InfoComm 2016: LED World

June 8, 2016 by Dave Haynes

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I have not been on the InfoComm show floor yet, as it doesn’t formally open for a couple of hours and only exhibitors can get in during set-up. But what I am told from contacts and what I have seen through the doors is a sea of LED displays. They are everywhere.

Yesterday was the Invidis-run Digital Signage Summit put on through InfoComm. For a first effort I thought it was pretty good. I didn’t like the room or the set-up, and the crowd was small-ish, but it was fine in terms of the subject matter.  Organizer Florian Rotberg knows the tweaks he’ll make for next time.

There was a lot of good information about some high-profile projects like the Samsung 837 store in New York and the LA Live entertainment complex in Los Angeles. The project lead behind the well-known AT&T flasghip store, Tim Johnson, was also up talking about how it came together and where it’s at now.

I was intrigued, particularly, by some things I heard from a couple of speakers.

Rotberg says the future in signage is all about the eco-system, and how the companies that are seeing success ensure they have a strong eco-system around then to fully deliver a project. If a company just offers one piece in the signage puzzle, that’s going to be a challenge when customers want a full solution.

Rotberg also talked about the upside he sees coming for System on Chip display vendors like LG and Samsung. He said the opportunity bubble is going to grow because these “smart signs” are or will shortly be using mobile operating systems. LG uses webOS and Samsung is shifting its smart signage platform to Tizen. That opens up signage to a huge pool of mobile app developers who can extend what they do to signage.

Screenfeed’s Jeremy Gavin was part of a panel on content and said something really interesting about commodity content like news and weather feeds. A client has done some proper audience testing, and found recall rates on marketing messages that came right after subscription content pieces had much higher recall rates.

So the idea is that an interesting news piece gets eyes to travel to a screen, and the gaze sticks long enough to view the trailing message.

Jeremy did a podcast interview with me and I’ll have that up in the coming weeks. I’ve also done chats in the last two days with Randy Dearborn from MGM, Randy Pagnan from RP Visuals, and Rotberg. A pile of other chats are set up over the next couple of days.

The podcast series is now past 8,300 downloads in the first month. Not bad. Blew away my expectations.

Gotta run. The blast furnace awaits.

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