Episodes
![Neb Savicic, Plainly](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/neb_img-p-500_h87ax9_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday Jul 17, 2024
Neb Savicic, Plainly
Wednesday Jul 17, 2024
Wednesday Jul 17, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Motion graphics designers tend to enjoy the creative side of their jobs, but there can be aspects of their work, like editing and rendering slight variations of the same spot, that are best described as soul-sucking.
Neb Savicic has lived that as a motion graphics designer, and with a couple of friends in Serbia, concluded there had to be a better way. So they put their heads together and, after testing interest, started Plainly - which automates video creation and produces finished spots at scale. Like 1,000s of videos in a matter of minutes.
This is not a library of pre-made templates that end-users can then tweak. It's a SaaS tool used mainly by creatives in agencies and studios to take what's developed in a professional toolset - Adobe's AfterEffects - and plug it into Plainly's cloud platform.
The net result is that a creative team that is charged with producing, let's say, 500 videos for a QSR chain can do that with one template and a spreadsheet file that has all the differences itemized per location. What might take weeks to accurately produce, instead takes one click and a few minutes to get rendered, ready-to-use videos.
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TRANSCRIPT
Neb, thank you for joining me. It’s nice to chat with you. We met in Munich a couple of months ago. I didn't know a lot about Plainly. I wrote a piece when you did some sort of a partnership with SignageLive, but for those who don't know who you are, can you tell me about the company, what it does, and how and why it was started?
Neb Savicic: First of all, thank you so much for having me. So Plainly is a product that helps creative teams automate and scale up video output while keeping the quality of their videos high. What that means, in a nutshell, is we have a platform that allows users to automatically render variations of their After Effects videos just by providing data that's going to be in those variations.
So the benefit of automation is you can produce videos at scale. You can produce a lot of videos quickly without all the monkey work to do each of them, right?
Neb Savicic: Yes, so the key benefit, and that's the problem we're solving, is that in many use cases, creatives have to spend their time changing text, changing images, and creating variations of the same templatized video they created a month ago for different markets, screens, and products.
My background is actually in video. I was a motion designer before planning, and I always hated those kinds of projects, and that's where the inception story came from, and, I was like, there has to be some better way. So we created a platform where you can create one template, and one After Effects project, and then our platform will automatically create all of the different variations you need. At the same time, you can focus on different, more creative, and more important tasks.
So I understand that for a lot of social media things, even for things like utility company bills, if they want to do a video summary, customer by customer, how would this be used in the context of digital signage or digital out of home?
Neb Savicic: When I first came into this industry, and I was looking at the content that the companies were putting out, and I said this on another podcast, the one thing that always bugged me is that these companies invest so much money into their systems into their digital signage systems and the content doesn't look that good. You invest so much money to have this great system running in the background, and the thing that's actually displayed and the thing that your customers see is the thing that's getting the least amount of effort.
So using a tool like ours, you can actually make sure that you have relevant content, personalized content, and updated content all the time on all of the screens. So you can imagine… This is the easiest example, but like a QSR where they have the same content on every screen in every restaurant across all the locations, and that's just because they have a limitation of human resources, they just don't have enough employees to create different content. So they're satisfied with the same stuff.
With a tool like Plainly and the power we give you, you can actually create individualized content for each screen. So, let's say it's raining in London. You can make different content when it's raining compared to Manchester, where it's sunny, and you're going to sell different stuff, it’s that ability to automatically create different individualized relevant personalized content on a large scale that's what we give to the digital sign, to our users from the digital signage industry.
Do you have companies that are actively using this?
I know I mentioned that a partnership was announced with SignageLive. SignageLive is always good about working with emerging companies doing interesting things, so it's not surprising they're one of the first to do that. But how are these company’s customers using it?
Neb Savicic: We work with many agencies, some of the biggest agencies, especially in the advertising and creative industries. These agencies are using it for digital signage for their clients and the way they're using it is exactly how I described it.
They were spending so much time creating different variations of the same content and they realized they needed to offload this to machines and open up some of that time for our creative team to actually do something more, they paid these people a lot of money because they're great and spend time moving the pixels around, their users, agencies, and in-house creative teams all use Plainly in the same fashion, where you can just drop in a big CSV, a big Google sheet with all of the different video variations and in a click of a button you can get a hundred or a thousand different video variations.
To be clear, this is not a template system like a lot of digital signage CMS companies have. I think they are sometimes called composer systems where you just open it up and you use templates that exist there, and you can adjust what's on them.
This is developing templates within Adobe After Effects, usually, templates designed by motion graphics designers who know their way around AE. Then, that's where you plug in, right?
Neb Savicic: Yes, exactly. One of our key selling points is that we are a native After Effects solution. So our users have to be After Effects users. That's why I'm saying they're in-house creative teams and agencies. So what this means is that we are not offering you boilerplate templates that are the same for everybody.
You can actually create your own custom-branded bespoke templates that look awesome and then use our platform to increase the output of those templatized videos.
So, what would the workflow be for? Let's use that example you had about QSR chains and wanting to have different menus based on weather conditions, geography, and that sort of thing.
How does that work in the real world?
Neb Savicic: Okay, so there are two ways you can achieve this. First of all, you can do what's called a batch renderer, which is very nicely demonstrated in a video we did for the SignageLive integration. Basically, what you do is upload your After Effects template into Plainly.
You say, okay, we want to change the product's price, the product's name, and the product's image with every video. You create a big Google Sheet that's gonna have all of the different variations. You drop in that Google Sheet or a CSV into Plainly, click Render, and Plainly renders all of the different variations. That's the simple, no-code-needed way.
The second way, which is a bit more advanced, is using our API. With our API, you can actually create any kind of workflow, and this is where we can also talk about programmatic. You can programmatically create video variations on demand. So let's say you have a system that detects it's rainy in New York, let's create a new content piece, that just pings our API and says create a new video, and we send you back the video so there are a couple of ways you can achieve the workflow, depending on the technical abilities.
What's the timing and everything of that? If you hit “Batch render” or whatever the button is, you click it, does that take 10 seconds, 10 hours, or 10 days?
Neb Savicic: You can see this on our YouTube channel. We actually made a video in which we rendered 1000 videos in 17 minutes so it's quite a fast system. Obviously, it depends on how complex the video template is, but it's quite fast, and it's quite capable of producing like we have customers doing tens of thousands of videos, like fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, so the core of our product is the scalable infrastructure that can output any number of videos.
Are you using big, cloud-based compute systems, like AWS or whatever to do that, or is this your own iron?
Neb Savicic: No, of course, we use Google for the rendering.
So that gives you all the scalability you need.
Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. It's scalable on demand, and we don't have to worry about them shutting down.
No, they're not anytime soon, at least. So what is the output file?
Neb Savicic: It's a video, first of all, that's the big thing for digital signage.
It's not an HTML5, it's a video.
Neb Savicic: No. It's an actual video, MP4 or MOV. So that also has some benefits in terms of being able to play it on older screens and any kind of screen so that also has some benefits.
So any media player, unless it's a complete piece of junk, supports playing out the video, whereas it might not play out HTML5.
Neb Savicic: That's one of the benefits, yeah.
Are there settings? If I say, “I want 720p, 1080p, 4K,” and “Here's the format: it's portrait or it's landscape,” can you munch on those things?
Neb Savicic: Of course. So all of those things are actually handled in After Effects. So the customer decides what's the duration going to be, what's the dimension of the video going to be, what's the design, but then also some of the agencies we work with, they actually do stuff for broadcast. In those cases, they require very specific output parameters. Because of that, we have a feature where you can define these specific outputs, such as, if you want to change the bitrate, the FPS, or any of those more technical parameters. That's also possible after the video is rendered.
If you do, use your example, a thousand videos in 17 minutes. For each of those videos, where do they go, and how do you distinguish which one is which? Can you give them names based on metadata so know this is Spanish, Escondido in California, postal code, and that sort of stuff?
Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. There are a couple of ways you can achieve this. One is naming the files. You can use the data parameters from the video. If you have a product name, and then you want also to add Spanish, you can name them. But in the case of the API usage, you can include the metadata in that API call, which will be how you distinguish those videos.
But specifically for digital signage, and this is one of the things we did with SignageLive, so let's say in the spreadsheet you also have a column that says, where is this piece of content going to go? In SignageLive, it's called tags. You can actually use those tags and automatically distribute the videos to the screens with SignageLive because of their integration and the way we did it. But generally speaking, you can achieve that level of automation where you're dropping a CSV or filling out a Google sheet, the videos are read automatically, and they are distributed automatically to all of the screens where they need to be.
I assume there are guardrails and checks and balances on this stuff. Automation is awesome, but it can work both ways. If somebody makes a mistake or something goes hairy and the rendered videos are incorrect in some way. How do you make sure that doesn't happen?
Neb Savicic: So that's up to the user. We don't alter the data in any way. So what we get is what we put into the video, and then it's up to the user to introduce some checks and balances and security measures to make sure that the content looks right.
So if there's an approval gateway of some kind that you want to look at each piece of video and go, okay, yeah, that looks right. That's up to the customer. That's not something inherent in your system?
Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course, and we do it also for security reasons. Of course, we don't want to be liable for approving something and then making a mistake. So we leave that up to the user and ensure they have the flexibility to do it in the way they want.
I think I saw in one of the demo videos that you do have or offer users the ability, at least at the creative stage, to do a draft render, look at it, and then go in and change some of the things, right?
Neb Savicic: Yeah, of course. If you see a video that may be in, the data was incorrect. You can easily re-render that video, or, as you mentioned, use a draft version to make sure that it actually looks good before it's published.
You're starting to work with AI, as everybody says they're working with AI, but how are you using it?
Neb Savicic: So we are introducing AI into our tool to help our users do the tasks they always do with the assets outside of Plainly. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you have a product image. Those product images, in a lot of cases, have backgrounds, and in the video, you want to have an image without a background. So we are introducing features that will help you - we call it pre-processing - remove the background or denoise your audio, and do those things that really help make the lives of our users a bit easier. So they don't have to do things outside of Plainly. They can do everything in one place.
It's very much what I hear from people talking about the coding side and using AI to remove or take away a lot of the grunt work.
Neb Savicic: Exactly, and I think that's the right use case for AI. It's just that there are tons of tasks that people just don't want to do, and it's the same as with Plainly like nobody wants to change the text layer or the product name 10 times like you should use machines for that, and I think you should also use AI for those kinds of tasks where. It's so obvious that it's useful in that regard.
So what about the idea of putting in a chat GPT prompt that says, “Make me a video for hamburgers that are $2.99. Sundays only”?
Neb Savicic: That's a good idea, but it's not what we're trying to build, unfortunately. What's really interesting about Plainly, is that given that we are an API-first solution, we are very modular. We have clients that are actually doing a bunch of AI stuff before the assets go into Plainly.
For example, we have one customer, at this point, multiple customers who are using AI avatars. So Plainly doesn't really add AI avatars. Still, since we have an API, they can quite easily bring our solutions together and have a solution that's creating an AI avatar. Then that video goes into plain to be included in the final video. If you want a ChatGPT prompt, you can just introduce ChatGPT before Plainly stringing them in a workflow and making any kind of workflow you want.
I have some history with content automation and using After Effects templates, going back 10 years. The struggle I had was where it was a partnership. The big challenge I had was people didn't get it. They didn't understand the idea of templates and automation and making their lives easier.
I'm guessing that it's much easier with this because you're not going to end users. You're not going to resellers or solutions providers. You're talking directly to the agencies by and large.
Neb Savicic: Yeah, it's quite an obvious thing for them because it might seem tricky from the outside because, you could say oh, you are making Motion Designers obsolete. You're taking somebody's job that somebody changed names of the product there all day. But being a motion designer before Plainly, I don't look at it from that angle, I look from the angle of, you can have that Motion Designer to do a lot more work, different work, different creative work and use his or her time a lot more efficiently.
Why do that menial work in that manner that’s soul-sucking, when you can create different templates and different projects and that's what the agencies see. They see an opportunity for new revenue. Basically, they can take in more clients because they now have this tool that's going to help them output ten times more content than with the same amount of staff.
Yeah. I was curious about that. I suspect there's a huge problem, it depends on its qualifier, but I'm curious how much time and money this can save.
Neb Savicic: Depends... I'm kidding.
I did some calculations, I was looking at some templates that are with our customers, and I was like, realistically, how much does it take to create ten videos from this template? And even if you have a fully templated project, you have all of the data ready to go, it can take anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes per video, depending on how complex it is. If you need to create ten videos, a hundred videos, thousand videos, you can see how that easily adds up where we clean with just literally one click. You add the CSV and can do thousands of these in 17 minutes. So the time savings are massive, but not easily counted. You cannot easily calculate it.
At least some of it is owed to, it's the old phrase around garbage in, garbage out. If you don't tag everything properly in the After Effects file, automation is not as easy, right?
Neb Savicic: Yes, of course. But it's not like you have to do some special work to prepare a template for Plainly.
You just have to name your layers and things.
Neb Savicic: Of course, every good Motion Designer or Video Editor will name their layers properly because otherwise, they won't find a way around their project if they return to it a month or six months later.
Believe me, I've fallen into that trap. It's very hard. So you just have to be organized. You have to name this name stuff properly, and everything is going to work like with some other solutions on the markets they all say they're After Effects supported, but the reality is that yes, they support After Effects, but it's not natively.
First of all, you must alter your creative process a lot, meaning you have to work with a plugin or some special effect to import After Effects into their platform. With Plainly, you're just working with After Effects. You put After Effects into Plainly, and it's going to work. So we don't alter your creative process in any way. We just empower you to create more videos. The other thing is that if you're not an After Effects native, that means that with a lot of solutions, you're actually turning After Effects into some intermediary format, which means that you cannot use all the effects or there is some quality loss that happens in that transition. So that's what our users love about Plainly.
I would imagine this opens up the opportunity for a “boutique level” agency or creative shop to take on very large jobs at a scale that, in the past, they would go, “We would love to have this work, but it would kill us.”
If they have this tool now, they can compete with the larger agencies, right?
Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yes, and that's what I meant when I said it opens up new revenue opportunities because you can now take on more work, be a huge company, you can be outputting hundreds and hundreds of videos, even though it's…
coming out of your spare bedroom.
Neb Savicic: Yeah, out of the basement.
How does pricing work?
Neb Savicic: Oh, so it's a SaaS, which means you pay either monthly or annually for a subscription and that all depends on the number of minutes you export. It starts as low as $59 per month, but it can go higher if you need more minutes.
So classic pricing tiers are based on the amount of work you do and the amount of output.
Neb Savicic: Which makes sense.
You charge on finished rendered videos, not on the draft, in terms of time?
Neb Savicic: Yeah. We just look at the output, not what you're doing to plan on, just the output.
You started this a couple of years ago, or three, four years ago?
Neb Savicic: 2019.
Okay. So five years ago, there were already some companies in the market doing maybe not the same work, but similar kinds of things. I did a podcast a few years back with Dataclay and I'm aware of SundaySky and some other ones out there.
How do you compare to them, and when people say, okay, why would I use you versus brand X, what do you tell them?
Neb Savicic: So there are a couple of things. First, if you compare Plainly to some other solutions, obviously being cloud-based, there is a difference to some of the other tools, like you don't have to worry about your rendering infrastructure because that's us. If something doesn't work, that's our fault. That's the core of our product. We ensure you can render as many videos as you want, as many videos as long as you have money. That's one thing, and then, of course, there are things like being After Effects native, where you can literally add any kind of template.
We have had clients with amazing 3D-based templates that wouldn't be possible in other solutions, and then they were API-based. So a lot of our customers are actually building internal tools. They're actually integrating Plainly into their apps or internal tools for creative teams. So those three things are what separates us from the market.
So for the big agencies with internal software developers, who would use the API, this is great. But for the smaller agencies or the purely creative agencies, they can go at it using the no-code side of it and not have to worry about APIs and things.
Neb Savicic: Exactly. Yeah, that's it.
Where are you guys at as a company? I saw that you got some seed funding from, what, the Serbian incubator fund or something?
Neb Savicic: That was the first thing. That was in 2020, and then we got accepted into a very prestigious US accelerator called Tiny Seed. We were the first company from the Balkans to get in there. So they obviously saw something in us, but we were growing as a team, growing the customer base. We are so lucky to be working with some of the largest agencies and names that you would recognize from both Europe and the US, and we're just trying to make them happy and create a product that makes their lives better.
I realized you're serving a whole bunch of different vertical markets and use cases, digital signage, just being one of them is, that a substantial noticeable or a friend of mine uses the term consequential part of your business or kind of an interesting sort of side aspect to what you do.
Neb Savicic: I'm not sure how big digital signage is with our agency customers. I would imagine that a good portion of the content they do is for digital signage, but as for us working directly with digital signage companies, we're just getting into that industry. With the SignageLive integration, we might announce more integrations soon. That's a new industry for us. We see that there are a lot of benefits for the users in the digital signage industry we're just trying to get into.
We chatted at the digital signage summit in Munich. So, obviously, you were there to network and meet some people, and I had some beers. Would you also be at ISE?
Neb Savicic: Yes, of course, and then Munich next year and possibly Intelcom.
I assume this product will always evolve. Over the next year, are there new wrinkles you'll be rolling out that you can tell me about without alerting your competitors?
Neb Savicic: Honestly, the good thing is that I'm so happy to have a technical team that's really fast, and the product improvement cycle is insane. We are putting out new features on a bi-monthly basis. So I don't know. One year from here, who knows what will be added? Definitely, the AI features are greater than everybody.
So all the normal stuff: faster, better, easier.
Neb Savicic: Exactly. The stuff that doesn't change.
Yes. All right, Neb. That was great. Very interesting. Thank you.
Neb Savicic: Yeah. Thank you too, Dave.
![Fergal Ó Ceallaigh, Ryarc](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/fergalo_p47i67_300x300.jpg)
Tuesday Jul 09, 2024
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh, Ryarc
Tuesday Jul 09, 2024
Tuesday Jul 09, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh.
It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects.
I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or mobile data networks.
That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like satellite content distribution, but different. When I found out Ryarc was the company that was doing proof of concept trials in the U.S., I reached out to Fergal - now based in Seattle - and we had this chat.
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TRANSCRIPT
Fergal, thank you for joining me. I've been aware of your company for a long time, but we've never actually spoken. For those people who don't know what you do, what the company does. Could you give me the elevator pitch?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Thanks for inviting me on. RYARC was founded as a digital signage application, with the starting point of their need for a digital signage platform that combined enterprise capabilities with knowledge worker-level skills by the operator. So this was in an era when digital signage was moving from what was a highly specialized and fairly rare thing, to something where at least from our perspective, the requirement was going to be that digital signage was just going to be another tool in the armory of an enterprise and, as such, it would require rather than a specialized team to operate at a knowledge worker level.
This goes back 20 years, right?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it does. We divert a little bit into kind of my backstory. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s in Dublin and I had a fantastic time there.
It was Microsoft where the Nvidia of the day, Windows 95 was coming out. So it was a fantastic place to work, and I couldn't have asked for a better start in my career, but I had an itch to try and start something of my own, and I happened upon digital signage. I could see the way trajectories were going in terms of connectivity. If you combine connectivity, availability, and cost & display, availability, and cost, two lines on a graph are going down and to the right and human labor is going up, and to the right. So those three factors combined to make it apparent to me that digital signage was going to be a thing.
If it was going to be a thing, it needed software to go with it. So I quit Microsoft, and I did my Asian Odyssey backpack and thing, and I was actually writing the code for version one. I got so bored sitting on the beach in Thailand that I took to actually writing code. I'm serious.
That is dysfunctional.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I guess. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I'm not a beach guy, which is, another strange story for someone who ended up in Sydney for as long as he did, but, yeah, so it was with that desire to have a go with that.
Coming out of Microsoft, I felt I had a decent handle on usability and what's needed for a knowledge worker-level software product, by which I mean a product that it became. It seemed obvious to me that digital signage was going to become a bigger thing and as a result, it needed to be a kind of a productivity-type app rather than some highly specialized thing that you'd need a broadcast engineer. I think the early software that was available did come out of broadcast if I'm not mistaken. I think that was Scala's backstory.
So, I managed to get my hands on one of those. I can't remember exactly what year it was, but I was like, oh, okay, I can see how this works, but you're not going to be able to give this to Joe in marketing and ask him to start operating it. So that was the kind of genesis of why I chose that particular route and why I started writing code to get there. But it took a few years, from building the thing in my apartment to actually launching the company.
When did the business start, like when you were out there selling licenses and everything?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I think the first license we sold was in 2006 but I had gone full-time about two years before that.
So you're pretty happy to start selling.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, I was. But it's funny. I was working for a company that was bought by Match.com in Sydney, and that was an interesting place to work at the age I was at the time.
But then, I met some folks there who are independently wealthy folks and the particular gentleman I approached is named Neil Gamble, a very well-known Grandi in the Australian business scene, South African guy, lovely man. But, a serious business guy who is running one of the largest software companies in Australia, such as they were back then. But he was chairman of the company I was working for, which was acquired by Match, and I pitched him my idea. I turned up in the boardroom office of this large software company at seven o'clock in the morning in Sydney. So I think it was 2003 or maybe 2004, it doesn't matter, but I pitched him the idea, and he said, “Fergal, that's brilliant, but fuck off and come back when you’ve got some customers.”
So, I duly fucked off and I think he ruminated on the idea for a while and came back to me a couple of months later. I was still working as a contractor at the time so I was fine. He said, “You know what? I've met some other people who are doing certain things in the retail space, and what you said clicked even more. So I'm going to take a swing on this”, and so he put in just enough money to basically pay for me and some other young guy to take the code from what was something I could, demonstrate to something that we could actually sell and the first customer was Zimmer if you've ever heard of Zimmer Frame?
No.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The Zimmer frame is kind of like that. It's a mobility tool for people with generally older people. It's like a walking frame.
Unfortunately, maybe I'll learn about that soon enough, but not yet.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Not yet. May it be many more years, but we put the website up and boom, that was the first one, and then, out-of-home started to take off in Australia and had a pretty decent clip, compared to other markets, and Neil was very well connected in the Sydney business scene.
He started to open doors into places like I could get meetings now with people, and my experience of that, and again, maybe it's reflected in our website and our kind of general low-key profile, generally, I found it, if I could get in front of a customer and showed them the product, we tended to do well. It was the getting the customers part, which was the trickier part for us, but Neil was instrumental in that, and that's how we started.
Back then it was trickier for everybody.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it was. Coming from an engineering background, I found it quite interesting, the whole scene at the time. What you had was advertising guys who were in the billboards business and suddenly there was, foist upon them this need to transform into an IT company, and that created a particular set of issues at the time, I think, where you had companies that whose experience and interaction with IT was about, “fix the printer” and “why is my email not working?” So they weren't tech companies in their DNA, they were marketing companies, and I tend to think of those years as like the cowboy years, by which I mean, there were an awful lot of platforms out there.
What I tended to see, although not uniformly, was a thing I noticed is that oftentimes, the decision makers because they didn't have a mature IT section within their company, it wasn't a traditional thing for them. It wasn't integral to their business in the way it is now, you often had people making software decisions who didn't really have the experience and wherewithal to assess software and what that led to properly, and I think this is partly what led to the massive proliferation of solutions out there was that the thing with digital signage is that it's fairly straightforward to get a piece of software that will reliably get a flash file or a JPEG or a video from A to B.
And when the software assessments were being done by people who didn't really have experience in enterprise software or edge management or remote device management, stuff like that, it was very easy for the smoke and mirrors guys to do well quickly, because no one was asking the boring questions about the plumbing. So that was something that took some adjustment for me with my background.
I think it's maybe part of what led to the proliferation of often these things. I don't want to denigrate or be down on the industry or anything, but there were a lot of solutions out there that were really something that someone had put together in response to a request from someone and then they came up with a logo, and said, we're a digital signage company, and often these solutions, if you ever got to peek behind, to look under the hood, as they say in North America, you'd be shocked at what was there, and I had several experiences in those early times of being Gesamt or someone with a fantastic sales pitch, which is something that no one would ever accuse us of.
I was thinking these guys don't know what they're doing anyway. Anyway, I think that's calmed down a good bit because you have to be sustainable and, eventually, if your stuff keeps falling over, that's going to, with the best sales pitch in the world, that's not going to last forever.
Yeah. I think there were a lot of companies, for a whole bunch of years, who signed on with a service provider, some sort of software company, and then three years later moved on to another one after they learned what they really needed and learned about things like device management and scalability and all that stuff. But first go around, they were attracted by the pretty pictures and the WYSIWYG UX and all that stuff, and as a consultant, I saw it first hand where I would say this thing is boring and ugly, like a Subaru, sorry, Subaru owners, but they're not the sexiest cars, but they just work, versus a Range Rover that looks sexy as hell, but it's going to be a nightmare.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, that was it. And I guess it was inevitable. If you looked at the factors feeding into that, you had an industry that was being dragged, kicking, and streaming into the world of it and you had a lot of people who saw an opportunity and needed to go quickly, but I couldn't believe some of the stuff that I saw pass muster, and I was because sometimes I get a peek under the hood and it was literally, The wizard of Oz, they're furiously pulling levers to keep the thing up.
But we learned, I think, that the company that was the first major out-of-home company we thought was iCorp.
Australian company.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: That's right, and they were also based in Sydney, and so we, very quickly, felt their pain when things would go wrong and that was an excellent kind of learning curve for us. But what helped embed in the company was this engineering mantra that we had, which was, if it can be avoided, never have the software operate In a manner where if a truck roll can be avoided, it's not avoided.
There's this focus for us on remote manageability so it's different. I know some people in the early days tried to use browsers for digital signage, but that failed for reasons that we don't need to get into, but when there's a huge difference between an application and this even goes all the way up to major, big sticker stuff like Microsoft, an application which leaks memory or does something like that and, yeah, it's annoying when you have to kill the browser and restart it, after a few hours, which used to be the case a while ago, but that kind of level of tolerance for unattended execution, you could see it didn't exist.
It's different if the program falls over and you ring Mark in IT, and he says, yeah, just reboot the machine. But if you've got three-quarters of a million-dollar screen in an airport, that's a really expensive proposition and the failure is immediately public and embarrassing. That helps embed for us that learning experience we had with out-of-home, of the importance of just reliability at the edge and going on from reliability to manageability. So we spent a lot of time finding bugs in Microsoft Core DLLs, that's just through the usage scenarios we had, they just weren't common enough even for Microsoft to have identified some of these issues with things that will leak a little bit every time they're used. It's a software term. If the software isn't carefully crafted every time it runs through a certain given set of routines, it can capture a bit of memory and then fail to release it, which isn't a problem if you're closing your laptop at the end of the day but if you're wanting to run 24/7 in twenty feet up in airside and an airport, it's a different proposition. So anyway, that was all a learning curve, but it helps embed for us this fanatical focus on stability and manageability.
You talked about the people in the meetings in the early days, the visual merchandisers and people from the marketing department, business communicators, those kinds of people, but that's changed, right? The people across the table now, quite often, are IT people.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, they are, and I think that's just an inevitable consequence of the pain of failure to not do that. It was like Mad Man so the whole focus was on the flashiness of the advertising and the creativity and all that, whether it's on a billboard or TV or whatever. But now they were in a new world where boring stuff like Enterprise IT management was crucial, a factor in their ability to succeed.
It was cruel as well because of any failures they had. If you're even running a service and your website goes down, maybe some people would notice, maybe someone won't, but if you've got a big screen downtown, and then your customer is there showing his friends or their customers, say, look, check out our ad down in some public place when it goes wrong, it's really bad because it's so visible, so those two things are combined. So I guess they had to learn quickly and yes, I think it's certainly, it's no longer the situation where you've got someone from Marketing making IT decisions.
So describing your product mix or suite now, what would it be, and is there a particular market that you focus on?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. I remember before I started the company I read how to write a business plan, and one of the things was identifying your customer, and I thought, wow, there are so many, anybody who wants to display a message somewhere publicly…
Anybody with money.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah. That was the prerequisite. Going back to what I was referring to with the learning curve in the early days, it became apparent to me that there's only so much gilding of the lily you can do in terms of the content management side. I sometimes bristle when we get described as a CMS, because really most of the value of what we do is it's fuller than that.
Content management is its raison d'etre, but it needs to do an awful lot of other stuff, and I always believed that for us, that was a strength of ours in our kind of relentless focus on manageability and Edge device management. I saw it just again, through the growing pains of helping an out-of-home company get through the early days of it. That's really where we needed to focus on managing the device and just being absolutely bomb-proof when it came to reliability.
What that has led to, I would say organically is: so are we a digital signage company? We are, but we're other things too. So what this hundred of man years of effort, of the device management side and the remote manageability side of things, we have customers now, who don't use us for digital signage at all. They're using us as a remote management platform for devices, and that has led us, over more recent years, probably since the time I moved from Sydney to the West Coast here into IoT, into Edge AI, into sensor management, and device management.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is what started as an organic reaction to needing remote manageability and not saying to your customer, yeah, you have to fork out an extra 15 bucks a month brand point for some other tool that's going to help you manage the device. That led to that side of the application becoming so developed that it could stand on its own even for folks who didn't need digital signage. So we're on lots and lots of things, where we're not controlling the screen, but rather they're using us as the plumbing, right?
For example, for AI and stuff like that. It can identify a Coke can versus a Pepsi can or whatever it might be. But how do you deploy that model to 16,000 different endpoints and how do you collect information at the edge about how you do AB testing? How do you manage the versioning of AI models at the edge? All that kind of stuff. So there's lots of sleep-inducing, boring, but absolutely critical stuff where the product focuses. And yeah, that's on device management, and we're also used to deploying other kiosk-style applications. So the person interacting with the device could be a piece of software running there. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's RYARC that is forming the plumbing that enables all that to work and go together.
Back at Infocomm, a few weeks ago, I hosted a little discussion panel where we talked with three people, both attendees, and executives, about what they saw and everything else, and I asked one of the guys who is actually from an LED company. What he saw that he thought was interesting, I thought he would talk about some other LED product or whatever, but he started going on about this idea that you could use datacasting to distribute content, and he bumped into a company that was doing that, and described it, and I thought, that's interesting but I'm not sure who he's talking about. So I asked him after the fact, who was that company? Eventually came around that it was RYARK. I thought, oh, interesting!!!
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Those guys are still around?
There was that too because I don't bump into your name very often, but can you explain what he was talking about this whole idea of ATSC and using datacasting to move content around?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, sure. The ATSC thing, so the whole TV industry is they've gotten together and they're pushing the ability of the traditional broadcast channels to be able to carry data. The ability to push data across has been around for quite a while.
Yeah, it happened when when TVs went from analog to digital, right?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Right, but the ATSC 3. 0 upgrade, which was the thing that was being marketed and pushed, just greatly expanded the ability and the bandwidth available to push data across. Again, I think this is likely to be limited in some respects globally because of the ubiquity and cheapness of being able to push data across cellular, right? So in other areas, cellular is the cheapest chip, right? If you go to places like Korea or India or Singapore or countries that have recently developed, they tend to get saturated with cellular very quickly.
The situation in the United States is that cellular data is significantly expensive compared to the rest of the world. Canada, it's the same story, right? What pertains in North America is a situation where it is so expensive that alternatives are becoming more attractive. Anyway, that's not really a signal to what ATSC three is all about, but essentially, working with some of the hardware and software providers in the broadcast industry. We've been able to plug into the broadcasting software and hardware side of things such that in addition to using our software, you can use our cloud service or install our software on your own infrastructure if you want to do that.
But in this case, in addition to publishing it to the cloud, which is what happens when you create campaigns and do that kind of thing, we can also add another pipe to the mix, and that pipe is the broadcasting station. So when someone clicks the publish button, it's seamless from the user's perspective. But if it's set up in such a way, in addition to pushing stuff to the cloud and having it dribble down over cellular that way, we can also have these files broadcast. So that's a kind of one-to-many, very effective way of getting data across that doesn't require large bandwidth bills.
We've worked with some companies with large numbers of devices. It was another example of us learning by doing, where their cellular data bills were a huge factor. So, we worked pretty intensely to make the handshake and everything else in our software super parsimonious. I think with 20 megs a month, I think what the chatter that our software has in maintaining connectivity with the server. So we worked relentlessly and got that down.
But anyway, that's all to show how much of a factor the data cost is, and that's that was the impetus that led to wanting to see if we can offer customers a much cheaper way of getting data across and it works seamlessly. We had a working example at that show at Infocomm. I wasn't there, but I think it was an EV station or something like that, which would allow them to do all the heavy lifting so that they've got video and stuff like that. You can push that over the air.
So what's at the far end of it? Is there a receiver or special hardware?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, TV tuner.
It's like a cable box.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: What we've been working on over the past year is ensuring that our software can run on these tuners. So you've got the prospect now of not having to buy an ARM or an X86 chip and put it in a computer running Windows in the back at the back of the TV, but we can squeeze our stuff now onto many of these tuner devices. So you have a small but capable box, that started life as a tuner, but we can have our software running on there. That's a big step in terms of cost-per-unit reduction.
For customers, the main difficulty, I think, with the ATSC 3.0 thing is that it's very easy to go to a Verizon or whomever and be able to estimate what your data cost is going to be. If I need to push across three gigs a month to 11,000 devices. I can work out how much that's gonna cost me. The data cost element in the broadcast space isn't quite as commoditized yet. So there's still some ambiguity there and, perhaps, lack of clarity, and I think the cellular companies are awake to this too. It has the potential to eat into or take up a lot of the enterprise pushing off large amounts of data, and there are many industries that can use that, but digital signage is certainly one of them.
This is reminiscent of the late 2000s or mid-to-late 2000s with satellite and multicasting through satellite.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Oh, yes, I remember that.
Is this the same idea, or is this different?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: The similarity I suppose would be in its one-way communications and you need a back channel to be able to do the other stuff.
So you still do with this?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: You can deploy with just broadcast, so we could get the software running so that there's zero coming back. The obvious thing with that is that you don't know if a meteor struck the sign, right? But it is similar to satellites in that it's one-way.
One of the things that we do actually—I don't know if we know—is we do a lot of in-store music. So we use the CMS side of our product suite to organize what is essentially a radio station template and the thing about audio is you can get away with having six ads running for a week on a sign, right?
But if you play three Alton John and five others in a retail environment, the staff in the shop, they'll climb ladders to rip the speakers out of the roof because it'll drive them crazy and that's understandable. So ironically, MP3s are fairly small, but you need thousands and thousands of them.
So we often found, for the in-store audio deployments we were doing, we had to work with that. We did Woolworths in Australia, which was the largest retailer, I'm not sure if they are anymore, but they're one of the big two there, and we did all their in-store music for years and that was all via satellite, which was really painful actually. But this seems to be working. It's a lot easier and it's a lot better as you would expect, it's nearly 20 years down the line from that.
So is it the same feed, so to speak, the same set of files that you're sending to everybody, or can it be addressable by location, setting different things?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, we've done some work on that. I can't get too deep into the way our product works because most people won't be familiar with it, but essentially, in our software, we've got this concept called a channel and a channel is an abstract entity that represents an endpoint somewhere or multiple endpoints. We have an engine that will categorize those things.
Let's say you want a national rollout. Now like a lot of other things in the United States, the broadcast market is really quite fragmented. It's not like the UK or Europe, where you've got a single national broadcast or a few commercials and you can go live everywhere. You've got a real kind of mix right across the country.
So obviously you don't want to be pushing, essentially what I'm getting into here is that we know where the data needs to get up. So there's a layer in the software that will go, okay, you need to go to station X, you need to go to station Y and I guess broadcast, but once it just gets pushed out, right? And it's the same kind of files, and again, from the user's perspective, when they're using our software, if it's being set up and configured in the back, in the backend to utilize ATSC 3.0 broadcasts that all happen seamlessly under the hood. So they're just clicking a publish button, and in the case of where they use an ATSC 3.0, instead of it just going to the cloud, it's also going to the broadcast station where we work with the some of the ATSC 3.0 technology companies, goes into their queue and then gets broadcast out and then it goes down to the tuner and then we're sitting on the tuner too, so we can watch the files come in and do whatever assembly and decryption that we need to do, at the edge and playback.
So is this something that could be done or are you supporting active networks that are now using this?
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: They are all at the POC stage. I alluded earlier to it being early days as well from the people wanting to utilize this, I think the industry is still working out how to package this and sell it.
If they're successful at that and I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be, it'll be great for North American enterprise because there's finally a competitor out there to cellular. I don't know what the word is, a triopoly? But yeah, the situation, that a reason why data is so expensive in North America.
We could talk for a very long time. We'll probably have to do this again at some point, but that was super interesting and great to finally meet you.
Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, I'm happy to talk, and I'm happy to do it again if you think there's more interesting stuff we can chat about. I am probably at risk there doing a lot of reminiscing, but, I feel entitled to that now. I've been in the industry for a while.
Exactly. All right. Thank you.
![Thomas Philippart de Foy, Appspace](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/tfp-24_q5gwmq_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Jul 03, 2024
Thomas Philippart de Foy, Appspace
Wednesday Jul 03, 2024
Wednesday Jul 03, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
One of the things I noticed bombing around the two exhibit halls at InfoComm in June was how most of the digital signage software companies were located in one hall, and some of them not looking all that busy, while there were at least a couple of others in the other hall, and they were packed with people.
One of those companies was Appspace, and it was clear to me why the company was there with a very prominent stand. They were with their people, so to speak.
While Appspace may have started years ago as another digital signage CMS software option, it now refers to itself as a unified workplace experience platform. That's why it was nested in with a bunch of other tech companies that provide the kinds of technologies - like collaboration tools - that drive contemporary workplaces.
The company started out small, but now has 450 staff, offices all over the planet, and about 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers.
I had a chat with Chief Innovation Officer Thomas Philippart de Foy back in 2022, and I wanted to do a catch-up with him because I was intrigued by what the company is up to. I also wanted to know more about how Appspace products have steadily been stitched into the fabric of how a lot of companies communicate, and tied in with many or most of the core tools now used around modern workplaces.
I also wanted to better understand the company's recent announcement of developing native support for its software within Microsoft's Teams. Lots of CMS software companies have tie-ins these days with video conferencing tools, but Thomas explains in our chat how this is different.
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TRANSCRIPT
Thomas, nice to chat again. We've done a podcast in the past, but for people who maybe don't know much about Appspace and didn't listen to the last one, the fools, could you give me a rundown of what Appspace is all about?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Hi Dave. Thanks for having me on this podcast again. Appspace has changed a lot over the last 15 or 20 years.
It was a digital signage vendor company many years ago. We are now considering ourselves as more of a unified workplace experience platform, delivering a lot of services to large enterprise customers, whether it's digital signage, which is one of the communication channels that we have, or an app, an intranet, or a whole workplace management suite of products.
So the company has changed. We have around 450 people globally with offices around the world and really focused on the enterprise market, although we do a lot in the education space as well. Around 200 of the Fortune 500 companies use Appspace today.
Where is the company based? Is it in Dallas?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Well, originally, the company was based in Dallas. Today, a lot of the leadership team is based in Tampa, Florida. So, I would say there is probably a split of headquarters between Dallas and Tampa. Both offices are very important for us in the US.
In the early days, you can correct me, but I think a lot of the development was done in Malaysia, right?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes. We still have a very large product engineering organization in Malaysia. Our Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Stan Stephens is still based over there. So that hasn't changed, but obviously, we acquired a company in the US, The Marlin company, a few years back. So we have additional resources elsewhere in the US and then we acquired Beezy, which is an Intranet company out of Barcelona in Spain. So we now have a big dev team out of Barcelona and some dev people out of Porto in Portugal as well.
I was at Infocomm recently and found my way over to the Central Hall. Most of the digital signage stuff was in the West Hall, but, if you could take a bus over to the Central Hall because of all the construction, I walked through there and saw the Appspace booth and saw it was very large and very, very busy. And you guys were just in the midst of an announcement.
So I thought, well, okay, this would be a good time to kind of catch up on the company and what it's up to that announcement was around Teams integration, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I thought you were already integrated with Teams and it sounds like a lot of companies have done that, but what you're doing was distinct.
Could you explain to me and the listeners what's different about the integration you've done with Teams and with the other platforms?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Sure. I remember having that conversation with you years back about digital signage on devices in meeting rooms and the benefits it would have for large organizations. Obviously, the pandemic increased the value of content on screens in meeting rooms, whether it's for safety purposes or education on how to use the technology in the room.
We've natively integrated with several platforms, first with Cisco, integrating directly into their Control Hub platform. This allows you to enable signage from their backend. We also integrated Poly with Logitech. Today, we're especially excited because we're natively integrated into Microsoft Teams Rooms, the leading video conferencing platform in the industry, and being integrated directly into Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) makes it extremely easy for large organizations to scale signage services to all those devices from MTR directly.
This means that when you enter a room, you're greeted with content on the screen. That content could be a welcome message, instructions on how to use the meeting space, or how to keep it clean after your meeting. It could be corporate messaging, but it can also include Microsoft Teams Rooms instructions, helping users navigate the technology in the room.
We're very excited about the reception we received at Infocomm from customers. I was actually locked into a little meeting room under NDA; it was focused solely on Microsoft, and customers could come in to discover not only what we're doing with MTR but also our integration with Microsoft Teams through our embedded app and our SharePoint integration, essentially everything we're doing with Microsoft.
And what's the difference between when other software companies say they're integrated with Teams and when you say there's a native integration? What's the difference there?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: The first and the most important one is that we're the only vendor that’s certified with Microsoft Teams Rooms. So if you have an issue with your MTR endpoint and you're running a noncertified digital signage solution on it, Microsoft is likely to say, “Hey, you're not using the product as it was designed. Therefore, it's not supported.” Because many large companies are using MTR, you would expect those companies to want to standardize on something certified by Microsoft. So certainly there is that aspect.
The other one is how you deploy it. A lot of companies have so-called digital signage levering a web URL. We're running our app on an MTR endpoint, and it's deployed through MTR. So from a deployment standpoint, from a monitoring, it is a true digital signage endpoint, like any of the other apps-based digital signage endpoint. That gives you many additional capabilities around the narrowcasting of content, broadcasting in case of emergency, and so forth. So I think those two are really critical.
There are other benefits to managing Appspace from MTR. But I would say just first, make sure you're using a Microsoft Certified solution so that you're fully supported and then the second is being able to deploy this at scale and have an MTR endpoint behave as a true digital signage endpoint and not just a web URL inside Microsoft, which is what some companies do with Zoom. That is not true digital signage as you know.
So because it's just a web URL, it's just showing a web page like any other web page versus what you're saying is because it's natively integrated, it's a true endpoint and you, you have the ability to know what's going on with it and manage it as well?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct. You're able to monitor exactly what content is displaying. You're able to cache content and not stream everything. I mean, it's our full Appspace app that's running on the device.
Okay. So with that, is it a kind of a push situation where your customer-facing salespeople and your business partners are saying to companies: You have this collaboration display in a bunch of your rooms, and it's sitting dark a lot of the time, you could do things with it?
Or are the end-user customers saying, “Hey, we have this collaboration display that's sitting dark a lot of the time, can we do something with it?”
Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it's a combination of the requests. What we're seeing is there's a lot of digital real estate deployed in companies that is not used all the time, whether because there's no video conferencing happening or there's no call, no meeting happening in the meeting space, but those meeting space are still visible from outside, either because there's a window that opens up to the meeting space or because it's one of those new types of Huddle meeting spaces, which are open.
So there's a request from internal comms and facilities to use as much digital real estate as possible they have to communicate to employees around the workplace and comms and safety. and there's less and less appetite for companies to print. So they're looking for every digital real estate they can leverage. So I think there's certainly that, and we're getting asked constantly by big companies saying, “Hey, we're rolling out AppSpace. We want to target the meeting group.” That's very, very important to us.
But we're also starting to see the teams that are using the technology for their day-to-day operations saying, "Hey, can I actually put my content on those screens as well? It's my meeting room in my neighborhood, where I have my team. I want to be able to use that screen when someone enters the room to talk about our team's performance and really narrowcast to their team.” So that's why they want full control of the device and not just a web URL streaming generic.
Now, do they have to go into the Appspace application to produce that content or to load it in, or is it somewhat headless in that they can produce something in whatever toolset they use and it's, and because of the hooks that are set up, it'll show up there?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah. Both are possible. One of our most popular integrations is with SharePoint. If the comms team is producing content on SharePoint, we have a connector that allows us to fetch that content and repurpose it for digital signs so that it automatically populates.
