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Digital Signage
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4/1/2007
DIGITAL SIGNAGE IDEA: NEWS AT 11
At Creighton University, four 40-inch LCD screens are installed in two of the college’s busiest areas. Two are mounted to the ceiling of a high-traffic hallway. The others sit side-by-side in the main entryway as one large presentation, tickers flowing from one screen to the next. The screens provide news, weather, and market updates to students as they move between classes.
The first of the Cisco products, the Cisco Digital Media Player, is a piece of hardware that connects to a display unit and controls the physical attributes of what gets played on the screen. The hardware is about the size of a deck of cards, and can attach to the back of a display screen so that it is virtually invisible to onlookers. The second product, the Cisco Digital Media Manager, is webbased software that resides somewhere in the data center, and enables authors to go in and schedule video or motion graphics to be published out to digital displays, anywhere in the world.
AT TEXAS STATE U's business college, networks of digital signs mix school info and world news. Business students can't help but stop to read the market ticker display.
Thomas Wyatt, general manager of the vendor’s Digital Media Management business unit, says that while these tools aren’t the first to serve the purposes they serve, they are the first designed to work with specific hardware, offering schools the opportunity to purchase everything in one fell swoop. He adds that because Cisco’s tools work together and have the capacity to push content to dozens of digital signs at a time, they eliminate the need for schools to assign valuable staff resources to upload content sign by sign.
“For most schools, creating content is not a problem,” says Wyatt. “Getting it out there, however, is where digital signage can really help.”
Replacing Paper
No school understands this concept better than Bryant University. After a deadly fire in a Rhode Island nightclub in 2003, new 2004 state fire codes stipulated that all paper messages had to be posted behind glass. On campus, where students had grown accustomed to stapling and taping flyers all over the place, the new ruling took its toll. When information changed, it was difficult to get access to the glass displays, to update the flyers. Some students, especially those who lived off-campus, never saw some ads or information at all. The result: Student groups began complaining. Then they went to administrators and demanded change.
Phil Lombardi, director of academic computing and media services, set out to find a solution.
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