Private Networks

I've just set up a company called Content Networks. Its simple aim is to enhance the lives of digital signage operators with Wide Area Networks.

We actually own a "Core Network'; the part of a network that configures and routes the rest of it. It uses MPLS, the protocol of the Tier 1 data carriers, and we use it to set up private WANs to look like LANs. It really is that simple.

If you've got a signage network with branches all over the country, this is the way to do it. No messing around with floating IP addresses. You can have fixed line or wireless, or both, with automatic failover between them. The whole network is fully redundant.

And it's secure. It's not even visible to the Internet, so there's zero possibility of being hacked.

Very exciting. It's going to transform Digital Signage in the UK.

We've just signed up our first customers.

This is going to be big.

More news as it happens.

Video. It's just video.

Something occurred to me immediately after my last post, which is that even if you think Digital Signage is all about animated posters, then what you are actually talking about is high defininition video.

In fact, if we regarded all digital signage as, technically, HD video, it would be much easier to cope with. Complex composites could be "flattened" into a single video sequence, and everything would flow more smoothly than it typically does now.

But that's only if your digital signage software really understands video. And that means more than just playing it in a small window.

So, keep an eye on the digital signage companies whose products have evolved from a broadcast background.

Actually, digital signage is all of these...

Just a quick note, inspired by this Daily Dooh post, to say that Don Sperring (who I had the pleasure of meeting last June) is right about digital posters; but Digital Signage is more than just a digital poster replacement: it's also a narrowcast TV channel, and it's an information portal.

Which of these it is in your application depends on what you're trying to do. Advertisers want digital posters, but with longer dwell times, they might want narrowcasting. And information providors might want a combination of these.

I think it's important to say that digital signage has a wider scope than JUST advertising, or JUST broadcasting, or JUST information. Look at combinations of these, and the potential's exponentially bigger than just one element on it's own.

This is how to do it...

It's easy to forget that the point of digital signage is to deliver a message. You normally don't have much time do to it; dwell times and attention spans are lamentably short, from an advertiser's point of view.

So you might not think that this example is a very good one. It's an ad from the eighties for the UK city Milton Keynes; a completely new city built on ultra-modern planning principles, with a rectangular street grid, tree-lined avenues and low-rise buildings.

Look closely at the ad and what you notice is that it tells a story. It's quite long, but it builds to a climax, and makes the point - that "isn't it a shame that all cities aren't like Milton Keynes" - just as the music is receding to an almost subliminal level. Cheesy, yes, but for me, it's just about the perfect advert. And the music? Spot on.

I've yet to see anything even one tenth as good as this on our industry's new medium.