What exactly is electronic digital signage? What is cloud computing? Why can digital signage benefit from cloud computing? And most importantly, why should you care and can you actually make money by offering it?
EDS TODAY
Electronic digital signage (EDS), in its most basic form, is a display that can be programmed to loop through different messages, including advertisements, to an intended target audience. On the higher end of the EDS spectrum a system can manage thousands of displays with different messages for each part of the day, networked together and centrally administered. And to make it even “easier” the content created for the displays can be location-aware, such that the content is displayed at the intended local time, and, if appropriate, shows information relevant to that particular location.
Does the electronic menu board at your favorite eatery change depending on what time of day you’re in there? That’s what we’re talking about.
Today’s technology allows that content to be created, managed and scheduled relatively simply. And systems allow for monitoring and managing networks in real-time so that failures are quickly recognized and corrected. There are even systems that allow outside content to be incorporated into the network, such as a local weather forecast or a stock market ticker.
THE FUTURE OF EDS IS IN THE CLOUD
While all of the above was developing, much bigger changes were afoot in regards to how people communicate. Mobile phones and social networking are ubiquitous parts of our daily lives now, as is using the Internet in ways that weren’t dreamed of 10 years ago.
That’s what had led to EDS converging with the web – interacting with smart phones and incorporating social networks. In many cases it has gone from a static walk-by medium to becoming an interactive experience.
This is a positive because it’s bringing the time and expense of producing all that content down. You can create once for Web standards and reuse or repurpose that information in several related mediums, including on your mobile Web page or app, on various social sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare, and on your electronic digital signage. It has become one creative effort, aimed at one medium—HTML—that is viewable from many different perspectives.
This is where the cloud comes in.
For quite a while in the EDS industry the hot term was “Software as a Service,” or SaaS. EDS software providers, for a fee, began offering the service of operating clients’ signage systems. SaaS plays to the ideas of simplicity and convenience: Why host and operate your own computing platform when you can buy it as a service from your EDS software provider?
The idea is sound because there is a very low cost of entry and the end-user company doesn’t have to set up its own servers and/or get its IT department on board with the project.
The downside is it’s not globally distributable or instantly scalable—that is, unless the SaaS provider spends millions on infrastructure and devotes a ton of resources deploying and maintaining it.
Cloud computing, on the other hand, is a means to the same end, but the global (and scalable) structure is already in place. Cloud computing service providers—like Google’s App Engine or Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—provide the maintenance and accessibility for the EDS service provider. That means their only worry is managing the digital signage content. Let the cloud providers worry about the infrastructure.
By leveraging cloud computing services, the digital signage software provider dramatically lowers the cost of delivery. And if the company builds its signage service on open-source code and makes it available via an application programming interface, then customers can take advantage of using the service to serve very specific niche clients inexpensively.
