Digital Signage Software, Digital Signage system, Digital Signage Solution, Digital Signage Players  

Digital signage software, Digital signage system, Digital Signage Solution, Digital Signage Players

Deliver your message to audiences all over the world with our integrated management solution that is powerful and easy-to-use	Deliver HD digital content to any audience in any location!
Deliver Your Message to Audiences Around the World in Airplanes, Commuter Trains, Busses or Anywhere Compact Digital Signage is Useful	Deliver your message to audiences all over the world with our integrated management solution that is powerful and easy-to-use

Digital signage has become an international standard in advertising that is surpassing “traditional” printed collateral in leaps and bounds for several key reasons. Whatever name you may know it as – “narrowcasting”, “place-based media”, “digital merchandising”, “screen media”, “digital out-of-home”, “captive audience networks” or “digital media networks”, it’s all the same animal: digital signage. With powerful, simple and aggressively-priced digital signage product such as SignagePro and SignagePro Mobility, Smart-AVI has taken a strong position within the market and has been very well-received by companies of all sizes, from civic organizations to major resort destinations.

But what is digital signage? You already have been exposed to it in many forms, at just about every waypoint in your day. On a business trip to a convention in Las Vegas: Walking through the airport to catch your plane, you look at the departing flight information display. At the top of the departure/arrival screens is one monitor showcasing the logo and information of a coffee house within the terminal. That’s digital signage. You board the plane and enjoy the small LCD screens that are inset into the seatbacks in front of you. As you soar over the Mojave toward Vegas, you’re watching ads for resorts, casinos and restaurants to visit when you land. Digital signage again. Once you leave the plane and head to the baggage carousel, you find yourself surrounded by huge video screens displaying everything from buffet ads to Blue Man Group and Phantom of the Opera clips. Have you guessed yet? Digital signage. Upon arrival at your hotel, there are flat screens everywhere you look with directions, resort offerings and entertainment announcements.

Digital signage galore! At the convention center, large screens indicate which hall is hosting your company. It also lets you know that when you break for lunch or dinner, there is a delicious Mexican grill located just a short walk from your booth. You’ve got it… digital signage. After the convention wraps for the day and you hop in the cab back down The Strip toward your hotel, you’re bombarded with intense lights, video and sound from the massive marquees belonging to each mega-resort. Digital Signage Nirvana. You get the idea perfectly. It doesn’t matter the size of the screen – whether it’s a postcard-sized screen in an airplane or a monolithic Vegas marquee – any screen that offers information to customers or guests is a form of digital signage. Even if all the screen displays is the signature “Wynn” – it’s selling you the Wynn branding, isn’t it? The sign doesn’t need to say, “Hey you tourist in the cab… stop here and drink, gamble, see a show and have a great time because this is the place to be in Las Vegas!” It simply says “Wynn”. And unless you live under a rock or somehow can’t see the 50-story structure looming behind the marquee, you already understand what “Wynn” means and what it’s selling. And as you pass by in that taxi, as soon as you’ve read “Wynn”, that particular form of digital signage has done its job – because you are now aware that you’re passing the Wynn Las Vegas and maybe you’ll think about venturing inside at some point to check it out while you’re in town.

Other forms of digital signage are more blatant. When you walk into a shopping mall and pass a fashion clothing store, there might be digital displays in the storefront window depicting models wearing the latest styles. Some of the screens also display the announcement that RIGHT NOW the FALL SALE is going on inside, so you’d better not pass these bargains up! This is typical in-store merchandising that once existed on static banners or large chipboard signs hanging from the ceiling or propped up on easels. Now, in stores, flat screen monitors everywhere flash images, play videos and inform you instantly about the latest and greatest deals ever as you pass by. It’s all precision marketing and you’re the target. Did you take notice of something that was being displayed? Isn’t it cool that the video game you’ve been waiting for or the DVD your child’s been begging you to get is on sale now and the price is actually pretty darn good here? The digital signage just did its job again. While initially purchasing digital signage players (basically, computers with powerful processors and a small amount of hard disc space that you load your content onto) and the monitors on which the digital images are to be displayed may be more of an investment than a cardboard sign, the versatility and economic sense of digital signage far outweighs continuing to spend money on signage that may only be used once for a sale or special event; after that, into the trash bin your signs – and money – goes.

