Ground Support Labs’ 2025/26 Review: Catherine Hansen on Why Digital Signage Networks Are Becoming Mission-Critical Infrastructure

December 30, 2025 by guest author, John Berkovich

As digital signage networks scale across regions, verticals, and use cases, 2025 marked a turning point in how organizations manage performance, reliability, and operational visibility. Ground Support Labs’ Catherine Hansen reflects on a year defined by rising expectations around uptime, unified systems, and proactive monitoring — along with the industry trends shaping how digital signage networks will be built, managed, and measured in 2026.

This has been an award-winning year for us at Ground Support Labs, with projects that showcased our creativity and full integration service capabilities. Years of technical experience and thousands of global deployments have taught us what it takes to keep digital ecosystems running flawlessly. We care deeply about technology and how it impacts our clients’ success. Whether it’s large-scale deployments, seamless CMS scaling, or resolving uptime concerns, we make the complex accessible through our Xen platform (NOC, CMS, media, connectivity).

Working across verticals, one thing has become clear to us at Ground Support Labs: network owners, retailers, and brands are moving away from disparate systems, archaic spreadsheets, and reactive monitoring, and adopting a unified digital approach. This is where Xen steps in — bringing all aspects of a network owner’s, retailer’s, or brand’s digital signage operations under one roof. Through Xen, our clients are seeing tangible ROI from the time and resources they save by managing their digital signage.

The beauty of Xen is its constant evolution. This year, we pushed the NOC platform further with deeper health reporting, smarter automation, and tighter integrations — uniting advanced sensor data, confidence cameras, and the growing software ecosystem our partners depend on. Behind the scenes, we continued scaling the Xen platform to support larger, multi-region networks, giving clients a safety net that never sleeps. And because the best problems are the ones no one ever sees, we strengthened our proactive remediation tools to stop issues long before they ever reach a screen.

By the way, we want to let you in on a secret—Xen 2.0 is coming soon. Xen 2.0 will offer DooH media companies and retailers an even more fluid way to manage their digital signage networks. Something exciting is in motion. More to come soon.

In October, we attended the DSE show in San Diego and saw firsthand some of the industry trends that will shape 2026 and beyond. What stood out among keynote speakers was the growing use and adoption of AI tools, enhanced storytelling and interactivity, and content performance diagnostics. Data-driven decision-making has matured to justify new hardware cycles, revised content strategies, and improved staffing models. Many major brands indicated they are now tracking network health as closely as content performance. Minutes mattered. Hours cost money. Remote management expectations escalated and brands wanted answers fast: Is it the player or the screen? Is it the network or the CMS? The industry demanded tools that unify those diagnostics.

In 2026, digital signage networks will prioritize resilience, interoperability, and real-time intelligence. Brands will expect their screens to perform like mission-critical IT infrastructure. The winners will be those who deliver transparency, reliability, and automation at scale.