2018 InfoComm Lookahead: 336 Exhibitors Say They’re In Digital Signage, But …

May 11, 2018 by Dave Haynes

I am starting to wrap my head around InfoComm, which is coming up in early June in Las Vegas.

It’s not a show I attend to see new stuff. I go to spend the poking around time that I never get during Digital Signage Expo. It is mostly about display technology and related stuff, like mounts, that I have time to see and learn more about – and there’s enough space in between ISE and InfoComm that new stuff has come along or other stuff – like LED – has advanced even more.

The potential is there for InfoComm to be even stranger than normal in Vegas for a Canadian. It will be insanely hot there by Canadian standards, as always. But there is a 50:50 chance the National Hockey league team that just started in the city in 2017 will be in the finals – and the locals are going nuts. So it could be 115F outside and everyone will be going crazy about ice hockey.

All that said – Go Jets Go! I have family in Winnipeg and mostly grew up there.

Back to InfoComm.

The registration list says, as of today, there are 955 exhibitors, and about a third of those identify themselves as having digital signage products and services. However, a LOT of those 336 companies will have cables or connectors or mysterious little boxes only nerds understand, that facilitate SOMETHING having to do with getting a signal to, among many potential things, a digital signage display.

A much smaller number are companies you’d consider being truly in the digital signage business. All the big display guys like Samsung, NEC, LG and so on are, of course, there. So are the mounting systems guys.

There are 116 LED exhibitors there – including 14 that have Shenzhen at the front-end of their company names and two more with Shanghai. There are many others from China that don’t include their city/government-backed ties in their names, at least for this show.

There are 79 companies that say they do digital signage software, but really, there are perhaps 14 that genuinely offer a CMS product of some kind. Those companies that are showing – like Visix, Spinetix, Tightrope, Mvix and ONELAN – tend to rely on channel partners, and this show works for them more as a means to connect with them than perhaps as a lead-generation thing.

It’s a big show, but you would not call InfoComm a digital signage show, or make it the one event you’d go to in a year of digital signage was your thing. You do DSE (which is JUST about digital signage) and, if you can get the budget OK’d from the boss, ISE. And then you hit some vertical market events or conferences.

This is more a show for the nerds to see the latest stuff, and for integrators to meet partners and walk clients through to see a cross-section of LED options, for example, in a really efficient way.

Different things have been tried through the years in terms of signage education, and the one I helped guide last year had awesome content but did not pull many people, at all. This year, the signage educational stuff is minimal – partially populated by vendor demos.

If you are going, see you there. If you are a hockey fan, and the Jets and not the Knights are in the final, I’ll see you near a big-ass screen at some bar.

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