With digital signage at your command, printed material is an easily-forgotten thing of the past. Printed material layout becomes digital media design and the cost of having in-store signage printed – is nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Media files – videos, high-definition images, music – replace drab printed material that most consumers simply gloss over as they pass by. When was the last time you stopped and stared at a sign in the middle of a store because it was so cool? It doesn’t happen. When was the last time you stopped in the middle of the store to watch a product demonstration or video clip on an overhead flat screen? How about a new game for the PlayStation® or the newest demo of The Beatles™: Rock Band™? It happens every time you walk through a store, doesn’t it? You don’t need overwhelming statistics or impressive, number-laden corporate graphs to demonstrate the feasibility and rate of which digital signage technology is being implemented around the world.

Just look around. Digital signage is everywhere you go. It’s used in every way possible to communicate a brand, promote a sale or offer you assistance in some way or another. Sometimes it’s very subtle and almost subliminal: “Wynn”. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious: “STORE-WIDE BLOW-OUT SALE!” Regardless of the message, digital signage works the same way, no matter what scale you’re working on. It doesn’t matter whether you have one monitor in your check-out line or 50 screens throughout your store. The science behind it is the same and straight-forward: you need digital content, a way to create that content, a server or digital signage player capable of storing and playing that content when and how you determine, and then your display screens. That’s it. It’s not rocket science. A digital signage content player is a dedicated CPU (computer processor and hard disc) that’s built a bit differently than your home PC or laptop. These players are designed to be digital media workhorses – storing and playing content over and over again. Typically, their hard discs are between four and 8 gigabytes, which may not seem like much, until you understand that generally-speaking, an hour of media playback equals about a gig. Unless you’re wanting to play one of the Lord of the Rings films for your clients in full and then do a video re-cap of what they’ve just watched, it’s apparent very quickly that four hours plus of media playback time is more than enough for most companies’ needs.

Generally, people won’t stick around for four minutes, let alone four hours! So while even 8 gigs may seem like a very small hard disc for your laptop – it is an enormous amount of space for a digital signage player. It’s all about perspective. You might be wondering what kinds of media files digital signage players can play. That depends largely on how the individual players’ software has been written. In the case of Smart-AVI’s players, our digital signage software has been specifically programmed to support common media files that users are already familiar with. These files include QuickTime, AVI, MPEG or WMV, for example. Image formats supported include JPEG, GIF, BMP and PNG. Other digital file formats such as Flash, PowerPoint, HTML and MP3 are also supported in Smart-AVI’s digital signage, making it very simple for our customers to incorporate files they work with every day into their presentations. Other companies’ products may work differently. Some are more rigid in the files they support or the way they handle certain media. This can cause headache when all you want the player to do is play your files. There are some digital signage players that require your files to be re-processed and converted to a proprietary type of file that particular machine’s software can read correctly. In cases like that, there is an additional step involved in creating your presentation – and definitely more of a learning curve. While it may not be a huge inconvenience, it is another step and what should be a very simple process suddenly gets murky with file conversions, time spent making your media compatible and the process of learning the ins and outs of how to make the digital signage software read your stuff.

When you have settled on a digital signage player that is what you’re looking for, and have made sure it can play your media files, it’s up to you to determine what your target audience is going to see. It’s easy to go nuts with multimedia files, but you need to remember that your message needs to be focused – just the way a printed sign would need to be to get its point across. You wouldn’t have a sign in the middle of a yogurt shop of a bulldog with the words, “HOT!”, “WILD!” and “100% Cotton” on it. Your customers would stop, read it, re-read it and walk away scratching their heads. Just like printed collateral, your digital signage must serve a purpose – you haven’t invested in a system just to have it sit in the middle of the store and scream, “LOOK WHAT I CAN DO!” No one wants or needs that. What people do want and do respond well to, are clear, helpful, fun and visually-appealing displays that serve a specific purpose. It doesn’t matter whether it’s directions to the nearest restroom or what the hottest CD of the week is – people want focused information delivered to them creatively or straight-up, without any bells or whistles. Whatever method you choose, choose wisely – and then once you have what your message is figured out, use the digital signage software to begin creating your play list. A “play list” on your digital signage player isn’t really much of a different concept than creating one on your iPod or within iTunes.

