Screenfeed continues to change up automated content for digital signage

March 4, 2011 by Dave Haynes

Jeremy Gavin of Screenfeed tweeted last night about a new weather feed his company does that dumps the well-worn approach of animated weather icons in favor of big visuals that instantly tell a story.

Instead of little animated rain drops that turn to ice pellets, the Screenfeed image for freezing rain is a big, full-screen look at what happens when rain freezes. In a word, nice. And visually right. The service is called Weather-in-Pictures.

News and weather are not particularly relevant or right for a lot of venues where that material is nonetheless used in programming. But if it does indeed have a place, at least this stuff looks great and has the visual punch to draw the eye.

As I was saving the Screenfeed images to upload here I remembered what we developed for the DOOH network launched way too early — 2004 — in Toronto’s PATH concourse system. We were bored with the “Accuweather” look way back when, and also used big visuals as backgrounds to suit the season. My backup hard drive still has a bunch of them.

From the too-early-adopter archives: This is circa 2005 stuff, and we overlaid xml weather data. Before you say, “AHA, Haynes had a ticker!!!” the only thing on that black bar on the bottom was the time and current temperature, which for what we were doing was really, really sticky content.

Anyway, I like what Screenfeed is doing, and wish more companies and networks (CNN’s feeds on LG’s SuperSign platform does similar work) would follow their lead. Full screen (or almost) just makes more sense.