| |
New to Digital Signage? Digital Signage is a unique medium that enables you to exploit the power of visual communications! In today's media rich environment and tech savvy society, capturing the attention of consumers, staff or visitors requires stimulating visual content rendered on high quality screens. Fortunately, building a modern and efficient Digital Signage infrastructure does not have to be a complicated or expensive process!
Digital Signage has seen widespread uptake in the recent years in several services sectors, such as Hospitality and Tourism, Banking and Finance, Healthcare, Education, Retail, Government and many more. This is mainly due to the great progress achieved both in basic hardware units, such as media players and LCD displays, but also in networking technology and media distribution and management software. PLAN YOUR DISPLAYS  Putting in place a successful Digital Signage network starts with a fundamental planning exercise, which requires business decisions in answering questions such as: - What types and size of screens should I use to create a compelling viewer experience?
- What is the optimal placement of my displays in order to maximize Return on Investment?
- What types of content do I want to show and what are my sources for it?
- How do I engage viewers and facilitate call to action?
These are typical issues, with which we normally help our customers at the outset of any Digital Signage project. However, technical expertise is not the most valuable resource at this stage. A lot of common sense and some out-of-the-box thinking can help you come up with an efficient and viable plan! DEVELOP YOUR INFRASTRUCTURE  Implementing your plan requires the development of a technical infrastructure that combines several components such as: - Display devices & media players
- Network connections
- A centralized management platform, such as DSplay
- Interfaces to content sources and third party systems
- Applications, empowering your audience to navigate through the content and providing feedback on viewer preferences
This part is best left to an experienced integrator that can harness the various technical details and let you focus on your communication strategy. Check out our integration and application development services if you would like more information on this stage or a quote on a project. PREPARE YOUR CONTENT  Next in line comes the preparation of content that exploits the advantages of your infrastructure and composes an experience to be valued by your target audience. Key issues to consider during content preparation are: - Is your content aesthetically attractive and does it represent you adequately?
- Is the content appropriate for delivery over a visual medium and does it still convey your messages with the audio channel disabled?
- Is the duration of your messages suitable for the type of viewer being addressed (typically 5-60 sec)?
- Does your content strike a balance between advertising, and informative, educational or entertainment functions?
Always remember that if every aspect of your infrastructure works well, your content will be the only thing your viewers will remember. Check out our content related services if you would like more information on this stage or a quote on a project. RUN YOUR CAMPAIGNS!  If you have completed the previous steps, you are ready to start operating your Digital Signage network and run your campaigns, or even use it to host advertising content on behalf of third parties. As with any system, proper monitoring and performance tuning will help you maximize the benefits of your investment and the effectiveness of your campaigns. Thankfully, a strong administration platform like DSplay can assist you in this task with advanced functionality for creating and scheduling content presentations, monitoring network status, production of reports on content projections, statistics over viewer interactions and many more. Take a more detailed view of DSplay and its features and find out why this tool is the right solution for you. |
DSplay supports interaction on the server side Processing of input events on the server enables DSplay to offer much greater flexibility and support interaction through IVRs, web pages, mobile phones and more. Updates to interaction scenarios are also delivered without updating the media players. DSplay can connect to any database DSplay has been implemented in way that is independent of the underlying RDBMS. It can therefore utilize the services of any existing database within an organization including (Oracle, MS SQL Server and MySQL). DSplay interacts with mobile phones through QR codes Viewers with mobile phones can interact with your displays and retrieve information according to their preferences! In DSplay, QR codes for any content item or presentation page are produced automatically. DSplay can store presentations on the server, the media players or both DSplay can be set to operate in one of three modes (entire presentation on the server, presentation on the player or content on the player), so that your network conditions are best matched. Retailers can publish promotions in a few minutes in DSplay The Promo app in DSplay enables retailers to publish daily promotions simply by typing a few text parameters and selecting their background image. No back and forth to a graphics designer is required. DSplay provides detailed campaign reporting Reporting on actual and not just scheduled content projections in DSplay can drill down to specific content items and content owners and thus support charging for any advertising campaign. Language can be set in DSplay for each separate user Language preferences in DSplay can be set for each individual user. The same installation will use a different version of the menu for users with different preferences. Weather is delivered in multiple locations through a single playlist in DSplay Geographically dispersed networks need a customized version of the weather in each location. This is possible in DSplay with a single playlist for all players, so that you do not have to copy your changes to a playlist across all locations. You can stack your presentation schedules in DSplay DSplay can handle multiple presentation schedules for any given player in your network. When a schedule expires DSplay will automatically load the next schedule in the player’s stack. Presentation layouts and templates can be reused in DSplay When you create your presentation layout in DSplay, you can save it and reuse it later for other presentations. The platform will even create a thumbnail version of the layout for easy identification. DSplay reformats external content according to your template specifications Content coming from external applications like the weather or news can be dynamically reformatted in DSplay according to your requirements. Simply change an XML based template, whenever you want alter their appearance. DSplay draws content from plug-in applications DSplay has a standardized way of communicating with applications that deliver content from external sources like the Internet or third party systems, thus rendering truly dynamic content on your screens. DSplay supports time-to-live for playlist items Content items within a playlist do not need to be manually entered or removed with DSplay. Just type in the date/time that you want them to appear/disappear and let the DSplay engine do the rest. DSplay lets you preview your presentations before deploying them The presentation editor of DSplay lets you create fancy screen layouts and then preview them on your workstation without actually sending them on a display in your network. DSplay supports distributed installation over multiple remote locations By installing a small footprint version of the system in each location, DSplay can accommodate distributed topologies with minimal utilization of network resources, while supporting dynamic content caching at the same time. DSplay runs on any operating system DSplay is a web based application and has been developed using open and standardized tools so that it can be installed on servers running both Windows and Linux. |