VOLLMER
Rupa Patel, 972-488-4790
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The Digital Signage Show
Joelle Coretti, 203-371-6322, ext. 209
joelle@jdevents.com

Software specialist Stratacache announced last week the creation of a $25m acquisition fund targeting technology and media companies in the digital signage and digital out-of-home (DOOH) markets. The focus of the fund will be products and solutions that compliment Stratacache’s digital signage offering, ActiVia. Stratacache cites falling advertising budgets as forcing many early stage companies in the marketplace into financial difficulty.

By Louie Hollmeyer, VP of Marketing, STRATACACHE

The need for metrics has been a hot topic within the digital signage industry. Trade show and conference panels have addressed everything from why a system needs to be in place to what emerging technology is on the horizon. The excitement and change the digital media and out-of-home (OOH) video marketplace has seen recently can leave newcomers in a tailspin. Providers are showcasing more and more forthcoming solutions that allow businesses to cater ads based on age, gender, ethnicity, and proximity.

Although digital signage has been increasingly adopted across all industries and has proven to be very influential and effective, the lack of real time audience measurement has curtailed the industry’s ability to realize full potential. There are two layers of audience measurement working in synchrony. At the provider level, metrics are needed to show that a particular solution is effective and meeting the clients’ goals and objectives. On a broader level, the industry needs to demonstrate that the medium is not only powerful, but clearly surpasses the effectiveness of other less targeted and less customizable mediums.

Stratacache, the privately held digital signage software specialist, has assembled a $25 million fund to target technology and media acquisitions in the digital signage market. The company is particularly looking for complimentary solutions that will bolster its ActiVia software product.

CEO Chris Riegel feels that there are many early stage companies in the market with good products and a handful of customers that are under real pressure, commenting that, “Although the out-of-home advertising segment is one of the fastest growing segments in the industry, many venture-backed or privately held companies were expecting unrealistic growth in the short term and are now running into significant financial difficulty.”

DAYTON, Ohio-Stratacache today announced that it has integrated its ActiVia for Media digital signage software on Amino set-top boxes (STBs), enabling the use of low-cost Amino devices as media players in digital signage networks. With their small form factors and plug-and-play deployment, Amino STBs make it easy for retailers and other organizations to establish robust, fully-managed and cost effective digital signage networks to tens of thousands of locations. ActiVia for Media allows companies to schedule, manage and distribute digital signage content to as many as 100,000 media players from a central server cluster.

ActiVia for Media provides centralized configuration, management, monitoring, content scheduling, distribution, playlist control, and reporting for digital signage networks. With proven Amino STBs now integrated with ActiVia for Media client software, distributed enterprises can easily create digital signage networks that incorporate reliable and cost-effective content distribution with full edge device management. The new Amino-based solution is especially useful for retailers, where low cost Amino flash or disk-based STBs can be used for both digital signage and corporate e-learning applications.

“Stratacache is a market leader in software for digital signage networks, and our STBs give retailers and other organizations an easily deployable solution for distributed locations,” said Roy Kirsopp, VP & General Manager of Amino Communications. “With ActiVia for Media built in, Amino STBs become the easiest and most cost-effective way to power digital signage in stores or branches.”

The AmiNET range of STBs represents a more compact solution for driving digital signage displays in branches. Rather than dealing with servers or PCs, retailers can deliver digital signage content by simply connecting an Amino STBs to the store network.

“This solution shatters the cost barrier for simple retail digital sigange and it brings digital signage networks within reach for retailers who haven’t been able to implement them before,” said Chris Riegel, CEO of Stratacache. “By adding the ActiVia for Media client to Amino STBs, we are creating a new digital signage solution that costs less and is far easier to deploy than traditional PC or server based solutions.”

ActiVia for Media 3.0 for Amino STBs ships October 30.

About Amino

Amino Communications (www.aminocom.com) supplies the AmiNET™ series of set-top boxes, renowned for their low-cost and reliability. The AmiNET range materially reduces service operators’ capital expenditure, whilst offering the full range of specification required; MPEG2 and MPEG4 encoding standards, standard and high definition TV, personal video recording and home networking. The high performance coupled with the innovative design of Amino’s set-top boxes, have brought the series industry accolades and the company a leading position within the IPTV market.

The AmiNET series of IPTV set-top boxes has been used by more than 500 customers in commercial deployments and trials in over 50 countries worldwide. The set-top boxes have also been sampled by another additional 700 customers. Amino Communications’ principal customers are telecommunications, broadcast and hospitality service operators. Generally, AmiNET products are supplied with the IntAct™ IPTV software stack pre-loaded.

Amino Communications is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amino Technologies plc. listed on the London Stock Exchange AIM, symbol AMO. Amino is based near Cambridge, UK, and has offices in Atlanta Georgia and Hong Kong.

About Stratacache

Stratacache is the world leader in efficient, scalable and cost effective content distribution, digital media presentation and application acceleration solutions for highly distributed, network connected organizations. Serving Global 2000 customers and mid-tier organizations in the retail, finance, service, manufacturing and government markets worldwide, Stratacache’s products transparently solve large-scale content distribution and application performance challenges while immediately providing tangible return-on-investment and dramatically improved user satisfaction. Stratacache is based in Dayton, Ohio USA and is privately held. For more information please visit www.stratacache.com or e-mail