Two Proof Of Display Products Hit Digital Signage Market On Same Day

May 13, 2014 by Dave Haynes

upstate-press_web

In an odd little twist, a pair of companies are making noise week in London about new products that monitor the state of digital signage networks using tech that watches the output of screens.

Beatpixels is launching UpState at an NEC Showcase event while Taggalo was formally launching and pitching its own proof of display tech at the DailyDOOH summit in the same city.

Upstate is described as an “an independent Proof of Operation monitoring service for flat panel or projection displays via a combination of a sensor and a microcontroller.  The unit can monitor and analyse what is actually on the display via the sensor and communication system rather than the traditional method of monitoring the output of a media player.  With the addition of a marker being applied to the content ‘UpState’  will  produce a number of accurate Proof of Playout reports based on what has been shown on the display.”

‘Upstate’ is extremely versatile for a variety of monitoring applications and not just Digital screens.  It will monitor the performance of the illumination in backlit poster sites including large format displays.  With options of a PC hosted, Direct LAN connected or 3G cellular sensors, ‘UpState’ can be used in the majority of locations for OOH and DOOH displays.

Jason Robinson, Managing Director of Beatpixels comments; “When we were initially approached to develop a proof of operation service I asked my Technical Director Janne Taponen to concentrate on the ‘service’ part of the solution.  By doing so we have created  a sensor system from an engineers’ point of view.  However it’s what happens in the background that really makes ‘UpState’ an outstanding and crucially valuable development.  We can monitor and analyse a display every second if required or every 10 seconds to coincide with the average industry content segment.” 

Beatpixels will offer the hardware to clients on free issue based on a minimum period monthly license fee.  We will give clients access to a number of defined reporting levels from each sensor produced on a clear and concise user interface.  The reports that ‘UpState’ creates offers clients the ability to give a true Proof of Operation or Proof of Playout to each of their customers. 

taggalo

Meanwhile, Taggalo somewhat re-announced a product that has been around in early forms for the last 1.5 years. I saw these guys at DSE 2013 and chatted with them about what was an early version of what was launched today.

Taggalo is a patent pending technology which combines a miniaturized optical device together with a compact digital signal processor to detect a unique tag which is associated to each advertisement video. Taggalo works independently from the digital signage software or hardware platform because it ‘s a smart and low cost hardware which works at the display level.

Taggalo is as small as  a 1mm x 1mm thin square sensor  on a ribbon cable that is placed at the very display corner and, I believe, is looking for a distinct marker in pixels of video so it can count the times played.

Working as a plug-in device it can provide realtime proof of display data or store them and as soon as a web connection is available send them to a server for further reports and data analysis. These data may be explored from the dashboard which every user can access to or imported into other systems thru the API provided by the Taggalo Software Service.

The sensors cost $99 and the management platform is $500 to buy (one-time, as far as I can tell).

Though Taggalo has been at a few shows in the past year, what looks to be new here is that the devices have Bluetooth LE beacons in them as well, meaning they can be used to trigger smartphone messaging on opted-in apps and also do quantitative measurement of how people move around environments equipped with these beacons.

Both are UK companies, though Taggalo’s roots are very much in Italy. Taggalo’s products appears to be skewed to the Digital OOH market while Beatpixels is more broadly presented as an operations tools for networks of all stripes.

Leave a comment