Signagelive Adds Low-Cost Restricted Version Of CMS Licence For Simple Web-based Content

January 29, 2020 by Dave Haynes

The guys at UK-based Signagelive have always had a knack for both reading the market, being early to add emerging technologies and tweaking its product offer to stay relevant and interesting.

The latest move is introducing a heavily-discounted version of its already inexpensive SaaS licensing,  restricting the functionality to web URLs and web apps. This license will cost 25% of what a standard Signagelive SaaS license costs.

“This acts as both an accelerator and ‘moat’ for us against the numerous newcomers to the market, with limited functionality winning on style and price, over substance,” explains CEO Jason Cremins.

I have been saying and writing for some time now that there are many, many use-cases for digital signage that require a bare minimum of the capabilities of a full digital signage platform.

For example, if you have screens on the Sales and Marketing floor of a company, that are there only to show visualized KPIs from a business intelligence system, it is never going to need all the sophisticated scheduling and targeting capabilities of many platforms.

When that’s the case, an end-user may balk at paying $20-$30 a month per license (maybe more, maybe less) for something that operator will not be using.

The value in those platforms, at that point, revolves around core stuff like device management, which this offer retains. It is one of the reasons BrightSign sells a lot of little purple boxes that use its device management but don’t even have a commercial CMS running the on-screen “show.”

“(This) uses the fully developed clients for each of the devices we support and all the monitoring capabilities,” Cremins explained to me via email. “All we are doing is restricting the media published to web assets, which can be URLs, web apps (all those in our Marketplace) and custom apps compiled to work offline using our Widget Development Framework.”

“It also supports the third party integrations we have with all the BI platforms, and the content services guys – the likes of Seenspire, Screenfeed and ArtPlayer.”

The Web Content Licence, says Signagelive in its PR, is ideal for customers who are looking for a cost-effective way to schedule and display web content, display dashboards, URLs or want to take advantage of the comprehensive range of 100’s of free and paid apps available in the Signagelive Marketplace. 

The Web Content Licence has less functionality in terms of content it supports, it also comes in at 25% of the cost of our Standard Licence, which makes it ideal for projects where only web content is being displayed. For example, if you are looking to display sales data such as Power BI, Grow or Ambition, alongside Apps such as weather, clocks or any other App available in the Signagelive Marketplace.

The Web Content Licence still includes unrestricted use of all the scheduling and layout tools included with a standard Signagelive licence. 

Sophisticated signage networks still, usually, need sophisticated CMS software applications. But there is a big, long tail of applications that just need to get something on a screen once, updated dynamically and managed remotely.

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