Samsung Partners With Israeli Start-up Niio On Subscription Art For B2B Digital Displays

September 13, 2021 by Dave Haynes

Samsung has partnered with a Tel Aviv startup called Niio to address one of the evergreen issues confronting many end-users who make investments in digital signage displays – feeding the content beast.

In the case of Niio, it’s premium, curated digital artwork that end-users would subscribe to in the pretty the much way as they might subscribe to on-premises audio. The Niio 4K art is drawn down by connected Samsung smart displays and then shown, on their own or presumably as part of a schedule via MagicINFO or a third-party CMS platform.

The Samsung page for this product suggested it can run on anything from the company’s prosumer displays for the SMB market to the premium microLED based The Wall series.

The service is positioned as a content resource for anything from corporate environments to healthcare waiting rooms.

I have mixed feelings about this sort of thing.

On one hand, great visuals can set the tone and mood for a designed space, and lots of large companies have built up art collections that are then used around their buildings. That’s happened for decades and digital display is just a new, interesting way to steadily keep the artwork fresh.

On the other hand, this can be the easy way out for content on a lot of projects. Ask most digital signage solutions people and you’ll get stories about end-users who spent $100,000 or more on a video wall – even a million and more – and then only as it was installed started asking questions about what to put on the display.

I think in the right environment this sort of thing can be great, but I always go back to the discipline of sorting out right at the start of a project why screens are contemplated and what they’ll do and show. Just putting screens in a space is a tactic, not a strategy. You’ll get much more from a digital signage project if you start it understanding why you’re doing it, and also understand why digital art is all or part of the content plan.