One of my ongoing themes is simplicity. I think most portals into the digital world are too complicated - especially when it comes to information exchange.
It's complicated, of course, because the world is complicated. If we were just binary beings, the only thing we'd want (or could) say to each other would be "I'm 1" or "I'm 0"; but in the real world, there's an unimaginably large number of states we could possibly be in. Multiply this by the number of states that everyone and everything else could be in and you're in the region that might as well be described as infinity.
So you have to simplify things.
You could do this by simply ignoring a lot of options; and that's OK if you're working in a specialised field.
In practise, what you have to do is agree on the categories of information that you want to exchange, work out all the variations that you want to be able to describe, and then come to some sort of mutually acceptable means of interchange.
Sounds arduous, doesn't it? Yes, but in narrow industry sectors this tends to happen anyway.
Except that it doesn't seem to be happening in digital signage.
You could argue that XML, JSON, SOAP, WSDL and stuff like that are standards; but I'm not talking about that level of interchange.
What I'm talking about is the ability to exchange bookings, schedules, screen layouts, hybridization schema, and so-one. The ability to make any digital signage content work on any player.
Without it, we're wasting too much of our time devising bespoke solutions, and not enough effort in trying to make the industry grow as a whole into the massive media phenomenon we know it's going to be, someday.
In fact, I do have answers to these. I'll hint at some examples over the next few posts.
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