Netpresenter latest entry in the "free" sector

June 6, 2008 by Dave Haynes

Dutch software company Netpresenter announced a version of its application yesterday as the first free,  hosted professional digital signage, PC desktop and screensaver solution.

Netpresenter EasyBroadcast can also be used as a fun tool to share YouTube videos, Flash images, photos, videos and messages between groups of friends, relatives, (sports) clubs, associations and communities. Netpresenter EasyBroadcast is fully functional, free for non-commercial use and does not contain advertising.

Netpresenter EasyBroadcast is based on Netpresenter’s professional communication software, used by multinationals such as Sony and Nokia. EasyBroadcast is hosted on the internet. It means anyone can make professional looking presentations with his web browser in mere seconds and instantly show them on one or thousands of screens. Presentations contain whatever information the user wants to include and are guaranteed to be free of advertising. Presentations can easily be played back on any Windows PC connected to the internet, as PC screensaver or desktop player, but also on large screens and even on mobile phones and PDAs.

This is not really a digital signage application in the pure sense, but for corporations that just want to get basic messages around to screens here and there, it would do the job over a local or wide area network. For those of you who are older than dirt, like me, you will recall the PointCast networked screensaver from the mid-to-late ’90s.

This is similar, though undoubtedly FAR less of a bandwidth hog (the downfall of PointCast), and equipped with user edit tools.

Presumably, the idea here is to broaden the user base and get some of those companies interested in upgrading to the “professional” version of NetPresenter.