Episodes
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Meghan Athavale, LUMO Interactive
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
Wednesday Jan 03, 2024
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point.
A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are things like fun, engaging games.
The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage.
The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD.
I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale.
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TRANSCRIPT
Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?
Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture.
Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.
When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are.
So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?
Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.
It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays.
So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.
So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend coding, how everything maps, but also, I think I saw there were something like 200 different apps in a library?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are 300 pre-made experiences, which they're constantly turning over. So we have some in there that have been there for 10 years that we will replace with something new. We're constantly rolling over those apps, and we take requests from our community, and that's one of the things that our business model gives us the freedom to do because we're not reliant on selling hardware and our community is very vast. We represent everything from education to large brands. Our community can make requests for new apps and we'll just make them and add them to our market. So we don't have the restrictions of having to charge through the nose for custom content development because we've developed these systems that make it very easy to pump out new content, and then the other thing that we offer as far as content goes, like out of the box content is we have an SDK for the companies that do have in house developers, and then we've got a number of different templates. So you can just say, I want to make a Koi Pond, and I want to throw my business's logo behind it, and you could whip something like that off in five minutes.
So are the templates purely done in-house or do you have third-party designers who are contributing?
Meghan Athavale: That's a great question. At this point, they're all done in-house. We are working towards outsourcing a lot of our content development just because it'll give us a wider breadth of content and make that content more available. We're just at the very beginning of seeing rollouts that are large enough to make joining a third-party content development team attractive.
We see this in gaming consoles all the time, where you'll have a new fantastic console that comes out, it's low cost, and they're trying to get game developers to create games for that console, but unless thousands and thousands of people have that console and are buying games for it, it's not really worth making a game for it so we're at the stage where we're starting to see enough of a widespread and permanent deployment of systems running on our platform that it makes sense to have those conversations with third-party development teams now and we're starting to have those conversations.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about scale because one of the particularly compelling things about your company and your offer is cost, in terms of, it's not very expensive at all to use this.
Can you walk through that and not really how the financials work, you're not charging a lot per instance of this on a monthly basis, so you need to have a lot of them out there, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's right. We still make a percentage of our revenue on five or six big custom projects a year. I would say that our MRR represents about half of our revenue. The goal is to reach a point in scale where we can just focus on the platform, but I do get asked pretty frequently why it costs so little.
There are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest one, I think, is just we want to make this, as you mentioned, democratizing the technology, we want to make this technology available and affordable to schools, that’s our primary business goal. I and my business partner, our moms were both special needs teachers, we've seen firsthand the struggles that teachers and educators have in getting technology into their classrooms they need it for kids with sensory issues or children with autism or ADHD, and we've seen how effective interactive digital displays can be in those environments, particularly for things like increasing social skills. A lot of these kids come in, and they're really stuck on screens. They're very stuck on virtual experiences, and so it becomes a bridge, where they can engage with one another and with their teachers socially while still having that digital feedback.
It's just very important to us that our pricing reflects our values as a company and that's one of our core values is making this accessible for education, but the other is that we really don't need to charge a lot for what we want to do. So at this point, our company's main work on the platform is around supporting hardware. So, as new devices come out, we're adding support for them so that you can download our software and you can plug in any of the commercially available 3D cameras, and it'll automatically recognize and calibrate that camera for you and take out the computer vision steps and specific requirements for each individual device, like DirectX. I think that would probably be the closest analog, you want something that you can plug and play regardless of which device you're using to achieve the tracking. So we want to focus on that.
We also want to focus on the tools that allow people to scale these projects to multiple locations. If you have an interactive display in a flagship store and you want us to put it into all of your stores, the step from running your proof of concept to scaling it to a hundred locations is very simple using our platform, and it's because we're constantly pushing updates and we do health management, we have a content management system, and those are the things that we want to focus on the long term. We don't necessarily want to focus on developing the individual games. We want to make the game development stuff as easy for other people to do as possible because we don't have all the ideas in the world, but we are really good at making sure that other people's ideas continue to run and don't go down.
Just so people understand, your top end cost is, if you work it out on a monthly basis, it's $74 a month, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's as high as it gets.
