Sixteen:nine

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT LED video wall technology is now so pervasive, and there are soooo many vendors, that it is increasingly hard for manufacturers to differentiate and compete. That's compounded by a lot of manufacturers selling on specs like pixel pitch, and the form factor of their products. Very few, however, spend much if any time talking about the why and what of video wall projects - as in why is this project being considered, what's it for, and also what's going to be on the screen when it gets plugged in. So I was intrigued when I was in touch with Chanan Averbuch, a South Florida LED industry vet. I learned he'd left his longtime executive sales gig with an LED display vendor to join a spinout that makes premium LED displays, but leads with creative. The company is called Blue Square X - with the X being short for experience. While most manufacturers just make the stuff, and ship it to integrators, Blue Square plans to bridge a couple of gaps - actin

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Feeding the content beast is an endless challenge for most companies who have invested in digital signage technology for their venues, particularly when the messaging mission is not data and pricing, but material that informs, educates and generally occupies the time of viewers. There are a few companies out there with suites of free streaming content channels, curated and sorted by interest areas. But free means ad-supported. So the action channel a bar owner might have up on screens has digital OOH ads, just like linear TV. A start-up called Stream is coming at this from a different angle, producing custom content that looks like cable TV news channels and is sorted by interest areas, like channels for medical and dental offices. The big differences are no ads and low-cost monthly subscription fees. The service puts people on screens, but AI is also used to what Stream calls augment the videos. Started just a year ago and just coming out

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Dubai, Qatar and more recently Saudi Arabia have developed a reputation in digital signage for bankrolling projects that seem mainly focused on sizzle and scale. But there's a lot more going on in the region than work that's just about Wow Factor. It's a busy, high opportunity part of the world for companies delivering big visual display projects, but also one that presents a lot of challenges in how things work - everything from regulations and timelines to cultural differences. I've got to know a Dubai-based company called Blue Rhine Industries through its strategy director, Nita Odedra, who I first met at an ISE conference. I'd already been impressed by how the integrator actually produces useful marketing - tight, explanatory videos that do the job of explaining what was done and why. It seems sensible, but is remarkably rare in this sector. I see a LOT of it, so I know. Nita and I had a great chat about the company's roots as a traditi

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Motion graphics designers tend to enjoy the creative side of their jobs, but there can be aspects of their work, like editing and rendering slight variations of the same spot, that are best described as soul-sucking. Neb Savicic has lived that as a motion graphics designer, and with a couple of friends in Serbia, concluded there had to be a better way. So they put their heads together and, after testing interest, started Plainly - which automates video creation and produces finished spots at scale. Like 1,000s of videos in a matter of minutes. This is not a library of pre-made templates that end-users can then tweak. It's a SaaS tool used mainly by creatives in agencies and studios to take what's developed in a professional toolset - Adobe's AfterEffects - and plug it into Plainly's cloud platform. The net result is that a creative team that is charged with producing, let's say, 500 videos for a QSR chain can do that with one template and a

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh. It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects. I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or  mobile data networks. That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like sa

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT One of the things I noticed bombing around the two exhibit halls at InfoComm in June was how most of the digital signage software companies were located in one hall, and some of them not looking all that busy, while there were at least a couple of others in the other hall, and they were packed with people. One of those companies was Appspace, and it was clear to me why the company was there with a very prominent stand. They were with their people, so to speak. While Appspace may have started years ago as another digital signage CMS software option, it now refers to itself as a unified workplace experience platform. That's why it was nested in with a bunch of other tech companies that provide the kinds of technologies - like collaboration tools - that drive contemporary workplaces. The company started out small, but now has 450 staff, offices all over the planet, and about 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers. I had a chat with Chief Innovati

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup. I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people. Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation. I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design. Subscribe from wherever you p

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The third of three that I did was an unscripted chat with conference hosts Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker, of invidis, that was billed as a Wake-Up Call for the Digital Signage Industry, and the three of us raised a series of issues that don't get enough attention and work. My big ones are, as always, having to deal with all the day to day BS put out by marketers, and related to that, the terrible job many to most of the marketers and business communicators do in this sector. Florian and Stefan get into other important topics. It all sounds serious, but we tried to make it a fun, worthwhile 30 minutes. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. No transcript, sorry!

I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The second of three that I did was focused on how to adapt to varying vertical markets, and that involved talking to companies focused on retail, food services and sports - Peter Critchley from Trison UK,  hospitality with Tim Hoddy of Uniguest, and Jan Reiners of Broadsign, which is all about digital OOH. This was the description for the 30-minute session: From DooH to Retail to Conferencing: in the digital signage business, it is all about the verticals. Different industries have very different requirements and pain points. So you need to adapt your strategies and products accordingly. But how can you identify these pain points? And how should you organize your portfolio to serve different verticals? Our panels of digital signage experts from different verticals will answer these questions. Speakers Ja

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The first was focused on IT security, which I will admit is NOT an area I’m overly conversant in. But I had a couple of good people who could come at it from different angles – Peter Critchley from Trison UK and Craig Francis of Google, who is arguably the main champion in the European market for the ties between digital signage and the Chrome OS and Flex ecosystems. This was the description for the 30-minute session: IT security has long been desperately neglected in a silo-architectural dominated digital signage industry. But today’s CMS platforms are API-first, data-driven and fully connected. Secure and certified platforms are a minimum requirement for large enterprise customers, government and increasingly also SMB clients. What are t