I mean, that's been a very old story, right? We heard about the need for repurposing existing content from third-party tools. SharePoint is super popular in the Microsoft ecosystem. but it's not only that. But so you could imagine having a playlist of content playing on an MTR endpoint that's just fetching. Microsoft Content from SharePoint that is potentially related to a team or related even to the IT team that operates the MTR endpoint.
So now, what you're seeing on the digital sign is the how-to instructions that were actually created in SharePoint.
There seems to be a real distinction between companies that have decided to make their workplace their core vertical market and, let's say, other digital signage companies, whether they offer software solutions that include workplaces as one of their capabilities.
Looking through the Appspace website, it strikes me that this is all you do, and you realized or have learned through the years that you can't just offer a digital signage solution. You've got to be making a space reservation, booking, assignment, and all kinds of other things like that. So what is the range of services?
And, also, is that what you found that guys have said, look, if we're going to work with you, this has to be just more than something that's going to put messages on screens?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I mean, if I go back, I think we were one of the very first digital signage companies to say our focus is going to be the workplace and not retail and transportation and others and we were very early there. So we focused on building our product to address the needs of the corporate market and corporate communications.
When we acquired Marlin, we were acquiring a company that was focused on frontline workers, and communication on digital signs. So again, staying very much in our focus area of workplace communication versus retail or other channels. When the pandemic hit, we had a lot of customers who reached out to us and said, our workers are now back home, we need to continue to deliver the message that they were used to seeing on digital signs, but we need to deliver it on their personal devices. That's really when we focused and started focusing on personal devices, released our employee app, and did an intranet acquisition and suddenly, all of this started to make sense for customers. One single platform to deliver across multiple communication channels, but all natively integrated, not something where you're trying to put solutions together.
So we do email publishing, publish to Microsoft Teams, WebEx, and Slack, publish on digital signs, publish into an employee app, publish on an intranet, and all of those are native features of the app-based platform. They're not point products that we're plugging one into the other. That means that from a core comm standpoint or facilities when you're creating content, you know you have the ability to amplify your message to all those communication channels and that all of that is going to be automated.
Now, while we were doing this and focusing on the comms aspect, there was a real need for a new weight for users to plan their journey into the office. You were no longer going and sitting at a desk and just booking a meeting room through Outlook. You needed to book a building pass to access the building. You need to reserve a hot desk or a hotel desk to be able to book other resources like a smart lock or a parking place, all those resources that are needed for you to have a productive user journey. And so we delivered the features In the apps that we had, so it was easy to do it on the signage front for scheduling panels because it's the same app that runs on the digital sign that actually runs on the scheduling panel. The same thing for the wayfinding kiosks, the interactive kiosks that we were doing years ago now also support wayfinding services, and then because we launched a mobile app for employee communication, all we had to do was enable those workplace services in that same employee app, so employees have only one app, one app to receive the latest company news, to be connected to the workplace, but also to manage their journey into the office.
Today, it's a whole suite. That's why we call ourselves a unified workplace experience platform. We have one app that team members use on their personal devices, phones, desktops, and tablets. Then, we have one app that runs in the physical workplace, on digital signs, on an MTR endpoint, on a scheduling panel, on a wayfinding kiosk, and on a desk bar. And then, at the core, you have Appspace.
How do companies get their employees to use that?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's probably the biggest challenge for any organization in launching a new app is user adoption for different reasons. You may have frontline workers who don't have a company email. So we had to support one-time password and digital signage plays a key role there in getting users to activate their one-time password.
Use digital signage, say there's a new app available for you. Scan the QR code. It asks you to enter your employee's unique identifier, your personal email address or phone number. You get a one-time password, and you're then able to log into the app and have access. So that's number one. You need to make sure that everyone is a first citizen of the modern workplace—your front-line worker, or desk worker, whether you have an email address or not.
The second thing is a lot of people use their personal devices and if you're like me, I'm not in favor of using my personal device to use a company-needed app. So I want options. One of the options is to have a fully responsive web app, a PWA. So, if you access Appspace on your Safari or Chrome browser, it behaves exactly like a native app. The first time you log in, you can actually pin it on your home screen. Next time you go in, there is no address bar, you have the full app experience, but it's a web app. You didn't download it from an app store. Makes it easier.
And then finally, For IT, the biggest challenge is certifying an iOS or an Android app on mobile devices. That takes a lot of time, sometimes 6 months, 12 months, even, to get the certification. So what we did is we embedded our app in Microsoft Teams, and because it is now the number one app used on desktops and mobile devices in the corporate space, you just, as an IT organization, need to enable the Appspace app in the admin console of Microsoft Teams, and one morning the user wakes up and they have on the sidebar next to do a call, your meetings, you now have the Appspace app and all the capabilities embedded in Microsoft Teams.
That from a user adoption point is game-changing, because now you don't need to certify an app, you don't need your users to download a new app, you don't need your users to remember a web URL, the app is just there living in Microsoft Teams.
So you don't have people going, okay, what is this weird thing?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: That's correct.
I'm curious, you mentioned the pandemic and COVID and there was endless writing about how this is going to change workplaces, everything's different. Will people ever go back to the office and so on?
I work from home and haven't worked in an office for a very, very long time, so I don't see it, but I'm curious, did it genuinely change, or did it just kind of sort of change?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: I think it really changed. I think employees will go back into the office, and most companies want that for cultural reasons, productivity reasons, and so forth, but the way we will go back into the office will never be the same. The physical workplace has changed. There are fewer desks than there were before, more meeting spaces of all sorts, huddle spaces, meeting rooms, conference rooms, a lot more, and so the way a user is going to operate in the physical workplace is never going to be the same as it was before. I think that's huge.
Also, we're still learning, and companies are still learning, changing, and adjusting. And so the core, the heartbeat of the workplace, in our case, Appspace needs to be super flexible to be able to implement new rules and new workflows to enable the user to plan their journey into the office and also to drive the behavior of a user. We have a huge services organization that implemented hot desking and hotelling, and when they opened their office, all the consultants and partners rushed into the office, and they had a huge capacity issue. People didn't book their workspace, so they expected they were going to find one, and there was no workplace available, so they got super frustrated.
So, the company implemented managed power outlets at the desk, and power is only enabled if you reserve your desk and check in on arrival. The following day, people who came into the office without reserving a workspace and trying to hijack a desk didn't have power, and that never happened twice. When you run out of power, you always figure out how to reserve your power for the next time you go around.
So I think those behaviors are changing, and technology is there to help the behaviors change, supporting the behaviors. And I think that's huge. So it's not telling an employee you have to reserve is telling the employee that if you reserve, you get all those incremental benefits,
Are you also able to support a lot of the devices that I saw in walking around Infocomm, and some of them I was already aware of like very small displays or even just little LED light things that communicate that this space is available, or maybe a display that says the space is available between these times and it's booked these other times or whatever?
I find those things very interesting in terms of office hoteling and so on.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, the number of new devices released in the last two years has been crazy.
Both you and I come from the signage world, and adding a new device and running content on the new devices is native to a digital signage provider. That's what we've always done. So whether you display calendaring data or turn on an LED or not, it's not different from any type of content in general.
I think that's where companies who did reservation software are struggling because they don't understand the physical workplace device side of the experience. But coming from the digital signage space in our case, we understand that. So, a scheduling panel back in the day, it was Crestron. Now it's Logitech and iADA and there are so many of those, the Cisco Navigator, and there are so many devices.
And because we're completely OS and hardware-agnostic, you run our app on it, and you deliver the scheduling experience and then the desk plugs are the same, whether you take the Crestron desk plug, the iADA desk plug, or the nPlug, they're all small desk plugs that allow you to run an app on it and display the experience on those devices. So for us, it's very native. What's interesting is what incremental device content we are putting on it and that's the other devices we don't see, all those IoT devices in the ceiling that track air quality, room temperature, humidity level, and occupancy. And being able to display that data back on the scheduling panel or on a wayfinding kiosk or a digital sign in the lobby when you enter the building, knowing where's the traffic, what's the occupancy rate, what's the current air quality. I think that's bringing another level of value. And as we always used to say in the digital signage world, content is king.
I assume you do analytics of some kind and how are they used?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: So analytics has always been a big part of administrative users of the Appspace platform to monitor the success of the communication campaign, being able to track which content plays at which time of the day and then when you combine it with tools such as audience measurements, cameras that try eyeball dwell time, then analytics becomes much richer because it's now a communication channel that you can really monitor and track the engagement level, but analytics on the workplace management is as important.
How many users came to the office? What's the average use of a workspace or type of workspace? Whether a meeting room is underutilized or overutilized with regard to the number of attendees? All of that data is extremely important. So we've built a lot of analytics and reporting capabilities in the Appspace Admin platform, so you can actually pull your reports, export all the data and view it live into Tableau or Power BI, correlate it with IoT sensor data, so you can now start to see Not only scheduled based data but also live data.
So I know this room was booked for six, but my live data tells me only four people are in the meeting room. I'm, therefore, underutilizing the workspace, or I'm running this communication campaign in the lobby, and I currently have 40 people standing in the lobby. That's useful data that you can have.
Now, when you add AI to it, AI starts to give us insights and recommendations. It will tell the facilities team whether or not you're about to run out of a certain type of resource. We're seeing a trend of desks with two monitors in the docking station, and we expect that within the next 30 days, you're going to run out of capacity, which will allow facilities to adjust their workplace and anticipate. And the same thing is true with the workplace. We've just released this week. The ability to create content on the signage and to auto-generate a QR code on the digital sign that will link to the origin of the content, whether it was SharePoint, your Appspace intranet, or the employee app.
So when you view the content, you scan the QR code, you're redirected. That analytic is captured and now you have true engagement on whether or not the communication campaign is successful.
Do you find that all these insights, are inherently actionable, but are your end user customers doing things with it? Or are they just kind of seeing and going, “Okay, this is what's going on?”
Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, on the facility side, it's huge because that environment is changing constantly, and they're looking at the best ways to optimize their workplace. So analytics is one of the most important things they want to get out of the Appspace platform.
From comms, now that we've re we really have true multi-communication channels, iit is becoming increasingly important for them to monitor their communication campaign. “Hey, I posted a story in the employee app. It was broadcasted on the digital sign in the Microsoft Teams channel in an email newsletter. I can track where users are getting access to that story. Is it directly from the app through an app notification? Is it because they saw it on the digital sign and scanned the QR code? Is it because they saw it in their email inbox and clicked on it?”
Most importantly, we allow reactions and comments and shares, and that provides additional analytics and so now that also provides additional value in understanding how people are reacting. But what's exciting with AI is that based on how content is trending, you can actually change the playlist on your digital sign to display content that is trending up or trending down to make sure you're getting the right message out to the user and you're promoting the right message and I think everyone is becoming more hungry for more of that.
A lot of what I see on the Appspace site and what we've talked about seems oriented to. white collar spaces to offices. Are you doing much in the so-called back of the house, production facilities, warehouses, factories, that sort of thing?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: A lot. I always start all my presentations to customers saying that we treat everyone as a first citizen of the modern workplace, and that's not just marketing. It's true. We want to make sure everyone benefits from the services that the organization's putting in place.
Signage for frontline workers is huge in warehouses. It's massive. When we acquired the Marlin company, it was because their number one focus was people in warehouses and manufacturing plants, making sure they were provided with the right safety information, education, material, and so forth. So I think we will continue to focus there. We're just now expanding the user to go beyond just the digital signage in the warehouse to their phone in their pocket. And if you're an employee or frontline worker in the store, you're not in all the time in the back office, you're often in the front office or in the front of the store, helping your customers to still be able to get that information, those important notifications on your phone are important and I think we do a lot there.
Again, unlike most of the signage vendors, we don't focus as much on the screen in the store, talking to the consumers. We're focusing more on the screen in the back office or the screen in the pocket of the user, but we, of course, do digital signage for retail as well.
What would happen if a retail chain came to Appspace and said, “Hey, we'd love to work with you guys on digital signage for inside our stores, not for employee comps, but to sell sweaters and shoes and so on.” Would you just say, I'm sorry, we don't do that?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: No, actually, the two largest retailers in Europe use Appspace in the store and in the back office.
The project started in the back store and eventually, customers saw, well, why can't I use that in the front store as well? We even integrated, I can't remember the name, with a little company out of the Netherlands who built an integration with Appspace to allow the sale of airtime in the store. We didn't build this natively in Appspace because that's not our focus. But by partnering with companies who have that expertise, we're able to deliver that.
The largest sports brand in the world uses Appspace in all its stores around the world. So we never say no to customers. But what we're very clear about is that we're not building a product just for retail. We're building a product for the workplace and if the features meet your needs, you're more than welcome to use it in the stores. I think we have a lot more than we expected using it.
Interesting. Last question. I get a sense from this discussion and previous chats that if you're a company lurking, looking at workspace as a vertical market, you really need to understand that it's a unique ecosystem and all of the different technology companies that feed into it.
You can't just say, “Hey, we can put stuff on your dormant screens and you can talk to your employees through our software.” You really need to stitch yourself in with all of the collaboration companies and all the other technologies that feed into it. Is that a pretty accurate statement?
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yeah, I think so. So I think companies are looking to consolidate, that's one thing. They're looking at replacing point products with a platform that delivers all those use cases through features and not point products for use cases like visitor management, room booking, and all.
So one login into one app, whether it's a physical workplace app or an employee app on your phone, you have one app, and you do everything from one place. That's for sure. It also needs to be truly integrated with the physical workplace because companies are looking to build up their ROI with the technology they're investing in. So, since the pandemic, everyone has rolled out more video conferencing rooms than before, but they need to justify ROI. ROI is by use of technology for its main purpose. But on top of that, when it's not in use, you can use it to better communicate and engage your audience and provide a better employee experience. There's incremental ROI to the technology. And so we can't be successful without integrating with all the players that exist in the physical workplace, whether they are access control systems to enter the building, how do I know if I have access into the building? When you scan your badge, your badge queries Appspace and confirms that you have a valid reservation and that you're granted access. It starts there, and it goes throughout the journey.
The menu boards of your restaurants, the menu needs to be on your personal device before you even get in the office. You could potentially book your lunch using the app. But when you arrive at the restaurant, the menu board reflects the same information As they have always been, but now you are aware you have that link between, “Hey, I saw that there was this on the menu and I can now see it on the digital sign.” And you have that continuity in the experience.
All right, Thomas. Thank you very much. I once again, learned stuff, which is what this is all about.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Oh, thanks a lot for having me. It's exciting. I remember the first time we met. I think we had a table at ISE, and now we have a bigger booth I'm glad it caught your attention, but we're super happy, and I'm looking forward to continuing to talk with you over the next few years.
All right. Thanks again, and safe travels.
Thomas Philippart de Foy: Thanks. Take care!
![Gideon D’Arcangelo, Arup](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/gideon-d-arup_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday Jun 26, 2024
Gideon D’Arcangelo, Arup
Wednesday Jun 26, 2024
Wednesday Jun 26, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When an announcement came out about the experiential work being planned for the new Terminal One at New York's JFK Airport, I was familiar with some of the parties involved but not the one guiding it all - a design consultancy called Arup.
I clicked over to LinkedIn and was surprised to learn this wasn't some little boutique company, but a multinational firm with more than 10,000 people.
Arup describes itself as a collective of designers, consultants and experts working across 140 countries. One of the intriguing aspects of the company is that while it has teams very much focused on the creative process, it also has large teams focused on wildly different aspects of projects, like structural engineering and water conservation.
I had a great chat with Gideon D'Arcangelo, a Principal at Arup who is running the JFK project and came over to Arup after many years at the much-respected creative tech firm ESI Design.
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TRANSCRIPT
Gideon, thank you for joining me. I think the first thing to do is tell me about your company.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Dave, it’s great to talk with you. Gideon D'Arcangelo, I joined Arup five years ago. I just reached my five-year anniversary of joining. Arup is a global design and engineering firm, 20,000 people strong, with over 90 offices. So, we work at a global scale. We're really joined up globally, and we do all aspects of design. We are a very multidisciplinary firm. We started out as structural engineers. We are a firm that has major projects with the Sydney Opera House and the Center Pompidou.
Arup is a cooperative. It became a cooperative in the 1970s, and so we have members that work globally, and we pride ourselves on our interdisciplinary design and practice something called Total Design, which is the more integrated, the more different disciplines working together, the better the outcomes in the built environment. Our main focus is on sustainable development, and in fact, the United Nations' sustainable development goals are our mission statement for the company and we feel that we can really move the needle since we touched so many projects in the built environment globally, every year, we can really move the needle in that direction.
Interesting. So, I'm curious about the sustainable development part of it. Is that a pivot that the company has made seeing where things are going, or is that kind of always been in the DNA or has been for some time?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: I'm really happy to say that sustainable development has always been in the DNA. Arup's been a leader in this place and has been leading in these concepts of sustainable development for 30+ years, if not longer. There are certain professionals here, Joe De Silva, for example, in the UK, who have been leading in sustainable design and development thinking for over 30 years, and really, we are happy to see that the sustainable advice practice that we have as the world is caught up to really understanding that this is a priority and a necessity. So not a pivot at all. In fact, something that we're just really happy to see is that everyone is focusing on it and prioritizing it as much as the firm is.
I was recently at a conference in Europe about digital signage. One of the major discussion points was what they coined as green signage and the whole idea of sustainability. I led a number of panels, one focused on the North American market, and I told the audience and confirmed it with the North American panelists.
While green signage is a big deal, and there's a lot of discussion around sustainability in Europe and other parts of the world, it's barely on the radar in the US and Canada, perhaps to a lesser degree, with a notable exception, maybe very large corporations, but most businesses really aren't talking about it yet.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: I think that's right that America tends to be and in Canada, North America tends to be a bit behind on this, and you get the leadership from Europe, from the UK, other parts of the world, I think, because resources are more constrained over there, frankly, and they're getting to understand the limitations of resources.
They're better than we do here yet, but everyone has come to terms with that quickly. So we tend to learn a lot from what's happening in Europe and bring it to the Americas because we know it's what's coming next.
Yeah. Some of the European guys were saying just about any RFP or tender that you get that's right up top, they want to know about your sustainability point of view and practices as well. One of the American guys said that in the last three years, we've never seen it in a tender; it's not even stipulated.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, it'll get there. It'll get there. It reminds me just of a project that I did at ESI back in 2015 for PNC Bank. PNC Bank, you may know, has just been a leader in the sustainable development of their real estate fleet for years, and there was a wonderful man named Gary Salson at the time, who was the director of real estate and commissioned the PNC Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, which at the time was the greenest sky riser and among the top 5 greenest sky rises on earth really pushed the envelope in terms of green design of a building.
I was at ESI at the time, and we were commissioned to create a digital display component, the sculpture component is part of the lobby experience. That was intended to give the building a voice and have it talk about how it was using resources or how it was saving resources really ahead of its time, fantastic project, and for that, we had to design our own canvas, our own display, because we couldn't put a big energy hog in the building to tell the story of the building. It was an interesting design challenge.
So you were at ESI for a whole bunch of years, right?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: I was at ESI for 24 years, so yeah, a long time. That's where I grew up in my career.
Fantastic experience. What was your role there by the time you moved on?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: I was in the organization's leadership by the time I moved on. I also led our business development and marketing. In the end, there, I became a multidisciplinary creative director on some of our projects, for example, leading the design lead on this PNC Beacon Project.
I joined the firm as a UX designer. We called it an interactive media designer in the mid-90s when I joined the firm.
Almost pre-digital.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, it was right at the cusp of all that stuff, and ESI was always leading edge in that regard, and we had a team of people that did interactive design when there were very few people in New York City at least the very few firms doing that at the time.
So that's how I grew up doing UX/UI designs for Museum interfaces. I was always into working in the built environment, creating some interesting museums and corporate programs. But over time, being there as long as I could, I was able to move into the position of design lead, where I could speak to the different disciplines required to deliver these experiences.
So we have physical designers, technology designers, hardware folks, software designers in both front and backend software design, visual design, graphic design, both static and motion, and content people as well as writers who are in practice. Directing that whole team together, is how you get these comprehensive experiences, and so that was what I was doing at ESI by the end of my career.
And it's the kind of company that while it's substantially in that particular space, in comparison to a rep or those kinds of companies quite small and you would have been contracted into projects like PNC and so on, as opposed to leading them versus I assume now with the rep that you guys are largely leading these projects.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: That's right. It's a different dynamic. When I moved to Arup, it was really about making a jump in scale and so from working in a 50-person boutique pioneering innovative firm in New York for a couple of decades, going to a global firm that's operating at a whole different level of scale, really excited me, and I thought this was a really interesting place to experience design because it was being recognized in the marketplace in different ways.
Various architecture firms were building up their experience in design practices. Arup was really interesting to me because it's primarily an engineering firm and so brings the deep technical acumen that no architecture firm could really bring to the table. So, I was attracted to a firm like Arup that could push into the next generation of experience design at much larger scales than we've ever seen it before.
So would you be competing for jobs with the populaces of the world in Gensler, or are they a different element of it?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Again, it all just depends on the context. We work with the populace. We work with Gensler all the time in various capacities on very big projects. There are ways to carve out scope for an Arup alongside our partners like populace and Gensler.
In some cases, we might find ourselves going up against each other for a certain piece of scope. All you know is that just happens in the course of business, depending on the client's situation and the way the scope has been described.
I'm guessing massive projects, but, at the end of the day, it's still a fairly small community, like the folks that at Populous and Gensler are some of the other companies?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, for sure. It's a tightly-knit world. We have a lot of respect for each other and we cross paths a lot at various, professional crossroads and conferences, that sort of thing.
So how was it to go from a company where you knew what everybody else was doing, and you're of the same mindset to ending up in meetings with civil engineers and people who were experts in water treatment facilities and so on?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, great question. I think that it was, first of all, exhilarating and inspiring, and invigorating. All of those things were really great. They were a catalyst for my thinking and what I wanted to do with my practice. I feel that the real part of being a good experience designer is being a good integrator of disciplines and being able to speak the language of multiple disciplines really fluently and so even at ESI, five different disciplines, it was not unusual, but a special mix of different expertise that were brought together. You had hardware people, you had people that knew about onsite construction and physical constructability, but you had people working on UX and UI design, and you had to be able to speak all those different languages, and dropped into Arup, suddenly 50 other languages to learn quickly, and, to really get, but there were many people that were interested in working with these integrated projects. So we have a fantastic lighting design here. We have acousticians of the highest order. We have fantastic AV designers but also even on the engineering side, we'll bring in folks that are working on urban planning.
It was really interesting for me to find which folks resonated with what we were talking about. Actually, we did a project in Providence, Rhode Island, where Arup, led the master plan for what was called the unified vision for Downtown Providence. It was one of the early projects that I did here, supporting one of my colleagues in the Boston office, where we took an experienced design approach to planning how to renovate and reinvigorate Downtown, and for that, we were working on a larger scale than I'd ever worked before. It was a whole Downtown district. We're putting experience design interventions into this plan, but we're also looking at the engineering of the site and how to make it ready for public use in a variety of ways.
So we worked both on the front end and on the back end, and all the infrastructure was as much a part of our design as the front-end experience pieces. That's what I was looking to do when I came here, and in fact, we did that, and it was a really interesting part of the design. It was so fascinating. We realized after a while that, after our Flood Modelers from the water team took a look at this and saw that the site was really going to be compromised in 50 years. We started to come up with a different design, building bridges, rather than digging tunnels, and a variety of things were done to actually shape the architecture of the site to anticipate the next 100 years and so I was like, that's the kind of thing we can do at Arup with this really highly integrated set of disciplines all under one roof.
Yeah, and that integration, I assume, is absolutely essential that you cannot operate in silos.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly, and I think that's been my skill, Dave, over the years: I'm a horizontally oriented person, and I'm a good interlocutor or translator. I can quickly pick up a language enough to understand what's critical in that one group and, make sure that constraint maybe is understood by another group that can't quite see it, and that's how I think you get to highly integrated design and make sure basically keep people talking to each other and keep working with each other, because every organization fights with silos because it's just the nature of larger organizations.
It can be deadly if that happens, though, right?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly. It's mission-critical, So Arup is, I think, smart in the fact that we have people that cut across as well, like myself, and I'm not the only one who cut across as well as we have deep expertise in our disciplines.
You can go into an engineering meeting and not be bored to tears or completely confused by what's going on.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: No, It's fascinating. It was just wonderful, always intellectually stimulating, and a really, really amazing group of talent here.
I have to say Arup came on my radar because of a post I wrote several weeks ago about JFK and one of the new terminals. I saw that your company was involved in that. Even though you're huge, I'm old and stupid, and I was completely unaware that you guys existed. That was intriguing to me. What were you doing there? And is that a typical project?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: That is a project that I am leading so I can really give you a good view into that, and I think it's an expression of all the things we have just been talking about the integration of multiple parts of a project that might in the past have been thought about as disparate or separate, and since the middle of 2022, Arup has been leading what the client calls the Art Branding and Digital Experience program of JFK New Terminal One and it came about because the Terminal has aspirations to be in the top terminals in the world when it opens in 2026, and it's known that these elements: a proper art program, a proper branding and storytelling program, and digital experience installations are all part of creating a true 21st-century Airport Terminal, and also, this is part of the larger context of the overall upgrade that's happening to all 3 of New York's airports, LaGuardia, JFK and Newark, and some of those new terminals are already online. You may have seen what happened at LaGuardia Terminal B was fantastic, right? I'm a lifelong New Yorker, so I'm benefiting from this.
Arup was deeply involved with Delta LaGuardia Terminal C. In fact, I did some work on that and Newark Terminal A just came online, so a lot of great stuff is happening from here. It's a good time for that, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is leading that effort to really upgrade. And so as part of that, there's a real demand for this art branding and digital experience piece and the idea was that while the architect was making the base building, and Gensler is the base building architect, a fantastic team from Gensler is leading that, the client was looking for one team to give a very integrated passenger experience for you of what that layer was that storytelling and a sense of placemaking was going to be on the architecture and that was going to be delivered through art branding as they called it and digital experience, and so we took on that role at the time, and so we've been leading the vision for that layer and for that storytelling and placemaking piece.
Since we started in 2022, we've gone through the strategy and design phases, and as you can imagine, 2026 isn't that far away. We're starting to move from design into production, and it was really key for that to make a strong narrative of what it meant to be coming into the New York airport and what's great about new Terminal One, Dave is, it's the only international terminal at JFK. People who are going to foreign lands are coming from foreign countries. So it's that kind of population coming through, and we had to create an experience really could only happen in New York. It couldn't be that this airport felt like something that was in Orlando or some other place it had to be for people coming from, coming, or New Yorkers departing or coming that it had to be something that could only happen in New York, and it's good that I'm a native New Yorker and I've lived here my whole life. I have a good sense of that. I like to think and we were really helping craft that narrative.
We then put together a team to work with us, and so we brought onto our team, Eddie Opara from Pentagram is leading the branding effort. We brought on a wonderful art curator team called CultureCore, who we've worked with in the past, at Arup that is leading the art curation, and then Arup is leading the digital experience design aspect of that, creating a whole set of digital canvases that are integrated into the architecture and a real media architecture style way throughout the terminal experience, both on departures and arrivals, and then a company that you know about we brought on, just last year after about a year into the process we brought Gentilhomme out of Montreal to develop the digital content for those digital canvases. We have a really amazing team that we're working with.
Another cool part of this project is that the client asked us to collaborate with the advertising partner for the terminal, Clear Channel to have this art branding and digital experience program complement what they were doing and work hand in glove, like one experience.
I'm happy that our client had the vision to do that, and the teams worked really well together to make something that was really passenger-centric and focused on what passengers needed every step of the way so that they worked together. It's they don't, there's no cacophony or competing for eyeballs and imagery. Instead, they work together because we work together and crafted the program.
How practically would that work in terms of, when you say they're working together, the digital at a home and the experiential art pieces?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Yeah, there are many examples of that.
Simply, we would work through each space and say, where are some of the high-value places where Clear Channel will do what they were doing and take that area, and then right next to that, we might put something that brings you into a New York sense of place, creating a moment, and so we went area by area and again, working together, it was going to really compose it together, I would say, and saying, hey, this area is good for that, and that area is good for that, and so one program came out of that. So that's what I mean.
Okay. So it means you're not running into conflicts around things like sight lines and you can design this in a way that makes sense as opposed to designing a terminal and designing where the experiential digital pieces go and then Chird Channel comes in and say, okay, what's left? Where can I put stuff?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Exactly, because you know, everyone's important in this program and we did it. What’s cool about it, I think, was we took a human-centric or passenger-centric approach to make those decisions and just thought, how can we make a great experience for passengers, and meet all the needs of the advertising program, meet all the needs of the experience design program, and keep it all organized that way.
I'm just always curious how companies such as yours invest a lot of time and have a lot of deep conversations with their customers. How do you define experience? Because when I think of an airport, my idea of experience is perhaps different from some others.
I'm intrigued by the big experiential art things and LED video walls and so on, because that's what I do. But for me, a great experience is wayfinding and status boards to tell me, “Am I late?” “Am I early?” “Where do I go?” All those sorts of things.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Those are also critical foundational parts of a quality experience. So that's a great question. I just gave a talk last week to an aviation group, and that's one of the things I said is wayfinding is the foundation of passenger experience design.
It’s boring, but it's incredibly important.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: It's critical, and for a geek like myself, it's not even boring and it's just so key, and it's not easy, and it's always being innovated, and in fact, there's a lot of innovation happening with digital in wayfinding now that we’re quite involved in, actually, not so much on New Terminal 1 project, but other airport terminals and other places.
The functional experience design has to be right, and that’s critical things. I'll just use an aviation example in a terminal. It's crystal clear where you need to go. It's crystal clear how much time it's going to take you and how much time you may have. You might want features on a mobile device that help you understand how you can get on tethered from your gate and roam and shop and eat and do a variety of things before you get on your plane. Those are key, and then there's the more ambient placemaking, sense of place environmental work also.
In this case, what we're doing with the New Terminal 1 is really that second category: creating that sense of place, telling that story, doing something that's all only in New York and doing that through a variety of means. It is that a whole other program is, in fact, happening for New Terminal 1 and one of the things I didn't mention. We also looked really hard at the wayfinding program to make sure that everything we were doing built off of that, too. There's a whole other because you have to pay attention to that functional side.
We do work, though, in other environments where our team will get into the functional side as well as the ambient environmental side, because they really need to work together as one.
I guess it changes with every project, but I'm curious, most typically, where does your team start and stop? Or where does Arup start and stop on a typical project? Or is there no such thing as typical?
Gideon D’Arcangelo: There's no such thing as typical, but of course, that's a broad answer because every project is really interesting and unique. No, but we start early. We're a whole life cycle company and we work with our clients that way because we are strategists. Still, we're also builders wearing hard hats on site, making sure that everything got installed according to the strategy and the design, and the big movement right now, in my opinion, Dave, what's happening in the built environment world is the shift from design and construction into operations is getting increasingly smoothed over and thought through in a different way.
So, a building was finished, and then people moved in, and there were various tasks like adding other things. “Add” is a term from air operational readiness that air airports used to shift from construction into operations because it has to work on day one; you can't take a few days to get it right. It has to work the moment it opens, you open the door. So there's a whole process, and Arup has that team. We can bring that to our clients as well, because our understanding of the design and construction process and the commissioning process at the very end, as it shifts into operations, gives us expertise in a way to make that as smooth as possible.
But beyond that, there is a whole movement of using the tools, the digital tools that you create and design and construction as models that then can be brought through into operations and putting sensors into the building and putting a variety of things into the design of the building, so as you move out of design and construction, you have a digital model of the building that you can help use to operate and maintain and work with facilities management and other teams that are helping that building to operate more efficiently once it's opened. So, the long answer to your question is that we really will start when there's a blank sheet of paper with our clients and help strategize what needs even to happen all the way through. Of course design is our main bread and butter. Of course, we stay on during construction to oversee construction to ensure it's delivered as designed and then increasingly into operations in that whole life cycle.
I'm guessing that when your career started, digital was something that was perhaps added on, thought about later in the game, and I'm wondering now, is the visual digital components of big projects are now fundamental to the overall thinking?
Like it's not something that's added on later. They're talking about it right from inception.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Definitely. It's a good insight, and I've seen that over the course of my now 30-year career to see the shift in that where initially we would have to work hard to convince the clients, even to consider some of these things, and then over time, about 10 years in, you started to see them showing up in a variety of ways and then increasingly they just become, as you say, just part of the program and assumed part of the program. But there's still such a long way to go on that front. And I've always thought that this idea of digital and physical being separate is a design problem of our age.
In a hundred years' time, people will just see that we got through that design problem and just digital permeates everything you do because it's, why wouldn't it? It's a smart way to go, and it's an innovation and human ingenuity and history. So right now there's a lot of work for bringing the digital mindset into every aspect of life, and particularly into the built environment. The built environment has been slow to pick up on this. So construction is really now in this kind of really exciting phase, the virtual design and construction where these digital tools are coming in and taking off, but there's a long way to go. I like to think of Arup as a leader in digital-physical integration, that's a task of our day, digital-physical integration.
It's not like digital something off on the side, but then you do it at the end or do it in a box. Instead, you think of it from the very beginning and build it into every aspect of how you design, deliver, and operate the project.
Yeah. I think it's exciting that we're getting very close to a level that LED displays, both physical ones and ones that are embedded in glass, and things like that can now be thought about as building materials that you can use as a wall. Is it necessarily going to be mahogany or travertine tile or whatever. It can be like LEDs that can be changeable when as much as they need to be changeable.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Absolutely. I worked with Michael Schneider when he was at ESI, with me. We often talked about that as we talked about media architecture as that was an emerging term in the field. One of the things I really am grateful for working with ESI was the idea that media wasn't something that you attach to an environment in creating an interactive environment, you actually were working with this audio-visual material as you say, that becomes part of the architecture, and what's interesting about that though is then the client for that gets confusing because if you're putting in travertine or mahogany, you're talking to one side of the client, the design and construction folks. As soon as you put a dynamic piece of media in, who are you talking to? You're talking to that same client who's responsible for building that space. But suddenly you're also talking to the director of communications and the director of marketing and the storytelling people of the company.
And that was something that I've always seen about this field. You needed to be able to talk to storytellers. That would be your CMOs, your directors of communications, your chief communication officers, as much as you could talk to the the head of real estate, that's building something.
Where it worked well, you got leadership from both sides on the client that really understood what you were doing. As you put this material into the building, there's still the question of what it's doing. What story is it telling? Who's maintaining it over time? What's the content strategy? And that's what made it really exciting because it's different from putting a static tile on the wall.
As soon as you put a media, an LED tile on the wall, it has a whole different governance aspect to it that is very modern, and I think now it is becoming standard. People expect that in their buildings.
All right. That was terrific. I know a lot more about Arup than I certainly did half an hour ago, and I suspect it'll be the same for a lot of listeners.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: That's great. Thank you, Dave.
I appreciate your time.
Gideon D’Arcangelo: Likewise. Great to talk with you.
![Industry Wake-up Call: Audio From Digital Signage Summit Europe 2024, With Florian and Stefan From Invidis](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/florian-stefan-600_hjfgmn_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Jun 19, 2024
Wednesday Jun 19, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on.
The third of three that I did was an unscripted chat with conference hosts Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker, of invidis, that was billed as a Wake-Up Call for the Digital Signage Industry, and the three of us raised a series of issues that don't get enough attention and work.
My big ones are, as always, having to deal with all the day to day BS put out by marketers, and related to that, the terrible job many to most of the marketers and business communicators do in this sector. Florian and Stefan get into other important topics.
It all sounds serious, but we tried to make it a fun, worthwhile 30 minutes.
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No transcript, sorry!
![Varying Vertical Markets In Digital Signage: DSSE 2024 Panel](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/dsse24-vm_9zrq9f_300x300.jpg)
Thursday Jun 13, 2024
Varying Vertical Markets In Digital Signage: DSSE 2024 Panel
Thursday Jun 13, 2024
Thursday Jun 13, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on.
The second of three that I did was focused on how to adapt to varying vertical markets, and that involved talking to companies focused on retail, food services and sports - Peter Critchley from Trison UK, hospitality with Tim Hoddy of Uniguest, and Jan Reiners of Broadsign, which is all about digital OOH.
This was the description for the 30-minute session:
From DooH to Retail to Conferencing: in the digital signage business, it is all about the verticals. Different industries have very different requirements and pain points. So you need to adapt your strategies and products accordingly. But how can you identify these pain points? And how should you organize your portfolio to serve different verticals? Our panels of digital signage experts from different verticals will answer these questions.
Speakers
- Jan Reiners, Broadsign, Sales Executive
- Tim Hoddy, Uniguest, VP Sales, Europe
- Peter Critchley, Trison UK, CEO
Have a listen …
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
No transcript, sorry!
![IT Security, with Craig Francis (Google) And Peter Critchley (Trison UK)](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/peter-craig_n22ky5_300x300.png)
Wednesday Jun 05, 2024
IT Security, with Craig Francis (Google) And Peter Critchley (Trison UK)
Wednesday Jun 05, 2024
Wednesday Jun 05, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I managed to talk the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on.
The first was focused on IT security, which I will admit is NOT an area I’m overly conversant in. But I had a couple of good people who could come at it from different angles – Peter Critchley from Trison UK and Craig Francis of Google, who is arguably the main champion in the European market for the ties between digital signage and the Chrome OS and Flex ecosystems.
This was the description for the 30-minute session:
IT security has long been desperately neglected in a silo-architectural dominated digital signage industry. But today’s CMS platforms are API-first, data-driven and fully connected. Secure and certified platforms are a minimum requirement for large enterprise customers, government and increasingly also SMB clients. What are today’s IT security threats in general and what’s the impact on digital signage? DSS Europe has invited IT security experts from Google and Intel to give first-hand insights into today’s and tomorrow’s risks and threats.
- Craig Francis, Google ChromeOS EMEA, Digital Signage Partner Manager and product expert
- Peter Critchley, Trison UK, CEO
Have a listen …
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
No transcript, sorry!
![Robert Johnson, PAM](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/rojo_37iswx_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday May 29, 2024
Robert Johnson, PAM
Wednesday May 29, 2024
Wednesday May 29, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There's been a steady stream of announcements in the past couple of years about new sports and entertainment venues going up in the US and elsewhere, and one of the notable attributes about these developments is that they are not just stadiums and arenas - they're big commercial developments anchored by that kind of building but surrounded by retail, residential and infrastructure.
They're sprawling, at times, and with that, not necessarily easy to navigate and use.
An Australian software company called PAM has a tag line about transforming complex spaces into loved places, and it does that mainly through what people in digital signage would call wayfinding. But there's more going on with PAM than just maps. The company blends that base capability with a digital signage CMS, mobile, analytics, and integrations with business systems, including Ticketmaster. It also intertwines all these components so that they're reactive, with data from one component informing another.
The company already has some big name, high profile clients and venues to reference, including SoFi Stadium in LA and the F1 circuit for Las Vegas.
Robert Johnson is VP Sales for North America for the company, and he has a deep background in both wayfinding and digital signage. He got into the sector years ago, in the early days of Four Winds Interactive, and I've known him for ages now. So it was great to learn about PAM, but also just great to catch up.
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TRANSCRIPT
Robert, great to catch up with you. I haven't seen you in years.
Robert Johnson: Likewise, Dave, it has been a while, and we go way back and it's great to reconnect with you.
I knew you from your time at Four Winds Interactive, where we were involved in a couple of pretty big deals. I was on the consulting side, and you were on the sales side when you were doing sales for that company. Could you give a background on your journey in digital signage?
Robert Johnson: Yeah, happy to, and you nailed it right there. You and I had a really exciting, fun opportunity to work on a couple of very large enterprise projects with some big names, great folks, and great clients and yeah, you and I cut our teeth together. That's where our relationship really spawned, but yeah, I was really fortunate, I got to start working with Four Winds Interactive when they were very quite small. I think when I started, there were somewhere between 25, and no more than 45 employees there.
Were they still in the house or had they moved out by then?
Robert Johnson: Yeah, I was in the original mansion, the Parkside Mansion, right off of City Park in Denver, Colorado, and that was a trip. They had weddings on the weekends and we sold software during the weekdays in there until we had to break down our desks. But that was a startup life right there.
Looking back is interesting because that was 16 years ago when I took that job with them and looking back, there's a piece of me that says that you can make a Netflix story about the rise of the software company because the economy was crap, it was 2007-2009, and the housing market crashed. I remember my parents asking me like, how do you have a job? How was the company doing?
What on earth is digital signage?
Robert Johnson: Why are people spending money on digital signage? And I remember telling my parents, I was young, I was in my 20s and I was like, mom, dad, this is amazing. People are buying this left and right. It was the kind of product that if you could just demo it and talk about it, you were selling it.
I was fortunate that I got to move up in the ranks and work on a lot of large enterprise deals, selling very complex digital signage solutions with incredible integrations to Delta Airlines and JetBlue Airlines, Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Staples, just massive digital signage implementations and yeah, we had lots of integrators and hardware involved and it was a ride, man. It was awesome.
So as it happens, people move on and you went to a new company but could you tell me what they were doing?
Robert Johnson: The connection is this: In the world of digital signage, I joke and say, I sold TVs for a decade, but on the TVs, on the screens, you're selling communications platforms, employee communications platforms, retail solutions, touchscreens, and wayfinding.
Wayfinding has been a part of my life for a long time. We sold many wayfinding solutions, helping guests navigate stores, retail, malls, airports, and other places. I then moved to a company called Concept3D, which when I started, only had one product: a mapping product, but no signage, and for me, that was a breath of fresh air.
I was able to eliminate all the hardware complexities because hardware fails, PCs and displays fail, turn on, turn off, and get vandalized, and for me, this was amazing. I could sell wayfinding without having to implement any hardware, and they have a phenomenal platform, but then their main focus was or is higher education and I was brought on to try to sell into enterprise solutions, and we had a few good deals in there, but then COVID hit and we launched another product for virtual tours and we did a bunch of other things in there. So they actually have five products now, all heavily focused on higher education, but the wayfinding piece always stuck around.
We sold maps to anybody who wanted to visualize their space and anybody who wanted to enhance their space. If you're on a college campus and campuses are huge, they're square miles large, and so you need to navigate those environments.
Easy to get lost in them.
Robert Johnson: It's easy to get lost, and a lot of faculty, students, guests, and parents are frustrated trying to make that experience better, and so that was the plug.
So you were with that company and then I think you went on a hiatus or something, and now you're with a company called PAM.
Robert Johnson: PAM, yeah, and this is not the cooking spray company. It's not spam. It's not Pam. Funny enough, and this is like an accident, but PAM is actually the word, map, spelled backwards.
Oh, okay. I was trying to figure out what an acronym was.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, but that was not intentional. We actually had a customer bring it to our attention. Did you know that PAM is MAP backward? Anyway, it's Project Asset Management. That's actually what it stands for.
But PAM is really unique because it combines the last 16 years of my life into this amazing software platform that has been in development for the last seven years, and so we're still in the ramp-up phase, the startup phase. We're not quite a startup. We're in a kind of launch phase right now in terms of our trajectory with adding clients and growth, but they do a couple of things. We have a digital signage component where we power hundreds and hundreds of screens for large entertainment districts, sporting facilities, stadiums, and arenas and we specialize in interactive wayfinding.
We don't go to market as really either one of those. We go to market as a smart navigation platform helping cities, visitors, bureaus, and entertainment districts have a more frictionless, guest experience, and as in your world, Dave, the frictionless experience can be anything from how do you get parking? How do you find something? How do you get information on screens or your mobile device? We touch a lot of different communication mediums. It's a perfect fit for me. I've been there for two months now, and it's just been super exciting.
Were you looking around, or did they come to you?
Robert Johnson: A little bit of both out there when you've been in the space for a while, as we chatted before, you get approached by people, and certain things become a fit and, every day on my, on LinkedIn and stuff, I'd probably get hit up by a recruiter every day for something, or you get someone reaching out to you.
So yeah, this just came across my plate. We chatted and chatted for a while. It wasn't one of those light switch things where you just turn on and jump ship. When you're our age, my age, your age, everything's pretty calculated at that point.
We're not our age. 'cause I'm way older than you.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, you're older than me.
I could be your father.
Robert Johnson: Fair enough.
I could even be your grandfather.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, wife, kids, all that stuff, and play, and I'm never just like making a brash decision to just jump because the technology is cool but yeah, it was a calculated decision, but once I got to dig into the software and see what these guys are about. Hindsight's 2020 and I'm just super, super glad I made the change.
This is an Australian company?
Robert Johnson: They are headquartered in Sydney but have an office in LA. Right now, I'm heading up the North American sales efforts, and they are very, very, hyper-focused on sports and entertainment districts. So yeah, we are taking a smart city, smart district approach.