The only difference really between creating a music play list and a digital signage play list is that you generally wouldn’t want to “shuffle” your media files within your digital signage presentation – that would make a mess of your message! Using the digital signage software, you simply tell your player which files you want played, which order you want them played in and how often they will play. Beyond that, you also use the software to determine how your presentation will be seen across your network or on your video wall. And again, the ease of this operation is greatly determined by the brand of digital signage player you go with and what its software allows for in programming your material. Smart-AVI’s digital signage software has been very carefully created to be extremely user-friendly for even novice computer users. We understand that most of the people tasked with creating digital signage presentations are not programmers or engineers – they’re normal folks just like you and me that maybe work in marketing or perhaps even serve as an office assistant wearing many hats within a smaller company.

Using Smart-AVI’s digital signage software as our example, all a user needs to do is select which media files will be played that are at first, resident on his or her computer’s hard drive or company network, if the files happen to be on different servers. Within the software program, he or she then determines what order the selected files will be played in – and on which monitors, if you are using a video wall system. In a digital signage network – such as individual flat screen displays lining the walkways of an airport terminal or the perimeter of a casino – keep in mind that you can have one player controlling as many screens as you have; each of those screens has its own receiver unit and each screen must be playing the same content at the same time as the other screens being controlled by the same player. One player can control say, 10 display screens via 10 receivers. And the content being displayed is identical. If you want half of those screens however, to play different material – then you need a different player for each varying program/media broadcast. But as long as you want your presentation to be replicated on multiple screens at once – the sky’s the limit. You can use as many monitors as you’d like.

It doesn’t matter to your Smart-AVI digital signage player whether it’s controlling one screen or 1,000; it functions the same way when it comes to programming the software and compiling your play list. Once your media files have been selected, their order determined and the frequency in which your presentation is looped or played over your digital signage displays has been set up in the software, your presentation is then “copied” to each receiver unit either via network or wirelessly over the Internet to remote locations – whether they’re in another building or on the other side of the planet. Once the files have been transferred, the broadcast begins on each monitor. And that’s how digital signage software programming works, in layman’s terms. Again, it’s important to note that each brand of digital signage player will have software that may work slightly – or a lot – differently than Smart-AVI’s does. And this is exactly why we have gone to great lengths to ensure smooth sailing for everyone that uses our digital signage products. We take great pride in knowing that all users will be able to have their presentations up and running almost immediately after taking our digital signage players out of the box. If the digital signage program is instructed to loop indefinitely, the hardware will play the presentation continuously – indefinitely – until the programming is altered (can be as often as you’d like or never) or instructed to stop repeating. If you run your digital signage player into the ground over a long period of time or something happens to malfunction (computers and electronics do wear out or malfunction from time to time – that’s the way of the universe), repairs/part replacements are simple with Smart-AVI products, as we have crafted our digital signage hardware from standard, off-the-shelf PC components (even though the hardware you end up purchasing is much different in operation than your laptop or desktop computer). This allows for simple and when necessary, cost-effective maintenance on all Smart-AVI digital signage players.

None of our hardware is proprietary in the sense that only Smart-AVI engineers are able to repair our digital signage products; that is one of the ways we produce our equipment for less and pass those savings on to our customers in the form of aggressive pricing within the market. Regardless of the company or brand you go with, digital signage is the way of marketing and mass-communication going in to 2010 and beyond. Traditional, static displays and printed signage will go the way of the typewriter and 8-track tape. The entire planet – not just America, Asia or the UK – now lives in the Digital Age. Smart-AVI has positioned itself and has created our digital signage hardware and software with the general public’s needs in mind so that when you’re ready to invest in your company’s future, we are right here, ready to assist you, with all of your digital signage solutions.