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Digital Signage Expo Featured Exhibitors: The solutions providers

All-in-one digital signage providers and aggregators showed a distinct focus on the small-to-medium business.

March 7, 2009

LAS VEGAS — One of the overall focii of Digital Signage Expo seemed to be "small-to-medium businesses," or customers that have only a small number of screens or deployments. There has always been a segment of the digital signage industry focused on this long-tail market, but the economy has no doubt lead even the big players in the digital signage industry to reconsider their target customers.

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Here is what some of those solutions providers were offering:

BLACK BOX NETWORK SERVICES
Many companies at DSE, even large ones, were focused on simple digital signage solutions geared toward the small to medium business market. Although Black Box has more than 180,000 SKUs in its catalog, it showed the iCompel, a player designed for small deployments which comes with software already installed in the player. Brian Kutchma, director of marketing, also said that although the software is licensed, customers aren't charged for future upgrades. --BY

Demonstrations of DMS' State Farm (left) and Crowne Plaza installations.

DIGITAL MULTI-MEDIA SERVICES
DMS, a digital signage provider out of Totowa, N.J., has an exclusive contract with State Farm Insurance and showed its custom-branded digital signage solution at the show, complete with a State Farm red bezel. As Ed Reger of DMS explained, the company provides State Farm with a library of promotions and graphics, allowing each brand to pick the appropriate content to fit its demographic. DMS also featured a three-screen hospitality display set up for Crowne Plaza hotels which included touch capability and live RSS-feed provision. --BY

THE INSITE GROUP
If digital signs are the pollen, the Insite Group is the swarm of bees carrying it from location to location, making sure it ends up with the right pistils. Or stamens. Whatever. The company has been in the traditional signage business for 16 years, causing installations to go smoothly and on schedule. Now that digital signs are replacing those fluorescent-and-plastic signs that are so last century, Insite Group is beginning to set those up as well, and had its first booth for that new part of the business at this tradeshow. Their team can work with digital signage vendors on everything from site surveys to installations and testing. They log all their work on the Web so a vendor can tell its client—the deployer itself—exactly where the installation is at any given point. --JG

SIIG
A designer and manufacturer of productivity solutions since 1985, SIIG is focused for 2009 and beyond on its digital signage products, which enable management and control of audio visual content between the source and the display. Primary products include extenders, transmission and video-processing products, video decoders, LCD mounts and cabling solutions—all directly tied to the company's core-strength connectivity and signal processing. --JG

A nine-screen video wall at Park's booth.

PARK
The new Park AP—which stands for Access Point as well as the name of company founder Andrew Park—helps deployers cut costs by feed wireless HD content to up to six screens simultaneously. Added benefit: The screens can be put on carts and moved around the deployer's facility, up to 140 feet away from the AP, even through walls and glass. --JG

X20 MEDIA
With the launch of the new X20 Xpresenter Xe all-in-one, stand-alone digital signage system, X20 Media offers the best of its full-size system in one compact solution. The affordable, entry-level solution uses proprietary broadcast rendering technology, so it has better-than-broadcast quality. Crawls are smooth, and updates are seen virtually instantly, all managed from a simple but attractive GUI. The product is targeted to users who aren't IT or AV specialists, such as the receptionist charged with freshening the lobby message. --JG

ZIPCAST
The expertise of this company is in deploying and managing networks in shopping centers and other retail environments. Retailers who want to roll-out a digital signage project can work with ZipCast to determine the best solutions and locations, with ZipCast acquiring the hardware and other necessary accoutrements and making it live. The cost to the deployer? Nada. Advertising pays for it. The company says its own surveys show that anywhere from 6 to 19 percent of people who see something advertised on a digital sign while they are in the store buy it. An added strength of the Houston-based ZipCast is its strong ties to the Hispanic community. --JG