It doesn't really happen as much in Canada because it's much, much smaller, but from what I can tell, any new sports venue that goes up is not just an arena, it's a district with residential, retail, dining, hotels, the whole nine yards.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. Like I joke and tell teens, yeah, you might be on a football team or a baseball or basketball or hockey team, that's fine. But you're actually in the business of pro entertainment. You just happen to have a hockey team associated with you or a basketball team associated with you and if you're football, you only have 8-10 home games a year. If you're basketball, you've got 40 and hockey 40, but there's another 200 to 300 days a year that you need to be putting on events.
So if you Google, there are 200 stadiums currently being built, planned to be built, and contracted to be built in the next 24 to 36 months and if you just follow a few of the blogs online every week, every month, there's a new stadium that's being announced or a new district that's being announced to be built, and all of these are now very integrated in the city. They're very much funded by voters and the city council and the visitors bureaus. It's a fully integrated approach these days.
I would imagine they pretty much have to say this is a commercial property development, and not just a stadium for that very reason, with the exception, maybe, Texas, where there are high school football stadiums that will see 20,000.
Most cities don't want to spend 200 million or whatever the number is on something that's only going to get a handful of days of use. they really need to justify that. This is going to create a whole bunch of other jobs.
Robert Johnson: Yeah. Nowadays, when a stadium is being built, they look at the entire infrastructure. Do we need to bring internet lines? Where's transit? Where's the parking? Where's the bus situation? If that stuff isn't considered, then the project just won't happen. It's a fully integrated approach, and there are Oakview Group, Legends, and Populous, and there are these massive architects and developers out there who are building these for them, they're managing these event centers and stadiums for the teams and the cities, and it's a huge business.
That's actually the way that PAM approaches the market. We go one to one and we sell our software and platform to the teams and the arenas. But we also are working the angle very heavily with the architects, and so we're talking to these projects right when they're breaking ground years ahead of time.
Yeah, I assume that what's important to them is that they may understand they're going to have digital signage, directories, and some degree of wayfinding, but they don't want a gallery of different technology providers to do it for them. They would likely greatly prefer that there's one service provider that can do the screens but can also do the wayfinding, the phone app for navigation, and everything else, right?
Robert Johnson: Yeah, a hundred percent. We work with Gable and we work with Daktronics. We work with ABI SPL, the tech providers so that when ABI SPL is recommending a solution, that way they have one wayfinding provider that's for mobile, that's for web, that's for the digital signage, and when they would need to make an update and communicate… I use this example on some of my calls, I don't know if a year or two ago, Dave, you were up in this area, the Buffalo Bills at the end of one of the games had a massive brawl and there was a fight, and that's like an incident, right? So immediately safety, security, and people like that are trying to get involved, and if you need to communicate to 50,000 people leaving the event that there was an incident taking place, you don't want to update your text message provider, your mobile provider, your web provider, or get on the phone with your web management team security.
You want to be able to go into one place and update. All your digital signage, all your communications, your mobile, everything with a click of a button, and that's the kind of stuff that we have the capability of doing. Just as an example, there are so many other things. Another cool thing that our software does when you think about planning and working with these different technology solutions is we have this really amazing data analytics platform where if there's an event happening on a Saturday, we can then show you this heat map that actually shows you all the dead zones. So if there's a dead zone on the South side of the entry and there's no internet right there, we'll actually be able to show you on the heat map that shows, as somebody was walking, there's a dead zone here and you may want to actually put additional, WiFi connections or routers or enhance the call-up Verizon or AT&T, your provider because there's a dead zone right there. So, our platform has the ability to do all these different things, which makes it really unique, and again, one of the reasons I'm grateful to be here.
Does the fact that you're working with stuff that's going to be on mobile phones as well, give you some sense of analytics as well, in terms of how people move around those kinds of spaces?
Robert Johnson: Yeah, that's one of our value propositions, which is the ability to provide data crowd management so that you can make a better decision. So think about this: I live in Golden, and I'm actually going to do one of the playoff games on Monday with my wife. We're going to go to the Denver Nuggets game. If I open up the Denver Nuggets app and I get a no before you go message, and it's, hey Robert, you have prepaid parking at this lot over here, and I pull up my app and I use the PMA app to get there.
The PAM app will then show that Robert Johnson because I'm logged into the, I got my profile set up with the Nuggets. It'll say that, Robert left his house in Golden via car, or Robert got on the train, went to Union Station, and got there. The team can then take that information back and say, look, you had 18,000 people at a sold-out game, and 4,000 of them took transit, they took a train to the game. You can take that back to your sponsors and your advertisers and Lexus and Toyota and those guys and say, look, you need to be advertising between the hours of five and six o'clock to all the people coming to the game and letting them know about the merchandise, food, beverage, coupons, parking, all of these things.
So yeah, our platform can give that data to the team so they can make literal, actual business decisions that drive revenue and sponsorship revenue and value to their sponsors. It's really cool. I have been in the wayfinding space for 16 years, and none of the companies I've seen have the ability to do that.
Yeah, I've always liked wayfinding, but the challenge I've always had with the stuff that you find on touch displays in shopping malls and so on is that you look up what you want, and it'll show you how to get there, but then you walk 10 paces and you can't remember where to turn or anything else. The next step is to put it on a phone, which gives you a little bit more, but it still seems a little disjointed from the rest of what goes on in a big space.
Robert Johnson: You'll like this, Dave, and I think you can probably validate it, as we're the only mapping platform that integrates with Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster Ignite.
So again, using that mobile example, if I'm leaving the Nuggets game and I just had an amazing time and there's another game because there will be another playoff game. If I'm like, honey, let's do it, let's buy the tickets for Wednesday night's game. Right there. I can do that transaction, and if it starts on the map and I say, yeah, I want to buy tickets right here and get my parking, we can follow that journey, go back to the Nuggets at the end of the game, and say, look, you had 4,000 people buy tickets, and their journey started on the map.
There goes 600 bucks.
Robert Johnson: Exactly, there goes 600 bucks.
But, like that's the thing that I, as a sales guy and sales professional, have always wanted to go back to my clients with and say, look, the map is generating revenue. We can see that people scan these hotdog coupons. We can see where people came from. You can go back to your sponsors.
All of this and more, Dave, just makes PAM; it's the belief inside me that knows that PAM is going somewhere pretty spectacular in this space.
Yeah, I'm sure that, some of the entertainment districts and so on that look at this, and say, the experiential side is very nice that this helps people get around, but if you can take another couple of hops and say, and it'll generate incremental revenue for you or boost the average attendee profile in terms of what they buy and so on, then that gets them a lot more interested.
Robert Johnson: It goes from a map turning into a really nice thing to have to, hey, this is something we really need and it provides value and impact.
So you mentioned that the company is ramping up, but I'm looking at the website and I don't want to rattle off names in case they're not accurate, but you're deployed in some fairly significant familiar areas, right?
Robert Johnson: Yeah, I'd say the company has really been fortunate in the last 24 months. The Australian Open was massive. It covers a huge ground in Melbourne, where the city is almost shut down for that event. Hundreds of thousands of people come in. We've been contracted with SoFi Stadium since the stadium's inception and went live.
That's the big one in LA for people who might not know that.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, they've got the Rams and the Chargers playing out of that stadium. Plus, it's a venue that hosts FIFA and the Super Bowl. I didn't realize this until a couple of months ago. The Super Bowl was just there, and the Super Bowl was the highest revenue-generating Super Bowl in the history of the Super Bowls because of the capacity and the venue drove so much revenue; the Super Bowl is going to be back there, not this season, but the following season.
It is not normal to have back-to-back Super Bowls within two or three years of one another at the same facility. And yeah, we're powering the navigation experience for that as well. Our relationship with Formula One is super strong. We just knocked it out of the park with Las Vegas, and yeah, before this call this morning, I just had a call across the world with another Formula One venue because of our relationship with Vegas. So yeah, it's been a gift. I appreciate that you kept on giving.
Yeah. Let's talk about Vegas because that's an interesting one in that it's a facility that's built for three to four days as opposed to a fixed venue that, if you like, you might go repeatedly. If you're a season ticket holder, you know your way around. But with this, everything was somewhat temporary, with the exception of the PADEX. How did it manifest itself?
What would be the PAM experience if I went to that I wouldn't because I just wouldn't want to deal with all the crowds,
Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. There are a couple of them out there. Miami is similar to Vegas because it's a semi-temporary structure.
There are now some permanent structures at both venues, but there are a few of them out there, in the world, but yeah, Vegas, in particular, was really unique, and they had a lot of challenges that they were very proactive in trying to solve this. You had to walk through Caesars Palace. You had to walk through the Bellagio. You had to walk through some of these hotels to navigate to your seat, to your area, maybe the party, or the venue that you needed to get to.
I didn't have the ability to attend the event, but I know, for example, the Formula One Las Vegas hat sold out. It's an interesting fact that they didn't make enough. They didn't realize that, but that was the one piece of apparel that everybody wanted to buy.
Probably because it was the one thing they could afford.
Robert Johnson: It's the one thing that they could afford, but everyone wanted to walk away and wear their Formula One hat, and as a takeaway for the event, they're like, okay, we need to put more hats around, we need to allow people to buy this apparel easier, we need to help people get to those locations easier.
I think you'll find this interesting too, Dave. I talked a little bit about the data, the heat maps, and the journey maps that we provided a second ago. That was a huge win for Formula One and the casinos. We were able to go back and show them. I'm going to make the numbers up because I don't have them in front of me, but let's say throughout the weekend, 50,000 people needed to navigate through the Bellagio or the Caesars Hotel to get from point A to point B, and we showed it, we could visually show them people were going and why they were going there and what the places they searched for. But because it was the race's first time, we didn't do any interiors for the Bellagio or Caesars. We just had the exterior of the building.
So now we've contracted with those properties to do the interiors so people can more easily navigate those facilities and get to where they need to go because they were like, we spent way too long trying to get through this hotel. We didn't know how to get through.
Yeah, and Las Vegas is a textbook example of where navigation is incredibly valuable. I've been to Las Vegas 40+ times, and if I go into something like Caesars, I'm going to get lost. There are no straight lines.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, there's no straight lines at all.
Our integration with Ticketmaster also played big into that one as well, again, if you're Dave and you bought a pass for you're going to be sitting at Turn 12, you're going to have parking around Turn 12. Your entrance is only going to be at Turn 12, and so when you want to scan your QR code or you want to get directions, our integration is going to say, we know Dave, bought parking here. We know he's staying at this hotel. We're going to get him to his property. Again, that integration with Ticketmaster was a really big value-added feature for the curated content experience.
So, how does the digital signage component work? Typically with a wayfinding application. It's a file that's going to sit in a digital signage schedule and that's how the two kind of sync up with each other. but I'm thinking it's probably a little different here.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is a little bit different. As you would expect, we have a content management system that allows us to manage the content on the map and the digital signage as well and so if you have a non-interactive sign, we can control the content on there. We can control the content if you have an LED parking sign. But there's a connection between the two, an integration between the two, where if parking lot G gets filled up, we can say it's full, and we're going to go ahead and let the digital sign or the LED board say it's full.
We're also going to provide that update on the map as well or the interactive kiosk so that all of that content is married up into one kind of seamless user interface.
So it's all integrated as opposed to, I'm going to do something with the mobile app and the wayfinding component of this, then I'm going to back right out of that and then launch the digital signage piece and do other things.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, exactly. The name of that platform with the digital signage is called 360 Live. That's what we call it. It's like a full 360 experience, but that's the idea. You don't have to go into two or three different systems. We don't have multiple content management systems. We've got one that has its parking application. We've got one that just handles navigation. We've got one that handles the digital signage, but when you make an update on one, it updates across all of them.
You mentioned Daktronics and Gable. I'm assuming you guys avoid the hardware side of it.
Robert Johnson: Yes, thank goodness. We do. I would have nightmares if I had to get back into the hardware game. So yeah, we work with those guys to partner with them on the hardware piece.
So is it something that you license via SaaS, or is it an on-prem thing?
Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is SaaS. We're a software as a service company.
We have managed services as well, but yeah, like a lot of companies nowadays, we have an ongoing recurring annual software fee that includes software support, maintenance updates, all the features we roll out. We've got initial set up fees for us to build out the beautiful artwork set things up and get it integrated. but once it's up and running, our clients can manage it on their own.
Formula One's done a great job of that. SoFi has done a great job of that. But a lot of these teams have really small marketing teams, and they rely pretty heavily on their vendors and so we do a lot of hands-on management of their applications for them.
We've known each other for a long time. One thing that I've noticed on LinkedIn in the last, I don't know, two or three years is a lot of posts by you about something called the Robert Johnson project, and it seems like you've been on something of a personal journey and the undertone of, it seems to be that you realized I was working my ass off and maybe not paying enough attention to my family.
Robert Johnson: You nailed it, Dave. You really did, and that probably just comes from years of experience that you have ahead of me. I've always been big in professional development and training and things like that and I started working very closely with a coach and coach, Townsend Wardlaw. I don't, Townsend Wardlaw. A good friend of mine, who I have known for 20 years, came back into my life, and yeah, I spent a lot of time working with him, I used to think that the number one thing in my life was work and success and money and getting up the food chain and I did a lot of that and I, and there was a kind of a cost to it, and the cost was a lot of travel. What you and I did together on occasion, a lot of it was late nights and dinners and president's club and all that stuff was awesome.
I had two kids while I did all that, and man, it's tough because without having done all that, I wouldn't be the person I am, and I wouldn't have a lot of the success maybe that I've had, but I pumped the brakes as I got close to 40. I joke, Dave, and I say I could write a book called 38-39-40, and when I was about 38, this all kind of came to a head, and I realized, the number one thing in my life is my kids, my wife, then sales and me. If I can work on all those things and put my family ahead of everything else, everything else will follow, and I'll still be able to have a really successful life. Yeah, I posted a lot about that on LinkedIn, and I still do occasionally because it's a big part of what I'm doing.
Now when I think about LinkedIn, I've got three kinds of things or passions, and one is my life. One is sales. I love posting about just sales, and then one is PAM and those are like the three buckets of things I enjoy talking about and posting about, and I don't have to try to do it. It just comes out naturally.
So a lot of people have that journey and realize, you know what, I need to pay more attention to my family and not be so obsessed with work, but they don't call it a project, and they don't put it up on LinkedIn. That's not a criticism in any way. I'm just saying I'm curious why you did that.
Robert Johnson: Wow. Why did I do it? Everyone's different, but for me, when you say something, you hear it, and you put it out there, it just becomes real. It becomes really tangible and real, and it becomes something that you live by, you wake up, and you know it is there, and you can come back to it every time something bad happens, you have a bad day, or if something didn't go the way you wanted it to.
When you go back to what your purpose is… I have a purpose and my purpose, it goes, actually goes in this order. I misstated earlier, but it's my wife, it's my kids, it's me and it's sales. Those four things are my purpose on LinkedIn. I've got another mission statement, and it's to connect with, motivate, and inspire as many people as possible. I come back to those things. If anybody asks, what are you doing on LinkedIn? And I said, look, I just. I just want to connect with people. Why do you want to connect with people? I want to see, if maybe I can motivate somebody. Maybe I can help somebody. Maybe I can inspire somebody.
It hasn't been quite two years, Dave. I started my journey. It was like September, almost 18 months ago, and man, I helped a friend. I said, now she's a friend, a woman at the time who really wanted to get into Formula One, and I made a couple of introductions, and literally about four months after I made some introductions to her, she was on a plane to the UK and gave a live in-person talk about UX and UI design to Silverstone. And that's inspirational and motivational to me and it all started with a connection, and LinkedIn serves a lot of purposes. That stuff just makes it exciting and fun, and I'm going to keep doing it as long as it's still exciting and fun.
As you know, running a podcast and stuff can sometimes feel like work, and when it becomes work, and it becomes really hard, and it's not fun anymore, I'm sure that you would probably just turn it off and walk away if it became really painful and crappy.
All right, Robert. You talked about connecting, and it was great reconnecting with you. We need to stay in touch more.
Robert Johnson: Yeah, Dave, really appreciate the reconnect here. This has been great, man. I'm just so happy for you with your business and everything you got going on and, yeah, thanks again for having me on.
![Jay Leedy, Videri](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/jay-headshot_ynm4cj_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday May 22, 2024
Jay Leedy, Videri
Wednesday May 22, 2024
Wednesday May 22, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Jay Leedy probably had a bunch of options open to him when he decided he'd done his job with Sony's pro display team, and it might have surprised some of his industry friends when he signed on with a much smaller company, New York-based Videri, as its Senior VP for Strategic Alliances.
It didn't surprise me, because Videri has been on a bit of a tear in the last few months, hiring well-connected and respected senior people away from other companies active in digital signage. That came out of a $20 million fundraising round announced late last year.
I did a podcast about a year ago with Videri CEO Wes Nicol, so I didn't want to spend too much time talking again about Videri's product and services. We get into that and what attracted Leedy, but what I was really interested in hearing about was his point of view on the CMS software market. His prior role with Sony was building up the digital signage software ecosystem, which involved talking to and looking at scores of different companies. He eventually onboarded some 90 in his three-plus years there, about 70 of them CMS software firms.
So Leedy has a pretty unique perspective on what's out there, and how companies differentiate themselves in what remains a very crowded CMS software market.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jay Leedy, thank you for joining me. You've had some big changes in the last few weeks.
Jay Leedy: Thank you. I have. Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to hear your voice.
Yeah, you don't want to see me.
Jay Leedy: It's been a couple of months since I saw you last at ISE, but yeah, some changes that were on the horizon at ISE kind of came to fruition over the last several months, and I'm happy to say I'm in my fourth week, almost complete with my fourth week here at Videri.
Wow, you're almost past probation. Are you going to make it?
Jay Leedy: They haven't kicked me out yet. My wife told me that the paycheck showed up in our bank account yesterday. Yay!
Things are rocking. I knew you when you were with Convergent and Diversified then you went over to Sony. Am I missing anything there?
Jay Leedy: I think that's the extent of my career in this space. I got introduced to integrations prior to moving to Convergent through a company that had point-of-purchase display manufacturing as their core and had a division that focused on, what we called Intelligent Loss Prevention. We were basically importing a lot of technology solutions to solve theft prevention in retail and that's how I got exposed to systems integration, and when I saw digital signage as a part of that, I naturally gravitated toward that. I saw there was going to be a big growth arc and fortunately, I've been right so far.
We can get into what you were doing with Sony because I'm intrigued by the role you had and the unique perspective that was offered, but I'm curious because when you started thinking, okay, I've done my job here with Sony and what's my next thing?
What compelled you to go to Videri, I suspect you had a number of options.
Jay Leedy: Yeah, it's a good question. The little background that I just gave you is in part why Videri was really appealing to me. You're right. I had really broad exposure to the market across a number of technologies, not just digital signage, and was considering options outside of digital signage, to be perfectly honest, but the reason that Videri was compelling for me was a couple of reasons.
One is the, very strong push they were making into the market with some clear funding and a product offering that was differentiated in displays that were very thin and lightweight looking and appealed to the sensibilities of retailers and designers and the folks that I really like engaging with on the creative side of our business, combined with software that really makes it easy to make these things pop and, deliver what we call orchestration of content across multiple canvases of displays to unify those.
But there were some other things that went into that as well. I met Rob Avery, who had recently joined the company from Scala, at your event at ISE. I'd already met Wes Nicol, the CEO, about a year prior, and then Steven Jenkins, who I'd worked with at Diversified, had recently joined as the CRO along with Nathan Jones, who I'd also worked with as a Managing Director for North America. So there are already some pieces in place, and when I met Rob and we chatted briefly about his point of view on where we are versus where he wanted to take the software on the roadmap, that really clicked with me. Then we announced Jeff Griffin coming in as a retail technology guru and a guy who was at the genesis of what we called Walmart TV. So it wasn't even digital signage when he was involved with that deployment. So he's had a long history of selling into that market, and really the last piece to fall into place for me was, we secured, Tom Ross from NowSignage and I think he must eat energy bars constantly. He has the most energy and passion for the channel of any guy that I've met in this industry, and I've met a lot. All of those things coming together was really a big part of making that decision for me.
Yeah, it's interesting. I've told the story a few times of couple of years ago at DSC in Vegas, some company called Videri had reached out to me and said, could you come to our suite at ARIA and have a look at our pots and pans? And I said, I'm super busy, and so on, and they bugged me and on the last day in the afternoon, I was dead tired, but I said, okay, fine, because I was staying next door and I didn't know a damn thing about them and met them, walked this endless hallway to get to their suite and they showed me these flat panel displays.
I thought, oh, dear God, I've walked all this way to see some skinny displays, but then they started to explain what they're up to, the business model and how they were working with a very large Austrian energy drink brand that they're not allowed to officially talk about, and I thought, now I get it, and over those, intervening two years, the company has really grown in terms of marketplace visibility and everything else and they have a somewhat unique, not entirely unique, but somewhat unique product.
Jay Leedy: Yeah, I agree. In fact, I was registered to go to that same event but couldn't get there because I was super busy that week. I also didn't have a relationship with them yet. So I didn't yet feel obligated, but I didn't see their product until Digital Signage Week, or maybe it was NRF, one of the two where they had a hospitality event at their offices in New York and I made my way there and I was as compelled as you were because of what they were doing but also where they were saying they were going.
And you're right. The visibility for Videri has been exponential. I think as contemporaries in our sphere of the industry have gotten more visibility to their hardware and a better understanding of whether software can cause the entire industry to really lean in and that's been the case. I think when I announced that I was leaving Sony combined with two days later announcing that I was joining Videri, I never had as much web traffic on my LinkedIn as those two days. I think it was something on the order of 15,000 impressions between the two posts and that tells me that there's a lot of people who were really intrigued about what this new company is and as I've gotten deeper into the organization and started to really look around at the core architecture of our software, which is an Android-based SoC. So all of our displays run Android 12, which offers a lot of opportunity for third-party solutions to run alongside ours, or in some cases, in place of our software with our firmware being the glue that binds the delivery of that software, and I think there's a lot of opportunities in that regard as well, right?
My goal will really be to build out an ecosystem and a partner strategy very similar to what I was doing at Sony and fortunately, I have a lot of existing relationships that I was already working with that can parlay right into that, that are all dialed into that Android approach, but I think Android, in particular, was compelling for me because it has become a de facto standard in many respects and in a lot of cases with retailers, because of the security components to it, and our particular flavor of Android is locked down, which is really appealing. all the stars really aligned there.
It's interesting because Android, if you asked people out five years ago, they would probably say no, not going anywhere near that.
Jay Leedy: I know when I was Diversified, it was an absolute non-starter, but the market's changed, and fortunately the strength of Android and the security protocols have changed, and I think it's you and I've talked about a little bit, right? The impression and kind of point of view on Android Deployed in enterprise environments has changed as well.
I think largely because of the broad use of MDMs or device management solutions and familiarity with those tools, with IT admins having a level of comfort with those. At the end of the day, displays for digital signage are IOT devices that have to be managed and locked down in a similar fashion. So something that's familiar just resonates with those decision makers.
You mentioned a couple of minutes ago third party suppliers or providers.
Are you saying, and you can correct me if I'm getting this wrong, that if I'm another CMS software company, I could, in theory, drive Videri displays?
Jay Leedy: Absolutely, and we've already tested a handful of them. I think we've got about five so far. We've also tested some lift-and-learn solutions that are quasi-CMS but would also be able to run in concert with our CMS.
That'd be like Glass Media stuff?
Jay Leedy: It's more like Sign Metrics. We're on ARC over at Pick‘n’Watch. He's got a really interesting solution that's all Bluetooth and UDP-based. We're also looking at wireless solutions for audience measurement, the likes of Blue Zoo or Movia Media.
Some of the CMS platforms that we've tested, run the gamut of the kind of those that are known more heavily in the space, like Spp Space and Corbett, and then others that are maybe lesser known like Play Signage or one of the newer ones that, as you mentioned earlier, the idea of a hobby business that's not yet full bore or fully funded or has a sales and marketing team behind it, what have you… There's a company called AbleSign that's got some pretty capable products.
Largely a lot of these are available as progressive web app options where the device management capabilities of their full-featured apps are stripped out and therefore don't present a conflict with some of the remote capabilities that are the device management capabilities that we bring to bear. But, in the longer term, we'll also test scenarios where maybe a full-featured solution could be used or what we see more as a trend; why I was looking maybe outside of digital signage, in other technology providers, is that, especially in North America, and I think that this will cascade to other markets is that enterprise clients, in particular, have a point of view on device management.
So, it was really important when I was at Sony to be compatible with whatever infrastructure decisions had been made upstream so that we could just say yes to projects and be specified regardless of what the requirements were. To some extent, that's a consideration with Videri's approach as well.
It's interesting, with this idea that you can work with other CMS software companies. I'm trying to envision that phone call or that meeting on their end, wouldn't they be saying that you have a software that competes with our software?
Jay Leedy: Yeah, but I think we also have a really attractive line of hardware, right?
The kind of customer that will gravitate towards our hardware may, in some cases, already have an investment and an existing state of software that they don't want to deviate from. So it may make sense for us to offer our hardware with some recurring fees for the support and device management components while also being able to enable content management on a familiar platform that is more broadly used across their estate. Those are scenarios that we're gaming out.
What drew my attention in the tippet area is how the square displays in particular were something that could replace old beverage brands’ neon or plastic backlit signs in bars and restaurants. It was something that was dynamic, the quick ROI that would come out of that, but I've seen Videri in particular marketing, multi-screen video cone matrix. I think there's another word you guys use.
Jay Leedy: We call it an orchestration, but yeah, it'd be a mosaic or a configuration of multi-canvas screens that, in some cases, we're seeing incorporated with other visual merchandising elements or other artwork elements in hospitality applications, for example.
You might like static, traditional artwork and imagery interspersed with dynamic elements that are part of Videri. The entire wall can very easily be mapped, and content pushed and split across the displays so that it makes sense visually without a lot of hardware to deliver that, and I think that's really a unique element of our software.
Yeah, and I like the ability to mix and match squares and rectangles display canvases and I know Samsung had a square product years ago, and it came and went because they like to sell hundreds of thousands, not thousands of units, but it came back with this and because manufacturers in Asia are now able to natively manufacture square things instead of cutting a rectangle and turning it into a square, redoing the electronics and costing a lot of money.
Jay Leedy: Yeah, the run rate on our square product versus the other ones is probably not as high, to be fair, but those unique shapes and, I think, more specifically, smaller form factors, the lighter weight, the bezels are only probably about three quarters of an inch thick. The fact that they're low-voltage offers a lot of flexibility. We've got a shop fitter or a point-of-purchase display manufacturer in Germany that's developed a unique bracket that allows these displays to be moved around in their modular system. The entire system is powered with low voltage.
It's a company called Visplay, and they've done some really interesting stuff. These powered, essentially track systems or grids have ports, and the brackets are designed to automatically pick up power as soon as they do. Once they hit the Wi-Fi, they just start playing content again. So it gives the retailer or the shop fitter a lot of modularity, and they don't have to get a technician on-site to make these changes. It's something that they can do with store staff and that's really appealing as well.
That's interesting. I've been doing a lot of reading and paying a lot of attention to the whole retail media networks landscape of late because it's obviously got a lot of traction, even though much of the spending now is not in the store but billboards and online, but it's going that way and I've said and heard from people that it's not going to be a second wave of stores, putting big ass LCD displays on every available surface like it maybe was in the 2010s when athletic wear retailers, in particular, were doing that.
It's going to have to be smaller displays and interesting displays that fit into the design and are designed from the start or ones that don't get in the way of merchandising.
Jay Leedy: Yeah, exactly. I think we've seen that in various gestations over the last several years, especially in consumer packaged goods, brands will incorporate digital elements as part of a turnkey fixture package. It's one of the things I was working on with Diversified prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately, the pandemic killed the momentum on a project that was really promising for us.
But it was in partnership with Westrock, and the idea was that, as Diversified, we would be the integrator and managed service provider to support design, build, and ultimately manage and service these things once deployed. Westrock designed the fixture and also what they called kit packing. So they brought in inventory from their partner at the time, GlaxoSmithKline. They fully merchandised a display fitted with graphics and then added our digital elements with an LTE modem cradle point. As soon as the store personnel received it, which they wielded into place, they didn't have to have a technician. Essentially, they had a turnkey solution that, as soon as it was plugged in, called home and had a range of content that would be played based on a number of parameters. There was an integrated camera.
So, I think there's a really appealing turnkey solution that doesn't have to rely on the retailer's data infrastructure, which is usually fairly constrained. This gives the brands a lot more freedom for placement but a lot more control over execution as well as the ability to, as you rightly said, put digital in places where you wouldn't expect it, and that's a hallmark of our approach, right? These smaller screens are unique form factors that are less obtrusive and don't detract from the merchandising but actually can complement it, and you're right, I think retail media networks will manifest in that way so that it's not an afterthought. It's not a screen that's hanging from the ceilings left in front of the end cap, but it's actually integrated into the end cap or into the merchandising fixture or what have you. So it really does the job of carrying the brand message, and I think there's a lot of appeal there, especially in lifestyle brands. Especially for a product where, through our orchestration, we could draw attention to an entire category or shop within a store rather than just having individual merchandising fixtures, each with its own message.
The adoption barrier that I've encountered when I've talked to brands about this, what you were just describing is they like it, but they only need it for six weeks or four weeks or some defined campaign term, and even though they may be a big CPG brand with all kinds of products they're so siloed that you couldn't just say, “This shampoo digital fixture could be a body lotion fixture for round two, and you could share it across different ones.”
They’d say, “Yeah, but that would never happen.”
Jay Leedy: Yeah, that was actually the concept of the one that we were working on with Westrock and GlaxoSmithKline. So the idea was that it'd be a seasonal product that was focused on at the time, Flonase and Claritin, and then once the season for allergies was over, they would pivot to another product that was better suited to the next season. That was exactly the concept.
I think you're right. There is a seasonality to these activities, but the beauty of digital is that you can effectively reskin these things and repurpose them. So long as you have an intelligent design and the rest of the fixture to accommodate a range of products, and basically send in another kit of graphics and merchandise to correspond with that in partnership with a kit packer like Westrock.
You can clarify your role with Sony, which you were there for two or three years, I think. But what I found intriguing now that you're not there is that your gig was basically developing partnerships for Sony to use its smart displays. When you started, there were, I think, one or two, maybe, and by the time you left, I think you were past 80 different partners.
So you had this unique perspective of talking to a whole bunch of CMS software companies about what they had and analyzing whether there was a fit, and I'm just curious, having seen all these different ones and now somewhat detached from them, what your impression?
Are they all the same, which is, I think what most people would think?
Jay Leedy: Yeah, I was there for three and a half years, and you're right. When I came on, there was exactly one product that had gone through any kind of formal due diligence or QA, and so my program was really about building out that ecosystem with some formalities and processes, and I was fortunate enough to talk to and onboard roughly 90 different technologies that were, I'd say maybe 70% of those were digital signage and the rest were spread between unified communications or AV over IP as a software-defined solution. We also had a range of telemetry and UCC solutions as well.
I think I had exposure to roughly 140 companies or so. On the CMS front, I know Invidus recently did a report that you commented on in your blog as well, and you're not wrong, for the most part, a lot of CMS platforms, at their core, do the same thing. The difference is how they do it. For me, the flexibility in their architecture, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of progressive web apps that decouple some of the real differentiation early in the market, that was an all-in-one solution with device management, has kind of evolved to the point where customers want flexibility and deciding and decoupling that device management from CMS but there's also, I think, the extent to which these companies have invested in APIs and manage those APIs and other data connectors and understand interoperability sets them apart.
I think for me, with Videri and our clear focus on retail and creative agencies and optimizing and enabling workflows that would be API dependent, as well as a cloud-based SaaS that has the flexibility to be able to grow and evolve, in that direction, that was what was appealing for me. It's not to say that Videri was the only one with all those marks ticked in their offering, but as we talked about earlier, had some other organizational considerations that really were the determining factor for me coming over here.
Without naming names or anything, did you see companies that were clearly more advanced versus ones that were maybe building on something that they've had for many years, and they're just incrementally bolting new capability onto an existing software stack?
Jay Leedy: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's true for any company in the tech space that, at some point, you have to acknowledge that your technical debt load is too much and completely re-architect the solution. We've seen that happen with a number of companies in our space. There are a number of others that continue to struggle with that technical debt and architecture that just doesn't lend itself to meeting the expectations of the market.
Were you recommending the key things that, whether you're a solutions partner or an end user, they should look for if they want to be future-proofed and really modern?
Jay Leedy: First and foremost, these days, it's an API-first strategy. We need to ensure that There's a robust enough set of APIs to enable baseline telemetry and interoperability with a number of other API-first solutions. I think about, in particular, what's happening with digital transformation in large consultancies like Accenture, EY, and Deloitte. A lot of those hinge on moving from on-premise to cloud-based solutions for a range of business applications.
If anybody listening to this podcast is using Office 365, for example, there are a number of third-party solutions that plug into those, obviously with a fee involved. However, to enable that, you have to have the right architecture, and digital signage isn't that different.
We talk a little bit in this industry about headless and the idea of headless means, I think, escapes some people. I think the idea of no or low code development also, I think, escapes some people, but both of those are similar in that they enable. A much lower cost of entry to get a lot more functionality because the architecture is built in such a way that it can just essentially plug in like a Lego, and you can create building blocks that are predefined, versus having to have a linear development approach that can be really cost intensive.
Yeah, I was on a call yesterday, and it was interesting. They were talking very much about that. From my perspective, if you have a solution that has a distinct login and you have to do everything digital signage through that login, with no real hooks into anything else, that's a big challenge, particularly for larger organizations that want to use one tool set.
It's going to push out to whatever the endpoint is and whatever that endpoint is communicating.
Jay Leedy: Yeah, and also just thinking about all the different ways content can be generated now. There's been a lot of buzz around generative AI, but the rules for content and distribution largely have been in most of these CMS platforms for a long time. But a means of automating those rules and creating if this, then that scenario or ingesting data that can then drive outcomes and content. that's not necessarily core to a lot of those platforms, or leveraging API calls directly from digital asset management tools and leveraging all of the metadata tagging logic that is built into those, and pulling those directly into the content strategy also necessarily isn't native to a lot of CMS platforms.
So I think those are all kinds of key things to consider when making a selection or at least knowing, if it's possible downstream, should your company mature to the point where they want to leverage those types of tools.
If people want to catch up with you and talk about what you're doing with Videri, I know they can find you online, obviously, but you'll be at Infocomm?
Jay Leedy: I will be at Infocomm and the Digital Signage Federation mixer in Tampa in about two weeks. Either way, I'd love to see you and continue the conversation.
All right, Jay. It's great to catch up.
Jay Leedy: Great to see you as well, Dave.
![Ross Noonan & Larry Zoll, LED Studio](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/ross-larry_2fpprd_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday May 15, 2024
Ross Noonan & Larry Zoll, LED Studio
Wednesday May 15, 2024
Wednesday May 15, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
I have invested a lot of time in the last six or seven years trying to educate myself on LED display technology and terminology, but sometimes it feels like I have mountain to climb and I am still at base camp looking for my oxygen bottle stash.
Manufacturers and their marketers keep coming up with new terms and acronyms, and they often play pretty fast and loose with their descriptions and assertions. Exhibit A are all the companies who are marketing microLED products that aren't microLED, and Exhibit B is the crowd of Chinese manufacturers saying they have Naked Eye 3D LED displays, when all of those visual illusions seen on displays lately are the result of clever creative and have nothing to do with the display technology.
So I have a lot of time for a UK company called LED Studio, which has made the conscious decision to educate its customers and broader market, instead of blinding that market with piles of specs and marketing terms that few people understand. The company has resources on its website that explain the technology and clear some of the technical fog, and people who know their stuff, speak openly, and aren't in perpetual Always be Closing sales mode.
I had a great chat about LED technology terms, what's going on in the industry, and what really matters. My guests are Larry Zoll, who runs US operations, and Ross Noonan, the UK-based Technical Sales & Marketing Manager and the guy leading the education effort. The accents will give away who is who.
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TRANSCRIPT
Larry and Ross, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a quick introduction of who you are and what LED Studio does?
Larry Zoll: I'm Larry Zoll, the president of the LED Studio's operations.
Ross Noonan: I'm Ross Noonan, the technical sales and marketing manager for the LED Studio.
Larry Zoll: We are a UK-based LED display manufacturer with a growing presence worldwide.
So just for clarity, Ross is over in the UK, and Larry is in the United States right now, so they can't look at each other and go, now you talk or whatever.
So, I've known you guys for a while. I've been to your little demo center in London, and I know LED Studio is based in the West of London. I had a good chat with Ross at ISE, and one of the things that really struck home for me was that there was a company that was actually trying to educate the market on more than just their product.
You know, Ross, in particular, was trying to clear the fog through blogging and videos and everything else, explaining to people what this is all about because it's a very confusing little space, is it not?
Larry Zoll: It's a very confusing space. I mean, Dave, you and I have known each other for a long time. I've always been very focused on technology and the education of technology and making sure that people understand what's really out there because it's so confusing.
You know, a big part of our initiatives is making sure that we're able to educate the market and simplify what's out there because for a long time, this has been an alphabet soup of different options and different availability, and really more often than not tends to be more confusing than it needs to be. One of our goals specifically is to help demystify that and help people understand what they need and, almost more importantly, what they don't need to implement successfully an exciting project.
Is it confusing because I'm stupid or… Well, don't answer that!
Or is it just that marketers are trying to outdo each other, so they come up with acronyms and push aspects of their products that maybe don't matter all that much but make them sound special?
Larry Zoll: I'll let the marketer answer that question. Then, I'll give you my perspective.
Ross Noonan: I think you’re definitely not stupid. I think we've got people who have been in LED for a long time, and they even have to get into the nitty-gritty as to why they're offering a product for a particular application.
You know, it is not like any other kind of technology. It doesn't just come out of a box. I know that some brands are going down the all-in-one route, and that's fantastic. It opens up big screens to off-the-shelf items. Still, it's a very small part of the market, and as soon as you move away from that, there are so many different ways to do something with an LED display. There are so many different applications that basically mean that the specs are ripped up and started again. I think I mentioned this on a blog previously. You know, a consultant came to me and said, why can't you just give me a data sheet? And the reason sometimes is that, well, because you've asked for a particular thing, we've got to go away and kind of rip that data sheet up and start from scratch.
Does it need different receiver cards? Does it need to have a different pixel technology? What is the function that you need? Where do you want to see and how do you want to see it? And then we'll go away and create that and that can be confusing, and it's why you're starting to see the emergence of companies like the LED Studio who are taking the time to try and make sure the customer understands why they're buying something and why they need it or why they don't need it and maybe that's a good point for Larry to jump in a little bit more on the sort of the project management side of things, and delivery.
Larry Zoll: One of the things that keeps me very excited about this industry is that it is very high tech and it does move very fast, and that can create some confusion in what the different technologies are capable of and what they're not capable of and why you should choose one thing over another, especially on the indoor, although the outdoor has started to make some big leaps in technology as well.
And I think that allaying that confusion and clarifying that understanding is really the responsibility of the manufacturers, or else it just becomes a mishmash of stuff, and it makes people feel like they're stupid, even though they've been in the industry for as long as anybody else, but it's a lot to stay on top of.
When you're dealing with customers or reseller partners, that sort of thing, are they appreciative of the effort that you're making to kind of explain things as opposed to just kind of blinding them with terms?
Ross Noonan: Absolutely. I mean, we sat down as a business, Larry from a strategic point of view, Rob as the owner, and myself as marketing, and we said right at the start of this two-year journey that we've been on to get the business.
In people's minds, we wanted to be thought leaders and try and educate people on the response to that has been nothing but positive. You know, people are starting to come to say now I understand why I need to specify this particular product. Well, now I know the difference between what a COB pixel means for energy consumption versus an SMD because before, I would look for a diagram, and there would be 100 different versions of what an SMD and a COB pixel look like, and now something that I can digest and understand, and that's been really exciting for us, to see people coming back and feeding back positive information, all the way from consultants to end clients.
Yeah, when I started really actively following this space, SMD was the primary way that these displays were being built and marketed, and then COB came along, I started hearing terminology like four in one and split chip and it just goes on and on.
Is there a dominant, primary technology that is now being made, marketed and demanded by buyers?
Larry Zoll: I think it really depends on the application like you said, but SMD, I'd still say, is the dominant general technology. But there are now a number of variations on SMD that can change the way that you implement it, whether it's GOB that gives you that protective coating, or maybe it increases contrast. You know, it could be a flip chip that reduces power consumption and increases brightness. You know, there are a number of different common cathodes, right? There are so many different ways that you can vary that one technology. Just saying SMD is the dominant technology is a little misleading, but it's a little understated, I guess.
But I think very quickly, we're also starting to see that for the narrower pitches and for micro LED displays, which we define and hope sort of the industry lands on a definition of anything under a pitch of one millimeter, you're starting to see more and more COB and COB is becoming more prevalent because there's more manufacturing starting to happen with it. It's been a challenge for some suppliers to date because of the difficulty in starting up the manufacturing lines and keeping them going. But that's becoming less of an issue. So that's starting to ramp up.
So what's the core distinction between an SMD surface mounted and chip on board or COB?
Ross Noonan: The main thing is that with surface mount diodes, it says exactly how it is. You've got a pixel in a package, which is then mounted onto the PCB. There are a number of components that make up that package.
I guess the biggest difference between the two is that with COB, you're effectively mounting the diodes directly onto the substrate. So you're removing that little building block that mounts onto the PCB. The biggest benefit of that is obviously a reduction in componentry. That means a reduction in resistance, which then has a knock-on effect on heat output so the screen is generally more energy efficient.
When you add a common cathode and flip chip to the COB array, you're starting to remove things like copper bonding wires and all of the other little bits and pieces that add to resistance. I think we worked out that on, a 1080p SMD display, there were millions and millions of bonding wires.
Larry Zoll: I think we said 20 million in an HD display, and they will add resistance. Whether they're copper or gold or whatever, they add a lot of components and physical electric resistance.
One of the things that I sort of lean on when I'm talking to customers about this is that when you're powering up a display, the electricity has to go one of two places. It's either heat or light and obviously, you want as much of that to convert to light as possible because that's how you make the display more efficient. So the hotter the display is, the less efficient your display is at creating light. So, really, what it comes down to is that by eliminating a lot of those components, COB becomes a much more efficient technology in creating light, which is good for everybody.
I assume it also removes points of failure and does it remove cost as well?
Larry Zoll: To be honest with you, that depends on who you're working with. I mean, a few minutes ago, I mentioned that there is a large cost associated with starting up and shutting down the manufacturing lines for COB. It takes a substantial amount of time and effort, and if it's not something that you have dedicated space for in the manufacturing process, then it's going to impact the price. Suppose you have dedicated manufacturing resources to COB, where you're not switching lines and switching manufacturing processes frequently. In that case, it does have the potential to save you money on COB, even over SMDs.
Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess one thing that we did as a business sort of a year ago was sit down and look at that fine pitch trend, which Larry mentioned. The long-term trend suggests that COB is going to be the dominant. Potential technology in fine pitch was that we needed to start offering COB at a price that was attractive to people who were potentially considering SMD versus COB. You know, in the past they were vastly different in price so we needed to ramp up our production line to be able to bring that price more in line with one another and make that decision easy.
When you start to add things like COB comes with a protective resin as standard as part of the pixel encapsulation process whereas with SMD, that's an additional cost through GOB resin, all of a sudden the ROI starts to really stack up for the client. They're really starting to see the benefits of that. Not only am I getting a more energy-efficient display, and in a lot of cases, maybe a better one in terms of image quality, but also my pixels are better protected against outside forces, accidental damage, lumps and bumps and things like that. So that's a huge benefit that COB has as part of its standard offering that clients are really starting to see the benefit from.
How protective is the GOB or the coating inherent with COB?
I asked because TSI Touch, a company in Pennsylvania that has started marketing an acrylic shield that you would put in front of a display. They showed somebody throwing a basketball at this shield, and I've always thought the GOB and the coding are terrific in that they're going to offer some degree of protection, but they have their limits. Correct?
Larry Zoll: Of course, it has its limits. I love the guys at TSI Touch. I've done a lot of work with them over the years. I don't know if putting a shield in front of the display, if you have a GOB is necessary. I mean, we have one customer we work with that has a lot of family activities around them where kids can easily reach the displays and we've got with this one client, we've got over 15,000 modules deployed, and over the past two years, they're all GOB and over the past two years, we've seen 20 of those 15,000 returned for service, which is like a 0.02 service rate, something like that.
