Android For Digital Signage: A Closer Look At Stinova’s iChannel
April 26, 2013 by Dave Haynes
We’re now at 10 entries, and counting, in this running series of closer looks at digital signage solution providers who have started working with the Android operating system and low-cost, ultra-small ARM processors.
Almost 30 companies have introduced products based on the open-source Android operating system that is very widely used for smart devices like handsets and tablets, all of them using CPUs based on ARM reference designs. Most smartphones and tablets use ARM.
It is likely that much of the industry will shift to ARM-based devices using Android or Linux in the next 1-3 years because ARM devices now rival the processing power of lower cost x86 personal computing devices, but at a fraction of the cost and, in most cases, size.
Stinova
The German digital signage software company Stinova launched its Android solution at the mammoth CeBIT tech show last month, running it off the iChannel platform.
The company’s spin on Android is that the operating system is just another way to use its DMS 6 and DMX 6 content management software: An important aspect, says the company in marketing material, is the maximum flexibility of the new system that supports different media players based on all major operating systems such as Android, Linux and Microsoft Windows. All systems can be managed within one common server and can fulfill all the demanding requirements of Digital Signage applications.
A couple of other interesting elements to what they are doing is a plug-in/extension thing called SignCreator that allows customers to edit content directly from within PowerPoint and access any screen via the DMS server, and integration with Fotolia’s 20 million stock photo database.
“With Android based devices such as Media Sticks or Tablet computers we can support customers varied applications for digital signage at a fraction of the cost of a similar PC based platform,“ says Franz Hintermayr, CEO of Stinova.
Stinova and Android
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