If I'm an agency and I decide I have a beauty brand client that wants some sort of activation that's an interactive floor or wall or whatever, that's going to cost like five-six figures probably, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, I mean, the part that determines the cost of any of these installations is the hardware you choose to use. If you're a brand and you're developing the content from scratch, maybe hiring our team or hiring a third party to develop custom content for you, there may be 3D modeling involved, there may be compositing, you might have multi-level programming, you might have second screen experiences, so all of those things add up.
But we can generally, when somebody comes to us and asks for a ballpark estimate, the only thing we really need to understand is where it is going and what kind of display you are planning to use, and we can generally come up with a range.
But if you're doing it, it's going to be a fraction of what it would cost if you just went to an interactive agency and said, “Build this, please!”
Meghan Athavale: Absolutely. But I think that something to keep in mind is that if you're going to an interactive agency and you don't have an idea yet, you're likely going to pay less. If you go to an agency and what you're paying them to do is to figure out what the activation actually should be, we're not an agency, and so we don't position ourselves as somebody that's going to do a lot of things like research and problem-solving. But what we can do is scale that.
You’re not Moment Factory.
Meghan Athavale: We are not and we don't want to fill that niche because it's a different skill set and it requires the ability to experiment with things on a one-time basis.
You may develop a solution for a brand or a display for the Super Bowl or something like that, where you're using a specific set of hardware just one time, and that's fantastic. I love that there are agencies in the world that get to do that, but that's not what we do. We look at it and go, how do we make this happen a thousand times, and that's a very different way of looking at things. So I think, if you want something that already exists, and you just want to put your stamp on it and create something that gives it a unique feel for your brand or experience, that's where you come to us. If you want something that's never been done before in the entire world and uses new technology that hasn't been proven long-term in the industry. TeamLab, and Moment Factory, are where you would go, but it is a lot more expensive for sure.
You're starting to use things like LiDAR and everything else.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. The risk is just so much higher, and you need people on the ground. You need to roll a truck if something goes wrong. However, with our systems, we're way past that point.
Yeah, because you've got the device management designed for scale and everything else, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we don't release anything into the market that hasn't been tested thoroughly in our labs for months and months at a time. We have the ability to guarantee things, whereas in some of these riskier projects, as long as you hire somebody that knows what they're doing, they're going to find a way to make it work, but they're not necessarily going to be able to tell you how from the beginning of the project.
So, for something like a classroom, what's the kit of parts, and what's the degree of complexity to put this in?
Meghan Athavale: Most classrooms either have an interactive floor, an interactive wall, or both.
Already?
Meghan Athavale: No, that's what they're putting in, and it's basically the same technology for either. We designed our software so it works with any projector, and a lot of classrooms already have projectors, so they'll just use what they have. So you've got your display, which in classrooms is typically a projector, a 3D camera, and a Windows computer.
We typically recommend that people use the sort of baseline specification on our site as an i5 or equivalent with a decent graphics card, you don't want something that's not going to be able to run games because that's basically what we're running, and the cost is usually like for including the projector for a classroom is usually around $2,000-2,500.
To set that up, is it the sort of thing that the school district or the schools, IT person, or people have to do, or is it simplistic to the level that if a teacher already got a projector pointed at a whiteboard of some kind, they can just do it themselves?
Meghan Athavale: So teachers can do it themselves, and we often help teachers do it themselves. But nowadays they're busy. Teaching is not an easy career right now, and we're typically dealing with the IT personnel for an entire division when these installations are going in.
If you're dealing with a full division or district, are they rolling out like that, or is it still onesie twosies?
Meghan Athavale: It's usually one per school across an entire district, is what we're seeing, and that's mostly in the U.S. We haven't really seen nearly the same traction in schools in Canada yet.
I didn't say at the outset, but you're in Montreal.
Meghan Athavale: Yes, that's right.
Why do you think that is just because of the way education works in Canada versus the US?
Meghan Athavale: I'm not entirely sure. I know that it's like that in all of our verticals. So it's not just education. I would say retail, events, and all of the verticals that we serve, we have faster pickup and larger rollouts in the US. It could be the population just much bigger.