So, I think in reasonable settings, you know, I wouldn't go and hit it with a baseball bat but it is certainly well enough protected for most general settings.
Yeah, I tend to agree, but I do wonder if in public concourses in places like arenas and so on, a GOB display may be fine for people coming and going from a Taylor Swift concert. But maybe not for a Norwegian death metal concert. Different demographics?
Larry Zoll: It's a fair assumption. That's a great question, though. I think everybody would really benefit if we could put together some metrics on what that protection really looks like.
One of the things that struck me walking around ISE was looking at all these gorgeous displays that were all COB or other technologies like that, in various stands, some very high profile, some you had to find kind of if you walk more towards the back of some of the exhibit halls and I started concluding, maybe right or wrong, that I don't know that the industry really needs to get to micro LED or displays that are called micro LED, because the fine pitch, sub one millimeter, more “conventional” and all displays look absolutely fantastic. So are you benefiting that much more from the additional cost of going to micro LED?
Ross Noonan: That's a very good question because, obviously, as humans, we're always in the pursuit of improvement. You know, technology was about driving the next best thing. You know, it was 1080p, then it was 4K, then it was 8K. There comes a point where this is, of course, my opinion, I think many people who have been in this industry and done what I've done would share that there's going to come a point where having a smaller pixel pitch really doesn't make that much difference.
I mean, how often are you going to go and stand less than a meter from a screen, especially if it's a big one? That's just not really what's intended for there. There are obviously some cases where maybe an immersive and interactive where you want people interacting with large format displays that perhaps a sub 1mm pixel pitch might make sense, but generally speaking, Larry and I spoke about this before the call. There are some 2.5mm is a fantastic pixel pitch for a lot of applications. 1.5mm is also fantastic. That's why many of those big screens at the show were kind of 1.25 or 1.5mm.
When you start to get lower than that, it becomes extremely subjective as to whether it is worth that extra $200-400 that adds for not an awful lot of benefit? I'm sure Larry's got more to add, but yeah, I think you're right. I think that chasing that pitch may be similar to what Larry mentioned earlier, which is cameras, and I'm sure he's going to use that analogy in a minute, which makes complete sense.
Larry Zoll: I think one thing that a lot of people don't realize is that when you move from a 1.2mm pitch product to a 0.9mm pitch product, you're doubling the number of pixels in that display. I don't care who you are; that is going to add a substantial amount to the cost of that display, and whether you're getting the benefit of that double the number of pixels is really a subjective question.
Yes, there are going to be applications where you're going to want something super tight, right? If you are trying to replace interactive LCD, right? In that case, you're going to want something that is tight because you're going to be within that arm's length, right?
But if you're talking about a conference room, a lobby, or something similar, there are plenty of arguments to keep things a little bit wider, with no discernible detriment to the project whatsoever and Ross mentioned the cameras; I feel like we're at a point in this industry where digital cameras were 5-7 years ago where everybody was racing towards a number of megapixels, and at some point the industry, consumers in the industry realized that 20 or 40 megapixels in an everyday situation wasn't really going to make a difference and most of the major camera manufacturers could hit a reasonable number of megapixels. So that industry moved towards, well, what were the other differentiating factors? You know, is it sensor size? Is it HDR? Is it whatever? And that's where you're starting to see, especially in professional cameras, since the industry sort of forking is on those differentiators, and I think we're moving in a very similar space in the LED market.
You know, most of the manufacturers out there now can hit a reasonable pixel pitch and do a good job doing it. So what differentiates Manufacturer A from manufacturer B is how you're doing it. Is it the components? Is it the epoxy that you're using for the GOB? Is it the lifetime performance of the display? Those are the start to think. Those are the things you need to start to look at in order to really differentiate the quality of what's out there.
With micro LED, one of the arguments I've heard from a company that's actually in that business is yes, right now it's still early days, but over time, because of the way micro LED is envisioned to be manufactured, when the yields get up there that they reduce the number of manufacturing flaws, you can hugely reduce the manufacturing cost per square foot of LED by using mass transfer and effectively, I guess, kind of printing these displays.
Larry Zoll: Yeah, and that's one of the things I was referencing earlier about the cost associated with starting up and shutting down a COB manufacturing line.
That's where a lot of those error rates and everything else come from. So yes, I agree. If you can keep those manufacturing lines constant, then it does have substantial impacts on that part of the process and gives you the ability to lower your prices because your failure rates are so much lower, and I think you're right, the mass transfer is the next big. The next big, I don't know, golden egg, and we're seeing that now with a few small manufacturers who are coming out with, they're called MIP displays, micro LED in the package, and MIP displays take advantage of that mass transfer process, and just, very briefly, very high level.
You know, traditional SMD COB displays, and even DIP displays are done using pick-in-place, where you have a machine that literally picks a component off of a real place on the PCB, and it gets soldered in place very fast. I've seen those machines. Yeah, it's still one piece at a time.
The big draw for MIP displays at the moment is that they can take advantage of this mass transfer process, where you're basically taking a piece of film that has X many diodes. It gets placed onto the substrate that way, and there are advantages to it. Still, I think eventually, with the micro LED displays, we're working towards that process there too, but that's going to take some time, and that's where I think a lot of the industry will eventually move.
Setting aside really specialized applications like medical imaging, what pixel pitch is pretty much enough? I mean, I walked around ISC and saw AOTO marketing a sub-five millimeter pixel pitch, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but who on earth needs that?
Ross Noonan: Yes, that's a very good question. You mentioned the screen on Langstand, and I think that was one of the main focal points because it was a fantastic screen with fantastic content. From memory, it was a 1.25mm. I don't think it was lower than one mil.
I think it was 0.9mm.
Ross Noonan: Oh, was it 0.9mm?
Yeah, I think so.
Ross Noonan: I think there's an element that's something to be said there that the awe and wonder that screen caused is whether we are going to get much more amazement from a screen that then is twice the resolution. I just don't know how the costs and benefits stack up. The human eye can only perceive so much detail.
We haven't even gotten into talking about the content creation costs and keeping that screen refreshed. You know, that's a high ongoing cost that many clients are not necessarily educated about, especially when we're dealing with clients who are now looking at 8k resolution screens, and they've got the budget for it; you have to have that conversation with them. We'll also have you get the budget and that content refreshed and then keep that content playing. It's not a cheap thing to do, and you're chasing a resolution that perhaps you just don't need. It's always a good conversation to have with clients. It's what you want versus what you need.
They're two different things, and sometimes we compromise with them, and sometimes we actually help educate them and help them pick the right thing. I mean, there's a reason why 1.5mm seems to be the fastest-growing pixel pitch of choice at the moment anyway, and I think that 1.2mm to 1.8mm is where we're going to see the most increase and longevity of pixel pitch sales. That's just based on the 7 to 8 years that I've been doing LED and seeing it ramping up and remaining or keep doing so.
Larry Zoll: I think that comes down, Dave, to the education that you were talking about previously, too. I recently went to a meeting where a customer was saying they’re putting this huge project together, and they're saying, “We absolutely have to do this with 0.6mm displays. There's no way we can't.” We took them and showed them a 1.2mm COB, and they were absolutely blown away.
Part of it is the education piece of it, right? I think a lot of people say they need to have the newest and the highest, the best, because it's the newest and the highest, the best without really knowing what the potential is for what may already exist and doing that education and exposing the market to what is possible and showing them what the range is, really can help people make very well informed decisions without having to as tight as possible.
Another interesting thing I was struck by ISC was with one manufacturer, a fairly substantial one, walking around their stand and looking at the displays and realizing they're not even showing the pixel pitch, like, usually particularly the Chinese manufacturers, they'll say it's this and that, and it's 1.4 or whatever it is. But they didn't even have those little signs that called that out, and that struck me as, okay, we're kind of getting beyond this pixel pitch rate race, at least for some of the people.
Ross Noonan: Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective. From a marketing perspective, it's a great idea. Let the screen and the content do the talking, and then people will come and say to you, “Wow, that screen is fantastic. Give me some details,” and you say it's at 1.8 mil.
It's going to, as Larry said, that's a great way of showing people that sometimes resolution isn't always the main thing. It's all about optimization and really good content.
Larry Zoll: The install quality is a big part of that too, but I think you're right. I think you can potentially lean on that, and my guess is that if you had people coming up to your booth asking about the pitch of the display, it's typically not going to be as tight of a pitch as they think it is.
What really genuinely matters, if I'm someone who's relatively new to this as an integrator or an end user, they can be all caught up on the terminology that goes, I need a micro LED display, or as you've said, they need a 0.6mm, that's the only thing that's going to work, that sort of thing.
What actually does matter?
Ross Noonan: What do you want to see, and where do you want to see it from? Yeah, it sounds simple, but that really is how you want to see it or how you want to interact with it? It's probably the next set of questions. I'll let Larry delve into it more, but that is how we always start a conversation.
What is it you want to see? Where do you want to see it from? And then let's explore the options that are going to deliver that, in the best way possible.
Larry Zoll: My background was in design before I joined LED Studio and the manufacturing side. I was a designer. I spent a long time in the consulting world.
I still firmly believe that technology can't drive the design. You have to let the story drive the tech, and that's how we approach every project. I also think that, as Ross said earlier, there are more and more companies out there doing all-in-ones, and we do them too.
There are great applications for all-in-one displays, but just as frequently, if not more frequently, this industry is still as much art as it is science, and what that translates into from a project requirement standpoint really depends on the ultimate goals for the project.
I've said to people when they've asked me that kind of question, I'm nowhere near as deep as you guys are on the LED side, but I've said what can really matter is quality of support and responsiveness of support and having more than just salespeople in the same country as you, but, in this discussion, you've mentioned a lot of things about what components are used, how it's made, how the heat gets out, all these sorts of things that are much more technical and in the weeds, but maybe are things that people are looking for if they're really trying to make good, informed decisions, they have to get beyond how pretty it looks on the trade show floor and find out how it works and how it's going to last.
Larry Zoll: No, that's absolutely right. I mean, we haven't even delved into the support part of it, but that's a huge component of it too.
I mean, there's so much out there and many different ways to buy products. I think people frequently underestimate the need for a good partner in these projects. They're living, breathing things; whether it's content refreshes or content management systems, they're ultimately all computers, right? Computers will do what computers will do. So you have to have a good partner who can support you throughout its life.
At a very basic level, everybody who's involved in technology knows this: Yes, you can buy stuff really inexpensively from China, but whether it's computers or media players or other devices, you genuinely are for the lower cost of getting what you paid for.
Larry Zoll: Yeah, a hundred percent.
Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess the support side of things is important too, for the fact that, as Larry touched upon, we know these project products are potentially quite complex. I mean, obviously, we've simplified a lot of them in terms of how they are installed, but sometimes you can't move away from the fact that you might need structural engineering; it's not just something that you slap at the end of the project. It's got to be project managed with architects and electricians and all these different trades. It all has to come together, perhaps to a grand opening of a large event, and so what we are finding is some of the bigger manufacturers, they don't want that headache of having the responsibility to do that level of support, which you could claim is quite granular, having to really get involved in the weeds and making sure that you're thinking of every potential outcome and then delivering that on-site and that leaves the door wide open to the smaller manufacturers like us who have built up a group of individuals who've been sort of working at the front end of LED displays. It means we can go in and offer a service that is perhaps a bit more personal, and of course, there are always problems with these projects. That's what technology is all about solving problems.
But we like to think that we're quite proactive at solving those plans and innovative in how we solve problems with our technologies to make things easier, and that's something that we pride ourselves on.
All right. I said before we even started that this was going to fly by and it certainly did. I think we'll have to do this again because I don't think we really covered the waterfront. We just started our little walking discussion here. But I appreciate your time.
Larry Zoll: Thanks so much, Dave.
Ross Noonan: Thank you.
![Frank Hoen, Netpresenter](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/frank-hoenj_5pa5wf_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday May 08, 2024
Frank Hoen, Netpresenter
Wednesday May 08, 2024
Wednesday May 08, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When the pandemic hit and a lot of people started working from home, many digital signage CMS software companies started developing and releasing solutions that pushed the digital signage messaging more normally posted on screens around workplaces to the laptop and computer monitor screens in the formal or ad hoc workspaces created around houses and apartments.
It was a new but necessary feature for most companies, but something the Dutch company Netpresenter has been doing for almost 30 years. The software company started out with that problem in mind, borrowing on the concept of screensavers to create what it calls desktop digital signage. Over time, it added more conventional digital signage capabilities for workplaces - a solution that founder Frank Hoen says is not an add-on, but as robust as the many, many, many other CMS options out there.
Along with offering a lot of integrations with business systems like SharePoint, the Netpresenter platform is very deep when it comes to triggered alerts for things like emergencies. That was developed in the wake of 9/11, when Netpresenter's US office in the World Trade Center complex was lost in the terror attack.
Netpresenter has more than 5 million active users globally, from SMB to huge multi-nationals and government agencies that see screens on desktops and walls as the most effective way to reach and update its workers. While most of that footprint is desktop digital signage, Hoen says at least five percent of Netpresenter's software licenses are being used for conventional digital signage in workplaces.
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TRANSCRIPT
Frank, thank you for joining me. I have been aware of Netpresenter for the longest time, but we've never actually chatted, and it's interesting that you're one of the oldest companies out there but not terribly well known.
Frank Hoen: We're all over the United States. We have hospitals like George Washington Memorial Hospital and big hospital chains across the US, for example, oil refineries in the Middle East, and military installations. There is just a lot of oil, a lot of industries, and a lot of offices across the globe that use our software, and it's been a while, so we have a couple of very interesting customers.
One of the very earliest ones was the US Space Command, I believe, in 1995. Can you imagine that? Those were the days of PointCast, and everybody was saying it was the next big thing.
I remember PointCast.
Frank Hoen: Which was a dragon of a piece of software. It was terrible.
Sucked all the bandwidth!
Frank Hoen: Yeah, and it is interesting because, actually, the beginnings of Netpresenter could be traced back to the fact that we were selling one of the big brands of signage out there. I can tell you it was a Scala, Commodore Amiga, which was expensive as hell. They tried to bridge TV to the PC, and well, you know, they weren't that successful. Windows was not very multimedia-oriented then, and it didn't go that well, in the beginning, at least.
We saw that, and we didn't want to build a signage solution or compete with them, but what we did see is that for the first time, all these computers out there with screens, which were managed, which were there, were available, and they were interconnected, and so you start to experiment. You put some images and videos on the server, and then the server comes down because of all the bandwidth. So we introduced some smart caching, and voila, Netpresenter was born.
It was kind of an interesting beginning, but big companies like Nokia, Sony, and the early pioneers picked up on it, and one of our early customers was actually a US Space Command. And so I literally started going to the trade show. I came across a Marine who was in this battle group who used Netpresenter, and I never heard of the people. I didn't know they were using it. They might have copied it from one Navy server to other ships, but what can you do? It's a nice story now.
So you have interesting roots in that since COVID became a thing, the pandemic bubbled up, and a lot of people were working from home. A lot of “conventional” or “mainstream” digital signage companies branched into making effective screensavers, pushing information to desktops for work-from-home people.
You, on the flip side, started as a corporate screensaver company that then evolved and expanded into doing digital signage as well, correct?
Frank Hoen: Well, yes, and if I may add, and taking it a bit back from COVID, we had an office in Twin Towers, and when obviously that happened, and all the people who I knew had died, we were like, could we have actually maybe contributed in a positive way and then trying to prevent when something similar happens to be able to save more people? And that was the beginning of what we call our Emergency Alert Capability of Netpresenter.
So, sir, you had an office in the World Trade Center?
Frank Hoen: Yes.
Wow.
Frank Hoen: So, that was one of those pivotal moments. Obviously, COVID was as well, and I'll get back to that. But, imagine this, there, and suddenly boom, and it was, yeah, obviously terrible. But it was for us. We were like, let's introduce emergency alerts in our platform so that our customers can actually use this for emergency evacuations, fire, aiding and fire alerts, giving specific information, active shooter, tornado warnings, and the software has been with us since then, basically, and to this day, many us hospitals actually use our software for that specifically as well, for example.
Still, we have whole countries that are actually running the Netpresenter software, including the screens, all these tools, apps, and push notifications. This is a full omnichannel emergency alert system capable of serving whole countries. They're running software. So if people are buying, and that's my point, if people are buying Netpresenter, they're buying something that literally whole countries depend on to address millions and millions immediately. So, we have seen quite a few copycats over the years, and I always felt, and so our developers, they had a very high shareware component in there. It was kind of like hack on the hack. Obviously, then those, what we have very often seen is people start off with that because they have rock bottom prices, obviously, because they can't compete on features. Still, eventually, those customers end up at us.
If you need to run on corporate devices, mobile devices, PCs, and all these things and networks. The last thing you want is for that piece of software to be installed, which kills your bandwidth and causes all kinds of problems. There are big organizations, especially in hospitals and other places, that they choose for quality, and that means. You know, we're not the cheapest solution out there, most expensive either, but we've had many customers for 20-plus years. What IT company can say that?
Not a lot. So, when you're asked to describe your company, do you say you're a digital signage software company or something else?
Frank Hoen: We're into corporate communications. Basically, this is a corporate communication platform. We do say that we have signage for the big screens, desktop digital signage for all existing PCs, app solutions, alerts, notifications, tickers, and all kinds of tools, basically any device in the organization.
I always use the parallel of a hospital. There are big screens hanging there. We provide those; we run on those. There's all the PCs, we run on those. We run on the tablets. We run on mobile devices. There's the alert notification as well. The whole thing integrates with things already available. In organizations such as SharePoint integrations, that's not many organizations that offer that.
So basically, organizations invest a lot in their intranets in their SharePoints and similar intranets, but predominantly SharePoint if organizations have Windows, but very few people are seeing the content. So that's problematic. There's a saying it's difficult to be famous if nobody recognizes you, and it's essentially here we are, they have invested a lot of money in that. So obviously, things like signage solutions, big screens, and being able to distill headlines literally, need-to-know, must-know information from intranets, that's a killer app that really is bringing the most elegant way and big heritage of push that's bringing content, throughout organizations, fully automated, and that's just beautiful because number one: organizations, they are popularizing the internet, but number two: they're the headlines of what organizations should know, everybody sees them, and that's just very cool.
Your website says you have about 5 million active users. I assume a pretty high percentage of that is desktop digital signage, as you describe it. What percentage would you attribute to the larger screens sprinkled around an office building?
Frank Hoen: Well, it's actually relatively high—I would say somewhere between 5% and 10%—and it's significant.
So you got a pretty big footprint out there.
Frank Hoen: Yeah, and the interesting thing is that we have customers who pay per annum or per month. The rule is, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. So if customers are happy and you keep adding relevant new features, they stay.
Well, if you've had customers for 20 years, that's a pretty good endorsement.
Frank Hoen: Yeah, and that actually brings in the fact that IT revolutions come and go, and listening very carefully to your customers and then working from there, for example, integrating AI, obviously is omnipresent. That is crucial if you want to survive as an organization, whether you're in the signage or not.
So I'm working for an organization that's using Netpresenter. I'm, let's say, working remotely. How does your product manifest itself on screens?
Frank Hoen: We use a couple of concepts. Basically, we don't want to be intrusive, so we do have pop-ups. However, I don't like the concept of pop-ups and things like that unless it's in your best interest that you should be immediately notified about something. So we have that, but that's not a mainstream tool.
The mainstream tool is the desktop app, and we have an app that is for mobile devices that's basically an elegant reader where you can command, and things like that, kind of a smart social internet dish, and that can actually is typically often connected with a SharePoint. So it gets automated feeds, but the key component is actually, the home is the desktop signage, desktop digital signage. That is the good old screensaver. Obviously, screens don't burn in anymore, but the elegance of these new flat screens is basically that the difference between sleep mode and active mode isn't that big.
Imagine walking through an organization, and every screen, every of those PCs displays the latest information and the latest headlines from your intranet automatically. You get so many impressions of the message. Then we actually measured that you can actually increase intranet, free fault, but more importantly, the retention to two and a half. So literally, a well-used intranet introduced Netpresenter, and a lot more people recall the key messages, and that's just beautiful. It elegantly brings without interrupting people in the core processes. We obviously want to give management from organizations a fighting chance of reaching their staff.
So if I'm banging away on emails and there's some sort of message that Corporate needs to get out to its staff, what's going to happen on my screen?
Frank Hoen: We have different levels of notifications. So you have a low, medium, and high level of notifications, and we can literally take over your whole screen if necessary. Think active shooters and things like that We call it an emergency alert, similar to the public emergency broadcast.
You get lower levels than that. You have partial screens; you have pop-up notifications. We can do things on your mobile device as well. If you're constantly hammering on your PC, the screens won't disappear. So there are all kinds of forms, and basically, remember old McLuhan, “the medium is the message.”
If you have a big toolbox, you don't only have the hammer, if you know what I mean. So you have a lot more tools available at home, but the key tool is still the screensaver.
I'm going to assume having done this for so many years that you have a pretty good sense of the balance that you have to strike. You mentioned the word intrusive before. You can cross that line, I suspect, pretty easily and just start annoying your staff as opposed to educating them and making them aware.
Frank Hoen: You know, obviously, we both agree that people don't consider a signage screen intrusive. It's just there. It's the same with a screensaver; it’s there when you're not actively hammering away at emails.
You know, you grab a cup of coffee, take a rest break, and turn to the computer, you will see it several times a day, but it never is intrusive because, you know, it's there with your lock screen as well and we have solutions for that as well. So, basically, when you're returning to your computer or not using it for a couple of minutes, we're there on whatever screen that is out there.
And are those configurable at the user end, or is that something that's set centrally?
Frank Hoen: The user has some capabilities, but most of them, obviously, you want to ensure that you have some control over internal communications. For example, the screens that won't appear when you're doing a presentation or having a team meeting wouldn't make much sense so you do have control over that, but the organization can determine which tools they use or which mixture of tools they're going to use.
I assume there's a percentage of people who don't want to be bothered and would be looking for ways to disable the application. How do you fight that?
Frank Hoen: That is easily done, of course, through configuring your PC. If it's an office PC, it's easy to do, but you know, I should state that it's ridiculous the amount of time people at work spend on their social media. It's getting crazy, and it's literally two hours or more at work.
And it's just not being able as an organization actually to have access, even simple access, to your staff. That's what we're talking about. So we're giving them back a little fighting chance. We're never going to be able to compete one-on-one against social media and all their algorithms and elegant persuasion mechanisms but with Netpresenter, you have a fighting chance of getting your need-to-know information, your must-know information well, between the years of employees, basically.
How do they know it's that much time on social media? Is that IT department just looking at browser activity?
Frank Hoen: Oh, no, these are studies.
That's easily googled. There are several big studies out there, and it's what I see here is from Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2023. It basically says that employees are disengaging. They want more recognition for their work, more communication from the leaders, more communication from the leaders, clear goals, stronger guidance, and engagement or culture.
How do you do that when working at home? So, how do you actually get culture across while working predominantly at home? Many employees experience stress often because of social media. They already overworked well before entering the office, so basically, there are a lot of studies out there. If you want to have the chance to keep connecting with your employees, your communication platform needs to be adapted to that so that you don't add to the information overload but basically bring some peace and quiet.
But if you cannot reach your staff while working at home, you will lose out. There will be no connection at all at your organization.
How much of this is integrated into other business systems? You mentioned SharePoint before, but you know, companies use Slack and so on.
Frank Hoen: Yeah. We also have Teams connections, for example, and several other connections. Basically, if you have the data, we'll be able to intelligently deliver it to the screens.
We're even able to analyze how much of that was read and understood through AI, through smart AI solutions. So imagine letting AI summarize the key headlines your staff or your management wants employees to know. AI literally analyzes it, compacts it, makes an abstract out of it, puts it out to the screens, and then actually keeps an eye on it, does small polls, two—or three-question polls, and checks whether they have understood it.
So basically, we're seeing now the move from isolated tools or very smart apps into integrated systems, which are basically working like the director of a big news broadcaster. When information comes in, they determine: is it breaking news? Is it news for the app? Is it news on TV? Is it news just for a website? Is it no news? So you have our AI analyzing information, then deciding whether it will be how important it is, putting it out there on the right spot and on the right medium, but also, and that's really new, it can actually detect among these thousands of employees, we actually typically see that on big signage screens or on the screen savers. It can actually detect if they understood it, if they know the basics of, for example, cybersecurity awareness or compliance, and that's really cool. Basically we're bringing signage into massive learning systems without being intrusive, and to elegantly pull, if they know it, not everyone, just a couple and just enough, so, you know, okay, now we need to snooze this campaign that now we need to snooze this campaign or now we need to upscale the campaign and show it more on screens more frequently or maybe even on other channels as well.
So that's awareness. Can you do training?
Frank Hoen: Well, you know, it's not full-blown training in that you're sitting and having your course on C programming. No, it doesn't do that.
This is meant for relatively small pieces of information, not whole ISO manuals or full compliance manuals. Still, the essence of the things the organization has identified is that nobody knows but they should. So, you need to know that those crucial pieces of information are crucial; you can put that in there. It can actually detect if the employees have read it, if they understood it, and it then can report back to management and say, “Hey, you know, did you know that your organization was 85% aware of the basic rules of cybersecurity awareness? It has gone down to 65%. As an AI, upon your instruction, I've decided to show more messages and cybersecurity awareness, and I'm happy to report that after two weeks, 95% of everybody knows cybersecurity awareness.”
So yeah, it's basically bringing signage into the big world where because of all these PCs out there, added real estate screen, real estate is literally football fields more than the screens you have typically hanging out there if you're only using big screens.
Right, and the screens themselves are physically bigger. As I'm chatting with you, I forgot the size of this curved screen thing I have here, but I could have a screensaver on one side and have a big desktop going anyway.
Frank Hoen: Exactly, and basically, you can imagine how big of a screen it is while you are hammering away on emails, but while you're still working in the office or environment, you literally can see the screens to the corners of your eyes or colleagues, or when you walk through the canteen, it's basically, it's everywhere.
Your messages are omnipresent because you literally use every screen in your organization.
So if I'm using this solution, is it a license that I buy, do I subscribe, or is it a bit of both?
Frank Hoen: We have on-premise customers that's our current form, and that's preferred by, for example, defense and some of the large organizations, but we also have a new cloud platform, and that's license-based, so we have all variations of licensing.
I assume the cloud side is pretty much essential for the work-from-home crowd.
Frank Hoen: Yeah. Although, actually, if they just installed it on their servers, then obviously the organization and the people have access to VPNs, and then it would be available as well. So it's that flexibility, which is really nice because some current customers don't need advanced AI integrations and things like that. However, they still want to be able to convey messages on their PC and rhe desktop digital signage, the alerts, that's all in there, and if they want the more advanced integrations with SharePoint, AI, and learning through signage screens, then they need to move to the Netpresenter Cloud.
Workplace has become a very hot vertical in digital signage. What was your reaction during the COVID era when all kinds of digital signage CMS software companies added some variation on corporate screensavers, desktops, and digital signage to their product suite?
Frank Hoen: We saw plenty of them, and most of them were just one of them. “We have those kinds of features-ish” types of companies.
There have been no further developments. Some have been limited to an announcement or very basic functionality. It's very easy to hack a browser module, display something on it, and wrap it in there. Still, it's much more difficult to have a full-blown, reliable system that integrates with all back offices and middleware applications.
So, basically, it brings back vibes from the shareware days of some competitors. Unless you're committed to developing, keeping it secure, adding new features, making sure it's not an island, it's not something I would advise big organizations to invest in because, basically, it's just a side note for those organizations,
Yeah. When you're talking, I was thinking it's the difference between a company saying, yeah, we can do that versus another company like you're saying, this is what we do.
Frank Hoen: Exactly. It's the same with signage. Everybody can connect a big screen to PowerPoint. That's not signage. That’s like the Nike network and USB sticks. That's not signage. Well, I don't consider that signage, and it still is a thing. If organizations would simply calculate the total cost of ownership of the applications, which includes support, which includes messy things with drivers or special PC configurations and things like that, you don't have that when that with Netpresenter, you know, it has for 25 years, it had to run on anything out there, anything, and while being elegant in terms of PC resources and a network resource. With that much experience, no other competitor comes even close there.
Sometimes, when a solution is focused on one thing, the other stuff it does isn't as robust as a pure-play digital signage CMS. How would you answer that?
Frank Hoen: We have an extremely robust CMS. Technically, it doesn't matter whether our signage is running on the desktop or big screen. It's even more difficult to run on a computer with dozens of applications open, and then we need to run reliably. Being able to run on those computer environments is so extreme, which means that Netpresenter software needs to be incredibly robust. So, I would argue that in terms of CMS, nobody can teach us lessons there.
Again, whole countries use our software—the original Netpresenter software—and you would use it in your organization. They literally run it too; for example, we had a system a couple of years ago in the Netherlands that was addressing 50,000 public screens and millions of apps, and if you're able to do emergency public broadcast on such a massive scale and reliably run every day on millions of desktop computers abused by users every day, basically, that says something.
Tell me about the company. How big are you?
Frank Hoen: Truth be told, we're a relatively small organization. There was a very deliberate strategy never to go to the stock exchange or attract investor’s money, it was never necessary. We kept growing and have been profitable for 25 years in a row. We're very comfortable financially, very secure, and very robust.
But yeah, I have a lot of friends. They did try to go to the stock exchange in the US, and some made it, but most didn't. So there are many organizations we see in our area that are just going bust trying to collect the big check on the stock exchange or investors becoming impatient and are downscaling. It's terrible, and it's killing the industry, and again, what kind of organization would you prefer?
Are you entirely self-funded, then?
Frank Hoen: Oh yeah.
So it's your company?
Frank Hoen: It's my company.
And how do you sell? Do you go through channel or direct?
Frank Hoen: Both, and there's a big opportunity for any of your listeners in the SharePoint or corporate world to connect with us for free. There's a big opportunity because how are you going to distinguish yourself from all these other internet integrators?
So there's that. So we work through these integrators and there's direct sales as well for, if organizations are of such a scale that it becomes more comfortable to do so.
So, last question, what might we see over the next year or so from Netpresenter?
Frank Hoen: Every new technology brings new capabilities, including the omnipresent AI and smart learning through signage, and that is our big focus right now. We want to be able to literally prove to management that through signage on your desktop and on the big screens, you can guarantee that your employees have seen and understood it. That's going to be our year.
Yeah. I mean, that's made a big difference to the digital out of home community, the analytics and proof of view, and so on. So it makes sense that if you're going to make that investment in the enterprise, in the workplace, it'd be great if you actually knew it was working.
Frank Hoen: It's not just about counting views. That's not it. Imagine a piece of information comes on and is conveyed on signage, and a small part of the organization receives polls to answer a pop-up, for example, very small, as little as possible, and they're actually being asked if they understood the question. So it's not about counting views. It's much more than that.
Gotcha. All right, Frank, thank you so much for your time.
Frank Hoen: Thank you, Dave. It's been very nice.
![Tom Mottlau, LG Healthcare](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/tom-m-sq_dbab9x_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday May 01, 2024
Tom Mottlau, LG Healthcare
Wednesday May 01, 2024
Wednesday May 01, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The health care sector has long struck me as having environments and dynamics that would benefit a lot from using digital signage technology. Accurate information is critically important, and things change quickly and often - in ways that make paper and dry erase marker board solutions seem antiquated and silly.
But it is a tough sector to work in and crack - because of the layers of bureaucracy, tight regulations and the simple reality that medical facilities go up over several years, not months. People often talk about the digital signage solution sales cycle being something like 18 months on average. With healthcare, it can be double or triple that.
The other challenge is that it is highly specialized and there are well-established companies referred to as patient engagement providers. So any digital signage software or solutions company thinking about going after health care business will be competing with companies that already know the industry and its technologies, like medical records, and have very established ties.
LG has been active in the healthcare sector for decades, and sells specific displays and a platform used by patient engagement providers that the electronics giant has as business partners. I had a really insightful chat with Tom Mottlau, LG's director of healthcare sales.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
David: Tom, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your role is at LG?
Tom Mottlau: I am the Director of Healthcare Sales for LG. I've been in this role for some time now; I joined the company in 1999 and have been selling quite a bit into the patient room for some time.
David: Has most of your focus through those years all been on healthcare?
Tom Mottlau: Well, actually, when I started, I was a trainer when we were going through the digital rollout when we were bringing high-definition television into living rooms. My house was actually the beta site for WXIA for a time there until we got our language codes right. But soon after, I moved over to the commercial side and healthcare, around 2001-2002.
David: Oh, wow. So yeah, you've been at it a long time then. Much has changed!
Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir.
David: And I guess in some cases, nothing has changed.
Tom Mottlau: Yep.
David: Healthcare is an interesting vertical market for me because it seems so opportune, but I tend to think it's both terrifying and very grinding in that they're quite often very large institutions, sometimes government-associated or university-associated, and very few things happen quickly. Is that a fair assessment?
Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. There's a lot of oversight in the patient room. It's a very litigation-rich environment, and so there's a bit of bureaucracy to cut through to make sure that you're bringing in something that's both safe for patients and protects their privacy but also performs a useful function.
David: I guess the other big challenge is the build-time. You can get word of an opportunity for a medical center that's going up in a particular city, and realistically, it's probably 5-7 years out before it actually opens its doors, right?
Tom Mottlau: That’s true. Not only that but very often, capital projects go through a gestation period that can be a year or two from the time you actually start talking about the opportunity.
David: And when it comes to patient engagement displays and related displays around the patient care areas, is that something that engineers and architects scheme in early on, or is it something that we start talking about 3-4 years into the design and build process?
Tom Mottlau: Well, the part that's schemed in is often what size displays we're going to need. So, for example, if somebody is looking to deploy maybe a two-screen approach or a large-format approach, that's the type of thing that is discussed early on, but then when they come up on trying to decide between the patient engagement providers in the market, they do their full assessment at that time because things evolve and also needs change in that whole period that may take a couple of years you may go as we did from an environment that absolutely wanted no cameras to an environment that kind of wanted cameras after COVID.
You know, so things change. So they're constantly having those discussions.
David: Why switch to wanting cameras because of COVID?
Tom Mottlau: Really, because the hospitals were locked down. You couldn't go in and see your loved one. There was a thought that if we could limit the in-person contact, maybe we could save lives, and so there was a lot of thought around using technology to overcome the challenges of contagion, and so there was even funding dedicated towards it and a number of companies focused on it
David: That's interesting because I wondered whether, in the healthcare sector, business opportunities just flat dried up because the organizations were so focused on dealing with COVID or whether it actually opened up new opportunities or diverted budgets to things that maybe weren't thought about before, like video?
Tom Mottlau: True, I mean, the video focus was definitely because of COVID, but then again, you had facilities where all of their outpatient procedures had dried up. So they were strained from a budget standpoint, and so they had to be very picky about where they spent their dollars.
Now the equipment is in the patient room, but at the end of the day, we're still going to get the same flow of patients. People don't choose when to be sick. If it's gonna be either the same or higher because of those with COVID, so they still need to supply those rooms with displays, even though they were going through a crisis, they still had to budget and still had to go through their day-to-day buying of that product.
David: Is this a specialty application and solution as opposed to something that a more generic digital signage, proAV company could offer? My gut tells me that in order to be successful, you really need to know the healthcare environment.
You can't just say, we've got these screens, we've got the software, what do you need?
Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Everything we do on our end is driven by VOC (voice of customer). We partner with the top patient engagement providers in the country. There are a handful that are what we call tier one. We actually provide them with products that they vet out before we go into production.
We go to them to ask them, what do you need? What products do you need for that patient? I mean, and that's where the patient engagement boards, the idea of patient engagement boards came from was we had to provide them a display that met, at the time, 60065 UL, which is now 62368-1, so that they can meet NFPA 99 fire code.
David: I love it when you talk dirty.
Tom Mottlau: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that.
David: What the hell is he talking about?
Tom Mottlau: Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. Basically, what it boils down to is we want to make sure that our products are vetted by a third party. UL is considered a respectable testing agency, and that's why you find most electronics are vetted by them and so they test them in the patient room. It's a high-oxygen environment with folks who are debilitated and life-sustaining equipment so the product has to be tested.
We knew that we had to provide a product for our SIs that would meet those specs as well as other specs that they had like they wanted something that could be POE-powered because it takes an act of Congress to add a 110-amp outlet to a patient room. It's just a lot of bureaucracy for that. So we decided to roll out two units: one of 32, which is POE, and one that's 43. Taking all those things I just mentioned into consideration, as well as things like lighting.
Folks didn't want a big night light so we had to spend a little extra attention on the ambient light sensor and that type of thing. This is our first offering.
David: So for doofuses like me who don't spend a lot of time thinking about underwriter lab, certifications, and so on, just about any monitor, well, I assume any monitor that is marketed by credible companies in North America is UL-certified, but these are different grades of UL, I'm guessing?
Tom Mottlau: They are. Going back in the day of CRTs, if you take it all the way back then when you put a product into a room that has a high-powered cathode ray tube and there's oxygen floating around, safety is always of concern. So, going way back, probably driven by product liability and that type of thing. We all wanted to produce a safe product, and that's why we turned to those companies. The way that works is we design a product, we throw it over to them, and they come back and say, okay, this is great, but you got to change this, and this could be anything.
And then we go back and forth until we arrive at a product that's safe for that environment, with that low level of oxygen, with everything else into consideration in that room.
David: Is it different when you get out into the hallways and the nursing stations and so on? Do you still need that level, like within a certain proximity of oxygen or other gases, do you need to have that?
Tom Mottlau: It depends on the facility's tolerance because there is no federal law per se, and it could vary based on how they feel about it. I know that Florida tends to be very strict, but as a company, we had to find a place to draw that line, like where can we be safe and provide general products and where can we provide something that specialized?
And that's usually oxygenated patient room is usually the guideline. If there's oxygen in the walls and that type of thing, that's usually the guideline and the use of a pillow speaker. Outside into the hallways, not so much, but it depends on the facility. We just lay out the facts and let them decide. We sell both.
David: Is it a big additional cost to have that additional protection or whatever you want to call it, the engineering aspects?
Tom Mottlau: Yes.
David: So it's not like 10 percent more; it can be quite a bit more?
Tom Mottlau: I'm not sure of the percentage, but there's a noticeable amount. Keep in mind it's typically not just achieving those ratings; it's some of the other design aspects that go into it. I mean, the fact that you have pillow speaker circuitry to begin with, there's a cost basis for that.
There's a cost basis for maintaining an installer menu of 117+ items. There's a cost basis for maintaining a Pro:Centric webOS platform. You do tend to find it because of those things, not just any one of them, but because of all of them collectively, yeah, the cost is higher. I would also say that the warranties tend to be more encompassing. It's not like you have to drive it down to Ted's TV. Somebody comes and actually remedies on-site. So yeah, all of that carries a cost basis. That's why you're paying for that value.
David: You mentioned that you sell or partner with patient engagement providers. Could you describe what those companies do and offer?
Tom Mottlau: Yeah, and there's a number of them. Really, just to be objective, I'll give you some of the tier ones, the ones that have taken our product over the years and tested and provided back, and the ones that have participated in our development summit. I'll touch on that in a moment after this.
So companies like Aceso, you have Uniguest who were part of TVR who offers the pCare solutions. You have Get Well, Sonify, those types of companies; they've been at this for years, and as I mentioned, we have a development summit where we, for years, have piled these guys on a plane. The CTOs went off to Korea and the way I describe it is we all come into a room, and I say, we're about to enter Festivus. We want you to tell us all the ways we've disappointed you with our platform, and we sit in that room, we get tomatoes thrown at us, and then we make changes to the platform to accommodate what they need.
And then that way, they're confident that they're deploying a product that we've done all we can to improve the functionality of their patient engagement systems. After all, we're a platform provider, which is what we are.
David: When you define patient engagement, what would be the technology mix that you would typically find in a modernized or newly opened patient care area?
Tom Mottlau: So that would be going back years ago. I guess it started more with patient education. If Mrs. Jones is having a procedure on her kidney, they want her to be educated on what she can eat or not eat, so they found a way to bring that patient education to the patient room over the TVs. But then they also wanted to confirm she watched it, and then it went on from there.
It's not only the entertainment, but it's also things that help improve workflows, maybe even the filling out of surveys and whatnot on the platform, Being able to order your culinary, just knowing who your doctor is, questions, educational videos, all of those things and then link up with EMR.
David: What's that?
Tom Mottlau: Electronic medical records. Over the years, healthcare has wanted to move away from paper, to put it very simply. They didn't want somebody's vitals in different aspects of their health stored on a hand-scribbled note in several different doctor's offices. So there's been an effort to create electronic medical records, and now that has kind of been something that our patient engagement providers have tied into those solutions into the group.
David: So, is the hub, so to speak, the visual hub in a patient care room just a TV, or is there other display technology in there, almost like a status board that tells them who their primary provider is and all the other stuff?
Tom Mottlau: So it started as the smart TV, the Pro:Centric webOS smart TV. But then, as time went on, we kept getting those requests for, say, a vertically mounted solution, where somebody can actually walk in the room, see who their doctor is, see who their nurse is, maybe the physician can come in and understand certain vitals of the patient, and so that's why we developed those patient engagement boards that separately. They started out as non-touch upon request, we went with the consensus, and the consensus was we really need controlled information. We don't want to; we've had enough issues with dry-erase boards.
We want something where there's more control in entering that information, and interesting enough, we're now getting the opposite demand. We're getting demand now to incorporate touch on the future models, and that's how things start. As you know, to your point earlier, folks are initially hesitant to breach any type of rules with all the bureaucracy.
Now, once they cut through all that and feel comfortable with a start, they're willing to explore more technologies within those rooms. That's why we always start out with one, and then over the years, it evolves.
David: I assume that there's a bit of a battle, but it takes some work to get at least some of the medical care facilities to budget and approve these patient engagement displays or status displays just because there's an additional cost. It's different from the way they've always done things, and it involves integration with, as you said, the EMR records and all that stuff.
So, is there a lot of work to talk them into it?
Tom Mottlau: Well, you have to look at us like consultants, where we avoid just talking folks into things. Really, what it has to do with is going back to VOC, voice of the customer, the way we were doing this years ago or just re-upping until these boards were launched was to provide a larger format, and ESIs were dividing up the screen.
That was the way we always recommended. But then, once we started getting that VOC, they were coming to us saying, well, we need to get these other displays in the room. You know, certain facilities were saying, Hey, we absolutely need this, and we were saying, well, we don't want to put something that's not rated for that room. Then we realized we had to really start developing a product that suits that app, that environment, and so our job is to make folks aware of what we have and let them decide which path they're going to take because, to be honest, there are two different ways of approaching it.
You can use one screen of 75”, divide it, or have two screens like Moffitt did. Moffitt added the patient engagement boards, which is what they wanted.
David: I have the benefit, at least so far, of being kind of at retirement age and spending very little time, thank God, in any kind of patient care facility. Maybe that'll change. Hopefully not.
But when I have, I've still seen dry-erase marker boards at the nursing stations, in rooms, in hallways, and everywhere else. Why is it still like that? Why haven't they cut over? Is it still the prevalent way of doing things, or are you seeing quite a bit of adoption of these technologies?
Tom Mottlau: Well, it is, I would say, just because we're very early in all this. That is the prevalent way, no doubt.
It's really those tech-forward, future-forward facilities that are wanting to kind of go beyond that and not only that, there's a lot of facilities that want to bring all that in and, maybe just the nature of that facility is a lot more conservative, and we have to respect that.
Because ultimately they're having to maintain it. We wouldn't want to give somebody something that they can't maintain or not have the budget for. I mean, at the end of the day, they're going to come back to us, and whether or not they trust us is going to be based upon whether we advise them correctly or incorrectly. If we advise them incorrectly, they're not going to trust us. They're not going to buy from us ten years from now.
David: For your business partners, the companies that are developing patient engagement solutions, how difficult is it to work with their patient record systems, building ops systems, and so on to make these dynamic displays truly dynamic? Is it a big chore, or is there enough commonality that they can make that happen relatively quickly?
Tom Mottlau: That's a very good question, and that's exactly why we're very careful about who's tier one and who we may advise folks to approach. Those companies I mentioned earlier are very skilled at what they do, and so they're taking our product as one piece of an entire system that involves many other components, and I have full faith in their ability to do that because we sit in on those meetings.
Once a year, we hear feedback, we hear positive feedback from facilities. We see it but it really couldn't happen without those partners, I would say. We made that choice years ago to be that platform provider that supports those partners and doesn't compete with them. In hindsight, I think that was a great choice because it provides more options to the market utilizing our platform.
David: Well, and being sector experts in everything that LG tries to touch would be nightmarish. If you're far better off, I suspect I will be with partners who wake up in the morning thinking about that stuff.
