By now I don’t have to tell you what digital signage is. It’s funny that in four years, we’ve gone from hardly ever seeing it to seeing it everywhere. Digital signage has taken over restaurants, airports, doctors’ offices, and practically everywhere else. It makes it even funnier to think we used to use these things for business:
It seems from the photos I found on the internet that now they’re just quaint ways of passing messages from one way to another. No, this old letter board isn’t the way we do stuff. If you want to seem quaint and folksy you use a chalkboard, and everyone else uses digital signage.
But are you using digital signage right?
Most of the digital signage I see is very simple. It’s driven by cheap media players. There’s nothing wrong with these things, but they are going to be limited by design. They may get you into the world of digital signage cheaply, but they’re not always the best option. A cheap media player will just show a series of JPEG files one after another. These files are easy to make and you can personalize them any way your heart desires. But are they really best? Here’s why they aren’t:
Image quality will be poor
JPEG and other static image file formats aren’t designed for clear text. They’re designed to make the image smaller. So, you’ll see blurry text and some real problems as the letters get smaller. This is actually by design. JPEG files were designed for photos, where it was ok for really fine details to get blurred out.
Motion graphics are even worse
I’ve seen a trend lately where people put a moving background behind their menus. This looks great for the short term but it can make everything very hard to read. Again, the video files are designed to be as small as possible and that means details like small letters can be compromised. Adding movement just makes it harder.
It’s not so easy to change things.
Sure it seems easy, just put what you want on a USB stick and connect it to the player. But really, that’s not such an easy thing if the TV is mounted to the wall with the signage player behind it. I completely understand why people do this… it looks nice and clean. But if you want to change the menu, you have to take the TV off the wall.
There’s a better way.
BrightSign digital signage players are a cut above all other digital signage solutions. You create your presentations on your computer or phone, using software that’s very similar to PowerPoint. You can be as flexible or creative as you want, incorporating videos and photos any way you choose.
BrightSign players can output 4K so you can take advantage of the new generation of cheap TVs to provide a level of clarity that you could never get before. And you’ll want that because Brightsign presentations aren’t just static images. They are live text which is as sharp as the TV lets it be. You’ll never have to worry about your customers wrestling with blurry text, ever again.
Best of all, BrightSign digital signage players update themselves. You need wired Ethernet to the player unless you buy a Wi-Fi adapter for each one, but that’s not such a big problem really. Your presentations are stored in the cloud. You can update them from anywhere and when you publish a presentation, it goes to every player that you want it to. No taking the TV down, no plugging and unplugging.
So yes, they’re more expensive.
You’ll pay about three times the price for a BrightSign digital signage player. I get it… that can seem like a lot of money. But when you think of why you actually got digital signage in the first place, it makes sense. You want players that can put out a clear image and that can be updated easily. That means really, you have one choice.
Shop now for BrightSign digital media players at Solid Signal.
