Skykit Partners With Verizon Reseller On LTE-Based Digital Signage Solution
March 1, 2021 by Dave Haynes
The Minneapolis digital signage solutions provider Skykit has partnered with the wireless connectivity integrator Source Inc. on a service built around LTE cellular broadband.
Source is a big Verizon Business reseller and this solution plays to the idea of making signage workable in locations where terrestrial broadband is hard to find or, well, crappy.
Under this new partnership the Skykit CMS can run on a little Android 9 device that gets it instructions and media files via Verizon 4G LTE.
“By working together, we’ll be better able to match customers who could benefit from a seamless, mobile-connected digital signage platform with the right software and hardware,” says Michael Nguyen, channel manager at Skykit.
The added mobile connectivity provided by the device – the SKP Pro Mobile – allows content to be positioned virtually anywhere – outside buildings, in-store vestibules, on food trucks, in lobbies and waiting areas, and more, the company says.
Digital signage via mobile networks is not at all new, but in a quick poke around the Googles I didn’t see much indication of other media players being set up this way. You could do it separately, for example, with a mobile broadband router that the media player then connects into.
There have been companies as far back as the mid-2000s, such as Mediatile, marketing digital signage over cellular broadband.
Getting reliable connectivity is far, far, far easier than it was in 2005, so 4G as a main option may not be all that logical. But as is noted here, business people who are mobile – like food truck operators and pop-up, event-based marketing teams – might embrace this.
Beyond remote customers like food trucks, a lot of financial institutions and healthcare institutions don’t want to allow anything ‘extra’ onto their networks for security reasons. If you are putting a screen or two in a hospital for a COVID need or any other small to medium need – that project can get nixed because its not ‘worth it’ to go through the hoops to get an OK to include it in the network.
This also removes the roadblock that we’ve experienced even in the case of people wanting to add traffic, news and other Screenfeed content to a screen already in their internal network because it added another outside source. If the internet connection is separated, they won’t have that concern.