Anyone in the digital signage business who shrugs off the interest in low-cost micro PCs and free/freemium software as hobbyists and church IT volunteers, equipped with almost no budget and stubborn natures, should keep these 116,200 things in mind.
116,200 page views, that is.
That’s the number of page views on this site, so far, for a post that I wrote and now update about the various options out there to do digital signage projects using low cost or free CMS software, running on a $35-$45 Raspberry Pi micro PC.
The post is a consistent top fiver on Sixteen:Nine when I look over the page view analytics.
So … if you dismiss the interest in low cost or free solutions as reflecting just a subset of the market, you’re probably right. But be aware it’s a big subset.
There are endless reasons why end-users should be focused on commercial hardware and software, and should understand the real costs of an effective network are creative, content and ops (if you choose the wrong hardware). But for a lot of other reasons, there’s a lot of very simple jobs out there, and operators with skimpy budgets, who want or need to go down the Raspberry Pi path.