Tom Mottlau: Yeah. I mean, we know our core competencies. We're never going to bite off more than we can chew. Now granted, we understand more and more these days, there's a lot of development supporting things like telehealth, patient engagement, EMR and whatnot. But we're also going to make sure that at the end of the day, we're tying in the right folks to provide the best solution we can to patients.
David: How much discussion has to happen around network security and operating system security?
I mean, if you're running these on smart TVs, they're then running web OS, which is probably to the medical facility’s I.T. team or not terribly familiar to them.
Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Facilities, hospitals, and anything that involves network security bring them an acute case of indigestion, more so than other areas in the business world. So these folks, a lot of times, there's exhaustive paperwork whenever you have something that links up to the internet or something that's going to open up those vulnerabilities.
So, Pro:Centric webOS is actually a walled garden. It is not something that is easily hacked when you have a walled garden approach and something that's controlled with a local server. That's why we took that approach. Now, we can offer them a VPN if there is something that they want to do externally, but these systems were decided upon years ago and built with security in mind because we knew we were going to deploy in very sensitive commercial environments. And so not so much a concern. You don't need to pull our TV out and link up with some foreign server as you might with a laptop that you buy that demands updates. It's not anything like that because, of course, that would open us up to vulnerability. So we don't take that approach.
It's typically a local server and there is the ability to do some control of the server if you want a VPN, but other than that, there is no access.
David: Do you touch on other areas of what we would know as digital signage within a medical facility?
Like I'm thinking of wayfinding, directories, donor recognition, video walls, and those sorts of things.
Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. I mean, we see everything. Wayfinding needs have been for years and years now, and those are only expanding. and we start to see some that require outdoor displays for wave finding. So we do have solutions for that.
Beyond displays, we actually have robots now that we're testing in medical facilities and have had a couple of certifications on some of those.
David: What would they do?
Tom Mottlau: Well, the robots would be used primarily to deliver some type of nonsensitive product. I know there's some work down the road, or let's just say there's some demand for medication delivery.
But obviously, LG's approach to any demand like that is to vet it out and make sure we're designing it properly. Then, we can make announcements later on about that type of stuff. For now, we're taking those same robots that we're currently using, say, in the hotel industry, and we're getting demand for that type of technology to be used in a medical facility.
David: So surgical masks or some sort of cleaning solutions or whatever that need to be brought up to a certain area, you could send in orderly, but staffing may be tight and so you get a robot to do it.
Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. And that is a very liquid situation. There's a lot of focus and a lot of development. I'm sure there'll be a lot to announce on that front, but it's all very fluid, and it's all finding its way into that environment with our company.
All these future-forward needs, not only with the robots but EV chargers for the vast amount of electric vehicles, we find ourselves involved in discussions on all these fronts with our medical facilities these days.
David: It's interesting. Obviously, AI is going to have a role in all kinds of aspects of medical research and diagnosis and all those super important things.
But I suspect there's probably a role as well, right down at the lobby level of a hospital, where somebody comes in where English isn't their first language, and they need to find the oncology clinic or whatever, and there's no translator available. If you can use AI to guide them, that would be very helpful and powerful.
Tom Mottlau: Let me write that down as a product idea. Actually, AI is something that is discussed in the company, I would say, on a weekly basis, and again, I'm sure there'll be plenty to showcase in the future. But yes, I'd say we have a good head start in that area that we're exploring different use cases in the medical environment.
David: It's interesting. I write about digital signage every day and look at emerging markets, and I've been saying that healthcare seems like a greenfield opportunity for a lot of companies, but based on this conversation, I would say it is, and it isn't because if you are a more generalized digital signage software platform, yes, you could theoretically do a lot of what's required, but there's so much insight and experience and business ties that you really need to compete with these patient engagement providers, and I think it would be awfully tough for just a more generalized company to crack, wouldn't it?
Tom Mottlau: I believe so. I mean, we've seen many come and go. You know, we have certain terms internally, like the medicine show, Wizard of Oz. there's a lot out there; you really just have to vet them out to see who's legit and who isn't, and I'm sure there are some perfectly legitimate companies that we haven't worked with yet, probably in areas outside of patient education we, we have these discussions every week, and it's, it can be difficult because there are companies that you might not have heard of and you're always trying to assess, how valid is this?
And, yeah, that's a tough one.
David: Last question. Is there a next big thing that you expect to emerge with patient engagement over the next couple of years, two-three years that you can talk about?
Tom Mottlau: You hit the nail on the head, AI. But you know, keep in mind that's something in relative terms. It has been relatively just the last few years, and it has been something that's come up a lot. It seems there's a five-year span where something is a focus going way back, it was going from analog to digital.
When I first came here, it was going from wood-clad CRT televisions to flat panels, and now we have OLED right in front of us. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of progression in this market. And I would say AI is one of them, and Telehealth is another; I guess we'll find out for sure which one sticks that always happens that way, but we don't ignore them.
David: Yeah, certainly, I think AI is one of those foundational things. It's kind of like networking. It's going to be fundamental. It's not a passing fancy or something that'll be used for five years and then move on to something else.
Tom Mottlau: Yeah, true. But then again, also, it's kind of like when everybody was talking about, okay, we're not going to pull RF cable that went on for years and years because they were all going to pull CAT5, and then next thing, you know, they're saying, well, we have to go back and add CAT5 because they got ahead of themselves, right?
So I think the challenge for any company is nobody wants to develop the next Betamax. Everybody wants to develop something that's going to be longstanding and useful, and so it's incumbent upon us to vet out those different solutions and actually see real practical ways of using it in the patient room and trusting our partners and watching them grow. A lot of times, they're the test beds, and so that's the benefit of our approach.
By providing that platform and supporting those partners, we get to see which tree is really going to take off.
David: Betamax, you just showed your age.
Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir. That made eight tracks, right?
David: For the kiddies listening, that's VCRs. All right. Thanks, Tom. That was terrific.
Tom Mottlau: Thank you very much, sir.
David: Nice to speak with you.
![Jonathan Labbee, SACO Technologies](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/Jonathan_Labbee-crop_drw4rh_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday Apr 24, 2024
Jonathan Labbee, SACO Technologies
Wednesday Apr 24, 2024
Wednesday Apr 24, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When I first spoke with Jonathan Labbee about the grand-scale media facades and displays being produced by SACO Technologies, the Sphere in Las Vegas was just yet another over-the-top thing rising up from the desert sands.
Two years on, and a few months after the giant LED ball was first switched on, the Sphere is probably the most discussed and photographed digital display on the planet.
So I was very happy that Labbee was willing to carve out some time to talk about some of the technical details behind the display side of that project, and more broadly what it has meant for the Montreal company, and for the concept of buildings as media facades and visual attractions.
In this podcast, we get into some of the technical challenges and innovations associated with putting together both the attention-getting outside exosphere of the building, but also the mind-wobbling 9mm pitch curved display inside. We also talk about the larger business, and the opportunities and challenges of turning big structures into experiential digital displays.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jon, thanks for joining me. It's been a couple of years, but a lot has gone on with your company, and obviously, the big thing is its involvement in the Las Vegas Sphere.
I know we can't spend all of our time talking about that, nor do I want to, but I would imagine your company's work on that has kind of rocked the industry
Jonathan Labbee: It has, and thanks for having me back, Dave. The sphere has been an incredible journey for us. I think two years ago when we last spoke, we were just about to start on our part of the construction, and we successfully delivered that project, which is, I think there were a lot of people and projects that were in the waiting to see if something of this magnitude could be pulled off successfully and now that it has, it has awoken a new level of giant projects around the world. I'm gonna say mostly in the Middle East at this moment in time.
Why is that? Is it just about money, or is it also about things like zoning controls and available space?
Jonathan Labbee: Well, I mean, obviously, money and budget are always a concern, but I think when you get past the level of installing a giant television on the side of a building and where the building itself is a media medium, but the infrastructure to support that is so significant in your construction budget, I think this is one of the key aspects for these developers and these architects to understand if it could successfully be done.
Now from a zoning perspective, I think that a project like the Sphere is quite revealing in the sense of how much control you have over brightness and the type of and quality of the content and secures the knowledge that a responsible owner can display tasteful content in the environment that it's designed to be in.
I know that there was a proposal to do a similar project in the east end of London and that doesn't seem to be going ahead, at least at the moment, and it struck me as one of the barriers to it was simply that you're putting up a very bright object within reasonably close proximity to residential and that's a challenge.
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, it is. I'm not a politician by any means, but I do think there's some politics there and also maybe some fear of new technology that could potentially be disruptive if used irresponsibly. Normally, people who spend this amount of money on a venue tend to have a very secure plan to fit within their environment.
So what was done for the Sphere was custom. Could you relate what was done on the outside and then on the inside? The inside is particularly interesting to me because your company's pedigree is not so much on fine-pitch large displays other than for touring acts, which are not as fine a pitch.
Jonathan Labbee: Well, yeah, so it's actually pretty interesting that this seems to be our persona; the reality is that most of our development is done on fine-pitch products. We just happen to have been doing quite a bit of low-res or wide-pitch products because we've been doing so many iconic buildings, it seems to be what we're known for.
But if you take, for example, a lot of the touring acts or some of the video screens that we did for Orlando airport, for example, those are 2 millimeters pixel pitch and all these types of things.
So if we go back to the Sphere, the exterior of the sphere, referred to as the exosphere, is made up of these pucks, I would say, that have 48 LEDs, and each one of these pucks is a pixel that is controllable for the client, and that's what gives you that beautiful imagery on the building, and it also has an aesthetic that the architects wanted and the client wanted, where it allows you to see through and see the base building through the exosphere. So, the performance criteria for the exterior was one thing, whereas the performance criteria for the interior were completely different. It needed to be audio transparent because if you go to the Sphere, there are absolutely no speakers or any kind of disruption, and on the media plane, everything is behind the screen. So it gives you a very pure environment.
The screen itself is nominal nine millimeters, but it is 16K x 16 K resolution, and because of the distance, everything just works when you're inside of that environment, you feel like you're wherever the artist or content creator decides that you're going to be. So, if you're on Mars or another part of the planet, you feel like you're there.
For the exosphere, because this had not really ever been done or certainly not done very often, was there an engineering thought process about how we make this work? Will it work? What are the sight lines, all that sort of stuff?
Jonathan Labbee: Oh, yes. And as much as I want to take a lot of credit for this, it was definitely a collective effort. First of all, we're dealing with a very sophisticated client that has a lot of knowledge and capabilities, the same goes for the architects and all the other trades that were involved.
So we had the opportunity to work with an expanded group of people that had a lot of knowledge and capability to visualize these types of things, and we have done mock up over mock up. So it's not just, oh, let's think about it and build it. It was:
Let's think about it. Let's prototype it. Let's prove it. Let's adapt to it. Let's modify it, and eventually through the process of iteration, you end up with something that is functional for that particular mission.
So, what was the big moment like? I think it was July of last year, or maybe a bit earlier when you first turned it on. Were their fingers crossed, or was it a big aha?
Jonathan Labbee: Well, I can tell you when the client first turned on that exosphere, I think it was like a huge wow moment for everybody, including ourselves, it was spectacular, and then when we had the chance of going to the opening for you to for the interior, which was, the end of September, that, I gotta tell you, was pretty emotional. I don't think that any one of us could have imagined what it would look like in its finished format.
Yeah, because you've done some grand scale indoor stuff for touring acts stadiums, and so on, which are pretty big ass screens, but nothing along these lines, right?
Jonathan Labbee: Nope, there is, actually, nothing on earth and in our industry that exists at this level of magnitude. And again, we've been working on this for 5 years, and we see it in sections, and we see the whole master plan. We see all this stuff on computer screens or in real life as mock-ups. But when you see the finished scale on the interior, it is mind-boggling.
How do you service something like that? Is this just like man lifts or lord knows what?
Jonathan Labbee: Well, the venue is obviously designed with service capability. I mean, at the end of the day, how do you eat an elephant? It is basically one bite at a time, and it's pretty much what this is. I mean, it's a lot of the same type of stuff. So everything is broken down into sections and if you have a problem, you need to go to service. If you want to go look at something, you have access to that section in a particular fashion, and then you have access to the screen, and you can do whatever you need to do.
I'm curious as well about some of the meat potato stuff, like video servers.
How do you develop something that can control that many LED modules and make it all addressable? When you went to your technical partners on that, was it a big, “Oh, boy, how do we do that?” Or was it, " Okay, we know how we could do that?”
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think, I think it was more of a “yeah, we know how we can do that because our video processors are scalable in nature.” They technically don't have a limit, but then again, it's not just our stuff that needs to function. It's everything up and down the chain.
So, we control everything from the video processor to the video screen. But everything upstream from us also has to function, and Here Against Here Studios, or MSG, design and create their very own control room with all of the workflow to function. So, from beginning to end, they have full control over the quality of the signal.
What about the creative?
I assume that producing this stuff requires a certain set of skills and experience, which is very helpful. Is it hard to do, or do you kind of get instructions on what to do, and then you make it happen?
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, my understanding is that the Sphere studios put together some templating and also offers its own production services to clients to make producing content much easier. So people are not just thrown into the project. They're helped all along the way.
One of the things that impressed me about the project is the type of content that's showing up on there that I think I, like millions of other people never would have even thought of.
Have you been surprised by it?
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. I have to say those guys have done an incredible job of coming up with some very interesting and creative ways of making that sphere look amazing, and you really never get tired of looking at it. I mean it's populating my Instagram feed and probably everybody else's. It's just incredible what they're able to put on there, and I think that they've been very clever in getting collaborations from different types of artists and collaborators.
When I was through Las Vegas late last year, I made a point of walking all the way over to the Sphere. I wanted to see what it looked like up close, and I have an industry friend who did the same, and it's this weird sensation of, now I see how this works and what the technology looks like up close, but it was almost like, that's something you shouldn't do. You really need to see this from a distance.
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, and it was designed to be seen from a distance, but I think that it's very interesting. I can't say that this was planned in this way, but I mean, obviously, we're looking for performance criteria. So we designed around that, and a certain aesthetic, and probably the architects have thought about this, but as you approach the building and you start seeing how things are put together, there's a sense of revelation that you get when you approach the building, and it becomes even more personable to you. I thought that was pretty interesting because I had a similar experience when I went there for the first time.
So what has this spawned? Do you have commercial property developers coming to you, resort operators? Who seems most inspired by this?
Jonathan Labbee: Well, yeah, I would say that the Sphere certainly awoke a new level of clients and types of projects. We normally work with the architects, so the architects who represent the owners and the property developers are coming to us with more and more intricate and large projects, which is super fun because not only do we develop technology, but we've designed an entire workflow, and toolset in order to design and efficiently manufacture and install and run these types of projects.
Yes, I mean, we're getting large resorts in the Middle East right now, which is in a big flux of change, especially in Saudi Arabia. So there are a lot of these giga projects or mega projects spawning all over the place, and we're getting a lot of inquiries on that side, which is great.
Are they serious?
Sometimes, you see these magic mega projects in other jurisdictions, and there's a lot of PR noise around it, but nothing ever happens. But I suspect because some of these are funded directly by the Saudi government through PIF or whatever, they're going to happen.
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think in the past, it was maybe a bit more true that there were kind of these big dreams, and then they would just never materialize, but I think things have changed a lot in the region, where projects are actually getting built. There seems to be a big sense of change in the entire region.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and that part of the world, continue to be very strong for us as well. So we're lucky that we're already out there and have delivered successful anchor projects.
What is involved in doing these? Is this like a three or five-year project?
Jonathan Labbee: I would say that normally this would have been a three year project. Obviously the pandemic happened, which no one had anticipated, which drove all sorts of additional complexities in time. But I would say that a project like this, I believe originally had like a three year type of timeframe, and any mega project would have roughly the same type of timeframe.
One of the things that's interesting to me is, as we were discussing before, that maybe people don't know the full scope of what your company does. I didn't realize you had off-the-shelf products that you manufacture and can order.
I kind of assumed it was all custom, but there, there is stuff that you can just buy, right?
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a whole suite of products that you can either utilize the way that they are or customize with brackets and carriers and these types of things. It is actually the bulk of our business, although we publicize more of the iconic type of projects simply because people like to hear about those.
Still, we do several hundred projects a year that are obviously much smaller and sometimes not as much talked about.
Are those fixed projects or do they, or are they more about shipping out material that's going to be used by touring acts?
Jonathan Labbee: These are fixed projects. Although we do a lot of touring, we just launched Morgan Wallen last week with our new A5 series, which is an amazing product and show, but touring for us is, it's really great, obviously for recognition, but it's ALSO a fantastic place for us to try out new ideas. So it is really like an R&D lab, and that's why we continue to put so much effort into rental and touring.
We get to try out new ideas with clients who are willing to take chances and want to be the first, and then once you have something great, you refine it, and you make it more robust for permanent installation because, in a permanent installation, the criteria are quite different. You don't want to go up 1000 feet to change the light bulb, for example, right? That becomes very expensive. When I was on a tour, it lasted for a few hours. You can take it down. You could address things if you need to so there's a method to our madness, I would say.
Is there linkage at all between, because you're a Montreal company, there's at least a couple of Montreal creative shops that have also done a lot of work with touring acts as well. Do those come together or are they kind of separate tracks and once in a while you bump into each other?
Jonathan Labbee: They are separate tracks, and oftentimes, we bump into each other. So, for example, when we did Orlando airport, the content designer for that was Gentilhomme who we know very well. We obviously have Moment Factory and a bunch of other creatives out here. So there's a really nice hub here, and we're all friends, by the way, so we all have lunch together and these types of things, because it's fun to talk about whatever we're working on.
Going back to Sphere, the product that you developed particularly for the exosphere, is that something that you can turn around and productize, like turn into its own product that could, could be used, or is it really unique to that building?
Jonathan Labbee: It is unique to the building and has certain features specifically designed around its geometry. So, I think that those additional features would probably be lost if we were attempting to use it somewhere else, but in any case, it's not something that we would want to do with it. It has not only technological criteria but also aesthetic criteria that are unique to the Sphere.
But the concept, though, of these pucks or discs of some kind that have LEDs embedded in them, I believe what you did at Burj Khalifa was kind of like sticks or something more.
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, exactly. Burj Khalifa, because it was a linear approach, used a product that we call V-Stick that we customized for that particular building.
But if you take L.A. Stadium, for example, or SoFi Stadium, that has a puck format on the roof. There are, I think, about 35,000 of them, and you get a video image on the roof when you're flying above from LAX.
So anytime you've got curvature, a puck is probably going to be a lot easier to manage than a stick because you'd have to custom bend each of them, right?
Jonathan Labbee: Yes, but it also depends on what the client is trying to achieve. So, if you take SoFi Stadium, they wanted to have an even spacing of the pixels, whereas Burj Khalifa had very different criteria. They were 30,000 pixels tall but only 72 pixels wide because we had to install them in between the windows. So, on the architectural things, each project kind of reveals itself in its architecture in terms of what product or what you should be designing to achieve their media.
When you work with architectural firms, do you have to invest some time at the front end with the architects, particularly on the engineering side of things, as opposed to the big vision side of things for them to understand what's possible and what's physics-defying?
Jonathan Labbee: I would say yes in the beginning, but we work with all of the major architect firms like Foster and Populous and those types, and the more and more projects that we do together, the more and more that we understand each other's criteria.
Now, on our side, what we did to make sure that we could have ease in speaking with the architects, we have an entire architectural division within SACO. So we have a Spanish office that has seven architects, BIM integrators, computational programmers, and so on, which mimics the architects' workflow. So, not only do we work with them to show them what's possible, but we also work with them to design the technology within the architecture. Then, we are able to produce the drawings at their level, which they then incorporate into their drawing sets.
I'm guessing, I don't know the architecture business at all, but I'm guessing maybe a decade ago, there were one or two projects where people were thinking about architectural lighting of some kind, and it was this novel concept, and I'm wondering now if it's almost like a default concept for all flashy new buildings.
Jonathan Labbee: Well, it is. If you want your building to stand out, you have to have some level of technology on it or some level of color or something because if not, you just fade into the background.
I guess I have come back to the whole idea of zoning that, I see skylines in China; it's just like the whole skyline; every building is lit up, and they're all animated, and they're all doing things, and I'm thinking, well, you can do that in China. I'm not sure you could do that in Long Island City in New York to face the Manhattan skyline with buildings doing that. Do you have to kind of factor that in?
Jonathan Labbee: Oh, absolutely. I mean, actually, obviously anything governmental kind of tends to move at a slower pace. So we have built it into our workflow, and in the architect's workflow, let's say, the sensibility of making some tools and visualizations for the city zoning people and a perfect example of that would be F.C. Cincinnati, which we did with Populous. So F.C. Cincinnati is a soccer club, an MLS team, and the entire architecture of the building is like these fins that are kind of slanted and it gives like some level of static movement to the building, and our job was to animate those fins at night to give the nighttime identity.
So we did an entire lighting study, and we have special filters built into the content so that, or into the content player, so that anywhere where it's facing residences, the light levels never exceed a certain amount.
We produced all of that, all of those studies with the architects, to present to the city on behalf of the client.
What's the thinking around what level of, for lack of a more exotic description, razzle-dazzle is appropriate?
I'm thinking in Las Vegas, the Sphere makes perfect sense. That's on-brand for Las Vegas. I'm not sure that would make as much sense in, I don't know, San Francisco or Minneapolis or whatever and I have a lot of affection for much more subtle architectural lighting.
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. But you have to think of the fact that Sphere is the extreme, right? It has a completely adaptive skin. So the skin, when there's no media on it, obviously, it's this dark surface, but the media at that point is designed for the environment. So, in Las Vegas, it's appropriate to have this very kind of flashy razzle-dazzle stuff.
But if you were doing something in San Francisco, the UK, or something like this, where you need it to be more subtle, the content would move maybe at a different speed and be produced in a different manner. Maybe it'll be more focused on lighting effects rather than full crazy commercials and that kind of thing. So, having adaptive skin is actually a really good thing in any environment because you can tailor it and adapt it as you move along.
I'm assuming that it would be pretty difficult for more conventional LED display companies like the I don't need to rattle off the names, but the major manufacturers who put billboards up in Times Square and on the sides of stadiums, but it's not part of the architecture. It attaches to the architecture. It would be difficult for them to get into this because you've got a massive head start.
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think it would be very difficult. I mean, also, there's a mindset that goes along with it. We don't choose the path of least resistance. I think the people that work here would get bored. But at the same time, you have to evolve over years, tool sets in order to accomplish these very difficult geometries because everything needs to support it from the back as well. You have to be able to do proper wiring diagrams and power layouts, and all this because it affects the entire architecture of that building, so we're doing it by choice, let's put it this way!
I saw a post last week on LinkedIn about a company that's made a sphere, I don't know, 25 feet tall or something like that as a product. how do you react to those things?
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I guess I'll go with the analogy of trying to copy something is flattery. Again, it's not the first time that these types of things happened. Obviously, it's not on the same scale as the Sphere, but I mean, year after year, we see people trying to copy what we've done.
Yeah, that can't be easy. I'm also curious about media facades and the use of LED within glass or applied to glass at some point. Are you being asked about doing that?
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, so actually, many years ago, we actually designed some technology and actually have a patent for LEDs within glass, and we actually tried it out, and in concept, it sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it's not that great of an idea, as we found out, and what I mean by that is that there's a couple things:
First of all, if you need to replace something, you now need to pull the glass off of the building, which could affect the tenants inside. If it's a hotel, it's a hotel, you know what I mean? If it's an office building, it's an office building. You're not replacing the glass. But the other thing that it did is that it could have potentially put us in competition with some of our clients, which are the curtain wall manufacturers, and we work with all of them. So if we were to come up with our own glass product, and we were to try to go sell it, we're essentially either aligning ourselves with only one of them, or we're competing against all of them. So we had decided against that, but the serviceability of it was the bigger problem.
Where are you at now in terms of headcount, where you're located, and everything else?
Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. So we're in Montreal still. We're just across the street from our old facility, which we were there for 35 years, and we're now in this beautiful 218,000-square-foot facility that we got into obviously with Sphere and other projects in mind, and we're 120 people strong, and when we're full project involved like with Sphere, we grew to about 380.
So we scale up, and we scale down depending on the projects, and we have arrangements with different companies for that and that’s where we are now.
Is it hard to be that elastic in terms of your workforce, given the challenges of hiring?
Jonathan Labbee: Well, the pandemic certainly tested us. I mean, we've never had issues with it before, but the pandemic made it a bit more difficult. The way that we design our manufacturing and all of our testing—I mean, we have a lot of electronic aids and stuff like that—we, the core people that we have here, can be split up to become team leads.
So, when we hire people, it's for the lower-skill positions. So it's easier. You have a bigger pool to choose from, and then after that, we scale back down when we don't need to do that anymore, and then our core workforce takes on all the responsibility.
So these could be logistics people who are just packing things up and so on?
Jonathan Labbee: Correct. Exactly.
I assume you're NDA'd up the wazoo on a lot of projects, but are there ones that you can talk about that will be released in the next year or so?
Jonathan Labbee: So I can't really talk about them, but I can tell you that we're building a beautiful project in Spain after having an office there for, I don't know how many years, finally, we get to do a project in Spain and that's very exciting.
What part of Spain?
Jonathan Labbee: In Valencia.
Oh, nice.
Jonathan Labbee: So right near the sea and stuff like that. So I can't say what it is yet, but it's going to be beautiful, and as I mentioned, we literally just delivered Morgan Wallen last week and that's pretty exciting as well.
What has the past couple of years meant for the company in terms of business? Has it just rocketed or is it just seen like a nice, healthy bump?
Jonathan Labbee: Well, I'm going to say it's going to be a controlled rocket because we, again, dealing with the pandemic is one thing and then supply chain and all that kind of stuff, but the other thing that we needed to be very disciplined about is to not take on too much work as to not affect the delivery of the Sphere, and that was on purpose, and we had spoken with our customers and our architects and stuff like that, and we were very selective in the projects that we took on during the big delivery of the Sphere.
Thankfully, though, the pandemic did push a bunch of the projects into the future. So now those products are coming back to us, and we have a lot of bandwidth, and we're filling that up pretty fast.
I suspect as well that the simple fact that you've delivered this and it's got the global attention that it has certainly made your architecture partners and other potential customers very comfy that, yeah, you can do this!
Jonathan Labbee: Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, and at the same time, we're not just a one-trick pony. We did deliver a very large project at Orlando airport at the same time and Delta the airfield at JFK and a bunch of other projects, the Rolling Stones and Lady Gaga and all those.
So we continued doing everything kind of caused an undertow, but Sphere was a really big focus, and now that we've finished delivering Sphere, we're working on many other very exciting projects.
I'm sure there are lots of day-to-day headaches in terms of being the CEO of a technology company, but it sounds like you get some pretty fun road trips with all these touring acts and big venues.
Jonathan Labbee: Yes, and you get to meet very interesting people and like-minded people, and you get to see behind the scenes, but look, it's a lot of work. There's no doubt about it. I mean, every day we're trying to do something different and do something new.
So you're always kind of in that development mode, but when you see the results, and then you see the teams that you're building and the culture that you're building within the company, it makes you proud and makes it fun to be here.
Absolutely. Congratulations on the product or the project and on everything else that's going on with you!
Jonathan Labbee: Well, thank you. Appreciate it.
![IV Dickson, SageNet](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/IV_Headshot_xw22rv_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
IV Dickson, SageNet
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
Wednesday Apr 17, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When I first spoke with industry lifer IV Dickson about his move from software to the managed services firm SageNet, the company was still in the relatively early days of getting itself organized to chase and then service digital signage opportunities. Five years on, digital in environments like chain retail and QSR are a core, what he calls consequential, part of the Oklahoma company's overall business.
SageNet's role has evolved from being an IT-centric managed services company that was adding digital signage to its deployment and network management capabilities, to having a main service line called SageView. It's a full-meal-deal suite of solutions and services that run from the ideation stage all the way through deployment and ongoing management.
These kinds of turnkey, all-in solutions are relatively common now in the marketplace, but the SageNet twist is its deep roots, experience and acumen in the hard-core aspects of networking design, connectivity and cybersecurity.
Dickson started out at SageNet as the digital signage guy, but as business has grown, and with it the staffing and skillsets associated with that work, he now has a role as SageNet's Chief Innovation Officer - looking more broadly at all the technologies that have a role in or influence customer projects.
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TRANSCRIPT
IV Dickson, how are you doing, sir?
IV Dickson: I'm doing well. Thank you, Dave. How are you this morning?
I am good. We haven't chatted in a while. We did a podcast back in 2019, so I would say it's time for an update.
IV Dickson: We did. A lot has happened in five years, if nothing else, a pandemic, but also just a lot has happened in the SageNet, and SageView world for us.
Yes. The last time I saw you, we were walking up a very long hill to the Barcelona Football stadium, and you're probably keeping a wary eye on me to make sure I didn't have a heart attack.
IV Dickson: Yeah, I don't know. It might have been mutual there, Dave, but I do know, though it was worth the walk. I will say that it was worth the walk.
Every little bit of it.
So over those five years, quite a bit has changed with your company. I would say the big thing from my perspective is five years ago, SageNet was starting to get heavy into digital signage, but it was one of the things that a larger company did. When I look at the website now, I kind of see SageNet leading in certain respects with what it does in terms of digital experience and digital signage in general. Is that a fair assessment?
IV Dickson: It is a fair assessment. And, by the way, my marketing team will be very glad to hear that because I think that's a position that we want to take and have taken. But we've also positioned ourselves in the market to be that, but also executed in the market to be that, and I think if I think about five years ago, one of the things I think I probably even said it five years ago in, in this podcast was we're a managed service provider in an integrator world. That really hasn't changed in many respects. There are still great integrators out there. However, what really has changed for us is the way people are now coming and looking at digital experience, digital engagement, and pure digital signage, right?
Call it passive or a kind of consumable digital signage. It's become more important today than ever to manage that in an ongoing fashion, and management is not just content. It's everything. Is the screen on? Is the player running? If it's broken, or when it's broken, how are you getting it fixed? And that's a big piece of the puzzle, and over five years, we've grown a lot. I mean, we've grown exponentially to be honest in this area. We were a few customers with a few thousand devices out in the world, and now we're north of a hundred thousand devices that are under management in that digital experience realm.
So, as a managed services company as a whole, what do digital signage and digital signage-sih activities represent for the company? I don't need an exact percentage, but I'm curious.
IV Dickson: That's a great question because it's something that actually was a driver for me in my previous role at SageNet as the VP of digital signage and digital experience: to make it a consequential piece of our business. And so at this point in time, whereas five years ago, it was just a mosquito kind of on the sideline of our portfolio. It is now one of the pillars of our organization. So if you look at our organization, historically, we still track the traditional managed services of circuitry and router switch firewalls. However, now, the idea of IOT and IOT management, digital experience, and digital signage management kind of lined up in three pillars for us.
I have heard a few times now that one of the things that's really changed in the last five years or so again is how, historically, the first meetings that you would have with a larger enterprise-level customer or prospective customer would be with the visual merchandising people, HR people, business communicators, that sort of thing, and the IT people would be there, but only begrudgingly. And, now they tend to lead these initiatives and guide them.
Have you seen that? Does it help the case for SageNet because they're familiar with the kind of work that you do?
IV Dickson: Yes, and yes. Yes, we are seeing that shift in who's leading the effort, and yes, that has been obviously fruitful for SageNet, but also just for the market as in general, to be honest. What I mean by that is that the marketing initiative has not been dampened; it's still the guiding light or the Northstar associated with the effort.
Now, you're getting buy-in from the organization about the importance of this type of infrastructure in a distributed environment. So if you have a thousand restaurants or five hundred or a thousand stores, all of a sudden, when you have a director or even a CIO-level IT person in the room saying this is something that's consequential to our business, that changes the level of investment from a general brand perspective. The other thing that we've seen, to be honest, is that we've seen its scope outside of it, marketing and even operational folks that are in the building, or as everybody's talking about retail media networks and how this bigger trade or merchandiser world factors into that conversation as well, depending on the brand.
One of SageNet's other big pillars is cybersecurity. Are you finding that's helpful in the pitch and in the ongoing effort for clients in that you have that pedigree, you have that understanding? It's not, “Yeah, we do have a cyber guy. His name is, let me look it up.” It's part of your DNA.
IV Dickson: Exactly. It's one of the greatest parts of our extended portfolio. So, about a year ago, I took the role of chief innovation officer, and it's been a journey for me, not only to understand some of the technologies that I didn't understand well but also to understand some of the technologies and wrap my brain around how do customers see that footprint and to your point about cyber security if you look not only at cyber, but you look at how cellular is affecting the market and you also look at the pure infrastructure that's going into one of these restaurants or into one of these retailers, and you start to realize that the POS that used the point of sale that used to be one of the primary network consumers, and by the way, it's still one of the primary from a cyber perspective.
However, it's a very small footprint compared to all the other aggregate devices that they now have talking on the network, whether that be IOT monitoring devices or whether it be digital signage and digital experience devices, or whether it be guest and or brand WiFi, all of a sudden the cyber level or the management of that connectivity becomes even more important than it was maybe ten years ago. And now you have changes in that market around not only how it's managed, but also around protocols that are being utilized, and you start to look at PCI 4. 0, and all of a sudden the brands are getting that much more intense in their needs, but also smarter in their requirements.
And so when you bring in a media player and a screen, they no longer say, “Hey, we're going to stick this on the network.” They want a deep dive into how that's going to communicate and communicate with what and for what purposes.
Yeah. I think many more traditional pro IV integration companies and solutions providers lack that perspective and experience.
When you look at something like a restaurant or a retail operation, as you just said, all the different business systems and sensors and everything falling into it, it's just a big chart to be able to try to understand all that.
IV Dickson: It is, and luckily I have fantastic team members, right?
We've brought in folks with senior-level capabilities from the industry, not only from pure restaurant retail but also from the I.T. on the side. We have fantastic folks in our organization to be able to tackle that because, to your point, one of the differences, and I talked to many of our partners about this in the industry. One of the differences in our business that a lot of people don't recognize from a traditional integrator perspective is when we walk in the door as SageNet, we make two near assumptions.
If we're talking to a restaurant or even a retailer, we make the assumption that you're geographically dispersed, which means you're probably over at least 5, if not 10, or 50 States. So you're all over the country. But the second assumption we make is that your ownership environment is potentially variable. What that means is it could be a franchise, a dealer, or some qualification of the licensee, and in that scenario, you're then adding a layer of complexity to that individualized brick-and-mortar environment that you're servicing, and that creates major complexity in the process.
Yeah, cause they might not all use the same business systems for some core operations, right?
IV Dickson: You got it. Especially when you get into the dealer and licensee world, and that's really where our focus on that, what happens in the “four walls” of that local environment, and then how do we bring that back to a more macro level of IT and AV management?
One of the things that SageNet did, and I assume, added to its breadth of capabilities and bench strength, was acquiring Convergent back in, I think, 2021. Why was that done, and what does that meant?
IV Dickson: We did acquire Convergent Media Systems back in 2021 and it’s an interesting conversation about why was it done versus what has it meant. I think actually it's relative to both, and yet there's some separation, right? The interesting thing that a lot of folks don't know is that there was some distant relationship between SageNet and Convergent prior to the acquisition because of the VSAT environment that SageNet acquired from SpaceNet, the better part of 10+ years ago, and so part of our business is VSAT Uplink for connectivity and Convergent back in the day was doing much of their delivery of Corp comm and digital signage and whatnot, TV broadcast type work over VSAT protocols.
So there was some natural connection there that kind of tied the two organizations together. However, at the really the kind of height of the pandemic, luckily, in some respects, but also prescribed in others, SageNet had grown, and our SageView digital offering had grown to about half of the size that it is today, and we've done that organically, right? We had team members that we had grown a fair amount of operational team members at the time. We had brought on Rob Suffoletta back from the Seneca day to day, and he was there a few years ago. And, so things were starting to churn, and we were about half the size that we are today.
The acquisition at the time of Convergent took that business and positioned it in a place where it was about double, not quite, but about double, and so it was very substantial. The other piece of that puzzle and I'm very proud to say this, is we acquired some really fantastic folks in that acquisition, including some real leaders in the digital industry who have substantially more experience than I do, 30 years in this industry from broadcast to digital signage. So, in that moment, we kind of bolstered our operational environment.
What subsequently has happened, and it's a good outcome of any acquisition when you can make this happen, we are now a broader force to deal with in the market. So our capabilities are beyond just Installation, monitoring, and management of hardware and software, and now we have capabilities to build solutions, to code against APIs and or pure I.P. We also have creative capabilities to augment what customers may have or what they may want through our experience labs group and so there's the footprint now of the capabilities that we bring to the table is a much more rounded out environment than it was three years ago when we first made that acquisition.
Now, does that all roll up under SageViw?
IV Dickson: Yes, that's correct. Yeah, SageView is a SageNet sub-brand, as you would call it, and that is specifically digital experience and digital signage. There's some kind of muddying of the waters between that and our SageIoT environment.
I remember going back a couple of years, I think I referenced it as kind of a full meal deal offer now that you can take a project right from the idea stage all the way through to ongoing management and do things like you just mentioned, doing the creative work and so on.
IV Dickson: Yes, that's exactly right. And if you look at just digital experience, our capabilities to now engineer and design an outcome and a solution and then bring that to fruition by hardware acquisition as well as configure kit and install. But then all of that, as we still really talk about on a daily basis, it's every conversation that we have. We do a lot of that just for the purpose of day two because still, five years later, we talked about this five years ago, I'm sure, the value of that technology is on day two or day fifty or day five hundred. It's only as somebody in my organization says: day one is only cool for 24 hours, right?
So that's really a big piece of that. But then, as we were talking about earlier, with regards to the portfolio, when you expand that digital experience, that SageView footprint and you start to add SageConnect, whether that be cellular or otherwise, you start to add SageIoT, then all of a sudden the footprint even gets bigger in terms of that, and that's really where we strive, and you look at someone like Noodles & Co, for example, that's a solution that we have been a network provider for many years. Last year, we subsequently rolled out to all of their corporate locations with digital and a network upgrade. but that's where the entire infrastructure of those four walls is key to that conversation.
Are you having companies come to you primarily with the idea that SageNet is capable of handling the degree of scale that we're looking at. We need to be out to 800 stores in the next six months or something like that versus jobs that, let's say, an Electrosonic, those kinds of companies might do that's an airport, it's one location. It's one big wow factor thing that I suppose you guys could do in theory, but that's not really your sweet spot, is it?
IV Dickson: No, not at all. And actually, to be totally honest with you, we sometimes leave those deals on the table on purpose and when you talk about scale and deployment, that is such a key piece to this environment that people do forget and it's hard to roll out that type of technology not only at scale but fast, and these retailers and restaurants expect fast.
Back in 2021, we were in the midst of a deal that we are still managing today. They had extremely high expectations of rollout, and we were doing nearly 300 installations a day during the month of June 2021, and we did the better part of 10,000 installations in eleven months.
Was this retail or QSR?
IV Dickson: Retail, but I mentioned Noodles & Co, that's about 400 locations. We did all of that in the 2023 calendar year for the most part, some 95+ percent.
So you have to have some serious project managers.
IV Dickson: We do have some serious project managers. That's one of the things I really like is we have those called macro or global project managers. We also have a really amazing field management team, and those folks are dealing with config, the kit, and our national logistics center and getting it out. Then, the onsite technicians make sure that the installation is done correctly.
Is the competitive landscape evolving? Are you seeing different kinds of companies getting in the competitive mix of opportunities?
IV Dickson: You know, when you started to ask that question, I thought, boy, howdy, has it changed!
If you look at the vertical markets, some things are identical to what they were before. I would say retail is still pretty similar. The folks who play in retail and who really excel in retail haven't changed a ton. Where we do see a lot of change in the market space from a competitive landscape perspective, QSR is a quick-serve restaurant and fast casual. Not only are there a lot of new names, but they're also not really new to the market. They're new in that space. There's also a lot of different offerings and it's very cloudy. It's extremely cloudy and selecting a provider because we're not there's a, there are a handful of folks that do what we do or similar to what we do.
There's a handful of folks who really are on the manufacturing side and creating great technologies. But they're selling those as holistic solutions, and they might not be, and then you still have the historic landscape of the content management systems, and CMS is out there that everybody goes, well, I don't know what to do with 85 CMSs, right? So that's where the competitive landscape is still the same, and yet you are seeing a lot of volatility in who's in the room.
Does it get murky because you have all kinds of companies with different sorts of software-driven systems that can bolt on a very rudimentary digital signage application and say, okay, here we've got a digital menus application for you? You don't need to buy a license, a CMS, or something else; just use this. Do you get those questions?
IV Dickson: You do, and you get some of that bolt-on conversation, and by the way, some of that is probably in our pitch deck as well because there are things that we do that are custom to a customer or customized for a customer around that. However, if you think about my background, I was at Scala Stratacache and back at NanoNation, and we're talking over 20 years, I've watched a lot of that change. I think a lot of people today, there's two factors that kind of drive that.
One is that many people don't understand the complexity of managing an enterprise-level menu. They think they're template managers; they think simple integrations will do it. When you get down to what might be fifty or a hundred or even two hundred configurations, it's extremely complex to manage all that content and data.
I think the other thing though, that's driving that conversation that the customer really struggles with picking the right solution is today, data integration and usage in menus is higher than it's ever been. The ability to get calories and price and even dynamic images or have dynamic capabilities to resort menus based on configurations. There's more landscape around that type of capability than we've ever had before. That clutters the idea of what my CMS does in its pure interface. What is the UI to take care of versus what am I going to have to go build and manage? And we, to be honest, in many respects, have fantastic CMS partners, and yet we downplay the use of that interface because most customers want that managed, and so they're not going to go and become experts inside of a CMS interface.
Yeah. Years ago, a very large QSR contacted me. They were very irritated with their CMS company because of some business moves that they made. They engaged me as a consultant, and one of the first questions was, what do you think of the software, because, you know, they wanted to consider moving on from it.
And I said, well, we've never seen it, and I said, pardon me, and they said, well, it's all managed, and I said, well, can you get a log in? And they're like, well, we can ask for one, but we've never logged in or anything, and I thought, whoa, this is like completely managed remotely. I guess it was a glimpse of where a lot of the business was going because you'd want to focus on making coffees or whatever.
IV Dickson: Yeah, it is, absolutely, and also, you have layers of software that are above the CMS now that are as valuable or more valuable, and yet they feed the outcome of the CMS, right? They feed the outcome of the menu, so if you have mobile data, a menu data management system, Adobe Experience Manager, or some other creative digital asset management environment, those are all sitting in a macro environment above that CMS, feeding into it and then getting distributed to those individual locations.
With SageU, you also introduced something called digital merchandiser two or three months ago, where you're doing some degree of software, like presentation-level software and management software, that might more traditionally be done by a CMS.
Is there a bit of a dance that you have to do with your partners where it doesn't feel like you're starting to eat through their lunch?
IV Dickson: Yes and no. I think the real key to that conversation is that SageNet builds and deploys solutions in the end. We utilize best-in-breed outcomes from hardware and software providers to do that, and we utilize incredibly talented and skilled folks on the inside of our team who do that as well. Our head of R&D, David Kai, who also oversees our IOT buildout, comes to the table and sees this from a greater solution perspective.
So when you bring him into the room, it's not a CMS discussion. It's an outcome-driven customer and customer outcome-driven environment, and you and I have joked online. We talked a little bit about it in Barcelona. This is actually where I embrace the idea of physigital. I know there's a lot of people who don't like that, right? However, if you really think about the idea of physigital beyond just marketing fodder and you think physical and digital, the consumer who has made the decision to go to a brick-and-mortar location, they've made the decision to go to a C Store, they've made a decision to go to a restaurant, they've made a decision to go to a retailer. They have the expectation of how digital technology is going to affect that, but it's just grown exponentially over the last five to ten years, especially with the pandemic. It created a situation where we did almost everything digitally. So now we're going back to that.
When you really think in that four-wall environment, and you think about, okay, they made it to my physical location. I now want digital to enhance their experience, then digital works for me, right? It becomes something of value. To that end, then we had to take what the infrastructure was and the solutions were the best-in-breed pieces that we had, and create solutions around that. So you mentioned digital merchandiser, there's a new video out that's about an artificial intelligence shoe kiosk that we showed.
It's about the integration of all the parts and bringing those to a space where they become seamless for the consumer, but they become wildly valuable for the brand. I joked at NRF because we showed lift and learn, and I've shown lift at learning at NRF before.
Probably in 2004?