I think we're just not risk takers, and I also think, to a certain extent, we're limited by things like weather and the accessibility of venues to having these types of, there are a lot more venues in the US that have built-in walls or built-in interactive components that we can just hop our software onto them. I don't think there are as many opportunities here.
You mentioned, in detail, education; what other vertical markets or segments are you seeing a lot of activity in?
Meghan Athavale: Events is the fastest growing segment, and this is like events of all different sizes and lengths, so it could be something that is like a week-long trade show, it could be like a birthday party for kids. It could be somebody who is a DJ, and they're bringing an interactive floor to all of their gigs.
It's really all over the map. We just did a pop-up in Times Square for a major chocolate brand. We've done interactives for movie launches, so like those short-term events where they're developing their own special content and it's on for less than a month, I would say that is our fastest growing vertical.
Interesting. We talked a little bit about planning before we turned on the recording, and I'm curious about how these things get planned out and how you ensure and how your users ensure that what they're putting up gets beyond just being eye candy/wow factor stuff because I often say that wow factor has a short shelf life.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you. I think there has to be a balance between the cost and the reward of experiences like this. One of the biggest mistakes that we see people making is they'll see something on the internet, they'll see something in video format, and they'll think, I need that at my event, or I need that in my museum, and they'll skip the part of like why they need it.
It'll be entirely like an emotional decision, and the challenge here is that there are so many more and more faked every single day. We get sent videos all the time with people asking us to do anamorphic illusions. People will see videos of that, and they'll be like, “I want that but interactive, can you make it?” And because they're seeing a video and the video is staged, and in some cases, the video is a complete composite. It's not even something that actually happened in the real world, they won't understand that it doesn't work from anything except for one very particular perspective. So, the person who's interacting with anamorphic content is not going to see what the person watching from across the street on a particular street corner is going to see, and the same thing with large-scale digital displays.
People will see these huge LED walls, and I think you saw this at our booth at LDI. When you walk right up to a big LED wall, you see the individual pixels, not the same image that somebody is watching from far away, so I think that those limitations are very difficult for people to understand and appreciate unless they've actually seen the installation in person. So I would say if you see something and you're planning to put it in an event, you're planning to use it in brand activation, go see that experience in person first. Don't make a decision about whether or not you need it until you've actually personally experienced it because seeing it on a video is not the same thing as what it's going to look like in real life.
And then the other advice that I give to people when they come to me with the wow factor criteria is like, what do you want the takeaway to be? Is this a shareable thing? Do you want a hundred people to come to your event to put up a hundred different videos and tag you in them? What is your metric for success? Because if that's it, then the content's going to be very different than if you want a hundred people to enter their emails in order to play a game or you need to know at the end of the day what you're walking away from after you've put that activation in place.
I've seen different iterations of this stuff. The applications in classrooms, I think, is fantastic and it plays to kids at their whims and everything else; they want to be involved. I find it's quite different.
A lot of the ones that I've seen in public spaces like shopping malls and so on, where you see the kids running around doing stuff, interacting with it, but you don't really see the adults, and that's fine if it's aimed at kids. But I wonder sometimes, when brands do these things, that the only real interest is with children and adults saying, “I'm not doing that, I'm not an extrovert. I don't want to do this trickery in front of other people.”
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think that's a very fair point. One of the things that we noticed when we first started putting particularly interactive floors into retail spaces was that we still have an entire generation of adults, and I would count my own generation in there; we've been trained not to step on screens like it's your impulse isn't to go running through the light. The generations who are comfortable with that and who grew up with touch screens and expect everything to be interactive, I think they're in their twenties and early thirties now, so we are seeing that change quite a bit. I would say that from about 35 years down, we aren't seeing that hesitancy to interact with things, but I do think that we still have a long way to go in discovering how the content can be used.
A lot of times, it's to augment like physical experiences is how you get adults to engage think like axe-throwing. Adding really cool interactive graphics to an axe-throwing experience is something that's going to really delight an older crowd. Same thing with bowling alleys, making those interactive. So I think…
So they're becoming Wii games.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. I think a lot of the time, people think that there's a choice between virtual experiences in VR and physical experiences like you would have with a traditional family entertainment center. But what our software allows you to do is combine the two, so you have a headset-free experience that does have digital interactive components, but you're also engaging with something physical. So we do a lot of Air Hockey tables, pool tables, and things like that where you're still playing pool and using physical paddles, but there are interactive digital visual elements on top of that. That's where we're seeing unquestionable pickup by older people.
