Samsung’s New Smart Signs To Start Shipping With Tizen OS; Signagelive Says Good To Go

September 1, 2016 by Dave Haynes

SamsungTizenSmartSignage

Samsung is moving its new version of its Smart Signage platform for commercial displays over to its own operating system Tizen, with Tizen OS-powered displays commercially available to partners, resellers and end-users by the middle of this month.

That means if you want to use the new version 4.0 release of SSP displays with a CMS, that CMS needs to support Tizen OS.

UK-based Signagelive, an early adopter and arguably the heaviest reseller to date of smart sign displays, has been working on the transition and says it will be fully compatible with Tizen out of the gate.

Tizen, if you are scratching your head, is a Samsung-developed variant of the Linux operating system, designed like Windows 10 to allow 3rd-party developers to write applications across many devices, from smartphones to screens on fridges, to IoT devices. It is open source, and competes with Android and iOS.

Version 4.0 of the SSP platform has an upgraded graphics engine, and touts three times the animation performance over previous SSSP models. This is important, as early versions of the smart displays were pretty much slugs when it came to handling motion graphics. The idea here is with more graphics power, these SoC displays can genuinely make an argument that an external media player is unnecessary for signage applications.

“With SSSP V4, Samsung have significantly improved the development process and environment,” says Marc Benson, Signagelives’s CTO, “which our customers will be able to directly benefit from as we can release quicker and with the improved support for a wider range of HTML5 APIs over previous iterations of the SSSP platform will allow us, our content partners and customers to push the boundaries of what is considered possible on SoC players”

The company says its software, running on Samsung’s SoC displays, can do things like playback of two concurrent full HD videos, transparent image layering, screen on/off control, automated remote application updates and automated remote firmware updates. The company will soon launch a Widget Development Framework and web triggers that will enable  real time triggering of content via the API.

The company has its software running on about 6,100 SSP Displays, across 296 digital signage networks in 23 countries. The biggest rollout is Vodafone Hutchinson Australia, which has more than 1,000 in its wireless retail stores.

I am am told by several different people the shift from Samsung’s current SSP platform to Tizen is not a rewrite of what may have already been developed by software firms that have supported the platform. It’s more than a tweak, but not a big time and resource drain.

  1. Jerry Stuckle says:

    That’s all we need – another OS for companies to have to support. Not a good thing, IMHO.

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