IV Dickson: You got it, right? However, the idea is that I walk into the store, look at something in the mobile app, walk up to the AI kiosk, ask it for a product, it shows me where that product is, I pick it up, and I'm then having a web and physical experience in a very similar manner, or a digital and physical experience.
Those capabilities have become possible because our engineering base in what we monitor and manage was extremely solid. We added the team members, not only through acquisition but also through a refinement of how we engage through experience labs and bringing David Kai into those conversations with software development capabilities and then really listening to our customer's voice is key for this, and so that's a big piece of this puzzle is really listening to what the customer is trying to accomplish, and finding the avenues where digital can help with that, not replace it, not be the only thing, but help with that transaction.
Last question. I'm curious because we've mentioned Barcelona a couple of times. I go for my own reasons. A lot of people go over cause they're selling stuff or whatever. As a chief innovation officer, I suspect you're going over there because there's great wine, but that you're there to kind of see what's emerging, what's different, and it's a different walk than what you're going to do, walking around NRF or InfoComm, that sort of thing?
IV Dickson: Yeah, very much so. I mean, ISE, for me, is still a location that has more value. Visual technology in one place than anywhere else. I can spend three or four days walking around somewhat by myself or with colleagues, friends, or folks from the industry. But I can consume that and be able to say to myself, what's out there that I'm not using, or how can I use something differently? You know, I use a quote many days, I think it was the MTV founder who said, “Innovation is taking two things that are known and putting them together in a new way.”
I think that's actually the thing that we've somewhat forgotten in this industry is that sometimes we don't have to go build something brand new if we can make something new and interesting out of pieces we already have. And, Barcelona, regardless of location, although Barcelona is a great location, the reality of that conversation is I go to look to see like, what are people doing? What is starting to drive the industry? And to see the year-over-year refinement of transparent OLED, and to see now the influx of transparent, or call them holographic, I don't know that I would call them that, but that's what the Muxwave folks call them that, that environment, but then also now to see what's going on with Kinetic LED and moving pieces and parts while the LED is showing visual capabilities. But then, even going back, I took a video of Epson. They had a massive umbrella, and it was covered in projectors. It was just a reminder that technology is out there and how it gets used.
People often forget that this industry is not entirely new, and yet there are many different ways to do stuff that are actually super exciting.
Yeah, I always say these trade shows are not about giant leaps; they're incremental advances, and you have to have the knowledge and experience where it's helpful to have that knowledge and experience to recognize, I go, oh, that's interesting, they've done this. It's not like I'm blown away by it, but oh, they've conquered this little challenge, and now it's better.
IV Dickson: Yeah, that's exactly right.
IV, we could talk for three hours, but I try to keep these to a certain time window, so I'm going to shut this down. It was great chatting.
IV Dickson: Dave, thank you so much for the time, and look forward to seeing you soon out on the road.
![Nick Johnson, NowSignage](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/Nick_Johnson_2023_jtsh5d_300x300.png)
Wednesday Apr 10, 2024
Nick Johnson, NowSignage
Wednesday Apr 10, 2024
Wednesday Apr 10, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company called NowSignage. He'd seen a lot of different options, but these guys he said, had something that was very modern and nimble.
I finally got my act together and scheduled a chat with founder Nick Johnson. Now's roots are in pushing social media messaging to big screens at live events - like concerts and big games. Requests started evolving, both in terms of what could be done with screens and how long they'd be used - which led in part to him concluding the future business was in permanent installations and revenue that was recurring and predictable, versus periodic.
Now markets its product as being affordable and not focused on a particular market segment, like QSR, workplace or whatever. That generalist approach tends to worry me, because buyer decisions tend to get focused on price, as in who costs the least. But in my chat with Johnson, he explains that their market focus is on what he calls multi-screen management - networks with a lot of locations and a lot of screens. Most companies would also say they want that and do that, but as Johnson explains in our chat, that's easy to talk about, but much harder to do well.
I also had to ask about the Frankenstein'd Rolls-Royce that was the eye candy for the NowSignage stand at ISE in Barcelona.
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TRANSCRIPT
Nick, thank you for joining me. I know NowSignage reasonably well. I suspect a lot of other people do as well, but could you maybe just give me a rundown on the background of the company, what it is you do, what's distinct, that sort of thing?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, sure. Cheers for having me on, Dave.
And, yeah, nice to be here. Yeah, so NowSignage, for those who don't know who we are, is a UK-based business that has been around since 2013. A lot of people thought we launched a market and were in a big whirlwind storm about six years ago, but actually, the tech has been being developed since 2013 now, and then we really honed in on the permanent signage market around seven or eight years ago, really.
In terms of signage, we position ourselves as a multi-screen management platform that allows our users to effectively and efficiently manage large networks of screens. So, we don't really focus on a specific vertical specialism. So, with IE, we're not a specific sector, like a corporate sector outright or anything like that. Our specialism is really around meeting the needs and demands of projects that have multiple screens, often in multiple locations or multiple sites, so those large-volume projects are our specialism.
Now, I would imagine most software companies would say: we can fully support large enterprise level, big footprint projects across multiple locations and all that, so that doesn't immediately hit me as a distinction, but I'm guessing you're going to tell me that it's easier said than done?
Nick Johnson: Exactly. So normally, as you say, with CMSs, and we found it ourselves in the early days, we had an eye on those bigger projects, but in reality, as soon as it got above 50 screens, that becomes a challenge for a CMS. It's got a different thought process that needs to go into the CMS from an intuitive nature, but also, your platform needs to be built to kind of balance those enterprise features alongside the simplicity, flexibility, and scalability of the platform.
So yeah, there are some nuances that, for sure, where if you want to manage those large scale projects, you really need to nail the ability to make it as easy as possible for those end users to target specific screens with specific promotions or specific content and that's quite a powerful and hard to achieve thing within a CMS. It's all about bringing those features to enable that functionality.
So, if I'm an end user or even a reseller integrator looking at different options out there, what's my sniff test (or smell test) to determine who can genuinely support large-scale networks like that?
Is it data integration, you know, is it elasticity, at the server level? What are those things?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, both of those, obviously, come into consideration. The way we position our product is that we ultimately want it to be self managed by the user. So if it can't be easy to be managed by the user, then you've got a problem, and to make it easy to be managed by the user, you do need those features in the platform like very advanced targeted tags or roles and permissions for locking down areas of the platform.
The targeted tags will allow people to target localized stores with localized messages based on the tagging functionality. I'd probably say the most important thing is just giving that flexibility throughout the platform. You can't say that all scheduling has to be done in the scheduling area. You need to be more flexible on that. So in the NowSignage CMS, we enable certain degrees of different types of scheduling to happen, whether it's in the content area, the actual playlist area, the scheduling area, and even at the screen’s level, there are different types of tools that you can use to meet the requirements of the customer.
So, it's not always one size fits all. You have to go to that customer and say, look, we've got this feature set here that makes it easy to manage large networks. What's your specific requirement here? And we may turn around and go, great. You want to use our targeted tags and our override functionality, or we might say you want to use nested playlists and the ability to set assets to show and remove at set dates and times. So, it's giving that broader flexibility within the CMS to adapt to their needs.
I'm curious as well about the whole idea of affordability. It's one of the things that comes across on your site pretty quickly that you talk about it being cost effective and affordable. But it's also pretty sophisticated, like a lot of the platforms that say they're affordable, it's because, they do the basics.
Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I'm glad you used the word affordable there because I don't like the word cheap. So, for us, it's not a race to the bottom. We're not about being the cheapest. We're about being what you get out of our package, which is the most affordable. It's the most cost-effective. So you get the most amount of performance out of our platform for the cost and ratio. So yeah, it's all about affordability. So, with the platform, we don't charge for add-ons within the platform.
When you get access to NowSignage, you get access to all our features and functionality, and you even get access to them as we roll out new features and functionality; they become free for all end users to use. So that's why we appeal, as I said at the start there, we don't really have a sector specialism; we focus on the type of customer that we want to work with, and then often those customers we find because we operate, let's say with lots of supermarkets, a supermarket isn't just a retail requirement in the front of the store. A true requirement for a supermarket is actually they want to centralize that CMS and they have a retail requirement. They have a retail media network requirement. They have a digital out-of-home requirement. They have a back office requirement. They have a factory and manufacturing plant requirement. So all of these requirements are completely different, and the NowSignage platform allows those users to pull on different features and functionalities in the platform.
So they may in their manufacturing plant use our Microsoft Power BI integration for showing dispatch information and fleet management, whereas in the retail media network, they might be using our proof of play functionality, which, as you've alluded to, is very much an enterprise feature and it normally very often doubles the cost of a license. We absorb all of those costs, from our servers and so on because we spread that across our whole customer base. So, yeah, it's absolutely the most affordable is how we position ourselves, not the cheapest in the race to the bottom.
Yeah, I've often said that if you're going to be a generalist, that can be a little deadly because you are just competing on price by and large, but what you're saying is, we go across a number of vertical sectors, but we're not really a generalist because our specialty is large, multi-screen networks.
Nick Johnson: Yeah, and what you will get with those networks as well, because of the types of brands and customers that you're working with for those projects, it's not really about just selling features and competing on cost for those large networks. Now, obviously, they will be price-driven because often they go out to tender, so you do need the ability to really come down on your price, which we have that capability to do so we can be very competitive on price, but equally, what the brands wanna see is they really want to build a partnership with that CMS to get confidence from you that you are advising them on how to structure their account to maximize the usage of your platform, to meet their goals and of what they require from the network.
So if you can communicate and instill that confidence, I think that's really where you find the winning edge to things.
You also, as a company, say that your hardware is agnostic. I have seen all kinds of companies go down that path, and many of them then almost surrender and come up with their own dedicated player devices.
I don't think it's because they're making extra hardware margin; it's just that they grow wary of trying to support all these different types of hardware, and the much easier path is to just have their own, which they can control because they know the build and everything else. So, how do you manage being agnostic across so many different platforms?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, so it's all about getting the feature parity across all those different operating systems. There are so many out there. You've got the standard kind of Android, Windows, Linux, all of those. But then you've got the more proprietary ones with the system on chip, where a lot of them are really using an Android base there but you've got Samsung with Tizen, LG with WebOS, BrightSign with their setup there. So, yeah, we've got one centralized code base, and so I probably can't share too much about that and give our full game away, but yeah, we've got one centralized code base set, which delivers feature parity across all those builds.
So when we make a change within the platform, we don't need to make it for seven different builds or ten different builds. We don't have to support lots of builds of the platform, meaning lots of developers. We have one centralized build, and that is built in a way that is then compatible with all operating systems out there. So you may have seen that on our stand at ISE. At ISE, we had three or four BrightSign displays. We had a large video wall that was powered by a Windows player. We had a Sony system on-chip display and a Samsung system on-chip display, and on one setup there via the show Wi-Fi, which is very flaky at times, we managed to achieve perfect screen synchronization across different hardware again, which is quite unusual.
Not only are we offering parity across the hardware, but actually with features like Screen Sync, we can bring all of that together and actually offer the synchronization to take into account those different processing powers and speeds and so on.
Does that mean if you inherit a network and you're then going to expand on it and it has multiple different operating systems on different devices and so on, you can manage them all off of your application without having something in the middle, like Signage OS or whatever?
Nick Johnson: Absolutely, and I think that's what's so important with the types of customers that we're onboarding is that they will have a network that's out there that's got legacy hardware and screens in there, and they're not in a position where they want a huge outlay of cost to go and transform all that hardware over brand new hardware. So because we can sit on a system on a chip, we can sit on the media players, we also work closely with those partners, as you've mentioned, the Signage OS, if there was a requirement there, then we could sit alongside that. But generally, because we have that feature parity and the hardware-agnostic approach, there's no requirement for that additional layer that needs to be added, so it can reduce all the costs and also mean that the network can be rolled out at relative ease and speed as well.
Some of the other software applications out there that say they are hardware agnostic, they're able to do that because it's a somewhat truncated application. It's a web player or something. So yes, you can get content, all the different operating systems or whatever, but it's not a pure player. It can't do everything that a native player could do.
Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, ours is a full application in the way that it's powered. So we are a Chrome OS partner, and we can run through a browser mode or any sort of environment like that where it needs to be embedded into a web page or as a browser player, but yeah, the way our code base packages or fit packages, or everything is its own native application.
A few companies have started talking, well, they've been talking about a few things, but one of them is this idea of headless CMS and the idea that, if I have a tool set that I'm already using within a larger company, that's pushing out to web, mobile, intranet, extranet, whatever it may be, they want to use that tool set to also do digital signage as opposed to logging into a separate application.
Can you do that sort of thing?
Nick Johnson: So are you referring to embedding us into different environments so that we could be played within an intranet environment?
Probably more so that the development, the scheduling, a lot of what you would do for a digital sign network, you could do within another application, and the digital signage platform is kind of the plumbing, the infrastructure that moves things around.
It's kind of the way that Samsung with VXT now is positioning itself as you can write your application on top of our platform.
Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, normally, we operate with a fully open API. So we really want to be the source and the conduit for everything coming into it. So we won't go out there and build some specialist functionality that other platforms already build a lot better than us, like a Microsoft Power BI integration; we wouldn’t try and build something like that or a Quividi integration that we've got if we want to do audience measurement with camera systems and so on, we have an API there. So we can pull all of those great features and functionality together and then be the source to output that.
Similar to QSR environments, things like with the API, we sit in harmony with their product systems. So, if they want to do dynamic pricing, we will just be another outlay to them. They will look at the output to all the other different avenues for that pricing, and we will just be a different source that they're inputting into. Then, we'll showcase that dynamic pricing data on the screen. So yeah, we've got an open API, and we're kind of pulling all that data resource into NowSignage.
I would imagine the data side of things is super important, the ability to support all that?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, from two angles, really. In terms of the data capacity on our side, we've just gone through a full year's process of improving and upgrading our infrastructure. So, the infrastructure of a CMS is super important. It is arguably what sets a lot of CMSs apart. You've found in recent years that there are certain CMSs that have risen to the top and that they're probably the ones that have invested in their infrastructure, their scalability as a brand, and their security. So, likewise, we've done the same.
Our infrastructure is invaluable to the platform. If we have downtime or anything that's going to impact our size of customers, which isn't acceptable, but also the data that we can then pull together and aggregate to then analyze and give back to the customers inside the platform is obviously crucial as well, and that's probably going to be a big focus for us this year.
We already have features like proof of play in the platform that can report on when, where, and how many times an advert is played on the screen, and all of that is live data that comes through. So customers don't need to wait for that data, and we obviously have lots of information about the status of the screens and the uptime status and the ability to kind of set them to go on and off and push our app updates and all of that kind of good stuff. But I think that will be a big push this year to analyze and help our customers understand that data more and more, knowing exactly where their screens are and what's happening with them.
Your company is young enough in relative terms that I suspect you're not saddled with some of the problems that, or challenges that, really well established companies may have in terms of they have a software application that's, they've been building off of for 15-30 years, in some cases, versus what you've got.
If you started in 2013 and you kind of emerged a few years after that, you've got a platform that's using modern web tools and everything else, and you're a lot more malleable, I suspect.
Nick Johnson: Exactly, and a lot of the team that I've brought together as well, we're all from completely different sectors, but before that, created and delivered and brought to market a very successful SaaS business there in a completely different sector.
So, as I built this business, I brought on a lot of the expertise from the old CTO, and my investor and my business partner are from that background as well. So right at our core, we understand how SaaS businesses and tech need to work. So we're not from a hardware background. We're not interested in the hardware. We're interested in it. How can this software be the most efficient and scalable piece of software and also the most innovative piece of software?
So you're right, probably the timing of it and in the sense that digital signage had kind of become to get a bit more established around that point and knew its place, so we don't have all the legacy burden of the hardware and having to build on and revamp our infrastructure with.
We've managed to build a very clean UI from day one, but also from the experience and background of myself, but also the people that I've built around the team, where we're really focused on SaaS and technology and innovation, that's what we live and breathe every day, really.
And the company kind of grew out of, or at least was inspired by, I believe, it was pushing social media to screens at live events. Is that correct?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, let's be honest. It was probably me just having a bit of fun in my mid-twenties at that point. So, yeah, the way it all started was I was working for a company that was a web agency at that point, developing websites. And so my part in that business was that we developed a piece of technology that was embedding social feeds into those websites. So, at the time, just before 2013, I separated that as a separate company and thought, wouldn't it be great if we could get some social content onto screens at events.
This was kind of around the time that the Twitter walls were emerging. So it was right at the early stage of that. So our first ever event was actually at the Olympic stadium, and we were powering the big screens where people were taking Instagram pictures and popping them onto big screens and I couldn't really believe what I'd got into at that point. So, I just enjoyed the ride for a few years. We got shipped around all over the world, doing large events and as we did more of those events, I suppose the platform evolved, which is why the platform is so intuitive and focused just around the software because we kind of started off with that base and then we were doing events where people then wanted to advertise onto the screen.
So we had to bring in some advertising capability to show images and videos, and then before we knew it, we started doing some more permanent setups where we needed to bring in that better structure and management and, then, as I say, probably around, I can't remember the exact date now, but it must've been around seven or eight years ago. Just overnight, it was 90 percent of our revenue at the time, I just decided we needed to focus on permanent signage. That was the model that was going to work. That's the sustainable model and the growth model that we wanted. So we kind of just made the ballsy move at that point that we were ditching all of that income, and we focused permanently on permanent digital signage and because we have the background of the platform already, as I say, people were looking at us going, who are these guys who have come to market and we've just kind of won four AV awards in a row. But, actually, it's because the software was there, and we actually just needed to understand what the channel was and what the industry was and that's what we focused on, and we don't sell directly at all. We only sell directly through our resell reseller channel, whether it's a balance of integrators or distributors, and that's how we now go to market.
It's funny, I was talking about that with somebody else yesterday about the channel and the opportunities and challenges of doing that and how difficult it can be to sell direct if you also have channel partners.
You're kind of saying that you've got to choose door number one or door number two. You can't go through both.
Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I think it's a fine balance, and I'd say certainly in where we come from, it's always through the channel, but I have seen some variances globally that some people say that the channel in Europe, and then in the US that they're selling direct because they get a big contract and the brand wants to work direct.
We've actually just secured a very large project in the US, which is great news for us, but the relationship of that is that we engaged directly and we built trust with the end user and we demonstrated our platform, but now it's come through to a commercial point. We are absolutely funneling that through the channel because that's how you build that trust and that relationship with the channel. So that's now being commercially funnel funneled through one of our channel partners, and then off the back of that. For us, there's no way that we can; we would never do a direct deal because that kind of breaks our whole model of how we're going to market and how we're building trust with our resellers that they're ultimately our partner and our direct customer.
And are you white-labeled and totally behind the curtain, or would the end user know that this is NowSignage as managed by Brand X?
Nick Johnson: In almost all circumstances, they will know it's NowSignage. What we don't do is we don't do white labels for our resellers. We want them to proudly shout about it being NowSignage. So everybody at the sales point knows that they are purchasing NowSignage. In some instances, once it then goes through the end user, they go, great, we're now using NowSignage, but actually, we want our staff to log into an environment that feels familiar and friendly to them; at that point, we can white label for the end user, but at no point is it hidden and that it's NowSignage. It's NowSignage all the way and then when the end users dive in, we can white label to an end user requirement.
Yeah, I've always wondered about white labeling. I understand the task and everything, but if you do that as a reseller, there's then an expectation you really know your way around the software, and I suspect that there are a lot of uncomfortable phone calls and meetings.
Nick Johnson: Yeah, and also, I think you get that frustration as well. We've found fortunately that we've managed to secure some of those resellers who have traditionally sold a white-labeled CMS, and the frustrations that they've actually ended up happening is that they get a demand from an end user to say, we need this feature, and we need it right now.
Now, it's not their code base. They don't own the IP. They don't own the code. They've got no developers. So, at that point, they have to go back to the CMS and say, can you build this? But I think from a CMS's point of view, that kind of, like, well, you're a white-label solution so you now just need to join the queue of things, whereas with us, we have that open dialogue with the end user and with our reseller. So if a request comes in, it funnels straight to us, and we control that kind of destiny of where those features come in, and we're very transparent with that roadmap to react.
ISE was a couple of months ago. You guys were there when I was walking around. I was expecting to hear a lot more about AI from different software companies. Here's how we're using AI. Here's how we're applying it. Here's the opportunity, and so on.
But maybe it's just early stages, and I just didn't hear much. I'm curious what you guys are doing with it or you're kind of sitting on the sidelines watching it?
Nick Johnson: No, we're absolutely not sitting on the sidelines watching it, but to have a go at us, we're not shouting about it as much as we probably should be, and what we've found is that we are doing a huge amount of development in the background with AI. So we've already done some integrations into the platform with AI that haven't been released as full features into the platform.
My understanding and the feedback that I'm getting from other CMSs that we talk to and have good relationships with are that AI at the moment; none of the big brands are quite ready to take the first step with it, really. They're all very interested in it, and it's a great opportunity to open a door and start a conversation with them. So we do have AI features built into the platform that can, you can walk up to a screen and tell it what your allergies are, and it can then relay what food is appropriate for you within that store or help you find products within certain aisles or find your preferences. So we're using it as a tool to really open up the door and demonstrate.
But in reality, there's not been a huge amount of adoption from it on our side, and I think that it will come, but I think some of the big brands are just waiting for someone to take the first step to see if it goes well, and then there'll be a lot of people to follow, but we're absolutely in that talking point where we've done a lot of AI development.
Yeah, I think, as you say, a lot of the work isn't really something that is going to be visible to an end-user or to a channel partner. It's work that helps expedite some basic coding and things, right?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, it's all about bringing in the data and feeding that back to the end user in the cleanest and most efficient manner. So it can become a very powerful tool, where we're seeing it. As I say, a great example would be to walk into a coffee shop and say, “I want something for breakfast, but I've got a nut allergy,” and it can relay all that allergy information and say, this is what we suggest, and if you say, “I don't want anything that has to meat in it,” it will say: here are the vegan options. “Where can I find that?” You can find that on aisle five, it's priced for 99 or whatever it might be. All of that is just pulling live data and using the AI tool to relay that information.
Just going back to ISE, I can't have this conversation without asking about the Rolls Royce.
Nick Johnson: Yeah. So we had a lot of interest in a lot of questions about why you have got a Rolls Royce there, but I think that's it Dave. But I think for NowSignage and me, we like to get noticed and it's important to get noticed because it's, at times, a crowded marketplace, and I think you've really got to understand that there's a cost of being dull, and a lot of people waste a lot of energy and get drowned out by all this white noise because everyone's saying the same old, same really. So you've got to really consider what is the cost of being dull.
And if you're going to be dull in the events industry, you're going to have an empty stand. You're going to have no pundits on your stand. You're going to be having no conversations. So, it's all about, I think, making people care, making people smile, and surprising them in some way, and if you can hit those three points at any point in any form of marketing, I think you'll get an interest in your sparking debates, really.
So, for people who did not go to ISE, what did you do?
Nick Johnson: So we bought a 1950s vintage Rolls Royce from a scrap heap, and we did it over three months. My business partner is a fanatic about cars…
Yes, I met him.
Nick Johnson: He did it as a bit of a hobby, and before we renovated it, we, to some Rolls Royce lovers, they may not have been happy, but I remind them that it was on a scrap heap, so we did save it in the first place. Wwe chopped it in half, we attached a flatbed truck to it. We then constructed a digital scene on the back to make it look like it was a, like a food van, but actually it was constructed with screens and the digital element created a visual effect to make it look like the screens went up and down and then we drove it 1,300 miles from Manchester in the UK all the way to Barcelona at 50 miles an hour and parked it on the stand.
So, was it on the back of another truck, or was it a viable rolling vehicle?
Nick Johnson: So with this setup, and it was over seven meters long unit, so yeah, and because of the age of it, we actually built an electric motor inside it underneath.
So what we did is we transported it on another vehicle that had to drive very slowly, and then when we got it near the venue, we actually drove it in with a remote control by the electric power. So we actually drove because no petrol was allowed in the car, and we remote control it in and reversed it onto the stand and then we had a few gags throughout the show as well, where we got people to sit in and then quickly remove the remote, and they thought that they'd pressed something and made the car move forward.
Well, that's certainly a lot more eye-grabbing than a bowl full of pens.
Nick Johnson: I agree.
So what are you going to do next year? Or you can't tell me?
Nick Johnson: I am under wraps on that one, but let's just say it's definitely going to be bigger and better. The problem that I think we will have once we do next year is that I'm not too sure how we're going to top it the following year. So, next year is going to be, yeah, pretty impressive.
It is vehicle-related again, but yeah, it's even more impressive. I'm quite looking forward to getting it over there.
Yeah. Well, the challenge of that is just what you just said. If you one up by yourself every year, then there's an expectation now: what are you gonna do? Is it gonna be a space shuttle or what?
Nick Johnson: Yeah, or just not turn up for any year or so, but I don't think we could do that.
Nick, thank you. That was terrific.
Nick Johnson: Excellent. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on, and yeah, I look forward to catching you in Infocomm or wherever I see you next.
Infocomm and I'll be at the event in Munich in six to seven weeks, something like that, so I’m around.
Nick Johnson: Good stuff.
All right. Take care.
![Todd Stahl, Clear Motion Glass](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/stahl400_xc33fs_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Apr 03, 2024
Todd Stahl, Clear Motion Glass
Wednesday Apr 03, 2024
Wednesday Apr 03, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays.
In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes.
So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass?
That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings.
Unlike other products on the market, Clear Motion's LED displays are sandwiched inside sheets of laminated safety glass - so when a building goes up or is being retrofitted, the glass panels that go in are also active, highly-transparent displays.
I had a good chat with Todd Stahl, a glass industry veteran who runs both the established and start-up businesses.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
David: Todd, thank you for joining me.
Todd Stahl: Hey Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. It's going to be a pleasure to talk about some LED glass with you.
David: Yeah, tell me about the company. I saw you guys at DSE back in December. You were busy almost the whole time. So I didn't really have the time or the chance to have any kind of a detailed LED conversation, but I know that the company has not been around that long, but it's grown out of a pretty well-established “performance glass company.”
Todd Stahl: Yeah. A little bit about the history there. So, at Clear Motion Glass, we're making the LEDs inside of the glass. I came across the LED glass around June of 2022, so I've had it for just about two years. The parent company is William Penn Performance Glass, and that's another company I started in 2011. We deal with high-end architectural Glass.
So, a cliffnote version: We go to the top architects in the country, and they're like, “Hey, who are you designing for?” And they'll say to us, “Hey, we want some really cool glass to go in the elevators for the Empire State Building.” So we got into the architectural space with glass, and actually, we'll William Penn, who was just voted one of the top 50 glass producers in North of North America. So something that we're definitely pretty proud of around here.
Then I came across LED glass around 2022, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen put inside a glass, and I wanted to be a part of it.
David: So when you say you came across it, what do you mean by that?
Todd Stahl: So, there's another product in glass, another glass product that's been around, I'm going to say right around since 2000. It’s a glass that goes frosted to clear from the turn of a switch, Switchable glass. So there's a company called Smart Film Blinds, and they were an applied film company that would actually take that, what we would call switch glass, but they just took the film and applied it to existing glass, and it was owned by Alan and Tracy Ackerman, and then they had this connection with LED Glass they weren't quite sure what to do with it. They knew it was really cool. And it had a chance to be really something big, but they were more of a film company, and then he and I got introduced, through a need that we had for some smart film, the switchable film, and then eventually we had a partnership for a while.
Then we decided basically that I'll stick with the glass part, what I'm best at, and he'll stick with the film part, which was what they were best with. But that's how I got introduced to it, right around two years ago.
David: What you're marketing now is Clear Motion Glass. Is that your own product or are you reselling somebody else's manufactured product?
Todd Stahl: We have partners overseas, such as a company called Filmbase. That's where we get the actual LED grid or LED mesh. We bring that to my facility in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the south-central Pennsylvania area, we're 20 minutes south of Hershey, close to Harrisburg, and then we actually fabricate everything as a finished panel here. So we'll make the glass, we'll get the interlayer components. We have a laminating machine that actually works by pulling a vacuum and heating it up to certain temperatures. After that, it comes out, and we have a clear LED glass display.
David: So laminated glass is something that's been around forever. So this is just basically sandwiching the mesh in between sheets of laminated glass?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely making a sandwich component. We start with a piece of glass, say that's your component number one. Then, we start with the inner layer materials.
In a case like this, we use a couple of different techniques, but we use EVA, which is ethyl vinyl acetate. Then we'll actually put the LED mesh grid on top of that, then we put another piece of EVA, then we go with the finished component of the sandwich, another piece of glass, and we stick them in an oven, we run a certain cycle, and about four hours later, we have a laminated piece of glass, exactly how you described. It's a sandwich makeup for sure.
David: Was there a lot of R&D work involved in it? Because I would imagine if you're putting an LED mesh inside of an oven, then going to a very high temperature and all that, I'm thinking if I didn't know much about this stuff, I'd be wondering, what's all that heat going to do to this thing?
Todd Stahl: Yeah. You know, we have to make sure that it can withstand certain temperatures, obviously, and if you don't heat, and just in general, if you don't get laminated glass hot enough, it doesn't bond, it does not bond correctly. What you have to achieve is cross-linking and cross-linking is basically the interlayer material to the glass itself, and that happens at a temperature of around 110 degrees Celsius, so it's not getting hot enough to cook a Turkey in there, so we're not really dealing with extremes.
I think a lot of people might think when you're actually making glass out of what we call a batch, you know that's where the glass is heated up to 2000 degrees and you're really dealing with some extreme temperatures. It's not quite the same extremes at all when you're dealing with laminated glass.
David: So tell me what performance glass is, and what high-end performance glass is because I don't know the glass world terribly well.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, sure. So, so what William Penn performance glass is the performance name kind of all started because our glass looks great and it, but it's an all safety rated glass. So that's kind of the performance part of the glass. So, if you're looking at our glass, say that's used for glass handrails, that's a very specific glass that's chosen to withstand the certain load requirements of a structural application, and typically most of our handrails are tempered, and laminated glass.
So there are two ways on this planet to make a piece of glass safety-rated. You either temper it or you laminate it. We happen to do both of those things in a lot of our projects, and it's kind of funny like obviously safety-rated glass is strong, but the only thing that's really taken into consideration when you're referring to safety glass are you automatically assume it's going to break and what happens when it breaks, right? So with tempered glass, you put a lot of stress on the glass itself through a heating and cooling process, and whenever that glass breaks, it breaks into small panels that would not be able to potentially cause a life-threatening wound, and then you have the exact opposite with laminated where if a rock hits your car, if that's ever happened to you the rock doesn't come through and the pieces of the glass, the shards don't come through, they stay together. So you got those two things to the requirements when you're thinking about what is safety rated glass.
David: With the Clear Motion product, is it an indoor product only, an outdoor facing product, or what are the use cases?
Todd Stahl: So what's really cool about our LED glass is that almost wherever you're using architectural glass right now, you can now use our LED displays. So it can be used in exterior applications, a building facade, glass canopies, and railings that may be exterior. All of the components are kind of encapsulated inside that glass, and that glass is making a nice, really safe, cozy home for the LED display inside of it.
David: And it's bright enough that it can be on a glass curtain wall like an auto dealer?
Todd Stahl: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the really cool applications for it. In fact, you had mentioned at the trade show and boy, were we busy? I think I was just talking about this yesterday. We scanned around 450 people in that short show. Our voices were a little strained by the end of the evening.
So, the brightness of our display at the show, Dave, was only running around 4%, and I thought that was one of the more amazing things about the product because it was still kind of bright at 4%. Later we started bringing that up because a few potential clients wanted to see it at 50-60% brightness. So yeah, you can totally use this as an exterior sign and get whatever brightness you need. I think some of the products are well over 10,000 nits depending on the needs, and I think one actually lasted up to 15,000 nits, so plenty bright for the outside.
David: Yeah, once you get to 3,500, you're good.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, exactly.
David: On transparency. I see on your website that it says there is up to 90 percent transparency.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, so when you get to some of the pixel pitches that are viewed from say, a distance of around a hundred feet, I think the pixel pitch at a 20, I believe that one may allow up to 90 percent of light to come through. It's really cool. I mean, you have this really great display, and then you're just getting all this, and you're not cutting off any spaces so if you have a traditional LED display, you can only view that from one side and I think that's kind of what's really amazing about this product and a lot of times when you're looking at the product, you don't even realize that it's transparent until the image would say it's rotating from one image to the next. And you're like, Oh, wow, that's clear, there are people behind there. So I think, yeah, it's really cool in that application.
David: From what I saw, because it's this mesh material, with super thin wiring in between each of the LED lights.
The challenge I've had with a lot of trans or “transparent products” is that they look good from the front side, particularly at a distance, but when you look at the back end of the things, there's a mesh, like a metallic mesh or something like that, a grid system that kind of makes it look like crap.
Todd Stahl: Yeah. With a lot of the applied films that have been out there before, and there's not a whole lot of them, but there are a few, certainly from that backside, it doesn't look at all like the front, and the same thing, with the LED actual metal meshes, again, they look phenomenal from the front, and you get behind, and you're like, man, what am I looking at here?
So with our product, what's really cool about that is you get a little bit of the halo effect, from the image that's playing on it, that you can see from, say, the view side of the glass, and then you get a slight reflection off of that front piece of glass that kind of bounces back through. So you see a little bit of a glow or a halo in the background, but it is not an eyesore, and it looks pretty good. You can see out, and you have a very clear picture of the people that you're looking through or whatever object you would be doing from the back of the product. It looks really good. It's a good look from the backside.
David: Yeah, there are numerous products out there that now do this kind of foil mesh effect, and you have to adhere it to the inside of a sheet of glass, which is all fine and everything else, but it doesn't look that good from the inside, does it?
Todd Stahl: No, it really doesn't. The concept here, we touched on hockey a little bit, earlier, but you know, we have, you have all these hockey nets in the arena to protect the fans that a puck doesn't hit them, and most of those meshes are black. It's harder for our eyes to kind of pick up the black mesh than it is for white. There are some that have whites, but not many, and the black is blended in a lot easier. I'm a big hockey fan, so I've been to a few arenas, and the white ones are a little harder to, I think it takes away from the image more, and that's why we're using a black LED mesh.
When we first started, it was white, and it just didn't have as good of a; again, I thought it took away from the product from the backside.
David: So presumably there are limits in terms of the size of a glass panel that you can do because you've got a laminate in an oven of some kind and that they're only so big.
So if you have, to use the example I mentioned earlier of, an auto dealer's glass curtain wall where the sheet of glass might be pretty darn big. How do you put multiple units together? And what does that look like in terms of cabling and everything?
Todd Stahl: Yeah. So we're always kind of limited in size by a couple of different things. Sometimes it might be the actual raw product glass that we're using. Some sheets are available to us, bigger and smaller, the width of the laminating materials, and then our oven as well. So basically, in our oven here in Pennsylvania, we can laminate an LED panel roughly about 6x10 feet.
You know, that's a pretty sizable piece of glass, and then what we can do, if you're doing a glass facade it kind of gets into a little bit more of how the glass is installed, but you're basically stacking the panels. there's a control unit. That attaches to each panel of glass, and then those control units are all tied together and then that gives you one cohesive image plane from one panel to the next.
David: Do you have much of a seam in between them?
Todd Stahl: So, if you remember, at the trade show, I think we had two panels out there and we had a seam in the middle. So I'll see the seam, you'll see the seam, but when the image is playing, you really don't even notice it's there. A lot of times, depending on the application, a glass facade is a little different, because you're going to have all most likely all four edges of the glass covered, but, we have a lot of applications where the panels are being butt jointed together and it's a nice polished edge there. So, yeah, with the image running and stuff, you really don't even see it unless you get within a couple of feet of it.
David: So we're talking millimeters, not inches, in terms of a gap.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. You know, a gap's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three, three-sixteenths of an inch, plus or minus.
David: So not much at all.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, not much at all. Like I said, it's pretty cool. When that image is going, you're like, it just looks like one big piece of glass.
David: And there are technical limits, like if, let's say, an airport curtain wall that might be like 80 feet high for the side of a terminal or something like that. Can you do that?
Todd Stahl: Absolutely. That can all be tied in. You'd have several zones there, and depending on how you're handling the programming from a laptop, and something like that, you just say zone one's the entire thing, and then you might break it down into individual zones if you want different things playing at different times, but yeah, we this is definitely designed to do entire glass facades or, curtain walls.
David: All those little lights generate some heat. How does the heat get out?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we've been working with these products for about two years now, and I always expect when I put my hand on the glass to touch it, that it's going to be nice and warm, but it really isn't. The heat definitely dissipates quickly. There is some energy consumption, and we have charts for that. So once we get into a building design, we can get in there and say, “Hey, this is what you're going to need for your power requirements.” But it has very similar power requirements to current LED displays that have been around for a while.
But yeah, it doesn't really create much heat. You would think it creates more, and I'm telling you, whenever anybody sees it, one of the first things that they almost always do is, “Oh, I expected that to be warm” and they touch it, and it really isn't.
David: Well, one of the criticisms or let's say what a naysayer might say about this, is, “All right, if I buy this, glass panel with the LED mesh embedded inside of it, what happens if there's a dead pixel? I'm stuck with that forever. It can't be repaired because it's sandwiched in between two sheets of glass.”
Todd Stahl: You know, it was my biggest concern. We spent a good bit of time.
I think the lifespan of the LED bulbs we're using is right under 11 years. So we found the biggest problem that we've encountered, and this took us a while before we were going to bring it to market because that's by far the biggest concern; anyone looks at that and goes, it's not the first time I've ever seen a bulb, you know? So there's a couple of things. There's been a lot of research and development to make sure when it comes out of lamination that we've already caused any bulbs to fail before those processes, and we actually have a little bit of a protocol we've developed. So, one of the biggest reasons a light bulb is going to fail is the heat and pressure in that vacuum. It's not so much the heat, but the pressure because there's a little bit of movement in there. So if all those connection points aren't just right, you're going to get a bulb that may come out after you've done all of the work, and then you fire it up, and you know, there's a lot of bulbs, and a diode and only one is bad, it's not good. So we actually have a pre-laminating process we run to actually replicate what is going to go through the stressors of the lamination process. And if we find a bulb or a diode that might not be working, we can replace it after that pre-cycle of lamination.
Now, on the flip side, let's say it's out there, it's in the field. If we use annealed glass on the front surface, so, annealed is not tempered, but the backlight would be tempered, so you're still dealing with a, fully safety rated tempered and laminated makeup. We actually have a drilling process where we can drill a core out of the glass, and we can actually replace that LED diode. What our experience is that once they come through lamination so far, with all the panels we've been working on we have not had one go out and we've put them in some areas of our glass production facility near our tempering oven, which is a really cool piece of equipment. It has a 600 horsepower blower that when the tempered glass comes through, it cools it to dissipate the heat, but it draws some dust, there's some heat back there. We've had a panel running there for two years in that condition without any issues. But yes, you can actually replace the bulbs if you need to, if one goes out.
David: So I'm curious when an architect and a general contractor puts a building up, they're thinking in terms of being there for decades, with maybe the exception of football stadiums, which seem to need to be replaced every five years or so.
Is 11 years an acceptable operating lifespan for a sheet of glass for a builder or for a building owner?
Todd Stahl: Yeah. I mean, our interlayers, they last 20-30 years. The interlayers and the glass products, yeah, they're going to last a very long time. When we've been bringing this product to market I think, the event back to the switch light is one of the first times you're us glass guys are introducing electricity into the mix. And at first that back in 2000, I mean, it was really cool. It had the wow factor, but it didn't quite last as long for me. I didn't really get into the product until recently. But you know, that product will last around 10 years as well, and we don't get a whole lot of callbacks very often with any of our glass products.
But it seems like most clients are happy with a 10-year usage. That's been pretty good for the Switch Lite product. We talk about a decade out there to the architects and designers now that, that's a number that they all seem to be very happy
David: Let's say a car dealer goes in, they're fine, they're thinking in terms of the glass that they put in is there for 10 years, and they may switch it out anyways?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, I think you know that everybody wants to be fresh and new. So we found a lot of these high-end retail stores that we've designed with, for instance, a high-end jewelry line, and let's say they have started in California with a new design. They take that design and they move it east to New York City. By the time they get to New York City, whether that's been five to eight years, and they redesign the whole thing over again. So there's a cycle and I think, especially with retail, and a lot of these buildings, they always want to have a new, fresh look, and I think a lot of times they're redesigning in under ten years for a lot of applications.
David: I'm guessing I could be wrong here, but I'm guessing that there's hyper-competition from China for, what I would say is conventional LED displays and so on; you're probably going to have less competition for what you're doing because of the sheer weight of, even if they can make glass cheaper over in China, shipping glass panels over here would be just ghastly expensive, right?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, definitely. It's pretty heavy to air freight glass, so it's always nice that there's this thing called the ocean between us and China, especially us being we've been a manufacturer forever, and thankfully, it is a little expensive to ship a finished product like that and take some time.
So, yeah, and you know, right now, we're kind of pretty far ahead of the curve in how to actually laminate this properly. Our feeling was when we got involved with this, all right, we got the LED technology. Now we'll just throw it in some glass, and we got a home run and it wasn't quite as easy to just throw it in glass and end up with a finished product, you know?
There are still some areas. We are not the only ones in the world laminating this product, but there are, from what I know, under five; we're the only ones who can do it with thin and large panels. We're the only ones that I know of that are actually doing some of the very specific things to make sure it's going to perform properly in these laminated glass applications. In our process, we are patent protected in our process where I think we're just like in the first phase, I don't know all the legal terminology, but we're going through the patent process for the way we laminate it.
David: Which will help you over here, won't help you with Chinese products, but again, there's that ocean thing in between.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We have a few intellectual properties here and I'm not one to get into too many legal battles, but we would have some type of recourse if someone does come and is trying to laminate in a similar technique the way we do it.
David: I suspect you're kind of looking around the corner as to where this is going and the types of technologies that are emerging. Do you kind of see this as, what you have right now is Gen 1, and over time the light emitters will get smaller, the wiring will be even thinner and so on?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly the way I see it going. I mentioned earlier: I really am a glass guy, and this is a glass company by people who absolutely love glass. Now, that's a Will Penn. Clear Motion, we have that same feeling as well, but this is more of a technology company. And what we're talking about today, like you said, generation one. We're going to revisit this in under five years, and it's going to look, I think, a whole lot different.
David: Who's buying it right now? And are you in the field with this?
Todd Stahl: So we're working on probably over 50 to 60 current projects right now in the design phase. Almost everyone we're working with has signed NDAs. So we can't necessarily say the clients that we're designing with right now. But one's a high-end fast food restaurant. They want one of these in each restaurant and that's actually for an exterior application.
David: Are these proposals or purchase orders?
Todd Stahl: They are proposals right now, so a lot of verbal commitments. We have a project we're working on in the Middle East in the design phase right now, that's 18 months out, the funding has been approved. They're designing it in the UK and then we're working with the audio visual company, I think in Texas. So this is really brand new.
David: You're in startup mode!
Todd Stahl: We really are, and this is the third company I've started literally from scratch, and I think it'll be the last one because boy, it is challenging. It takes a lot of energy. There's this great energy when you're starting it, and this is a little extra challenging because this is brand new. No one has ever seen clear LED glass displays like they just did not exist four years ago.
People might've thought they saw something similar. Like you said, it was a film or a grid that was put behind the glass. But when people are seeing this now, we're creating a new market, we're educating people to that market, and we're educating ourselves.
David: I'm guessing when people come to a stand at a trade show, you're at, the architects and the people who design physical spaces are the ones who are going, this is more like it.
They haven't really liked the idea of films or foils and all that because of how they look at the back end or they're worried about a film sort of, particularly if it's exposed to UV light and all that, it's going to yellow and on and on…
Todd Stahl: So what the feedback from the A&D community has been? We did an AIA show in San Francisco last June, and we had one or two clients, say, “Hey Todd, we have the budget for this. We have clients who want this product, and we've been looking for it for years.” Then we start designing the project with them, and that's the thing: once I shake hands with an architect, we might not actually have that project begin production for 24 months to a year.
So, depending if the building's coming out of the ground or if it's just a remodel of an existing one, it's a very long cycle until we actually get orders placed, and you know, something I've been dealing with for 30 years. It's kind of the way the industry is.
David: Infrastructure projects are never quick, are they?
Todd Stahl: No, they really aren't, but the A&D world is kind of our background. It's where we've been for a very long time in that space, and we've definitely noticed that companies, individuals in the audio-visual world respond to this entirely differently.
