Outdoor Digital Signage Tips - For a Rewarding Project
When deploying any outdoor digital signage campaign there are some things that cannot be missed or overlooked, if they are you are just wasting your effort and cash.
We will look at them in order of importance:
1. Plan the campaign – without sufficient planning the solution could be installed in an area with low foot traffic, or even worse vandals. Correct planning will certainly influence how fast you see a return on your investment, oryou may as well go out of your office and give the first person you see the money you would have spent on the project to them.
2. Deploying the solution – this can be either an all in one solution using a digital poster or a solution that uses an LCD screen and a media player, we will look at the later as this is were it gets costly (well sort of). If you are installing a group of displays in a network you have two options firstly to hard wire the units or connect the units up to a secured wireless network, depending upon the size of files and locations will depend upon the infrastructure used.
3. Selecting the correct screen – this can be a nightmare as many people try and use standard TVs when starting out in digital signage that are designed for indoor domestic use only, the perfect solution is a commercial grade panel designed and manufactured to run 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. They may look the same however they are hugely different.
4. LCD Enclosure – this is a special case that offers both International water ingress protection to IP65 and NEMA 4X. Some of these LCD enclosures on the market are equipped with internal heating and cooling solutions as a high flow air current is essential in the enclosure to remove any warm air that the panels generates inside the case.
5. Media player – this will depend if you are going down the WIFI route or wired, if wireless ensure that the network is secured and all the default settings are altered, otherwise some people will be advertising on your network free of charge, worse still they could hijack the network and hold it to randsom, use the inbuilt firewall to guard against from Trojans and viruses.
6. Software – many media players come as standard with sophisticated software built in, check it out when you are looking through specifications. If it is incliuded in the content player you dont want to be buying any more.
Now these six basic tips will help you create a solution that will work efficiently from day one, taking a short cut in any one of these areas can put a project in serious trouble.
We will look at them in order of importance:
1. Plan the campaign – without sufficient planning the solution could be installed in an area with low foot traffic, or even worse vandals. Correct planning will certainly influence how fast you see a return on your investment, oryou may as well go out of your office and give the first person you see the money you would have spent on the project to them.
2. Deploying the solution – this can be either an all in one solution using a digital poster or a solution that uses an LCD screen and a media player, we will look at the later as this is were it gets costly (well sort of). If you are installing a group of displays in a network you have two options firstly to hard wire the units or connect the units up to a secured wireless network, depending upon the size of files and locations will depend upon the infrastructure used.
3. Selecting the correct screen – this can be a nightmare as many people try and use standard TVs when starting out in digital signage that are designed for indoor domestic use only, the perfect solution is a commercial grade panel designed and manufactured to run 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. They may look the same however they are hugely different.
4. LCD Enclosure – this is a special case that offers both International water ingress protection to IP65 and NEMA 4X. Some of these LCD enclosures on the market are equipped with internal heating and cooling solutions as a high flow air current is essential in the enclosure to remove any warm air that the panels generates inside the case.
5. Media player – this will depend if you are going down the WIFI route or wired, if wireless ensure that the network is secured and all the default settings are altered, otherwise some people will be advertising on your network free of charge, worse still they could hijack the network and hold it to randsom, use the inbuilt firewall to guard against from Trojans and viruses.
6. Software – many media players come as standard with sophisticated software built in, check it out when you are looking through specifications. If it is incliuded in the content player you dont want to be buying any more.
Now these six basic tips will help you create a solution that will work efficiently from day one, taking a short cut in any one of these areas can put a project in serious trouble.
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