Profit from Digital Media Technology (Let's Get Digital)

Sign of the Times

It was only a matter of time before the digital media age took hold of signage. Why should digital signage should be limited to the scrolling LED marquees like those in Times Square? To broaden the reach, there's been an onslaught of new offerings in this space.

One of the larger providers of digital signage solutions is Cisco Systems Inc., which offers its platform as part of the Cisco Digital Media System. Customers can license the digital signage solution alone or couple it with the other component of the Digital Media System, desktop video, which can work in concert with the digital signage platform.

Cisco’s digital signage offering became available in January 2007, and the company received several hundred orders in the first year of deployment. One very large international customer deployed the digital screens to more than 4,000 locations, the company said. The solution spans the content-creation process through media management and all they way to the actual screen itself. A digital media player creates the graphics rendering and the video playback on the LCDs or plasma screens at the location.

Thomas Wyatt, general manager of Cisco’s Digital Media Systems Business Unit, said in-store media is just one product of a transforming advertising industry. “The business models are shifting in the way people are moving money from television ads on major cable networks to much more localized and segmented forms of advertising and marketing,” he said. “We’re seeing a lot more focus moved from these mainstream ad places like newspaper and television to in the store because customers are much more likely to make a purchase decision [at that point as opposed to before entering the store].” Wyatt said these business model transformations are occurring simultaneously with technological innovation, and affordability of that technology, creating an incubator for solutions like digital signage.

I.C.G. (Internet Connectivity Group Inc.) debuted its plug-and-play wireless digital signage solution in February. The unified solution is comprised of The Mobile Media System and ViFi Adapter, and I.C.G.’s ICNet and ICPro services, which are the connectivity and professional services parts of the offering. The Mobile Media System eliminates the need for several disparate components by bundling a 3G/4G wireless network module, a Wi-Fi router, an integrated media player and a hard drive, and enables cached content to be streamed over wireless links. The ViFi Adapter receives the streamed audio and video content over Wi-Fi and connects through a video output to a variety of display types.

I.C.G.’s president, Kurtis Van Horn Jr., said the solution is one of the first to utilize 3G networks as its primary form of connection. “Our technology leverages the wireless broadband network infrastructure and is really a convergence of digital signage and this infrastructure,” he said. Van Horn said the digital signage solution makes up a large percentage of I.G.G.’s current and forward-looking revenue, and the company has already increased YTD revenue over the same period of time from 2006 to 2007 by more than 750 percent.

Additionally, a company called Adder [http://www.adder.com] sells the AdderLink AV200 line of multimedia extenders for digital signage through its channel of distribution partners and resellers. The extenders, which come standard with the company’s Adder Display Manager software, allow the user to power screens on and off individually or by group, and also automate this function, via a newly integrated RS232 interface. The five-component solution contains three video/audio transmitters and two receivers, and can control up to 64 individual screens.

It would be impossible to list every digital signage offering here, which speaks to the tremendous growth of a previously novel market.