initiative helped make Digital View focus on how to optimize its media player product range, and the ViewStream players do offer a sustainable route to creating digital signage networks, because they are both low power and extremely reliable, Cobbold says.

"Reducing power consumption is not only good for the environment, but it also saves money for operators and venues," he said in the e-mail. "Reliability means fewer engineering trips, fewer replacement parts and a longer life-cycle (i.e. five years of 24/7 playback). We have now boosted this solid base with a focus on improving our supply chain efficiency, with step changes in the manufacturing process and improvements to product packaging."