Partnership With SignageOS Almost Doubles Sony’s CMS Platform Ecosystem

November 23, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Sony has become a very different player in the digital signage since it brought on some people very familiar, experienced and connected in the sector – Rich Ventura first, then Jay Leedy and probably some others I am forgetting (SORRY!)

Before they got involved, I could not name a mainstream CMS partner working with Sony, and you got the sense there was not a lot of business activity on the pro display side, at least with digital signage. That’s changed.

Ventura is running the business side of pro display and Leedy, who came over from giant integrator Diversified, has been steadily adding on CMS partners, going quickly from damn-near near-zero to dozens. Now the Japanese electronics giant has developed a partnership with signageOS, which has offices in the US and Czech Republic, and develops software that bridges different operating systems and CMS platforms.

Says the PR:

The new signageOS alliance will nearly double the compatibility of Sony’s displays to offer support for close to 60 integrated CMS options, and is planned to be available next month.  Additionally, the partnership will better position Sony’s network of systems integrators, resellers, channel partners, managed service providers and software alliance members to extend and expand their implementation of professional BRAVIA displays with greater ease due to signageOS’ single API system.

“We are thrilled not only to align with signageOS but to offer more functionality and value to Sony’s displays – and the bottom line of our growing partner ecosystem worldwide,” says Ventura, VP of Professional Display Solutions. “Working with signageOS elevates Sony’s professional BRAVIA lineup, providing more compatibility, enhanced sustainability measures and a wider range of vertical use cases, while streamlining and unifying many disparate offerings.  With a partner like signageOS, we’re also presented with many opportunities to jointly develop and strengthen our businesses moving forward to create a better digital signage ecosystem for the industry.”

“As they build out their end-to-end digital signage capabilities, we’re honored to help Sony enable support for so many of the providers that are driving the industry to transform and become faster, easier, and more integrated,” says Stan Richter, CEO, signageOS.  “Sony has a definitive mindset on building strong B2B relationships and we look forward to cultivating and expanding our relationship with Sony to directly benefit their Alliance Partner Program while addressing the needs of the community.”

Sony’s BRAVIA pro displays use Android-based system on a chips and support HTML5. Unless something has changed, it is slightly different from what some other display and software companies do, in that it is Android TV versus the broader Android used on lots of set-top box media players.

SignageOS first got into the market offering a software solution that enabled software companies to support proprietary operating systems like Samsung’s Tizen and LG’s webOS, without the CMS company software teams having to write native software players and do full integrations. SignageOS offers a middleware platform that makes it much easier for CMS companies who, let’s say, work mainly on Windows and Linux, but have a big opportunity that needs to specifically or additionally support something like Samsung smart displays. It runs through the SignageOS infrastructure but is seamless.

This deal means the same sort of thing, I believe, enabling software companies to support Sony’s Bravia SOC pro displays without those companies going down the time and cost-consuming path of full development.

Along with multi-vendor and OS support, SignageOS has been adding a lot of device management capabilities.