What About Digital Signage?

We’ve got an interview coming up next week with Eric Kanagy, the CEO of RedPost, the company that we’ve blogged about before here that offers a DIY wireless picture frame kit. Something that I knew less about prior to the interview is that RedPost isn’t really a hardware company — they’re a digital signage company that sells hardware.

After talking to Eric, I’ve been thinking about digital signage. I wrote in this space a few months ago about the benefits that wireless digital picture frames could offer to tradeshow exhibitors. But the digital signage market goes far beyond that. It encompasses menus at fast-food restaurants, arrival and departure displays at airports, local information kiosks at hotels, displays in banks, and much more.

There are many companies already operating in the digital signage space. A quick Googling turns up a handful of interesting ones on the first page or so:

• 3M
• Navori
• Helius

3M is, of course, the biggest name that my Googling offers up. Their Digital Signage division offers its clients a combination of consulting, hardware, software, and support to deploy their digital signage networks and content.

The other two companies, Navori and Helius, are new to me.

Navori offers some interesting features, including the ability to play media types like video, Flash, and PowerPoint. They complement these features with touchscreens and RFID options. They don’t, however, seem to offer wireless networking features.

Helius, on the other hand, does offer wireless networking and provides content that will sound familiar to FrameChannel users — news, weather, and sports feeds.

As far as I can tell from their websites, all three companies require customers to use proprietary systems, servers, and software to operate their digital signage networks. When you combine proprietary equipment with custom consulting, I suspect that these networks must be pretty expensive to design and install (one analysis I found suggests that the cost of operating a single digital sign for three years could be over $12,000).

When I look at that figure, and at RedPost’s $550 price for their DIY frame kit, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t an opportunity here.

Many current digital signage offerings combine proprietary software with expensive plasma displays. It seems to be that there’s an opportunity for a smart, lean digital frame company to apply the open technology and lessons of digital frames to digital signage.

This kind of solution could use much lower-cost LCD displays (a couple hundred dollars vs. over $2,000 for a plasma screen), RSS feeds, wireless networking, and open web technologies to push content to a network of frames. A web management tool would need to be created to manage and display the content. Some more standards for frame software and hardware might also need to be developed to smooth out this process.

I’d wager that this kind of digital sign network wouldn’t be robust enough at first to replace many current digital sign installations. The really powerful features might need to be built as the network grows. But I think it would appeal to a whole new market, to businesses that are attracted to the technology but don’t have the budget to spend $12,000 on a single sign.

I suspect a smart digital frame company could create a success business here. That frame company could be RedPost. It could be someone we haven’t yet heard of. But if this kind of digital sign network appears, we might see a lot more digital signs a lot sooner than we expect.

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