Digital Signage Industry Focuses on Cloud
The digital signage industry emerged back in the 1980’s. Unfortunately for this industry, that’s where most of the innovation stopped. Digital signs traditionally use the client server model. While this method seems reliable and gets the job done, there is some inherit costs that are associated with delivering digital signage using this cumbersome method. In efforts to reduce these costs, digital signage experts have toyed with the idea of delivering these advertisements directly from the public cloud versus maintaining the client-server model. This delivery model would reduce much of the technical overhead costs associated with running a digital sign that you might see near the expressway.
The biggest positive for the digital signage industry is the fact that they don’t have to maintain hardware. Using a cloud solution such as AWS or Azure, digital signage providers can hook directly into the cloud and scale up and down as needed without the upfront investment of hardware. If you have ever encountered a digital sign that displayed a blue screen of death, you’ll understand that once a node fails in the client server model, the result is disastrous. With a cloud solution powering digital signs, all of the underlying hardware is agnostic therefore digital signage providers won’t need to worry about faulty hardware causing the system to blue screen. This allows digital signage providers to provide service level and uptime guarantees on the ads they sell to their clients.
Content distribution would theoretically be easier in a cloud based system for digital signage. Since many of the design tools are also located in the cloud, digital signage enterprises could theoretically be managed from a mobile device or a tablet. Even from a desktop PC, the method of distributing content, managing advertisement contracts and even obtaining analytics from your digital signs can all be achieved using a cloud solution custom tailored for the digital signage industry.