Yeah, so where there's tangible fun or some sort of activity versus so often when I've gone to trade shows, if I see some sort of an interactive video wall thing, please walk up to this thing and dance in front of it or wave your arms, and there'll be light particles and that's nice, but I don't see the business case here, and I don't think it's interesting for more than 10 seconds.
Meghan Athavale: For sure, if you're in an environment where you're dancing anyway, having cool visual effects while you're dancing is like a good bonus, and I think that's how we have to think about it in terms of engaging an older audience, is you need to be augmenting something that they're doing anyways.
You can't expect them to do an activity that they wouldn't normally do just because it's like eye candy. But if they're doing something anyway if they're already in a curling league and you can make their curling more fun…
We’re getting really Canadian here.
Meghan Athavale: Right. I mean, I'm available for anyone who wants to try that. I've done soccer, I've done hockey, I haven't done curling yet. I would really like to make an interactive curling experience. But yeah, that’s where you attract adults by helping make something that they want to do anyway, much cooler.
Where did this come from, like why did you start this company?
Meghan Athavale: This is a very existential question. It's actually a pretty funny story. We started the company by accident. My co-founders, Keith Otto and Curtis Wachs and I, all worked at an agency together, and this was like 2010, back in the days when Instructables and a lot of those sorts of YouTube channels were just starting, and we started hanging out after work and just making stuff and it was all things that we would never get hired to make. We were designing our own touch screens. We created our own mist screen for projection. We did a lot of building projections and it was all for fun. We saw other people doing it all over the world. We thought it was really like a fun hobby. We started throwing parties to show off some of the things that we were making, and a friend of mine, Kayla Jeanson, who is an incredible videographer. She also has moved out to Montreal. This all happened back in Winnipeg, which is where my company is based.
So we're all back in Winnipeg. Kayla shows up at one of the parties. This was before Facebook, so it was an SMS-controlled wall where you were sending text messages, and it was making things happen on the wall. She took a video, and that video ended up going viral. We found out about it after the fact, and we started getting contacted by different businesses the University of Nevada, Reno reached out and said, “Hey, we'd really like to have something cool like this in our cafeteria.” and Curtis and I just looked at each other, we're like, wow, people will pay us to do this. We registered a business, and we all quit our jobs. We applied for CMF funding, and we launched as an agency designing these interactive experiences and, within the first two years, realized that the biggest challenge was once the experience was in place how do you maintain it? How do you make sure that it's going to continue running?
And that installation that we did back in, I think, in early 2011, in the cafeteria in Reno is still running, and part of it was just like starting by accident because a hobby that we were doing for fun led to some economic opportunities for us and the direction that we ended up taking was as a result of people liked what we did long enough to want to keep it running, to want to keep having us continue updating it. We've had a number of large-scale installations. There's one in Red Rock, Ontario, where they've done entire refreshes. We did our original installation for them in 2011 as well and just very recently replaced and updated a bunch of the software for them. The validation has been there, so the thing to focus on is how to make these experiences last, not how to make them cool for a week.
The company is quite small. I believe it's just like a handful of people, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. That's right. There are four of us.
And that's all you need to be because you're not getting into the weeds with the hardware, and I think you sell the hardware that you have through a reseller, Simply NUC?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, we have a number of resellers, but Simply NUCis our preferred partner because they send us everything that they're selling so we can test it 24/7. So we're able to say with high confidence that anything you buy from Simply NUC is going to run long-term with our software.
I would like a bigger team. In all honesty, we had to let a few people go during the pandemic. I think one year in, we were like, okay, we're not going to be able to sustain ourselves with a larger team. So, I think we'd like to see some growth in the team within the next year or so. Because of the way that we've built our platform, we're able to outsource stuff that we can't do where we don't have enough work to bring somebody in-house for long periods of time, and there are also just amazing resources out there for outsourcing, now that didn't exist when we first started the company.
