What is digital signage? Well it is the use of new technologies to market products or services to existing and new customers; these are broken down in to the following categories.

• Location advertising - to up sell product lines
• Advertising by media companies to local stores or service providers
• Enhance your customers experience – displays in restaurant waiting areas to reduce the perceived waiting time

Now to maximise any investment in digital signage, you need to have in place the digital network infrastructure. These normally consist of Internet access, a media player, distribution network to the electronic displays and some way to manage the network. So let us take each component and look at them a little deeper.

Internet access – this can be either hard wired or wireless. A wired connection normally goes through cable or a DSL modem with the wireless connection going through a mobile broadband modem or satellite connection. To give an example of these networks, mobile connections are used for updates on public transport such as buses and trains.

Media players – what are these? Well, media players are computers that play the content via the software installed on them. The content can be installed by three methods, USB memory stick, wired/wireless connection or by uploading from a DVD inserted into the computer. Content is then distributed to the chain of networked displays using a wired connection, using structured cabling such as Category 5 data cabling, or if using a wireless connection wireless adapters are used with the computer.

Distribution network – this is group of locations where the digital signs are to be located, so it could be in restaurants, in a mall or even at gas pumps. They can be local or even in different countries; it totally depends upon what the product is and your budget!

Electronic display – this can be a regular TFT or LCD television, nothing special!

Network Management - the network is then managed from 1 central point, were updates are distributed from, the network is monitored reporting any maintenance issues.

However, there is a more affordable way to distribute content providing, time is not an issue and that is to use DVDs, create the content and then burn the content to discs and then mail them to the locations within the network, this does not require the heavy investment the wired/wireless networks do, but it does have its draw backs.

We specialise in various digital signage solutions from digital posters through to LCD enclosures for outdoor digital signage.