StratosMedia Bundles Its Own Free Audience Measurement Software With Digital Digital Signage CMS

March 19, 2018 by Dave Haynes

With hundreds of CMS options out there, it’s really hard to stay on top of who does what – but I think it is at least rare for a signage CMS company to throw in face pattern detection software and resulting analytics as part of its core offer.
The Australian firm StratosMedia, which has been gradually building more and more of a North American presence, has announced facial audience analysis will be available starting next month for customers, at no extra cost.

“By simply adding a USB camera to hardware running the StratosMedia Player service, network owners will be able to via a single service and hardware device, collate and review insights gathered on their audience,” says a company press release. “Insights such as gender and dwell time of their audience from remote locations will be obtainable in conjunction with their content delivery. This service shall be available on all StratosMedia Player supported hardware and operating systems including Google’s Chrome OS.”

“The captured audience data is available in real time as well as being available for later review straight from the StratosMedia’s cloud based Enterprise Management console. This data shall give network owners a good indication of their audience composition and levels of interest around messaging, allowing content to be tailored to the audience.”

An advanced service with additional functionality including multi user breakdown by age group and the ability to trigger events in real time based on this data, shall become available as an additional subscription option in June of this year.

This is a bit of a departure for Stratos, which has been in NEC’s stand at a number of shows demo’ing its integration with NEC’s own audience measurement software. I’m told this is quite different from the NEC offer.

“Digital signage network owners are savvy to the fact that pushing images and videos to displays and guesstimating impact is no longer good enough.” Ms Noonan went on to say “the ability to obtain insights on audience makeup and engagement has long been desired in signage, however It has been traditionally cost prohibitive for many. StratosMedia believe including the ability to gain gender and dwell time insight at no cost for our clients is a game changer,” says Anthea Noonan, Executive Director Global Sales.

Much more typically, CMS software companies work with companies like Quividi and AdMobilize, which are laser-focused on the product and service and deep into machine-learning and AI. I’ve no idea how they compare, but it’s reasonable to imagine the Stratos service would be “lite” by comparison – but then arguably all some clients need. Dunno.

The price (or more accurately lack of one) will certainly have some fans who aren’t enchanted by the idea of paying a monthly for a commercial CMS and another, separate monthly for the audience measurement subscription.

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