This doesn't have as many questions in their minds. They're more educated because we've been used to dealing with LEDs for a very long period of time. So it's kind of interesting how the two markets work together, like the DSE show where we introduced the product, I would say more to the audio-visual world if I'm using the right terminology there, it was received just as with that much energy, a lot of more understanding right away, not as many technical questions.
David: It's a variation on stuff they've been seen before, but maybe a better variation.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely, and the architects, like you were saying, and even in general, I think even though LG makes an applied film. The North American President of, I forgot the gentleman's name, he was in my shop a little over a year ago, and we were working with his film, and then we showed him our LED glass, and he was blown away by it.
David: “There goes my business”
Todd Stahl: Well, I think he was like, I'm going to make that too. I don't think he was worried about his business, but that applied film that they had been using, again, from a very long viewing distance, the product looks great. It's not yet ready to be viewed in shorter viewing distances, but the fact that it's applied, I do think that there is something like when you're buying a high-end product, you don't want people to be able to come up and pick it off, and I mean that definitely happens with every piece of film, I think I've ever worked with in my life.
The first thing people do is take their fingernails, and they try to scrape the edge of it. It's just something that is instinctual about humans. But I think if you take that film now, I always say, if you put a piece of film on glass, it's just film. Once you laminate that film inside of the glass, you now have a glass product that protects it.
It does what you were saying. It prevents it from being yellowed over time because the inner layer blocks out almost 100 percent of the UV rays. So I think it's a great home for the LED mesh.
David: So does William Penn and Clear Motion Glass, do they operate separately, or are you kind of in the same office, the same building, and everything else, it's just different business cards?
Todd Stahl: No, actually, we are in the same overall building complex, but we're not connected physically. So Clear Motion, basically has the equivalent of its own social security number, which down here in the business and for business, the IRS wants us to have EIN numbers for our businesses.
So Clear Motion has an EIN number. Will Penn has an EIN number, obviously, but they definitely operate as two companies but obviously very close connections.
David: And you are running both?
Todd Stahl: I am running both right now, and spoiler alert: two's a lot harder to run than one.
David: Yes, I bet. If people want to find you online, they just go to ClearMotionGlass.com?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, that's it. They can find us there. There are some emails there. They can shoot an email to us and we'd love to talk to anybody if this product's right for them we're really excited about it and definitely creating a lot of energy with it.
David: Are you at a trade show anytime soon?
Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we're doing Infocomm, I believe. It's the middle of June out in Vegas. Are you going to be there?
David: Yes.
Todd Stahl: Awesome, man. We get to meet in person, then. We'll carve out some time for that, Dave.
David: Absolutely, yeah, and that's a good show for you. There are tons of pro-AV people there.
Todd Stahl: Yeah, I love that. That's a new space for us. So we're a little extra excited cause that's definitely not like a glass trade show is.
David: All right. Todd, thank you so much for your time.
Todd Stahl: All right. Yeah. I appreciate it, Dave. It was a pleasure.
![Neil Chatwood, Omnivex](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/chatwood_qhwzup_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday Mar 27, 2024
Neil Chatwood, Omnivex
Wednesday Mar 27, 2024
Wednesday Mar 27, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach.
That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS software firm Omnivex, which has been around for more than 30 years and has always made data-driven communications central to what it does. More than 20 years ago, the core Omnivex solution included a module called DataPipe. I know, because I was using the thing way back then for a digital ad network I launched ... probably 10 years too early, but that's a story for another time.
While a lot of its competitors have developed and marketed platforms that are pretty and loaded with bling, Omnivex has resolutely stuck to its technology guns with software that's quite involved and very powerful. The net result is Omnivex gets involved in a lot of the more complicated jobs in which real-time data, and the context it provides, shapes what shows up on screens. Airports, for example, are a very active vertical.
I had a long, detailed chat with Neil Chatwood, a transplanted Brit who runs the global transport file for Omnivex. We could have gone on for hours, as he has a lot of insights about data, security, and programming content for large, very involved environments.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Neil, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Omnivex, can you just give a quick rundown on the company?
Neil Chatwood: Yeah, for sure. So, Omnivex was established back in the dark ages of digital signage, 1991. It’s a privately owned organization, just outside of Toronto, Ontario and Canada.
Oh, come on. It's in Toronto. Like, Toronto goes on forever.
Neil Chatwood: Yeah, it's right. Pretty much right on the border. Well, it's on the subway line now. They've expanded the subway, so that finally happened.
Yeah, it's not like you see countryside on the other side of the parking lot though.
Neil Chatwood: Not anymore. In the last 10 years, there's been a Vaughan skyline, as depressing as that may be. But yeah, I've been around a long time in a private family owned organization and it's really grown off the back of our focus on leveraging real time data, integrating with basically any system we could possibly think of.
And that pedigree has kept us in the business for over 30 years now.
Yeah, I have a history in a network I started more than 20 years ago using Omnivex. So I was familiar with Omnivex products and datapipe and everything. So we were talking before we turned on the recording. I found it amusing that a lot of the software side of the industry has awakened to the idea of data integration and data handling for the last four or five years when it's something you were doing like 25 years ago.
Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Back in around 2009-2010 when a lot of the industry was yelling Content is King. Right.
Don't say that.
Neil Chatwood: I know. You see. I do. Yeah, it's a classic. And our ownership at the time, you know, they like to have fun and they took that and changed it into Context as King and we've really kind of run with that since inception.
But I joined the organization in 2010 and data and complexity is where we've always really hung our hat. We're a software vendor but the majority of our revenue comes from licensed sales. But we really do find ourselves in the trenches with our partners and our clients getting in there and providing pseudo consultancy on what data do you have in house?
Like, how has it been stored? What methods can we use? And figuring out the solution in parallel with all of the stakeholders, even though at the face of it we're just slinging CMS licenses.
So that's our heritage and when I'm when I start talking to someone who's interested in looking at the market or you get a lead or you're talking to someone at a trade show, my advice is always to take a look at a bunch of companies. Take a bunch of companies, look at all these CMSs.
In all the old guard, there's a good handful of companies that I might say some names, Navori, for example, StrataCash, Scala, right. They're all pretty old guard, when we talk about the digital signage industry.
I encourage people to take a look at all the products that are on the market and once you start to get those demos and you start to go through the sales process, you can really see the DNA of where that company's come from, right? Like, are they focused on a really pleasant UX/UI experience? Are they focused on performing high end post processing within the platform itself and are good at asset generation as opposed to creating it in a third party piece of kit and bringing it in.
Our DNA has always been on the data side our position is that if you're going to make good images and assets that you're going to bring into the CMS, trying to ask a creative to use a tool, that's not something they're already comfortable with, you know you're kind of paddling upstream on that.
So we've always taken the position of let people use the software that they're already comfortable with. Let's not introduce a knowledge gap, bring it in. And that leads us to, well, if we're not going to focus on the asset side, let's focus on the data side. So yeah, that's where we've come from.
And it's where goals are set for in the future as well.
Well, when you have literally hundreds of software options out there these days and I would suspect most of them in some way say, yes, we do data handling, we have data integration, we have APIs or whatever it may be. How does an end user discern what's real versus just you the bare essentials?
Neil Chatwood: That's a good question. When the user is going through that sales process and they're doing their comparisons, they have to show you it works right? Like, we're in an industry that is extremely visual, very creative. And you and I have been to a lot of trade shows and a lot of the DSEs in our time and if you're walking around there on setup day, I've seen plenty of CMS vendors running their showreel on windows media player, right. Before the crowds arrive and it's like, well if your stuff's that good, why are you using that? Like, why are you doing it that way? So if I was a buyer or if I was a third party consultant trying to guide someone through this, I'd be like the first couple of calls you're going to have with them. You're going to get the dog and pony show, right. They're going to show you all the sexy stuff, right?
Oh yeah, all works great. Do you want to bring this plug in? Get your IT team involved, right? The people who know where your data lives and what format it's in, how accessible it is. And get them to sit down with the sales engineers of these CMS companies and get them to POC and get your data into their product, right?
Most CMSs at this point, they're cloud hosting their software as a service, right? If they're sitting there and they're saying this is really easy. We can just go bing bong bop and it comes in, alright then show me. Just don't accept it at face value if you really want to dig into this stuff. I don't know any software vendor out there that isn't going to entertain the idea of a proof of concept or at least won't say, yeah, sure like any salesperson just wants to get the sale. Right.
So, if you've got this accessible data, right. Let's say it's up on Azure, right. It's some kind of blob storage or if it's accessible through an API. Can you just give me the keys? Like, let me in and I'll show you it in real time and then we'll bring it in.
Once they can prove that to you, then it's not about data accessibility anymore. It's then you need to start looking into the assurances that they're going to be ethical and they're going to have the same levels of governance and control over that data that is being ingested into their system. That's where a lot of our focus is now.
And you've really kind of touched on that with APIs. Back in the nineties, when we were asked to integrate with all these different data sources. We were lucky if there was documentation, it was probably RS232, serial cables..
David:That's a term I haven't heard in a long time.
Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Using Telnet to get in. So like, a lot of the solution building was just kind of banging your head against the wall just to even access the data and make it legible to processing that data into information and then getting that information down onto the screen.
That is less of a concern now because we're at the point where any data provider, they've probably got a fully or semi documented API or they've got an SDK, a software development kit where for the most part, if we're looking to POC a data integration. It probably takes us two to four hours, right?
But based on how well documented it is, if the data structure is easy to work with and more often than not, the biggest part that takes the most time is liaising with the third party organization to let us in, right?
Because the client will say, Oh yeah.we use such and such for this and we're using this product for our bus timetables, our bus scheduling. Can you guys hit that? So it's like, well, there's a good chance we've already hit it because we've got clients there already but if we haven't, then we need to start up an engagement and start talking to that third party organization.
This is the sticking point, right? Because when we start talking to that third party organization that controls that data, that the client is already paying for and leveraging it in house. Depending on the attitude and market position of that third party, they might not want to let us in, right? Like there's a bunch of organizations out there that sell digital signage as a value add, right?
So, a good example of that would be, the historic vendors for flight information display systems, right? Screens in airports showing arrivals and departures. They sold data and the screen element was like, Oh, by the way, you probably want to show this on a screen, right?
So we'll just sell you that too. It's a value add, it's not a true CMS. It's a point solution. So when we're engaging with that third party vendor, I'm often at the head end of this for transportation, I'm like, Hey, we're working on this project with a mutual client, they want us to get into your data. Is there any way you can provide a sandbox or some test keys so we can just prove this out? Depending on where they're at, they might not want to let us in. So, the sticking point becomes, then I have to go back to the client and say to the client, I don't wanna cause any friction here, but we can't get in without credentials and they're not giving us any.
So can you please get involved? And those are the conversations where things start getting political. We're not looking to roll logs under our course friction anywhere. But as far as I'm concerned, your client's already paying for the data, right? Like if you know if you want to bolt on some charges for hey now you're using it for digital signage, so we want to charge you an extra 5k a year.
That's on you. But as far as I'm concerned, an existing client is paying for the data, they want to use it this way. You're standing in the way of progress here. So, how do we deal with that? I spend so much time dealing with that now.
And a reaction to that about five years ago, I started a scum works team internally. Here in order to proactively build data partnerships so that when a client says a key phrase, Everbridge is a good example, right.
For mass emergency notification. So when a client says Everbridge, we don't have to go through an uncertain process of reaching out to someone we don't know, not knowing what their position is. It's like, we've actually already got this working somewhere else.
We can get in here. I can show you an example of it already working or if you can give us access, we can actually prove it with your data. So that, yeah, that's the business.
I just wanted to ask,
I've seen companies that talk in terms of what I call functionality apps so that they developed a data handshake with, as you said, Everbridge and then they sort of market that as an application, this is something that we can activate for you.
Is that how you look at it? Or is that kind of a different angle?
Neil Chatwood: We look at it that way, conceptually because it's modularity, right? So, in our product, we're going to use a mechanism to reach out to that, that could be through some custom scripting or it could be within a product in our stable that has a full UI, in order to access that data.
Like a good example would be, back in the day we had a via link for a via phone system. Right. So, that functionality that some organizations call them widgets, right. Where it's like, Hey, I just want to slot in this functionality. It's a couple of clicks.
I put in my username, put in my password and away we go. We operate that in the backend of the system. But at this point, don't have a full kind of walkthrough where it's like, Hey, put in your Twitter username and password and away you go. Ours is a little bit more behind the curtain.
We do it that way because we have user personalities. We actually used to use the Simpsons characters too, like, are we dealing with a bar? Are we dealing with Maggie? Like, who are we dealing with here? So those user profiles. It's like, you should be doing this, right?
And if when we're looking at building out a data integration, that should really be set and forget it. There really is no reason to go in there on a regular basis and be changing that information or that query or the way we're massaging the data. So that is an administrative function, right?
That is something that's behind the scenes. By virtue of that, we're probably dealing with someone who's a bit more technical, as a bit of an IT background. So, we have a relatively open system, right? So, whereas when we're dealing with widgets and a simplified user experience. Click this button, put username in, click this button, put your password and click this, or it comes on screen and now you can kind of like trim that down like that.
That's what I've seen some CMSs do and I think that's a really light low friction way to get that data in there. We take the approach of like we're a toolkit. We're going to assume that our users and our clients and our channel are matching our products and our toolkit to the right levels of user.
So, in the backend, it's like, here's a fully open interface that you can do whatever the heck you want with, we can give you some foundational building blocks or modules to enable and empower that user to take it where they want to take it. And that speaks to kind of one of our other positions in the industry where anyone who's been around kind of knows that Omnivex deals with relatively complex situations because we've got that wide open back end that frankly is quite and is a bit scary, right?
To a user that just wants to change a welcome board or change some numbers that are on a restaurant board. So that's really not our target market, right? Our target market is predominantly enterprise level. They've got an in-house IT team or they've got a good system integrator involved where we can really get into the weeds on what data you have.
Data has a cost, right? Well organizations are paying to cultivate it, gather it, store it in house. How do we make that data actionable by adding incremental value to it? That's what we're looking for. So when we go into a situation, we want to find those people, those stakeholders within the end client and within our channel to get into those deeper discussions on like, I know you want to point an arrow to the right but if we look at what data you've got in house, like, let's say, modern elevator system or a modern escalator system where we're able to tie into the back end of, Hey, on a Monday, this elevator serves floors 8 through 12.
But, on weekends or on bank holidays, that elevator is completely shut off. Then, I probably don't want that arrow to go right, when that elevator is offline. I want it to point straight ahead like a zero degrees rotation, right? Instead of 90 degrees rotation. So if we don't have an awareness of what data the client has and the client doesn't have the kind of persona or has the team in house that knows, how their systems work and how their architecture and what data they have, then they might not be the best fit for the kind of challenges we're looking to tackle.
You're doing a lot more than changing a price or a soup of the day.
Neil Chatwood: Yeah, that's the table stakes, right? I mean honestly, it's a bad word in our industry, but If you really want it to go down, PowerPoint is able to do that now.
Like you can integrate PowerPoint with Excel. So I know, ever since I've been in the industry, you’re always kind of one step away from someone saying, well, why wouldn't I just use PowerPoint for that? It's like, well, you're missing a whole bunch of functionality on top of it. But fundamentally, any CMS worth its salt has two core elements that it needs to play with. It needs to play with data and it needs to bring in assets and basically import those two elements into a layout, right? So by that definition, can PowerPoint do it? Yeah, If we really boil it down but there's so much value on top of any of these systems.
But getting to that data, exploring the data with the clients is where our ROI comes in and that's a scary term for a lot of people in this industry too. I honestly think digital signage was really looking for ROI metrics for what feels like 20 years, we were really struggling.
We only really started to get metrics around that in certain fields. Right. So it's really easy to establish ROI when we've got a camera pointed to the audience, we're looking at expressions and demographics and we're triggering it and we're detecting when eyeballs are looking this way.
So ROI on that is really easy. You want me to give you ROI on a wayfinding arrow changing from zero degrees to 90 degrees. That's going to be a bit more obfuscated but maybe you're going to see that down the road when you have an independent audit on your facility and your KPIs go shifted five points because your space is a lot more usable now.
So, adding incremental value on that data is really what we're looking to do and you mentioned menu boards. Menu boards are a real quick win. It's very transparent, the value of that is very clear but when we start to talk around, passengers flow around an airport or like nudge theory, convincing people to move one way instead of another way because that benefits the operations of the environment.
That is a little bit more tricky to prove ROI on but the humans walking around that space are going to have less friction and less stress while they're in there. But it really all comes down to weaponizing the data like how do we get the most out of it? How do we turn data into information?
I could ask a bunch of questions but we probably talked for about three hours. I'm curious about a big job that you were directly involved in and Omnivex was obviously directly involved in at Minneapolis airport which is considered one of the better airports on the planet now.
What's all involved there? Because there's a lot of data handling and a lot more going on than just saying that the flight to Seattle is at gate 47.
Neil Chatwood: Yeah, there is a lot going on at MSP and just to give them a quick shout out, MSP just won the best airport in North America for the third year running. I think that came out a couple of days back and I think they've won it like seven times out of the last eight years. So, they've got a dedicated team in house that takes care of this stuff.
And I really want to focus on not Omnivex for a second here because the airport deserves to be called out here and so do us. We've got a system integrator in there called radiant technology as well out of Columbus, Ohio. And the success there has really started with the vision of their CIO, Eduardo Valencia.
He was directly inspired by sports stadiums, right? And he was personally quite frustrated when he went to a sports stadium. How come the puck goes in the net, the whole stadium changes color and everything goes whiz bang and all of a sudden I'm being advertised, Coca Cola and like why do my screens in my airport suck?
But I'm able to see this when I go to a hockey game. So there's got it. So he used certain mechanisms to figure out what's going on in the industry and who's able to power these full experiences within a facility and thankfully led him to us.
So it really started with that frustration and they took a strategic view at the airport where you'll hear Eduardo talk about it. The entire airport should just be treated as a single pane of glass and I should be able to control any screen in the airport any way that I want which is a great ambition and a lot of facilities, it's not just airports. A lot of facilities have a similar ambition and it's very easy to start with that dream but it's not going to happen unless you align resources in house. So, MSP have their own decision making panel for digital signage.
They've got a group in house that is responsible for pushing this forward. Nothing good, nothing worthwhile, nothing award winning happens by accident. Like, they've taken a real pragmatic approach to this. So, they took a look at their screen estate. They took a look at the use cases.
They took a look at that data and they engaged that system integrator as I mentioned, Radiant to like all right, how do we make good on all this stuff? So, it started from the top which kept teams engaged. It kept them focused and that's why this is a success. So, a part of that with a foundational piece of technology in there.
But we're really just a toolkit and it speaks to what I mentioned before about, Hey, our backend might be a little bit scary but you can do whatever the heck you want. That's the power of a toolkit. So, to go back to what you mentioned about that widget and that usability you can have a really like turbo linear workflow but that really hamstrings capabilities, right?
So when you're making a product, you've got to decide which way you want to go?
Do I want to go a mile wide? And an inch deep or do I want to go real deep where the scary stuff lives? That's where we typically are. Where were the, you know, where were the angler fish?
So, that was MSPs approach and that example I mentioned was about what the elevators are doing, what the escalators are doing. What's happening operationally right now within my airport. So that's where you start. Like what's happening right now. Okay. So what's happening now?
Well, Delta airlines have these check-in counters open. So well, I know my building, I know where the check-in counters are. So the screens that are directly parallel at the curbside to those check-in counters, then let the people pulling up in their cars know, Hey, if you want to go Delta, there's a big Delta logo and it says open underneath it.
Okay. Particularly airports that are dynamically assigning check in counters for smaller airlines, right?
Neil Chatwood: For sure. Yeah. Multi-use, environment. So, when we're, yeah. So there's always going to be situations where like, Oh yeah, that terminal that's United terminal, right?
So like, there's no real variance there, but there's a whole bunch of smaller airlines and they call it common use. So, yeah. So, you know, we've got systems where, you know, let's say, you know, a smaller airline, you know, logs in like, you know, one example could be Flair. I don't, it's not around anymore.
Right. But flair could log in. Okay. Well, they've only got two flights a day but they need to take over the ticket counter, they need to take over this gate temporarily. So when they log into the common use platform which is what's on those screens in front of those agents. When they log into that common use platform by virtue of them logging in, I know who they are, right?
And I know that they work for Flare. So now it makes sense to change the screens that are physically behind that desk. Put up the default content for Flare right now because until this agent makes some decisions around, this screen is going to be the backdrop. This screen is going to be a priority checking or whatever.
Maybe we just want to highlight that this is Flare's house now and then as they go through their login procedure the screens can be set up any way that they like and what we can do is we can provide dashboards and linear use case tools that makes it easy for that user. That's where things should be easy where someone's interacting with digital signage as this is not their job. Like their job is to make sure that they're processing passengers and getting them to where they need to be. There might be really high turnover. They have no interest or time to be trained on how to use a content management product.
So it's like, look at that requirement. So what do I need to do? I probably need to present the screens that are behind them, I need to present to them the assets that are available to them and I need them to highlight which flight that they care about right now, that could all be manual.
So, their experience is like, okay, I'm Neil, I've logged in, I'm at Flare, bang, screens change. Okay, I've got four screens behind me, what do you want on each one of these screens? I want to do image one, image three and image five. Instantly goes up on the screens behind them. All right, I'm done. So that's where it's really important to reduce that friction and make it easy.
Not necessarily when we're setting up the data flow because again, I'm only really going to be setting up that data flow once and then maybe changing it when upstream data sources change. That experience for that airline agent, that is multiple times a day. That's where we need it to be frictionless, not on the data integration side.
I think it's interesting with airports and other large footprint facilities like mass transport hubs, stadiums, multi use areas where there's a stadium, restaurants, residential, commercial on and on and on and airports in particular, I kind of see two threads to how experience works.
I see these gorgeous, very ambitious, very expensive, digital art installations and giant LED walls in newly built airports and they talk about the experience of that and how people are going to feel good about flying and so on. But I see this whole other side and it is much more what you're talking about. A great experience in an airport is not being panicked, not being lost, not being delayed, not knowing where things are, all that sort of stuff.
To me, that's a far more important experience, is that kind of how you see it and how some of your clients see it?
Neil Chatwood: There's a few hats I could wear on this. The first hat I'll wear is someone who wants to sell as many licenses as possible. I would rather they have a thousand flat panel screens, right.
But that's not where the industry's going. Right. And the big reason for that is, we as an industry, we've watched the price of DV LEDs really just go through the floor to the point where there's real comparisons where it's like, is this a parity with like a 55 inch flat panel now
For me to get a DVD, like a modular DVLED the same price. So that's a huge part of it. It's like the cost has finally come down to a point where it's reasonable at scale but a lot of it is also just straight up hype, right? Like airports, like anyone else have to sell and compete with other airports.
And this is something that you don't really think about until you get into it but when you've got two airports that are within an hour's drive of each other. They're not only competing for passengers, they're competing for the airlines.
Yeah.
Neil Chatwood: Right? So it's like, If I'm courting with the idea of trying to bring a major airline two that are right next to each other but a good comparison would be like SFO in Oakland, right?
So it's like, okay well, if I'm in Oakland, how do I convince people not to go over the bridge to SFO? I'd probably need the carriers that carry the most passengers.
San Jose?
Neil Chatwood: Oh yeah. Good example. Yeah. So a lot of these big sexy installations are coming from, you've got to keep up with the Joneses.
But also the price of DVLEDs is reasonable now. So there is that part of the market where it's all about the LinkedIn posts and the marketing and the wow factor. Yeah, you're exactly right. So there'll be like a handful of those within an airport, right? Like a good example would be, Nashville.
We worked on a project with Nashville airport and the content that provided for that was, Gentle Home out of Montreal, where they all are. So, they provided that in an awesome job but that is just one. It's essentially two screens in probably in a state of, I think about 800 or so,
Something like that.
Neil Chatwood: So, the big glitzy installations are now basically a requirement for any new build or any renovation for any airport. There's a couple of projects that I'm aware of that are really interesting. But in terms of decision making, like when I come back down to the fundamental goal of signage in general, not just digital, is to convey information quickly and clearly guide decision making in an environment.
Is this generative AI artwork doing that? No, it's not going to help me get some flight on time but it might bring down my blood pressure a little bit, that's what these art installations are, right?
Like they're looking for an opportunity for facilities to express themselves, reinforce their branding, market the local area but also sell advertising which is a huge driving factor on some of these big installations too. So, there's very much like, let's call them the anchors, right? Like they're the anchor installations now where there's millions and millions of dollars being spent and then it's why I've always kind of enjoyed your outlook and your material Dave is like, the boring stuff and that's what I'm into as well and when I'm walking around the world. That's the stuff that I'm like, Oh, that is cool as hell. One of the best bits of boring signage at MSP is that good design is invisible, right? So, there is an underground walkway. It's not a walkway.
It's more like a hallway but it's very much a liminal space and you're going under there. I'm trying to imagine putting my hand up. It's probably about 10 feet tall. So it's like, well, there's not much opportunity for overhead signage cause we can only really add probably about eight inches to this, like overhead.
So, that team works with a display vendor and they put in, I think it's roughly around it's about a hundred or so feet wide. I know I'm probably over, I get it. It's probably about 80 feet wide. But 80 feet wide by about seven inches high.
So number one, okay, well, we're still compliant with safety and we've got this screen in this hallway now.
What's great about it is it's pure wayfinding. All it does is just show people where they need to go. But upstream of this, like this very boring sign is I would estimate two and a half thousand data points. Yeah. In order to get the arrow point in the right way showing, Oh, you're looking for this airline or you're looking for a route with accessibility or you're looking for the TSA. When you add together the time to get to the queue, plus the queue time, which way should you go?
What condition are the elevators in? What condition are the escalators in? Where as an airport, do I want to drive people right now, based on what's going on in my space? All that intelligence is above that sign, logically. But as a passenger, I look at it and I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm going with Air Canada today.
Bump, I'm done. But the solution is so complex behind it but ultimately, it just means, Hey, this logo appears on screen and this arrow is at 220 degrees and that boils down to that. And I think that use case is beautiful like simplicity in design, it gets rid of the friction. It gets people where they need to be.
That's what we're in this business for.
But the bottom line on that is it looks simple to the end user, to the observer, but there's a lot going on behind the curtains to make that work seamless.
Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Again, good design is invisible, right? Like you would have no idea the complexity that goes on with that screen.
Like I said, we could talk for a very long time but we're already running longer than I usually do. So I got to wind this down, Neil, this has been great.
Neil Chatwood: Thanks, Dave. Omnivex has been around for a long time. I've been around a long time. You've been around a long time. I'm surprised we've not get to this earlier but thanks so much. I really respect Sixteen Nine and what you've done for the industry. And I encourage you to keep at it. We need a rational voice in this craziness.
All right. Well, thanks. Thanks again.
Neil Chatwood: All right. Thanks a lot, Dave. Take care.
![Joe Occhipinti, ANC](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/Joe-O_ibvaxu_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday Mar 20, 2024
Joe Occhipinti, ANC
Wednesday Mar 20, 2024
Wednesday Mar 20, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed.
Screens are sync'd, and content is carefully timed and triggered based on data and all kinds of variables.
While most integrators and solutions providers are focused on executing on ideas and needs, the New York company ANC has for years being delivering services and software for what it calls branded entertainment.
The work started with collegiate and professional sports, but more recently the company has branched into areas like retail and mass transportation - including the multi-venue, many screens experience that stretches between the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan and underground to the World Trade Center complex.
I had a great chat with Joe Occhipinti, ANC's Chief Operating Officer.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
David: Hey Joe, thank you for joining me. I've chatted with ANC in the past with Mark Stross but that's going back like six years or something like that. I'm curious, first of all, what your company does and maybe we could get into a little bit about the background of basically buying the company back from prior owners that started as a family company and now it's going back as a family-driven company, right?
Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.
Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.
It was a good five or six year run we had with them. And I was with the ANC for a lot of those years. I started back in 2012. So I saw the end of Jerry's initial ownership and then into the Learfield, and then I kind of parted ways with ANC in early 2022 and found my way into a company called C10 with Jerry's son, Jerry Cifarelli Jr. and shortly into 2022, Learfield reached out to us and was interested about looking into a potential acquisition and I think Learfield's business has changed a lot, right?
Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.
They were in multimedia rights and they've kind of shifted into a data-driven company with all their fans and engagement and I don't think it was core to them any longer and obviously with Jerry's father, having started the business, it was very near and dear to our hearts. We felt that ANC had all the right foundation but due to its success over 25 years, we can kind of take it back and change a few things, get the parts back together, streamline things, and get after it once again to bring the band back together.
And that all happened in early 2023. We couldn't be happier to kind of be driving the boat again.
David: So, anybody if you meet at a cocktail party or a neighborhood party or whatever, says, what do you do? And more to the point, what does your company do? What do you tell them? Because it's quite involved.
Joe Occhipinti: The loaded question. Hopefully they have like two drinks like one in each hand or something. But basically, the ANC consists of four business lines, we like to call it. So, the kind of the moneymaker, the thing that gets the most press is LED Technology installations and that could be the things that catch everyone's attention is obviously the large format LED displays but we're really a technology integrator, throughout the entire venue.
So we have installed IPTV, we've installed TVs, we've installed full control rooms, things of that nature. And those are the apps which have a large format. I keep going back to that but the main video center hungs and arenas, center field boards and baseball. We have a 280 foot display at Westfield world trade center.
Some of those marquee kinds of displays that you guys have heard and seen. Then we also have a services department or venue solutions we like to call it. After which all the pretty lights go up, we have to then maintain it and make sure it works for the life of that display or until the next renovation happens.
So we actually have a fleet of operators out in the field who are going on pregame off days and making sure that modules are fixed and things are corrected. The proper content's loaded into the software and they're ready for the game presentation or for the next event or for the next change in scheduled content that's going to happen in an out of home venue.
So we do a ton of that as well and then we also have our ad agency business. So that goes back to when Jerry started the whole business of TV visible signage, where we are acquiring inventory from teams that we work with or we go out and purchase it and then we also represent brands.
So we'll place a discount tire behind home plate at a specific market that they would like to see or a number of different advertisers that we've been working with for years that really want to have that TV visible signage in sports our ad agency is mostly on the sports side we do some and out of home but obviously those are kind of owned by the properties and things like that so it's a little bit different and then what ties it all together is our software business. So It's called LiveSync now. It started as FasciaSoft, VisionSoft, VSoft and now it's LiveSync and it's all in the name. We specialize in syncing all your displays throughout the venue. So, somewhere like Westfield World Trade and Fulton Center, they're kind of one venue to put together.
I think they have upwards of 75 or 80 displays between LCDs and LEDs and we have a constant stream of scheduled content. That's looping every 10 or 20 seconds 24*7 and you can sit there and watch in one area 5 to 10 displays all changing at the same exact time, frame to frame, everything running pixel to pixel.
But the beautiful thing about live sync is what it does is we're wide open, open API, open source. If you want to play ball with everybody else that might be in the control room and we want to be able to trigger whatever else you might want to trigger with that piece of content.
So if you wanted to run a home run graphic at Fenway park and you want to get your LED lights for a night game to flicker, you know when the guys around the bases. ANC Live Sync can trigger that software and it can all run synced and simultaneously. So, we really like to say that we can be the quarterback of the venue like somewhere like Wells Fargo Center. We trigger an IPTV program to have a goal animation run in the suites over whatever TV broadcast is being shown.
So, we've really come a long way in that regard. The software has come. Leaps and bounds, probably even from six years ago when you talk to Mark and we're really proud of the software that he's developed with his team.
David: And this is your own software. It's not something you sell, right? It's software that you use when you're working with various customer venues.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. A lot of times our software is installed when we are doing the full install. Right. We don't really sell it out of cart. We have started to look into that, right?
Like we think the software is at a point where it can do that and can be that. We did a deployment this year at I think it's PPG paints arena at Pittsburgh Penguins where another LED manufacturer got the LED job but they came to us for the software. So that was just a software standalone installation where we went in there into the control room and installed the servers and had it integrate with everything else they had there and it runs their live game presentation now.
David: Right and when you're talking about being known for LED or being known for LED display control and so on but you're not a manufacturer or reseller of somebody else's product, right?
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we're not a manufacturer at all. So we do have competitors in this space, right? You know, big name, LED installers but they're all manufacturers.
So, even though we were competitors, we're kind of not, you know what I mean? Like you can see a world where we can come together with some of these and enhance their business. Right. We feel that we can do a good job on the installation side and on the service side. But we really talk to the clients and figure out what they need from the LED signage perspective and we go out and find the best possible product to deliver that.
And then we'd like to use our four business lines to create a cohesive partnership with that client. So, once we're in a venue and they want to add a display here and there. It's very easy to add it into our existing licensing software or to add it to our services.
Right? So, we like to use or give the partner back ad dollars by finding somebody to buy advertisements on their home plate or elsewhere in the venue. So, we really can use our different lines to be a full service partner for all of our clients.
David: It's interesting. Years ago, I remember talking to somebody about shopping malls and how shopping malls, particularly in Asia, were no longer just seen as warehouses or Harmonized venues for retail.
They were experiential places that were programmed and that had like programming calendars and special events and everything else related to it and it kind of sounds like what you're doing and what you can deliver is you're really programming a venue or in the case of down by the World Trade Center, multiple venues so that content cascades across them things happen and so on, but it's all kind of cohesive as opposed to maybe more traditional digital signage and just display work where there's something driving this, there's something else driving that maybe they once in a while sync up but they're not really working together.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I agree. I think these are all becoming everyone's fighting to get the people to their venue, right? I mean they want to drive sales or drive concessions or whatever it might be. And the malls are becoming more of let's go spend a few hours at the mall.
I mean let's not just go pick up something I need, right? It's like, let's do this with the kids or see this special event or whatever it might be. And being able to create an atmosphere that's inviting and appealing to people's eyes kind of goes hand in hand with that.
And then obviously you can promote the upcoming events and whatnot too. Right. So there's just more and more digital installations happening and the interesting thing that we're seeing in the business and it's happening in sports as well.
I mentioned Jerry Cifarelli Sr started with rotational signs like static banners behind home plate and on ribbons and that grew into LED behind home plate and then LEDs on Ravenstein, these massive center hongs. But now these at home venues and these sport venues are now expanding, right? You have these big conglomerates businesses that are doing stuff outside beyond just the stadium, right?
Trying to get people there before the games and to the restaurants and to the bars and you're seeing digital marquee that you would typically see on the highway, kind of up on the back of a stadium or down the street at the bar that they just built, that's owned by the same kind of marketing company that owns the business or has similar interests.
So, if they are kind of meshing a lot and they're all trying to fight for those eyeballs and fight for those people to bring the dollars and revenue in their way.
David: Yeah, it kind of seems like the worlds are converging, when I was reviewing your company website and seeing how deep a background you have in sports, both college and pro. And expanding into retail and in public spaces like mass transport and so on and thinking at first that well these are very different worlds but when you really think about it they're very similar worlds in a lot of ways these days because like airports are shopping malls and sports venues are no longer just the arena,
It's the multi purpose sort of event area with retail and residential and hotel and everything else and it's all being driven by the same developer or developer group. So they are harmonizing all this stuff.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, that's exactly right. And we're here to help. Whatever those entities are to create a cohesive appeal to the entire look. And then what's happening too is a lot of our venues are old, right?
Our malls are a little older, our stadiums are getting older. So you're going to see more of these stadiums, new builds will happen but you're going to see a lot of renovations where there's going to be seating upgrades and there's going to be changes to potential sight lines and things of that nature and make egress and easier and more exits whatever it might be.
But the technology is really what's going to put the renovations over the edge and it used to be that once you walked through that little tunnel and saw the baseball diamond, the first LED you saw that day was then. Now it's like when you're a couple of miles away on the highway, you see a billboard that's on the stadium.
So right away, you're triggering people's eyeballs before they even get to the park. Then you're tailgating and you're seeing advertisements run in your face and then you scan your ticket and you see an LED when you go through the lobby and the concessions and things like that, those can be obviously monetizable and you can have advertisements there.
And the same things happening in malls and in transit hubs and in other places where they're trying to grab your attention before you even think about heading into that wherever you're at, wherever you're going.
David: Do you have to sell this whole notion into these kinds of venues or do they just inherently get it now because they've seen it in action elsewhere and it's no longer just this sort of exotic concept?
Joe Occhipinti: They definitely have seen it and they want to do it. I think where we come in is kind of helping them bring that to life. So we actually have like an architectural designer that will go and meet with teams and say, Hey, we have this area of our club or of our mall or transit hub that we'd really love to be able to monetize and put some LED signage here but we don't really know how to do it.
So that's where we come in, I would say we consult them but we're really just trying to provide another service to an existing partner or potential partner to say, Hey, we'll take some pictures, we'll create a virtual world and we'll throw some LEDs on there and you guys can kind of see and understand what it might look like.
And how do we angle it right to catch the attention of people coming up the stairs so that whatever it might be. So you can maximize the eyeballs and the dollars that you would get from that, right? Or the feel or the presentation that you want there. So we're doing that constantly.
We have done that at a lot of our marquee venues where we start with one install and the next thing you know is there's three or four or five installs over the next five or six years where they're adding a screen here or there because they realize it's a high traffic area or during walkthroughs or tours. It's a good place to promote their upcoming events or whatever it might be, you know what I mean?
So we kind of do that a lot for our places just to allow them to continue to add to the technology and to provide a better presentation to their constituents that are at the venue.
David: Is it just the highly visible stuff? In the case of, let's say, a sports and events center, are you also driving the menu boards, menu displays in concession and the ticket windows and things like that?
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we've done some of that. As I mentioned, Wells Fargo is like our, I don't want to say crown jewel but it's been a really great partner for us for I believe over a decade. And we literally do everything there from, they have a sports book lounge on their top level to where they were ingesting staff feeds and scores and betting lines, their main video screen is kind of kinetic.
It comes down at one size and opens another and we just have to hit one button in our software which allows it to do that and then their IPTV system. I think it's upwards of 700 LCD or TV displays that they have across the venue and we don't have our own IPTV software but we built a bridge between us and their IPTV providers so that when they do score a goal or there is a win, we can send graphics out there.
Or if something they want to promote to their suites or to certain areas of the business of the venue, I should say, we can do that. Or even emergent emergency messaging or something like that. We have the ability to go full blast on every display that we touch that's in there.
And then even still, they're even adding more, we have billboards out on 95 there in Philly. They added some more displays on their outside, where if you go to a flyers game tomorrow, you'll see us up there kind of installing it. So, like I said, they're trying to get you from when you're a few miles away to get you thinking, you know, I'm excited for this game and I'm excited to participate in this event but also what goes out on there, you alluded to that.
I kind of said the betting lines and things like that. But one of our venues we have in the city, we have two JP Morgan Chase banks and you think that's kind of like a sleepy thing like who's going there to see the LED. But what Chase does for their customers is while you're sitting there, you might see If there are any subway delays, we work with the MTA to ensure that you'll see any traffic it might be if you're heading to Queens and say, it'll say take the tunnel not the bridge or whatever it is. Right.
And whether we'll pop up. So yeah, we're not creating this data but we're ingesting it from different feeds and from different sources and we're making it pretty, we're creating the graphical ways that it might show up and kind of add to the person's experience being at whatever venue they're at.
David: Right. Now if I talk to virtually any CMS software company out there these days and I asked them about data integration, they'll say, of course, yeah we do all kinds of data handling.
We've got APIs and this and that where we're all over that stuff but I get the impression that there are very much different kind of tiers of this that you can have kind of basic data integration that yes, you could query, let's say some transit data if it's publicly available as an XML feed or something. From what you're telling me, this is quite a bit more exotic than that.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I believe it is. I mean, I think what we can do is if the weather variable says it's going to be cloudy, we create a graphical thing that shows what you would think would be cloudy and that shows up there, right? Or if when it's time for the weather to come through and it's sunny, the background will say 65 and it'll be sunny but if it's 65 and rainy, the background will have rain on it.
So we're even going to that level where what the trigger is we're not just spitting out what the variable is but we're trying to create a cohesive content experience too, that kind of shows what's happening and then it allows us to trigger different items in our software too that if we can automatically change when the variable goes from top one to bottom one, it automatically changes the advertisements that would run in that happening.
So it even comes with efficiencies on our end of what we're able to and how we're able to gain presentation and things of that nature. But yeah, I mean these are little subtle things that the customer or the fan really appreciates and it's just great for us that we have an in-house design team.
We recreate these things, we're then our statistical engineers and our developers are then creating ways for it all to work together. So yeah, you do have your base level where we just want to see the scores on a ticker which we're happy to do but if they want to get more involved and do some more graphical things to enhance the experience, we're obviously able to do that as well.
David: When it comes to things like game day experiences for big sports venues and multi purpose venues like that, do these organizations have their own teams that handle all that and they just kind of work with you or are you actually doing the game day experience for these companies?
Joe Occhipinti: It's different at every venue. We're happy to be part of the team. However they would like us to be. It goes anywhere from a place like the game bridge field house, right? They just hosted the all star game and we live sync touches every LED display that's permanently installed there.
And our operators heavily involved in production meetings need to understand what the run of the show is to load the content prior to the game. He's been there so long. I'm sure maybe he will make some say, Hey, maybe try this or that. I don't know but he's been there for a while.
He's great at what he does and they fully trust us to carry out the run of shows that they have created but what might be in that run of show or graphics that the in-house design team also creates. So that's kind of part of the services department that I mentioned before, we also have graphic designers in house that if they want a special intro or some graphical element for a camera like a kiss cam or something. These keys and things that you see that help with game press, we kind of create those things for them.
And our guys are downloading it, testing it, making sure that it works for the game when it inevitably runs in the game. So it is varying levels somewhere passive, right? We're like, Hey, we're here, let us know what you need us to do. Let us know what content needs to be run.
And then in others where we're heavily involved where we're talking to them twice a week on content and churning out thousands of hours of graphical design and in their production meetings and we're upgrading their stat layers every season and creating a new look that might go with their season tickets or whatever it might be.
Right. So they would kind of like to have that whole cohesive kind of brand. Brand look that they go for. So it does vary per client just based on your level with them and what they want to get out of the relationship.
David: Your company background is much more in sports but as we mentioned earlier, you kind of branched into retail and mass transport and other kinds of things like that.
How does the business break down now? Is it still predominantly sports or are you seeing quite a bit of traction in these newer areas?
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. I mean, obviously the legacy business, it used to be ANC sports and we dropped the sports when we started to foray into other things, the at home kind of markets.
I would say we do more volume and on the support side but there's obviously a lot of growth and a lot of greenfield on the place we call it places are out of the home side. And we've been lucky enough to do some impressive installations where the clients have trusted us to perform those, even though we had a lack of experience in it.
I've mentioned Fulton and Westfield, that was our first foray into it and was a hit and it looks great and still looks great, seven eight nine years later. We did a really good install down in South street seaport which we believe is really impressive.
We did some stuff at Moynihan train hall. So we've been lucky to have some big marquee type installations. We are trying to build our relationships with a lot of the out of home players without naming any names. Like we were trying to build those relationships and just kind of see what the partnerships look like there and be an installer and integrator for them as well, just like we've been able to do in the sports.
So, I think the numbers will probably say that we're still more of a sports type business. But I don't think it's that far off from being even one day and I think we are going to put some resources behind it and we're going to do some stuff with the software that will help us change. We are in the process of changing our user interface to be a little bit easier to use.
We're doing some cloud type and quick play type stuff at NBC Universal right now, where they can walk around with their phones when they're doing tours and they can just change what's being displayed on the screens from their phone. So we are putting some resources behind it because we believe in it that we could help a lot of different partners achieve their goals there.
David: I would imagine the typical media companies, even very large ones, would be pretty happy if somebody handled these more involved installations like Times Square or an entertainment district where there's a lot of screens because they're primarily in the business of selling media time and display faces and so on.
I don't know that they really want to get all that dirty in terms of running these kinds of networks, particularly when they start to get quite complicated.
Joe Occhipinti: Literally and figuratively dirty like we're also installing the displays. It's a heavy construction type thing too.
Right. So we're installing the display, we're doing the steel work and then we're plugging everything in and running the show as well. So yeah, I think we have a lot to offer. And obviously, we need to make some enhancements and it's almost like the out of home stuff isn't easier.
It's different from in-game live presentations. And like you said, the legacy business was built that way. So when we got into the out of home market, it worked for out of home but we had some of these features like scheduling and overtakes and some of these things but they weren't maybe as robust as they are today cause we started doing more in it.
