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Broadsign Ends Long Holdout, Joins Crowd Of CMS Software Firms Supporting Smart Displays

System On Chip “smart” commercial displays have been around for almost 10 years now, but Broadsign – one of the bigger players in digital signage content management  software has steered clear of the technology … until now.
Sony was technically the first large display manufacturer to market smart displays with embedded media players, but Samsung was the first to make it a major element, and pretty quickly a dominant element, of its commercial display product mix. Samsung has been at the smart display game since 2013, followed by LG and then by most of the other displaycos, usually using some version of Android instead of proprietary, Linux-derived operating systems.
While many software firms developed web player or native player (deeper and more involved) versions of their software to run on these “smart” units, Broadsign did not. Back in 2013, it was instead among the first to go big on dedicated, low-cost Android playback boxes (though it reverted the focus to Windows a couple of years later).
I don’t know the thinking behind the shift now, but suspect the decision to develop to smart displays owes much to how SOC hardware has matured and improved through the years, and customer interest. The circa 2013 smart displays weren’t all that smart, and couldn’t do a hell of a lot more than function as digital menu displays or run simple loops. Today’s versions have much more computing and graphics power and also have much more back-end capabilities, like remote management.
That maturation has compelled many more end-users to use SOC, and as adoption and usage has now grown common in digital signage, there would likely be a lot of end-users and resellers asking Broadsign about it.
“Adapt Media is excited about Broadsign SoC as it will greatly simplify our digital signage setup, allowing us to expand our DOOH networks more rapidly and cost-efficiently,” says Tatiana Abondano, DOOH Media Manager for Toronto’s Adapt Media. “We will only have to invest in one device and we will have our screen and player needs taken care of simultaneously, reducing our deployment time, efforts, and overall costs.”
Broadsign in PR says the benefits of supporting and using SOC include:
  • Streamlined network operations: Manage all inventory from one central location and support nearly any mixed-screen network;
  • Smart screen optimization: Harness the most powerful OOH advertising platform to get the most out of smart screen inventory;
  • New revenue opportunity: Unlock ad-based revenue by opening up SoC-equipped screens, either from direct or programmatic OOH channels;
  • Advanced network scalability: Reliable, scalable, and automated workflows make it easy to grow networks without bounds.

“SoC represents the next big opportunity for Broadsign customers to expand their OOH footprint and reduce their hardware investment,” says Maarten Dollevoet, Chief Revenue Officer, Broadsign. “We’re thrilled to bring all the automation, inventory optimization, and monetization opportunities that the Broadsign platform offers to SoC solutions from major industry players like LG, Samsung and BrightSign via this launch.”

The early marketing for smart displays tended to focus on how having a commercial display with a built-in media player removed the need and substantial cost for a separate media player, but in reality the most that really did was lower the cost. The SOC media player component was just added to the display cost, and as companies standardized on smart displays, it became increasingly hard to discern what that added cost was, because there were no “dumb” versions of the same displays to compare against and get a price delta.

The more contemporary arguments for these smart displays:

  • they go in faster because there are fewer components to put in;
  • are tidier installs because of the lack of cables;
  • lower field service costs because there are no things like HDMI cables to come loose.  

The anti-SOC crowd argues going SOC boxes software companies and end-users into proprietary platforms, limiting flexibility and having their development roadmaps contingent on the roadmaps of the display companies. They also worried, earlier on, whether the display companies would stick with SOC, though that has clearly diminished. All the major manufacturers now have substantial smart display offerings, with Sharp NEC the wild card with commercial displays that have trap doors to snap in optional smart modules, including an embedded BrightSign board and a Raspberry Pi 4 module.