Digital Signage Central

We’ve been pondering this question recently, and realized that the answer is probably multi-pronged, and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Getting data to your digital signage screens is a critical piece of the system, and we believe it must be done in ways that depend on the type of content.

Here is a quick summary of various digital signage content delivery methods, by media type:

As you can tell we think RSS/XML (same thing, really) is the way to go for some simple data feeding to your digital signage display. Digital signage that is XML/RSS capable is not yet widespread, but is receiving support and is being pushed by some major players like screenfeed:

This is our preferred method of delivery because it is standards based and allows the player to pre-download the content to the local player or server before it is time to display on screen. We’re working with many digital signage software companies to convince them to add Media RSS support. A few that have include Tight Rope Media Systems, Signagelive and Coolsign.

Screenfeed is an interesting content aggregator. Some gather and aggregate content using a central server, with aggregation software. Then, once the content is in one place, it can be distributed to the players on the network. This is good if you are showing the same thing on a large number of screens, or if you are pulling data from a large number of sources and need to ensure it is valid/validated before pushing it out to the digital signage screens seen by the public. This is known as “SUBSCRIPTION BASED CONTENT DELIVERY FOR A DIGITAL SIGNAGE NETWORK”

FTP – Even though FTP is becoming aincient, it can still be used to deliver new video, audio, or simply a new SWF file to the player unit.

http/https  - Since you can show a flash file in a browser, why not? Why not use http (or https for secure transmission) to get the content out? This uses a network connection, which is common everywhere.

WE would love to hear your comments on this one.