It's a small team. I don't anticipate that we'll ever be much more than 10 people.
But a few more wouldn't hurt.
Meghan Athavale: Yeah, a few more wouldn't hurt. I'd like to build in a little bit more redundancy, and I'm getting older, and one of these days, I'm hoping that there will be some sort of a succession.
Because of the relationship that we have with our resellers and our installers, there's really not a lot of mission-critical stuff on our side. We push our regular updates. We create new content and respond to community requests and stuff. But not a lot of the work that we do is like on a deadline. It's a pretty chill working environment where we identify things that we think are going to be of value to the customer, and then we ask our customers, and then we build the thing. There's no pressure.
And there's also a knock on wood at this point: not a ton of competition because it's still a very niche market. We don't feel the pressure to be like the trade show that you and I met on; it was the first we've been in business for 13 years, and that was the first time we've ever done a trade show exhibit.
Oh, wow, and what was your takeaway from that?
Meghan Athavale: It was great. It was definitely time. We came away with quite a few new customers, and it was LDI. The reason we chose LDI as our first trade show is because there are so many companies that do events, and the total lifetime value of customers in the event space isn't as high as education would be or something where it's a permanent installation. There's just a lot more of them, and it's a lower-hanging fruit. We're hoping to bump up our revenue enough so that we can start expanding our team sometime mid-next year.
Do you have a reference case or a handful of reference cases? If people said, this sounds really cool. I can't really just walk into a classroom, obviously. Are there museums or public spaces or something like that where I could go see this?
Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are quite a few.
What we usually ask people to do is if they want to see an installation of ours in real life and they aren't able to set it up themselves, just contact us, let us know what city you're in, and we'll find somebody in your area that you can go visit. There are a lot of live public libraries and museums and buildings that are open to the public that have installations in them, and then the other thing that people can do is we have a free evaluation version of our software that you can just download and install.
So, for people who are getting into this on a commercial basis, it's a really good idea to set up a system for yourself, test it out, and play around with the tools. Don't pitch it to your customers until you've tried it, please!
So we make it possible for people to just install it for free and play around with it before they make any sort of purchase before they make any representations to their customers about what it can do.
Okay. All right. So, if people want to find you online, that's LUMOplay.com, right?
Meghan Athavale: Yep. That's right. LUMOplay.com, and if you reach out through the site, you will be talking to me. My name is Meghan.
All right, Meghan. Thank you very much.
Meghan Athavale: You're very welcome. Thank you, Dave.
Thursday Oct 19, 2023
Gil Matzliah, Novisign
Thursday Oct 19, 2023
Thursday Oct 19, 2023
I bumped into Gil Matzliah at a conference this summer, and told the software executive we were long overdue to do a podcast about what's happening with his company, Novisign.
We finally nailed down a date and time, and as it turned out, it was just days after the horrendous violence that broke out in Israel - where Matzliah and his company are based.
We chatted about the situation and the impacts on his company. He's fine, his family and staff are fine, but everyone is understandably rattled.
We then got into the roots of Novisign does, what's different about its CMS solution, and what they're seeing and hearing in the marketplace. Novisign was an early adopter of Android and it remains its primary go-to operating system.
Though Israeli, more than half of its business comes from the US and another quarter from Europe. And now the company is growing business in Japan.
Transcript
Gil, thank you for joining me. You’re in Israel, where a few days later things went crazy there. I have to ask, how are things going? How are you? And I assume the family's fine and everything?
Gil Matzliah: Yeah. Thank you for your concern. Yes, me and my family are all good, also the team members that are here in Israel are good. Last Saturday was a very hard day in Israel. It's something we never expected would happen. But now we are good.
Your offices are pretty close to the West Bank, aren't they?
Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, Israel is a small and tiny country. It's not too big. So everything is close to everything. Our office is close to the West Bank, the conflict and all the issues you hear now in the news have been in the south area of Israel with the border of the Gaza Strip.
I hope everything continues to be fine for you and things settle down there.