So, we've really focused in and debugged them and made them stronger and better so that we can run an out of home type market but it's almost too robust for the simple kind of one display on the side of a building like I'm talking about where we specialize is game presentation where you see five or six or seven different screens. They all have to be synced to kind of make the game presentation feel cohesive or in certain venues like Westfield, where you see many screens at once, you don't want it to be choppy and look off but we're maybe a little bit too robust when it comes to a single display, right? And because we're too robust, our features, maybe a little bit heavy in terms of costs.
So we're going to try to address some of those things and really create something that would get all the features that we have but can also be used in an easier type setting as well and not be so cost effective and then like I said, we want to start getting our cloud infrastructure stronger and things like that, so that people can go by and change it with a phone.
Right now we have people on staff that are scheduling these places for us in our lives.
They're voting in and scheduling all these things. It would be easy if you work for Westfield World Trade and you're trying to court a client. You don't have to coordinate with ANC and the scheduler to, Hey, between 11 and 12, I want to show Sixteen Nine podcasts on all displays.
You could just walk around and you could press a button on your phone and right when you're showing up and you can just launch it.
Right. So we're trying to do things like that.
David: The Fulton Center thing is interesting in how it crosses into a world trade in the Oculus retail area and so on. What did you learn out of that in terms of putting together a visual network that was going to run across multiple venues that aren't necessarily visible to one another.
They're connected by tunnels or concourses but they're different things in certain respects and also, instead of a game where people are sitting for 40 minutes, almost all of them are constantly on the move.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. So obviously they placed the screens in places where they felt there was going to be higher traffic, right?
Like an entrance to a subway tunnel or you come out of the path from Jersey and you're trying to get up into street level Manhattan and you walk that past, what amounts to almost four or five hundred feet of screens and it was definitely a little difficult to envision what they were trying to do but as it started to come together, it made a lot of sense to us and they kind of made it a little easier on us than had they treated the different areas of the facility to want to run different things, right?
They want the whole facility to run everything all at the same time. So we're able to create the software, create batches that have all the displays and throw all the content in there and then schedule them appropriately rather than this side underneath by the path station needs to run this at this time and then over by tower two, we want to run that. And then in Fulton, we want to run this other thing.
They are two separate venues so we have two different schedules going at each one because they're different trains that run at each station, right? So in Fulton, you have four or five. And in Westfield, you have the AC and the two-three or whatever it is.
So you have to decipher what goes where but the way they wanted to run it allowed things to be a little bit easier on the back end but we had to deal with network infrastructure and everything else like that which was new to us in this type of a venue. But they're really there to obviously be advertisements.
Also, they need to make the place feel beautiful. Have you ever been down there? It's like all marble, it's a really beautiful facility. So they had to fit and they wanted to be in your face cause they were driving advertisements. They want to be appealing but they still need it to be beautiful and look good as well.
So there was a lot of pressure on us too. The 24/7 nature of it is a little different than sports where you have a game and if something goes wrong, you generally have till the next day or two days later to fix it. That doesn't happen outside of home. Things gotta be working 23 and a half hours a day with not a lot of downtime and not a lot of issues happening because advertisers are walking through it and potential advertisers and the customers.
So it was a lot of pressure on us. We literally have people walking the facilities downtown, New York, for 18 hours a day reporting issues and fixing issues. We don't want to have any downtime on these displays because the stakes are that high.
David: Yeah, really.
How many people do you have working in the company? Roughly?
Joe Occhipinti: We have about just under a hundred full timers and depending on the seasonality of it, we have around 200 part timers that work for us all across the country.
David: And of the full timers are most of them kind of in the greater New York area.
Joe Occhipinti: There's probably like 30 percent in this area, just cause like I said, we have a lot downtown and kind of work at our headquarters in Westchester but we're pretty spread out. We have upwards of almost a hundred venues across the country where we have something.
So, in those markets, like in LA or Washington DC or Baltimore, where we have a lot of different things going on. We have full timers that are in those markets actually running a stable of part timers as well.
David: Yeah, because they need to be there. They can't just say, well I can get there next Thursday or something.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, they gotta be there at a moment's notice most of the time. .
David: Alright. This is great. If people wanna know more about ANC, they just go to ANC.com.
Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. ANC.com.
David: Nice and simple.
Joe Occhipinti: We do some stuff on social media but LinkedIn is really probably the one that makes the most sense if you want to check out some of our posts and what we've been up to lately.
But we just did a full rebrand. We changed our logo. We kind of changed our colors after we bought the company back. I think the website looks great. So yeah, ANC.com will take you straight there and you guys can learn everything there is to know about us.
David: Powered by C10, I see.
Joe Occhipinti: Powered by C10. C10's still around. Obviously, Jerry Cifrelli Jr. founded that company and that was the vehicle from which we acquired ANC but obviously with the legacy he had with his father and the name brand that ANC had, we decided we wanted to keep it. And just give it a refresh and push it forward.
David: All right. Joe, Thank you very much for your time.
Joe Occhipinti: Thank you, Dave. This has been great. I appreciate it.
![Rowan Brunger, Amino](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/rowanbrunger_kw9a2h_300x300.jpeg)
Wednesday Mar 13, 2024
Rowan Brunger, Amino
Wednesday Mar 13, 2024
Wednesday Mar 13, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players.
They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment.
So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage?
That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic.
I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about?
Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on.
So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices.
David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV.
Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management.
So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players.
David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market.
Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world.
There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a lot of the endpoints for Triple Play, Vitech and some of the IPTV streaming guys. So we've got loads of boxes out there in circulation and they're coming up for renewal or people wanting to upgrade to 4k, et cetera.
So that gives us a natural pull off. Okay, let's look at this market in isolation rather than just bolting onto our existing business. And then there's actually looking at the experience that we've gained in the pay TV world which has become a very competitive environment to be in.
We can take a lot of that experience and truly add some value within the pro AV space with the gravitas of products and devices that we've managed previously and importantly, bringing over our video expertise onto the media player, rather than just looking at signage. We've done well where we integrate the two and we're finding a lot of customers are wanting both of them to run side by side on one device.
So we can pull the huge expertise we have in enterprise video and actually put it on the same device next to, for instance, the CMS platform,
David: The markets and the use cases are, in some respects, very similar in terms of both needing very high quality of service.
Like the stuff can't go down, right?
Rowan Brunger: Sure. Yeah. We look at that from a number of different angles in terms of the physical player itself is truly enterprise grade, steel case designed to work in all environments 24 seven and some would argue we've even over engineered it. I mean, we've literally got boxes that have been running 24 seven in the field for 10 or 12 years solid and they're still displaying every single hour of the day.
But then there's the actual total robustness of the system and that's the inevitably when something does go wrong and things obviously do go wrong, the ability to fix that very quickly and also the ability to make sure the ongoing security and updates of that device are easy to get onto it, is as important as it running really.
David: Yeah, I would say any number of CMS software companies in the industry have only in the last few years sort of realized the importance of remote device management, whereas it would have been inherent in what you do right from the start, right?
Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it's absolutely an upfront thought in where we've come from.
And inevitably like a lot of things, you only realize how much you need something when you don't have it and when there's a problem. So certainly a lot of the signage projects that were involved with it, it's not their first signage project at all. They're learning from the deployments they've already made and what the pinch points were and what the really painful bits about it.
And I think we're in a world now where people are taking their signage a lot more seriously with a big emphasis and cost push to get people back to the high street. For instance, when we're looking at retail, it's not just a tick box, we have a signage system in place. It's got to be absolutely robust.
You've got to be able to rely on it and certainly, in times where people are paying to have their content advertised within the stores or the settings, they want to know it's actually been on the screen.
David: So you're competing in a few ways with different kinds of companies. You've got the consumer/prosumer android set top boxes that have come over from Shenzhen or whatever. You've got special purpose media play out boxes like a bright sign box and then you've got companies like SPINX who have their own box and other companies that have their own boxes and then you have PCs.
So how do you kind of position yourself?
Rowan Brunger: It's a really good question. So, if I cover the first section early on, I'll probably include system on chip in that as well. So we've got a system on chip users, people have realized that there's value in having a player but maybe not as necessarily selected.
One that hits all their objectives, I'm sure we say and then we've got the likes of the guys that do really high end boxes with multiple outputs. We've liked to keep this really simple, we have two products in our portfolio, for instance, we have a POE model and we have a Wifi model.
So we keep it really simple. It's at a price point where we're stretching the people from the cheap consumer devices and the system on chip operators but add enough value to make that extra investment to move towards an enterprise grade player but we're underneath a lot of our true competitors that you know do fit for purpose signage players because we don't try and do everything. So I'll give you an example of that.
We like to partner with specialists in areas that aren't familiar to us. So if somebody needs a four output player, we've got a partnership with the likes of Matrox to give you that. So those guys specialize in multiple output play, cards and players, we feed into it. But what that gives the customer is one platform for pretty much whatever they want to do.
So our device management and the reliability is right up there with the top end competitors. But we've got a really simplistic view and what our customers like is no matter what they're displaying or what they're using the player for, it's the same player that does it all. So we've got one customer that has probably six use cases for our player within their stores.
So a large rollout of about 650-700 stores in the UK and they're doing multiple things with it but they know it's a H 200 player, that is just programmed in different ways for those different use cases and they really liked that from a maintenance point of view. So we've kept things really simple.
We are definitely a step up and a professional grade player to challenge the lower end operators in the market and in terms of the higher end guys, I think we're hitting a price point. They can't, so we can get mass adoption from our product and we've got the right partnerships in place to cover all use cases with the guys that lead the industry in those areas.
David: So for the age 200 player. If I'm buying, like 10 of them, what roughly in U. S. dollars would be the cost?
Rowan Brunger: So well, I'm doing a conversion in my head.
David: Well, give me, EU or sterling.
Rowan Brunger: Yeah, so we've got a package to trade within Europe that's about 240 pounds.
Okay. What are we at? Just over 300 and that's a full two year package of enhanced support, premium device management software on the player itself. The player itself is around 200 on its own with various different options. So it hits a price point if you want to power four screens; for instance, in a video wall, it actually becomes price.
It prices itself well enough that you could actually put a player on each of those screens, run it as a video wall, or run them individually and have that flexibility. So you're not just doing one or the other, yet you're still coming in at probably less than a quad head player that would powerful screens,
David: Yeah, and it's interesting. By standardizing on just one box for a whole bunch of different use cases, you could keep a spares pool without having to think, okay, I need two spares of these and two spares of those, and so on. You just have five on the shelf that you can pull off if you need to.
Rowan Brunger: Exactly that. I mean the scenario I just gave you before, they're even looking at running just some simple audio or some simple HTML pages, just because they like the simplicity that everything is powered by exactly the same thing.
David: You mentioned that you've had stuff in the field for 10 years. Do you have a rated operating life?
Rowan Brunger: Well, the chipset has changed, which has sort of adapted that slightly, and then you've obviously got the provisions of using flash memory but the products that we have in the field have normally been programmed to do one thing, from the offset. So, quite often, decoding video streams, so they haven't really been updated, and that's why they've been running for 10 or 12 years plus. They’re designed and warranted to run for, you know, the standard sort of five or six years, but they've become so robust that people have just left them in cause they're working.
We've got an airport with 2000 of the units in, and it's only because they want to change to full grade that they even thought about upgrading them. They've been running in excess of 10 years in that airport.
David: So with the build for these units, if I have 500 of them and I decide, okay, I'm expanding, I'm an airport, I'm expanding a new terminal. I need 500 more. Is it going to be a different box at this point, or would that even matter?
Rowan Brunger: The H200 has been around for about two years now, it really depends on when those proxies were deployed but the older boxes that we have in the sort of thousands out there, aren't supported anymore because they're well over 10 years old, but we've got a very easy upgrade path to swap those boxes out for the new range of products. And in doing that, they're all on the same platform for managing them then as well.
David: I asked this because one of the complaints, among probably quite a few complaints with buying little Android boxes from Shenzhen or elsewhere is that if you order a hundred of them and then you order another hundred that second batch of one hundred might have different operating systems or different versions of the operating system, different electronics inside and everything else. So every time they show up, you're starting from scratch.
Rowan Brunger: Absolutely. Welcome to buying consumer products. But we manage our chipsets and our components very strictly, and you can imagine the volumes we make them in because there's a lot of crossover from the set-top box side of the business but more importantly, we operate Android AOSP. So, we actually control and write the firmware for the product ourselves. So, in terms of updating the products, we're putting our own firmware on there. We're not relying on Google or Android updates for anything; in fact, much the opposite, because we want to be in control of it.
So for instance, when you boot one of our boxes up, there's no app store. There's no standard Google browser on there, it's exactly what we choose to put on there, which makes it very fit for purpose because it's not running a million things in the background. We give it some very clear parameters and control exactly what middleware or APK that we put on there that's monitored centrally and all the versions and updates are controlled centrally as well. So you know exactly what's on there and you’re the master of your own destiny.
David: Are you having to worry about security, well, I guess everybody worries about security, but because, as you just described, does that kind of greatly reduce the risks?
Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it does, and again, this is something we've pulled over from our knowledge of the Pay TV market. So working with Android, we adhere to some pretty strict guidelines from Google in terms of security patches and timely updates, et cetera, and we actually think that's really very relevant in the pro AV market as well. So we've actually pulled over the standards that we adhere to on the Pay TV market, within the digital signage space.
So as a result of that, we do at least four firmware updates a year that contain all the relevant security patches because there's nothing else on there in terms of an app store, et cetera, we’re cleared in very highly secure environments. So we do a lot of work with the government. We've got a really interesting project going on, within a prison. So somebody's made their own middleware that they're using on the box and actually running entertainment within prison cells using the H200, which you can imagine is a super secure environment. So because we're in complete control of it, we can make it as secure as we like.
And we're seeing that more and more prevalent with even retail rollouts now, with things like 802.1X authentication on networks, which I've never heard asked for but have been asked quite a lot for recently. So we quite got an agile development team. We're able to add functions like that and drop them in the latest firmware, and get them out of the boxes very quickly.
David: So because you're shipping a lot of units, do you get some sense of what the marketplace demand is?
For the longest time, people were saying, yes, it would be nice if we went to 4k, but nobody actually needs it yet, and for signage applications, it's probably never needed. Certainly, 8k, which is being marketed, is something that is probably years away if it ever comes. What is the marketplace actually using?
Rowan Brunger: We are being asked for 4k a lot more. You're right in the signage space; it’s less applicable, although a lot of the CMS providers don't even output in 4k, which, obviously, is a stumbling block. But for those that do, we're just testing a build for 4k content at the moment, and we've got out with some beta testers, and that's going very well. Obviously, 4k video is pretty much a must when people are looking at video, and that's very much our expertise, how we can stream that and what protocols we use to stream it and transport streams and encryption, is all around 4k and in particular, low latency is something that we specialize in quite a lot. So that takes us down certain vertical markets such as sporting and gaming where latency is an absolute deal breaker.
So we're seeing for our players and going back to your question about market trends, I'd say 50% of our opportunities are video-led, and the other 50% are signage-led, but with an element of video, a lot of them are with an element of video as well. So I think our expertise in video is really setting us apart here, and that, down the 4k route. POE has been requested more and more so that's why it's standard on our H200s.
David: For retail more than anything I would imagine?
Rowan Brunger: Actually, no, and I thought it would be, but what we're seeing is the requests for Wi-Fi is actually coming through retail more than anywhere else because when people are doing a retrofit of a store or they want to have quite an agile space within the store and be creative with where they're putting the screens, there's not normally a network point there.
So we're actually finding some of our big retail rollouts are actually going down the Wi-Fi route, which I didn't expect, to be honest, but we've done a separate Wi-Fi unit for that marketplace because leading back to the security, a lot of our government and military deployments require us not to even have the ability to have Wi-Fi in the box altogether, which is why we didn't just add Wi-Fi to the existing H200. We've actually done it as two separate products. But yeah, interestingly, we've just launched our, or we're just in the process of launching our Wi-Fi unit, and the inquiries that are coming in are predominantly retail, and also the leisure industry as well as people want to put more screens and things in bars and pubs that typically have terrible infrastructure. Wi-Fi seems to be the easiest route to go with that as well.
David: You mentioned streaming, I'm a little curious about that because most of the set-top boxes that are on the market have onboard storage and digital signage most typically is forward and stored and played off of a hard drive locally.
Are your boxes doing that, or is it all streaming?
Rowan Brunger: No, it's all streaming. We can digest the number of transport streams such as multicast, unicast, low latency dash, and low latency HLS because that's what our bread and butter are on the set-top box side of the world.
So we're finding a lot of people for instance, within the betting industry where low latency is an absolute must, we're working with specific middleware vendors that provide the streams on an OTT basis, and we decode them locally on the box with various different levels of encryption and it's enabling people to reduce the amount of head end hardware that they've got. Even down to sort of office builds, government buildings where there's an element of wanting just some basic news channels alongside the signage, the ability to switch between the two. So typically, you'd have a big head end, consumer set-top box with aerial on the roof, bringing those streams down, we're able to bring them in completely OTT.
So we remove the need for all of that hardware, and just, bring it on an OTT basis straight to the box, which is game-changing for somebody that's, maybe, got a larger state and they have to rent aerial space on the roof of all their stores, have a big server unit within there, consuming a lot of power, needing managing, and obviously bringing those streams down locally, we literally just pop the addresses into the box, into a JSON file and we pull them down through our player that's on board within the software stack.
David: Are there worries at all about the quality of service and reliability of service for connectivity? Because God knows that used to be an issue, but maybe it's gone away.
Rowan Brunger: It's becoming less of an issue because with different encryptions and transport streams, they require a lot less bandwidth. It still needs assessing, obviously, when you're looking at a sign. But you can tweak the bitrate frames between the different encryption levels to get to a happy medium of a quality that you want alongside a bandwidth that you're willing to play with. So, it's becoming less of an issue. We can still obviously decode on-prem feeds as well when it's absolutely paramount that the feeds have got to be on-premises but the bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue now.
David: You mentioned enterprise TV at the front end of our chat. How do you define that?
Rowan Brunger: So it's really whether it's TV-led, and what I mean by enterprise TV is, anything that's not residential, and not, hospitality so retail, office environments, sports stadium, things like that. That's where we'd class as enterprise TV. So it's the enterprise-grade of the box, but it's primarily streaming IPTV rather than just signage.
David: Do you sell direct or do you kind of go through a channel or, through software partners?
Rowan Brunger: So we sell purely through a channel. We sell through distributors around the globe, trade only, through the channel directly to our system integrators, and onto the end users. So yeah, we're a channel-focused business, and that's something that we've recently sort of redesigned because that model is very different from what Amino is used to in the Pay TV market where they may deal directly with operators.
We've decided that within this marketplace, a channel-only focus is the best way to go. It ensures our partner's protection on pricing and margin, et cetera, and also gives us scalability that we've got partners out there promoting the product for us.
David: When you started Looking at the digital signage market, was it a little baffling when you realized how many software companies there are?
Rowan Brunger: Yes, there does seem to be an ever ending amount of CMS partners to play with. We've worked with a couple that we've got a history with and onboarded those guys. We've now got an accreditation process. So when we do onboard a partner, we truly onboard them as a partnership rather than just saying, okay, we've tested that version of the APK, and that works fine. Let's call it accredited.
We actually onboard them and make a commitment that CMS will work ongoing with Amino and we go into a partnership with the CMS so we get beta releases of each other's software so we can truly test it in advance, which is why it takes a little bit of time to onboard, although we have quite an impressive list of CMS vendors on the list to go through accreditation, so it is definitely a nice route to market. We want to play with as many people as we can. At the same time, not overloading ourselves.
I think what's helping us there is the fact that a lot of CMSs seem to develop their APK before the platforms, so we do tend to be able to onboard people fairly quickly. And if there is any integration work that needs doing, it's fairly straightforward, and we've seen it before on somebody else's application. So yeah, onboarding and partnering are absolutely key for us over the next 12 months. We don't want what CMS somebody uses to be a barrier to sell, and it's not just a CMS, we work very closely with a number of streaming middleware companies as well that are specific in certain vertical markets as well.
David: So you're at a stand at some trade show and a CMS, digital signage CMS software company walks up and says, “Hi, I'm aware of you guys, and would like to be involved.” What's that thing you tell them when they say, “What do we need or how do we need to be set up in order for this to work?”
Rowan Brunger: Initially, we would ask for a version of their application and log in to their system, and we deliberately ask for no more than that because we want to test it as a virgin user if you like. So we put it through a first round of testing, which is:
Does this go onto the box? Does it behave as if I would expect it to behave as a user? And that's our first round of testing. Normally, if that goes okay, we put it forward towards a full Q.A. test with our Hong Kong development team, which is a 400-point Q.A. test, which literally tests every element of the software and the integration, and at that point, we give a report back to the CMS provider to say, “Yes, it's all gone smoothly” or “It works, but can we suggest we do this and this integration together to make it a better experience?” And then, we go into the commercials of the partnership and make sure that we're sharing best practices with each other in terms of updates and things.
We also have a lot of APIs that are available through our remote management software that we're finding a lot more of the CMS partners want to integrate into their CMS platform to give the end users, that one pane of glass, whether they're managing content or the device that they can do it in one place. So we have completely open APIs for the CMS partners to be able to do that and put a lot of the functionality that we have in our device management, actually in their front-end system that the customer is using every day for the content.
David: Does your platform support IP streaming or multicast or that sort of thing? Is there a foundational thing they have to have?
Rowan Brunger: No, not at all. We are dealing with some partners to put our video play technology within their CMS but it's not these guys' expertise. So, actually, the value to them of working with Amino is you can run their CMS software and switch seamlessly into an IPTV solution alongside their CMS. So, all of a sudden, they can speak to their customers about IPTV streaming solutions alongside pretty much any CMS rather than having to have a specialized solution incorporated into their roadmap.
How many times have we provided screens to somebody and you get the call, maybe two, two weeks later, two years later, “Can we put some TV streams through this for us?” For us, that's just a service we can turn on without having to ship any hardware. So it gives a lot of flexibility to these existing CMS deployments.
David: You mentioned the Hong Kong software team, is that where the company is based?
Rowan Brunger: No, we're based in Cambridge in the UK. So we are a UK-based company and have been for our existence. We have a couple of support teams. One is in Portugal, level one support is in Portugal, and we have a level two support team in Hong Kong. So we've got to follow the sun kind of coverage on support.
David: And manufacturing is done in China like everybody else?
Rowan Brunger: Some manufacturing is done in China. There's a whole host of countries that we're manufacturing in. We've got stuff coming out of Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong. It depends on the product or the chipset, but yeah, a fairly well-diverse manufacturing plant. We're not stationed all in one place.
David: What's the next AV trade show that you guys will have a stand at or a presence at?
Rowan Brunger: So Infocomm is coming up. We've got a presence there, and we've just done ISE, as you know, and then we've got some presence at NAB as well because we do see some crossover from some of the broadcasting shows that are looking at enterprise video or signage. So our trade show calendar is still split between Pay TV, but with a much larger emphasis than we have done on the AV world.
David: If people want to know more about Amino, where do they find you online?
Rowan Brunger: Sure, just go to Amino.tv.
David: Clever! All right, Rowan, thank you very much for your time.
Rowan Brunger: Thank you, David. Pleasure as always.
![Sebastien Boulanger, DVOX](https://pbcdn1.podbean.com/imglogo/ep-logo/pbblog1142747/Sebastien_Boulanger_-_DVOX_qnz698_300x300.jpg)
Wednesday Mar 06, 2024
Sebastien Boulanger, DVOX
Wednesday Mar 06, 2024
Wednesday Mar 06, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are lots of reasons why digital signage and digital out of home ad networks don't have audio - the biggest reason being that the majority of people (especially staff who are in that environment all day) don't want to hear messages over and over.
Many speakers have been stabbed with forks or seen their audio cables snipped by workers who could not take it day after day.
But there also cases in which audio would be welcomed, and very useful.
There are different technologies out there that can enhance and complement the messaging on screens, and headset devices that can be borrowed or rented, so that audio can be added to things like museums and attractions or live sports events. The challenge is that the technology used might be old and limited, or the set-up requires maintaining, cleaning, charging and keeping track of a lot of hardware.
A Montreal company called DVOX is taking a different approach - making audio streams from live events and from screens available over local area networks and WiFi, so that anyone with a smartphone and headphones of some kind can launch a simple web app and start listening.
The primary markets, I think, are with big sporting events and conferences, but it's also the sort of thing that has applications for digital signage and digital out of home. I spoke with DVOX president Sebastien Boulanger.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Sebastien, thank you for joining me. I know very little about DVOX. Could you give me a rundown of what the company is?
Sebastien Boulanger: DVOX is a fast-growing startup at the moment that is offering a new generation technology for live audio streaming purposes in several domains.
How does it work?
Sebastien Boulanger: Easy enough. DVOX is taking and acquiring any analog audio source, that might be coming from a live microphone, sound desk, broadcasting trailer, audio extractor devices, or whatever you please. We're acquiring analog audio input and then converting it to digital to stream it directly over the local area network, meaning that guests or visitors have to be connected to the right WiFi to be granted access to the audio stream.
We're doing so that the stream goes out through a webpage, so the end user doesn't have to install any mobile apps or whatever. It's only a web browser page, basically.
So the idea is you're seeing stuff on a screen at whatever venue you're in, whether it's a sports bar or a sports stadium or some other place, you can basically hear the audio without, the having to crank the speakers to 11 for, that to happen?
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Let me give you a couple of examples here that might be helpful here. Let's say you are in a sports bar, as you were just mentioning, and you have plenty of screens in front of you. So, which of those screens will be on the speaker boxes? So basically you can have ambiance, music, whatever for all the other guests, but if you feel like you want to hear a football match, you simply have to have the audio of that screen.
So with DVOX what you can do is have all the different audio feeds running inside of the system And then by being connected to the right WiFi, you will be able to choose which audio feed you want to hear, so basically, through a regular webpage,, as simple as browsing, you have access to all of the audio feed that the venue is offering in live, in real-time. You only need a QR code to get onto the event page, and if you're on the right WiFi, there you go; you have all the feeds.
You're using a smartphone and a web app to get this, as opposed to asking people to download our special app and go through a bunch of hoops?
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct.
And that's why we're having a lot of pull these days in the sports industries, in the congress center industries as well, educational because any audio source can be streamed through WiFi. We're just back from Detroit, where we're showcasing our technology to a league, which is called the UFL, and in the meantime, we present it to the NFL Lions and the Active Forward Field, and basically, what these guys are offering is having a 60,000 seats venue with powerful WiFi coverage. So now, with DVOX, they can have any exclusive content because it's not a broadcast. It's a local stream. It's a huge difference here. So basically, they can have any audio feed, and give it to all of the attendee's, ticket owners that are inside of the building to have exclusive content.
So, while your eyes are looking at a football game, you can have an audio description, you can have a quarterback microphone, you can have a bench microphone, you can have anything you please, basically.
As long as the organizer decides to make that available, you can capture it through your devices and then use it.
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Mainly what we're doing is installing physically the device, the DVOX hardware piece of equipment next to the broadcasting trailer, let's call it in the loading dock, if you please, because all the audio feeds run through that truck, basically broadcasting trailer. But before getting those streams to the sound desk and on air, we can have those same feeds and put them back in the venue for the guests that are attending.
If we rollback a little bit of discussion to the digital signage here, just to give you another example, it might be helpful to understand with another example. Let's say you are in an airport. So you are here two hours, three hours prior to your flight. You already have your headphones. There's already WiFi in the airport, and there's, I don't know, in between 600-2000 screens all over the airport. All of those screens are on mute. But why? Because it would be a mess to try to have sound coming out of those. That's for sure.
So now, you have plenty of apps that could be available, and some of them are really neat. I'm not arguing these, but you might be a tourist with a foreign SIM card, not having a data plan or whatever. With DVOX, basically, you log into the WiFi, simply browse to the airport webpage that is offering sound, and if all of those are video feed or backed by an audio feed that the airport wants to give you, then all of a sudden you have access to the audio feed for all the screens without the need to install anything, no latency, and then, basically, you choose whatever you want to hear without reading the subtitles all the time.
I travel a lot. I go through a lot of airports, and the quality of the WiFi varies pretty widely, from airport to airport, sometimes it's amazing, and sometimes it's dreadful. What kind of impact does introducing these audio streams to an airport that maybe already has as much demand as it can handle, what's that going to do?
Sebastien Boulanger: That's actually a really good question, and here's one thing I would like to explain in detail here, if I may. WiFi is one thing, internet access is another one. So, in your example here, when you're saying the WiFi is weak, is it the WiFi strength, the coverage, or the internet access? Because sometimes, the issue is not necessarily the strongness of the signal, meaning you have good reception over the WiFi antennas that are installed all over the airports. There are so few nets, but yeah, you're right, sometimes the administrator just locks to a certain speed, the up and down traffic to avoid having a bottleneck to the networks for somebody with, I don't know, streaming live or whatever.
The thing is, with DVOX, when you are on to the WiFi, you simply download, if I could say, the visual of the event page. So, simply by browsing, you're accessing a webpage. Same thing as when you are asking for google.com, and you have the search bar popping in. So basically you only have a visual that's coming in. But as soon as you click on play, all the audio feeds are kept local. Your cell phone has a direct path to the hardware, which is inside the building. So to answer your question, having slow internet is not even a problem as long as you have WiFi coverage, and even with only one bar of signal, that says we're enough because we're only carrying audio around on purpose.
So here, in that scenario, we are using 48 kilobits per second per user per listener. 48 kilobits is nothing. Those antennas are built to manage one gigabyte of data transfer. Everything stays local. So there is no round-time trip latency with the cloud or internet, whatever. So we have less than 0.04 seconds delay. So on the WiFi, it's really light.
Unlike if you're trying to send video around, which should be very heavy on a network if there was a lot of demand, audio is nothing.
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, absolutely. Plus I'd like to add that since we know that we are only audio for obvious reasons, all the web browsers are behaving the same way. And for any network, might it be public or private or whatever WiFi infrastructure, we are considered as voice over IP. So, therefore, there's already pre-configured, quality of servicing because, of course, people sometimes are having Messenger calls or FaceTime or whatever. So the audio goes smoothly through any network, and all the web browsers, such as Safari, Chrome, Edge, whatever browser you might be using are behaving the same way because they think it's a web radio.
So you can kill your screen put your cell phone in your pocket and keep listening for hours without dragging down your battery. If we were to have video content or subtitles or video bumper or whatever, we would be having issues with being polyvalent with all the web browsers they are not behaving the same way.
So this concept and need has been around for a while now. The idea that I wish I could hear what was on that screen, but they've kept the sound down for whatever reason, or I wish I could hear this or that.
There have been other attempts in the past to do this sort of thing. I remember there was a little company called, Hear My Lips which is a god-awful name, but maybe that was part of the problem. But there's been a few things out there. Technology advances this stuff, obviously. But I've also seen things like golf tournaments or other events where people have this weird little thing clipped onto one of their ears. That's a remote speaker, it's a hardware device that you have to have in order for you to hear specialized commentary or something.
You're saying we can remove that equipment because you have a receiver in your pocket anyway, your smartphone and earbuds, and you're good to go.
Sebastien Boulanger: That is correct. And, I would like to compliment or answer that question with a brief history of DVOX. So being myself, a technical director in the show business industry for a while, at first I was asked to have instant translation over a large crowd, let's say 2000+ guests at a corporate event back in 2015 and back then in 2015, there was still a lot of Blackberry in the market and it was a business conference.
So even the business people attending did not necessarily own their own cell phones. Remember the very beginning of the Apple smartphones, sometimes they were business phones, so they wouldn't even be allowed to install. Plus the speakers, the keynote speakers, or themselves refracting the fact that their content might be going into the cloud. They didn't want that because they just created or written a speech for this particular event without allowing us to have any content going to the cloud.
That said back then, I only had infrared technology, which is great, but it's an old-generation technology where you need to have dedicated receivers, landing counters, managing IP, installing radiators, and so on. So then what's left, you have FM technology, which is behaving the same way, basically with a dedicated receiver. And you know as well as I do that all the FM frequencies are saturated, downtown, and it was a mass basically. So now by looking for a solution, I end up with apps that were out of the question.
So back in 2015, they said, okay, there's nothing that is doing a simple thing, which is acquiring audio streaming live through a webpage. So then I asked around, and I decided to build it. So if I rolled back to your previous question, sorry for the long answer, you're absolutely right. Any cell phone and/or an MP3 player, which is WiFi capable, iPad or anything that has a web browser that can be on the WiFi is, in fact, an actual receiver with DVOX.
So that you may use your preferred headphones or your preferred Bluetooth devices that you already have configured with your cell phone and there you go, you have a new receiver. It's really convenient. You don't have to bother with having a dedicated piece of equipment. There's no cumbersome stuff to install either.
I was in the UK a few months ago on a working holiday and went to a couple of museums or places where you would pay to get in and walk around, and you could give them five pounds, and they would give you a headset device of some kind that streamed, and I thought they were great, but there's a whole routine to cleaning them, making sure that they get them back. I'm sure there's maybe not shrinkage because people aren't really stealing them as much as just forgetting they have them, and they walk out and see them when they're on the subway, and they decide, you know what, I'm not going all the way back with it, so they toss them. So it's expensive, and there's a lot of management involved.
You're saying with this, even in a museum setting, you could just use this instead of this hardware suite.
Sebastien Boulanger: Absolutely, and then you don't have to manage all the batteries that are going to be dying and people dropping their receivers. All your points were really valid ones. And, yeah, your cell phone is the only thing you need.
I might add, just to a certain extent, how many cell phones, old cell phones, do you have in your, I don't know, Gunther tray or how many devices do you still have at home from the past?
Four or five.
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, there you go. So even without a SIM card, they're still accessing the WiFi, right? So even these old cell phone phones are actually working as a receiver for you. So in a museum environment, I know they do have a lot of schools coming in and younger visitors and stuff like that. So they might be willing to use it. In that sense, this is not an issue at all. Anything that is web-capable is an actual receiver. They may provide, or they can provide themselves, any MP3 player that’s WiFi capable, and all of a sudden, you have a visitor that can use their cell phone, and that's it.
For an airport, for a museum, for a big sports stadium, those kinds of things, they're going to have IT teams, they're going to have telecommunications closets, IT closets, they've got all the stuff together, and the experience and qualifications to put something like this together.
If it's a sports bar or some sort of small to medium business environment like that, is this over their heads? Is this something that would be great, but they won't even know where to start?
Sebastien Boulanger: Oh, no, it's so easy. Even when we went to the Australian Open at the beginning of the year in January to become a medium, it took 20 minutes. The hardest problem was to have the right feed out of the sound desk, basically over 20 minutes, we're up and running.
Let's put it that way, whenever you have audio content somewhere, you have the audio side that you can have access to, and you have a WiFi net, DVOX fits right in between. So, on a boot cycle, we're up in about two minutes, and we're already in your WiFi because we connected the network and then we plug in the analog audio feed. The only thing left is to match the volume, and that's it. It's really easy to understand and integrate.
These are basically rack-mounted appliances, like 2U appliances, you just slide into a rack, and off you go?
Sebastien Boulanger: Absolutely. You need a 2U rack space, and it's super convenient for any rack because they are standard AV kind of dimensions. So this is not a huge rack and this is not a refrigerator that you have to deal with in your AV room.
Yeah, so it would fit in most businesses, and it's not a big footprint, too.
Is it the sort of thing that a business owner could install, or are you doing this through resellers and integrators who would put this in for folks and manage it?
Sebastien Boulanger: That's a kind of a two-way answer here. If I were to send you a device right now over FedEx or whatever you receive, I'm pretty sure that within, I don't know, 15 minutes, you'll be up and running.
As long as I have a hammer.
Sebastien Boulanger: I'm sure you won't need it. You just need an Ethernet cable, not a hammer, and I'm positioning my company as an AV manufacturer here because we're aiming for several markets, and several fields of usage, meaning digital signage, sports, hospitality, transportation, whatever, and whatever, plus we're having several territories.
Now, we are distributed in the Australian market and New Zealand. We are as well in the US and Canada, and soon enough, we'll be in the UK. We're just leading the discussion right now. So, I will not personally be able to answer the call for all of these territories, right? So, I'm relying on a seller to help me be the first layer of servicing and/or be the integrator.
And the complexity is not on the DVOX side. Let me give you an example of the airport once again. Whenever you're in the airport, you have announcements, a lot of announcements. You sometimes have ambient music, or, in a sports bar, you have a little happy hour music or whatever. But whenever there's an announcement, it's just taking over because they want to have everyone hear it per terminals, whatever. So these guys already have audio DSPs, amplifiers, speaker boxes, and stuff like that. So basically, by having all the audio DSPs, those AV integrators would reprogram the DSP just to have an audio mix that goes through DVOX that will still keep the announcement on top whenever there's an announcement, right? Priority. But in that sentence here, this is a bit more complex, so yes, an integrator would do it, but for any sports bar, you take any audio source out, maybe an HDMI audio extractor, and put them in a DVOX and that's it, you have nothing else to do, So if you want to have a dedicated mix with priorities over some feeds and blah, blah, blah, that's a little more complex. I'm relying on resellers and integrators, but if you are going your own way with analog in from an auxiliary one out of your preferred sound desk or HDMI extractor or microphone, you're good to go.
Does the footprint of a facility, like something like an airport, which is vast, does that present any kind of a problem in terms of latency, on the local area network, or it doesn't matter whether you're 10 feet or a thousand feet away?
Sebastien Boulanger: No, absolutely. An airport is a good example here. They can't generate delay on the IT side meter. All of the terminals are interlinked through fiber optics cable. So there's no IT delay, if I can put it that way, and, I'm going to use again this Australian Open example here where we're connected to the Melbourne Olympic Park. These guys had more than 400 antennas, and that was still leaving the site of the Australian Open, and along the bicycle path or whatever, you go out of the site, and you have another section, which has a huge hill, grass slope where people are sitting and looking at an enormous big screen. So, for all of those that are not ticket owners, they could be going there. So the WiFi was offered to that section too, and we were snap-syncing the screen. So the delay of the IT is not an issue. Of course, if you are running with copper wire over 27 switches, you will be infringing on the delay. But, we are not experiencing IT delay, if I can put it that way, on our installation, and we can be as wide as the coverage is.
It strikes me as there's always a challenge with, something unfamiliar to get people to, first of all, be aware, and second, do whatever is needed to get it going. Do you face that at all in terms of putting this in place, like at the Australian Open?
How does the Australian Open make their ticket holders and fans aware that this is there and get them to use it?
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, totally. First, they must communicate that this is a DVOX device. This means you should bring your own device and headphones. So what they did in this particular event was to have one or two emails sent prior to the event to the ticket owners mentioning, to bring their headphones or their devices, but on-site, there was a lot of advertisement as well. “We're using DVOX. You can connect to your cell phone!” So that's for the part about bringing your own device. Now, what we did at several events, actually, not only at the Australian Open, is have a small JPEG, a picture, that is telling people, step one, connect to the WiFi with the name of the wife, connect to whatever WiFi, right? Step two, scan this QR and done. So, any guests in the room simply have to take a cell phone, connect to the WiFi, and scan the QR and that's loading the page. That's it. W
e also have prints, large banners, vinyls, and stuff like stickers, posters, whatever that are applied almost everywhere on site. So people can have this QR for them. Web, event, page, anywhere, so that's pretty easy to communicate with the guests.
Could you have tiers of service? So let's say you can get a basic thing of the in-game play-by-play, but if you want to hear the audio from the quarterback's helmet or whatever it is, you can get that too, but you're going to pay an extra five bucks or something?
Sebastien Boulanger: Paying a little bit, five bucks more, that's totally up to the broadcaster itself because with DVOX, you just give me the audio feed you want to stream. So in your example here, okay, we went to the Crypto.com Arena on the Fox sport request to have a showcase or technology for a boxing match, back in September, and you were sitting in the audience; it was a private one, right? It was with the Fox team and ADI and whatever so we were roughly 30 people trying the solution. So, for that test, what they gave us was the blue corner, red corner, the referee mic, and the commentators. So when you are listening to the commentators, these guys who are commenting on the match are next to the ring, so you can look at their lips and you are directly sitting next to them. You can hear it super clearly, and you don't have any delay. So the lips to your ear are instant, plus whenever these guys were, and that was a heavyweight championship. I'm so happy not to be a boxer or a fighter. These guys are, I'm saying politely, monsters.
They're big, and they're anyway. So I was in the audience, and when I grabbed the referee microphone that was falling from the ceiling microphone, you could hear it. The glove hitting the face, the glove smashing the skin of the opponent, and, it, hurts, basically, so you are in the audience, and for the first time, you're experiencing the hit; you can't be closer without getting hit, basically. And the red corner and blue corner were really quiet. These guys are fighting, but as soon as you hear the ring, ding, the dong, and then whenever they jump back to their corner, their coaches are giving them strategy, and you can all hear it. That's really engaging. You can select the red corner, and you can hear, “Okay, just try to block a little more, and he's punching you all the time in the same place.” And you have all this relevant information that is changing the game completely, so basically, it's super easy to get any of your feed out from the broadcaster.
It's interesting. I keep coming back to airports, and honestly, the TV screens that are on there show news every half an hour or whatever, I'm very happy if I can't hear that, but what I would love to be able to hear, particularly at many airports that have god awful audio systems is I'd like to hear the gate announcements because it sounds bad. I can't figure out what they're saying because they're using cheap old speakers or God knows what, but if I could just hear that now they're boarding zone two, I'd be happy as a clam.
Sebastien Boulanger: Of course, and not to forget about all those noise canceling headphones that work really great. So you can be in your small cocoon of yourself, and hear everything in the announcement clearly without bothering about a baby crying or so on.
In the digital signage world, we're also leading a discussion with, I'm not going to mention it per se, big players that are offering, exterior places like Square that are surrounded by LED screens. It is not Times Square, but just picture Times Square in your mind so you will see what I'm talking about. So basically, when you are walking in this environment, you have plenty of LED screens, but the only thing you hear is cars passing by, or tires squeaking, or whatever noise might be happening. So all of those. Publicity or visuals are only video for the moment. And, then again, you're walking by, you might be waiting for a bus or whatever, will you take time to install an app? You already have 80 of those on your cell phone. To have the sound of a billboard could be as easy and it is as easy as getting a QR code and then you have it directed. So that's really cool. It's a good way to wait for the bus basically.
Yeah, although I really can't see myself walking through a big public plaza and deciding I want to hear these ads as well, but that's just me. I'm a cranky old fart.
Sebastien Boulanger: No, but you're right. This is not necessarily for publicity audio,, but some places like the one we're talking about right now are also running interviews.
Last question, because this just flew by, what am I, as an end user, buying? Am I buying hardware, or am I buying hardware and then subscribing to a service as well?
Sebastien Boulanger: Basically, what we are selling at the moment is the hardware solution because we need to acquire the audio and stream it to your network. So, the input card which is DVOX hardware, has to stand inside of your building. On the other hand, we have a yearly licensing, which is really good, though super affordable, because we're not dealing with up and down traffic. So the only reason why we're having a yearly licensing is for you to be able to customize your visuals. You can totally modify the webpage, the event webpage, as we call it. You can put your logo, your color, your name, your picture face, or whatever you decide. So you can customize the visual.
You can also customize when it's going to be up and when it's going to disappear when the event is over or whatever, plus one thing that is really important. You can extract the KPIs. Basically, at the end of a certain period of time, you decide you jump into your event, and you can interrogate this system to have relevant tasks. But they're all anonymous, not an app. So we don't know anything about you; we just know about your cell phone. Meaning, how many people were listening to which feed, or how long, and which was the most popular, or what time of the day was the most popular. We can have all these graphs. So, to answer your question, yes, you have a first expense for the hardware. Then, after, there's a super low price licensing; it's a yearly base flat fee, and you can customize as you wish for your unit.
And on the back end, you're getting insights on what actually interests people. So, in a bar where you're showing premier league games on eight different screens, you can start to understand, okay, this is actually a Liverpool bar. We didn't know that. But now we do.
Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, and these days, we have enormous LED screens, LED walls, whatever, and we have a lot of pictures inside of it, so we can have several feet inside of the same screen. Well, give me one audio feed per picture in picture, and all of a sudden, we'll be having a totally different experience, and at the end of the day, you can have a look and interrogate the system to see, okay, this one was really popular. So we were paying for the rights to have baseball, but no one listened to it. But there were a lot of people tuned on to the soccer game. So next week, what about taking the PIP out for the baseball game and putting a bigger PIP for the soccer game?
So that's only an example, but the KPIs are really relevant. You know exactly how your system is behaving with your guests.
All right. That was terrific and very interesting. Thank you so much for spending a little time with me.
Sebastien Boulanger: Cool. It was a real pleasure, and if you ever have any more questions or whatever, we have our corporate website, dvox.com