ISE 2018: Day 3 Impressions: SOC Screens Are Rolling Out In Volume

February 9, 2018 by Dave Haynes

Finally spent some substantial time in Hall 8 at Integrated Systems Europe, where many of the digital signage vendors are located. That said, there are vendors – particularly smaller ones – in sometimes odd spots, the product of late bookings or skimpy budgets.

I chatted with Signagelive, which has a nice integration set up with Adobe’s Creative Cloud (effectively a plugin), that can push motion graphic animations from Photoshop and through Animate. The media can get data-tagged, so content updates when information updates. The UK company also has  integrations now with Admobilize (analytics) and queue and mobile ordering systems.

Sat down with Jerome Moeri, the forever CEO of Swiss-based Navori, who related new upgrades with his company’s CMS, and noted how sales were already good and then went up 42% in 2017.

We chatted about system on chip – a subject I have been raising with a number of companies here. The adoption rate seems to be climbing, and not just because most of the major display guys ship all or much of their product with built-in players.

The old story was that while Samsung and others were moving a lot of smart commercial displays, only a relatively small percentage of end-users were running media with the SOC players. Most were plugging in PCs or things like BrightSign or IAdea boxes in behind.

That has changed and there are very large rollouts happening in multiple countries, and there are more and more companies going down the SOC path.

Moeri was among several senior people who just shook their head at the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt they say is being spread out there by companies that are not doing SOC. The “FUD” has to do with SOC players – notably from Korea – are vulnerable to hacks, and have back-doors. The guys I spoke with uniformly said Nope. Samsung, for example, uses something called KNOX, which is US Department of Defence-rated security.

The debate will continue.

I also spoke with an interesting Swiss company – SignageOS, which has Swiss Army-knife, API-driven software  that runs on 12 different platforms. That could in theory mean it is a web player that doesn’t do a whole lot, but these guys happily demo’d some real depth, and knew their stuff. The really interesting thing is that their SaaS subscription model STARTS at $5/month, and goes down with volume.They admit they need to get to some serious scale to make that business model really work.

I spent some time, as well, with NoviSign getting a rundown on what the Israeli company does with its CMS, which runs on Android and has a substantial user base  both in their region and the US.

Walked quickly by several things I want to slow down and look at more closely today (last day of show).

One quick thing that struck me – those madly spinning LED blades that have been around a few years have never done much for me. The persistence of vision thing is interesting, but the pizza-sized image was never going to be enough to make much of an impression.

But there are at least two companies here – one with a substantial booth – showing sync’d clusters of these things, so that there is a much larger visual. Kinda interesting, but think these will still be novelty installations and not something that’s scaled. For one thing, the ones I saw were LOUD. I’d also be worried about operating lifespan and safety. These things would take off a finger or grab hair prettyy easily.

Time for my last long march to the RAI! For this year, at least.

 

Leave a comment