Gil Matzliah: Yeah, we also hope so. At the end of the day, we like to work, we like to have peace, everybody wants to build good things together and so do our neighbors. In NoviSign, we have Arab Muslims, Christians from all around the world, Jewish people, we all work happily together and that's what we hope the world will go for. It's just this thing with the Gaza Strip that... and there's an organization called Hamas, who is making the issues and challenges for our regions, which I hope will be better moving forward.
Has staffing been affected at all? Have you had members of your staff be called up to the military?
Gil Matzliah: Yeah, in many countries, they call some of the stuff but you can say it's less than 10% for a team all the time one or two people in total.
Yeah, it's just one of those things which you can't help but be directly affected in some way because of the size of the country and the way things operate, right?
Gil Matzliah: Exactly. Yes.
All right. So enough of that. I don't want to dwell on it and no doubt by the time that things will have changed and hopefully gotten better.
Just for the benefits of people who maybe don't know your company, can you run down what you do, how long you've been around and how you distinguish yourself in the marketplace as NoviSign.
Gil Matzliah: Perfect. So, we are NoviSign. We do digital signage software. Our company is based in Israel and provides services from all around the world. We have people in the US, Germany and Japan. With a team of more than 200 partners all around the world, we give a global software as a service for digital signage.
I started a company with my colleague, Avi 12 years ago. It was 2011. We established it here in Israel, with the dream to be a great startup, changing the world and leading the digital signage software.
Have you changed the world?
Gil Matzliah: It's not so easy but we're sure we'll do it. We are making changes. We are progressing. Opening a startup 12 years ago, that's a long journey and like a roller coaster, you go up, you go down, but you keep going forward all the time. And after a few years, we started to see the good results coming and since then we are growing and growing constantly every year.
Good. So if you were lined up against, let's say, 10 other CMS software companies out there and somebody said, all right, I've looked at all these other ones. What is it about you guys that's distinctive and different and important? What would you say?
Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, first it's the team. We came with a lot of experience in software programming. We are technical people. We are software programming people. We have opened the company to lead in the platforms that enable people to do that. So, it's the team that you work with. It's the technology behind the servers, the player, the communication, the integration and it's the offering that we have.
We have a wide offering, which is very reliable and secured and trusted by thousands of customers around the world.
You mentioned security and I know you're SOC 2 certified. Was that important to do?
I'm hearing more and more from a variety of different companies saying that the security piece of this is really important, maybe much more so than it was even a couple of years ago.
Gil Matzliah: That's correct. So more and more organizations are looking at security, but also it's the maturity of the company.
So when NoviSign started with few installations, what you are busy with is just building software that works. And then after it works, you start adding more and more features. And when we started, we were looking at a small and medium businesses. But slowly, as people saw, we have a nice, easy to use platform, then the bigger companies started wanting it. But when you go for a bigger company, and as time changes, all these medium and large companies today want better security, they looki at all these RFPs, abd you really need good security in order to get these customers.
Have you evolved like a lot of companies have, where they started with the small to medium business market and now they're more focused on enterprise?
Gil Matzliah: We are not focusing on enterprise yet, but this is the growth engine that we have. So if you had asked me like five years ago, we wouldn't work with banks, insurance companies or bigger Fortune 500 companies. But if you look recently in the last five years, we started to work with a few banks and corporations and insurance companies worldwide and there is the bigger number of bigger business we work with now.
I'm curious when you say five years ago, you wouldn't have worked with a big bank or somebody like that. Is that because your platform wasn't ready for it or a very large customer, as I've said to some other people in the past, they could be great, but they can kill your company because they just get so involved and they can be so needy?
Gil Matzliah: It's a good point. So if I look at that, I can tell you an interesting story. Like a year or two after we opened the company and we have the website and we started to do promotions and we started to go to shows and I'm sitting in my home and suddenly I'm getting, today we have people in the US, but back then we were just in Israel, and a call was redirected for me from the US and it was the MTA of the New York transportation company asking about our platforms.
And you're not really ready for these types of companies when you are less than 10 people, a small company with a new product. But once you are in almost 10 years or so, and you have enough people to support, enough understanding of the security, the features, the integrations, the platforms, then you get ready to serve the bigger companies.
