InLighten Touts First Windows-Based Digital Signage Stick

January 16, 2015 by Dave Haynes

inLighten ARGO Press Release Image

Buffalo-based software house inLighten has released what it touts to be the first HDMI stick for digital signage to run on Windows.

The Argo, as it is called, is a companion product to another HDMI stick that runs Android, called the Apollo.

“Argo was created for organizations that seek the savings in hardware and installation costs made possible through stick-sized media players, while maintaining the consistency of their Windows-based environments,” says CEO Dan Snyder, saying the market response to a streamlined product prompted the development of a Windows version.

“Our goal,” adds Snyder in a news release, “has been to liberate our clients from the expense, complexity and inconsistency associated with traditional ‘computer-and-cable’ based systems, while offering the market at large the advanced capabilities we’ve become known for in the high-end application world.”

The units, which should be shipping before the end of Q1, run on inLighten’s cloud-hosted Argocast network, which includes content creation software and both media and network management tools. No specs were provided in the release, but it is likely using an Intel Atom Bay Trail processor and running Windows 8.1.

There are many, many digital signage player sticks out there, but all of them run Android – ranging from the really dodgy to solid stuff like the Dell Wyse Cloud Connect. I’ve not run into a Windows-based HDMI stick for digital signage until now, though Windows on a stick has been around for a few months.

It will only be a matter of time before someone takes Intel’s recently announced Compute Stick and makes it a player, but inLighten’s is not, I’m, told, using that. It IS an Intel processor, however. The company has numerous Windows products, called the iBox series, ranging from small units to desktop towers with multi-head video cards.

I think the marketplace demand to make media players smaller was resolved long ago, and we’re now seeing rollouts with embedded system on chip display panels (meaning no external player). So the form factor thing with all these sticks and boxes is no big deal. Ease of deployment and use, and reliability data, will dictate how much adoption they see.

 

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