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There's been a steady stream of announcements in the past couple of years about new sports and entertainment venues going up in the US and elsewhere, and one of the notable attributes about these developments is that they are not just stadiums and arenas - they're big commercial developments anchored by that kind of building but surrounded by retail, residential and infrastructure. They're sprawling, at times, and with that, not necessarily easy to navigate and use. An Australian software company called PAM has a tag line about transforming complex spaces into loved places, and it does that mainly through what people in digital signage would call wayfinding. But there's more going on with PAM than just maps. The company blends that base capability with a digital signage CMS, mobile, analytics, and integrations with business systems, including Ticketmaster. It also intertwines all these components so that they're reactive, with data from one

Jay Leedy probably had a bunch of options open to him when he decided he'd done his job with Sony's pro display team, and it might have surprised some of his industry friends when he signed on with a much smaller company, New York-based Videri, as its Senior VP for Strategic Alliances. It didn't surprise me, because Videri has been on a bit of a tear in the last few months, hiring well-connected and respected senior people away from other companies active in digital signage. That came out of a $20 million fundraising round announced late last year. I did a podcast about a year ago with Videri CEO Wes Nicol, so I didn't want to spend too much time talking again about Videri's product and services. We get into that and what attracted Leedy, but what I was really interested in hearing about was his point of view on the CMS software market. His prior role with Sony was building up the digital signage software ecosystem, which involved talking to and looking at scores of different companies. He eventually onboarde

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have invested a lot of time in the last six or seven years trying to educate myself on LED display technology and terminology, but sometimes it feels like I have mountain to climb and I am still at base camp looking for my oxygen bottle stash. Manufacturers and their marketers keep coming up with new terms and acronyms, and they often play pretty fast and loose with their descriptions and assertions. Exhibit A are all the companies who are marketing microLED products that aren't microLED, and Exhibit B is the crowd of Chinese manufacturers saying they have Naked Eye 3D LED displays, when all of those visual illusions seen on displays lately are the result of clever creative and have nothing to do with the display technology. So I have a lot of time for a UK company called LED Studio, which has made the conscious decision to educate its customers and broader market, instead of blinding that market with piles of specs and marketing  terms t

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When the pandemic hit and a lot of people started working from home, many digital signage CMS software companies started developing and releasing solutions that pushed the digital signage messaging more normally posted on screens around workplaces to the laptop and computer monitor screens in the formal or ad hoc workspaces created around houses and apartments. It was a new but necessary feature for most companies, but something the Dutch company Netpresenter has been doing for almost 30 years. The software company started out with that problem in mind, borrowing on the concept of screensavers to create what it calls desktop digital signage. Over time, it added more conventional digital signage capabilities for workplaces - a solution that founder Frank Hoen says is not an add-on, but as robust as the many, many, many other CMS options out there. Along with offering a lot of integrations with business systems like SharePoint, the Netpresent

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The health care sector has long struck me as having environments and dynamics that would benefit a lot from using digital signage technology. Accurate information is critically important, and things change quickly and often - in ways that make paper and dry erase marker board solutions seem antiquated and silly. But it is a tough sector to work in and crack - because of the layers of bureaucracy, tight regulations and the simple reality that medical facilities go up over several years, not months. People often talk about the digital signage solution sales cycle being something like 18 months on average. With healthcare, it can be double or triple that. The other challenge is that it is highly specialized and there are well-established companies referred to as patient engagement providers. So any digital signage software or solutions company thinking about going after health care business will be competing with companies that already know th

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first spoke with Jonathan Labbee about the grand-scale media facades and displays being produced by SACO Technologies, the Sphere in Las Vegas was just yet another over-the-top  thing rising up from the desert sands. Two years on, and a few months after the giant LED ball was first switched on, the Sphere is probably the most discussed and photographed digital display on the planet. So I was very happy that Labbee was willing to carve out some time to talk about some of the technical details behind the display side of that project, and more broadly what it has meant for the Montreal company, and for the concept of buildings as media facades and visual attractions. In this podcast, we get into some of the technical challenges and innovations associated with putting together both the attention-getting outside exosphere of the building, but also the mind-wobbling 9mm pitch curved display inside. We also talk about the larger business, a

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first spoke with industry lifer IV Dickson about his move from software to the managed services firm SageNet, the company was still in the relatively early days of getting itself organized to chase and then service digital signage opportunities. Five years on, digital in environments like chain retail and QSR are a core, what he calls consequential, part of the Oklahoma company's overall business. SageNet's role has evolved from being an IT-centric managed services company that was adding digital signage to its deployment and network management capabilities, to having a main service line called SageView. It's a full-meal-deal suite of solutions and services that run from the ideation stage all the way through deployment and ongoing management. These kinds of turnkey, all-in solutions are relatively common now in the marketplace, but the SageNet twist is its deep roots, experience and acumen in the hard-core aspects of networking desi

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company called NowSignage. He'd seen a lot of different options, but these guys he said, had something that was very modern and nimble. I finally got my act together and scheduled a chat with founder Nick Johnson. Now's roots are in pushing social media messaging to big screens at live events - like concerts and big games. Requests started evolving, both in terms of what could be done with screens and how long they'd be used - which led in part to him concluding the future business was in permanent installations and revenue that was recurring and predictable, versus periodic. Now markets its product as being affordable and not focused on a particular market segment, like QSR

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays. In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes. So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass? That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings. Unlike other products o

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach. That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS software firm Omnivex, which has been around for more than 30 years and has always made data-driven communications central to what it does. More than 20 years ago, the core Omnivex solution included a module called DataPipe. I know, because I was using the thing way back then for a digital ad network I launched ... probably 10 years too early, but that's a story for another time. While a lot of its competitors have developed and marketed platforms that are pretty and loaded with bling, Omnivex has resolutely stuck to its technology guns with software that's quite involved and very powerful. The net result is Omnivex gets involved in a lot of the more complicated jobs