You work with a lot of different platforms and therefore hardware partners. I know you're on Android, you're on different SOC platforms for smart displays, all that sort of thing.
Is it a challenge to manage the variety of, they're all are just similar in certain respects, most of them are Linux in some way or another, but how easy or hard is it to stay on top of all those different ones?
Gil Matzliah: It is a good point. It is a good challenge because looking at that, when you're a small company and at the beginning we started with Android.
I think we've been one of the first, if not the first, to develop an Android based player, an APK back in 2011. There are more and more people on Android, it's not the most of them. And then we started to add ithers, we added Windows, we added Chrome, we added Linux, now we are adding HTML Player, we are adding Tizen, we are adding WebOS, and we're adding more and more features. It's becoming very complex to support them all because once you have a change, you need to see it's working on all the platforms.
And when you speak about the Android platforms, just the Android platform has so many versions. And we even have, lately, forced all our customers with Android that is less than 6.0 to stop using the system because until half a year ago, there were people that were still using Android 4.4 with us and the difference between Android 4 and Android 12 is huge. So imagine that fixed security support, as you say it's becoming to be more and more challenging and you need to grow the team and it's slower for you to add new features because you need to see that it's working on all the platforms, but we do believe we should be always hardware agnostic because what is differentiating a CMS software from a Samsung LG and all the other display manufacturers that are doing the software is that we work with all the platforms and they work just with their platforms. So we keep it as a focus for us.
Is technology enabling you to go towards being operating system agnostic without having to make compromises in terms of, yes, we can work across all of these different platforms, but we can't do everything on each of them or whatever, which I've heard versus, natively written software that's native to Tizen, native to WebOS and so on.
Gil Matzliah: Yeah, it's hard to do 100 percent of your features on all the platforms. Not all the platforms, not all the OS work equally. So our main player from the first day until today is the Android, which we can do 100 percent of our capabilities. When you go to Tizen or WebOS, you are limited in some way, and then you need to give away some features sometimes when you're developing your platform.
Are you finding that the marketplace end users and your reseller partners are starting to settle in on certain solutions, like they're settling in on Android or whatever it may be?
Gil Matzliah: I think you probably know better than me the hardware, the platforms, the ways to do digital science is like a big jungle. There are so many things and choices, even the software, you always say that there are many more CMS platforms.
So there are so many varieties there. So I don't see anybody locking on anything and that's why we keep the diversity to be able to support the most.
For the technical people at AV companies that are just starting to get into digital signage or the AV IT people for end user customers. Do they look at this space and go, come on guys, can you just establish some standards and continuity and not have all these varieties of options?
Gil Matzliah: They're asking for that. We are asking for that. I think the world needs that. The one thing, we do see that Android, since we started 12 years ago, and imagine 12 years ago, you didn't even have a set up box of an Android, or just the first one was just coming in 2012, like the year after we started, or the first year of NoviSign.
And today, most of the world, most of the set up boxes around the world are Android based. So we do see that Android... both the system on chip and both of the players have been the main platforms for digital signage. For us for sure, more than half of our installation and most of our installations are Android based either with a player or with a system of chip. I find it very strange that Samsung and LG are still struggling to stand out technology and not going with the mainstream.
That seems to be changing. Samsung is moving away from its software partners, at least it certainly seems that way and marketing its own platform and LG WebOS now has a standalone player, a WebOS player, as opposed to you having to buy their display so that they've got some flexibility there.
So I think the big guys are seeing the need to either adjust or just decide, you know what, yes, we have partners, but we are going to do our own thing as well.
Gil Matzliah: We believe in Android, but we still believe that we would need to be hardware and OS agnostic.
Partner and end user demands, have they changed through the years? Like what they wanted when you got into it or maybe even five years ago, is that different from now?
Gil Matzliah: That's an interesting question. I don't notice a big change in the partners. But one thing is for sure, customers, partners, they want everything all the time, so we need to be there to deliver it for them.
The impression I get generally is both for the AV/IT ecosystem and particularly on the end user side, they understand the technology a lot more, they understand the benefits and so on. So you're no longer having to put stuff up on a website or elsewhere saying what is digital signage and here's the reasons you want to use it and so on.
