Digital signage is huge, no matter where you are today, you will have seen at least 1 digital sign, promoting a companies product or service.  Now a lot of people are put off digital signage as soon as they discover they have to create content…

I intend on describing the basics of digital signage, to try and explain the black art! For any outdoor digital signage or public access signage you will need the following:

1. An LCD or plasma display, this will depend entirely on your budget, however LCD TV’s in the range of 32″ upwards are coming down in price daily!
2. An LCD enclosure, this is a special protective enclosure that will accommodate the display and offer protection to the weather and potential vandalism, to IP66 and NEMA 4X. Some times plasma TV’s are used and the standard LCD enclosures are also classed as a plasma TV enclosure.
3. Small, form factor PC, this is the computer that will run the media content. As the name says, it’s small, much smaller than a standard computer, allowing it to fit inside the enclosure.
4. Internet access, either via a secure wireless link through the form factor PC or hard wired. The hard wired option is perfect for remote locations, for example if you were based in Fort Myers, Florida and had stores in California, all you would have to do to upload content to the entire digital network would be to dial into the remote computer and upload the new content, ruling out expensive travel to the actual sites or even CD duplication of the content. You could also schedule the upload to be done at a set time when no one was in the store and reboot the system. The wireless option is ideal for 1 or 2 digital signs that are in a close locality, i.e. 2 in a single restaurant, it’s just like connecting to a hot spot, enter your user name and password and your in…
5. Power is needed to feed the display and computer, most areas have power supplies near by.
6. CONTENT CREATION! Well it’s far easier than you think, for example if you are a baker and create some wonderful cakes for weddings and special birthdays, all you have to do is take some good pictures of the finished cakes and have the digital signage near your front door, people who were passing your store front will see the amazing cakes via the digital sign and will be getting your marketing message across.

Now all you need for a simple digital signage solution is to get a display that has an inbuilt memory card reader, most new LCD and plasma TV’s have them now. Then you connect your computer with the images of your product, such as the cakes and drag the images to the memory card, then once complete you insert the card into the display and the images will be displayed on a rotation.

A more cost effective option would be to drag the images to the memory card and then insert the memory card into a digital signage poster, this is a “mini digital sign” around 12″ wide x 24″ long and can be situated in store windows, it does the same job but the entire solution would probably cost the equivalent to the LCD display on it’s own.

For more information on cost effective solutions for outdoor digital signage, LCD enclosures or PC enclosures, just contact us on +44 (0)844 8841899.