They get it, they understand it, perhaps they've used it, and now they're looking for their second generation of software because the first selection did the job, but didn't really do what they wanted or limited their capabilities. Are you seeing that?
Gil Matzliah: Yes. I think the world is more familiar with digital signage. When we started 12 years ago, not many people would knew what it was, what you do with it, how you install it.
And today, every new project of signage is an integral, internal mass part in all these new setup locations, public places, and when more and more people are dealing with that, then they have more knowledge about it and then they start to learn more, to ask for more and this is something we do see.
Are there particular vertical markets that you're seeing a lot of growth in and that you guys are focused on?
Gil Matzliah: I can tell you about the geographical region. So most of our business, more than half of our business is coming from the United States, which is the easiest market to work with. The faster trying thing, understanding thing. Then we have the European market with a quarter of our business coming from there and they’re more conservatives, what they're getting, how they're getting, planning, trying and so on. And then, we have the rest of the world and we are focusing and growing in the last five years in Japan. We have a local team over there in Japan and in Japan they are testing more, asking more. If you deliver and if you have a lot of patience, then it grows. So these are the regions that we work with.
As for the different sectors, we really don't have anything which is like more than 20 percent of our business. We do have hospitality, we do have health care, we have the cooperation, we do have retail.
But we started a new initiative, which we spoke about in the past a little bit. We established with some partners a company named which is focusing on the retail industry. So everything which is fanning out from retail. Today, we are moving to this new initiative that we built and generally the sectors.
Are you mainly selling through a “channel” or do you sell direct?
Gil Matzliah: We are acting both direct and on the channels and both of them are significant for us. So, there isn't one which is more or less significant than the other.
A lot of our partners are white labels. There are so many installations around the world, which are based on the NoviSign signage that you won't even know.
Which I assume is very important to these partners.
Gil Matzliah: Yes, because for years, these partners have had their their software, their brand and our support behind it and we give them like instances and so on.
We give them confidentiality, of course, if an end user will turn anything upside down and look and research, after some time they’ll find us, but it's working fine for our partners and for us.
Are your partners layering on managed services so they're white labeling and then saying, we can run this network for you or at least keep an eye on it?
Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So when we're working with a local partner, and we have more than 200 of them all around the world. The nice thing is that, if a customer is calling us and say, I want to install this hotel, this hospital, this restaurant, this city hall, we'll tell him the first thing, we are a software company. We are SaaS, it's a do it yourself, we can support you over the phone.But if you want installation, if you want hardware, if you want initial setup, if you don't have the right people in your organization, then we can refer you to one of our partners.
Our partners, they are integrators. They know how to build the right hardware, how to configure our software, and how to set it up for the customers, and they do it because they know it much better than us.
So, if a customer just wants to get the SaaS subscriptions and they're going to do it themselves, then your partners aren't going to really see anything out of that anyways. They're looking for the services and the hardware integration, all that stuff, so they're not too fussed if you go directly on that but if there's an opportunity to layer in things, then you throw it to your partners.
Gil Matzliah: Yes, because we are not going to do meetings with our customers. We are not flying to customers. We are not driving to customers. We do everything software, everything from remote. As long as you need a meeting then it's not going to be sent anywhere.
Are there, “whale accounts”, big reference accounts or they could even be small ones that you, when you get asked about who you're working with that you're able to talk about?
Gil Matzliah: One of our biggest accounts is Worten in Portugal, which is like Best Buy, that has more than 10,000 endpoints with us and we do have some other big corporations and hotels with us as well. In Israel, I can tell you some names like Ikea, Coca Cola, most of the hotels that are working with us here and many other big brands.
In that Portuguese big box electronic store, what are they doing in there? Is it strictly just big displays or are they doing interactive?
Gil Matzliah: It's more like a display of things, but they have a lot of initiative, they're very innovative and for more than five years, we work with them and they are always one step ahead of the market, whether it's very nice gates and video walls and presentation layers and everything related to products. In a way, when you go to the Worten store, it will dress the entire store with a special occasion, holiday, festival and the promotion that they do.
I'm curious about how your company is using AI. You come from a part of the world that has, pretty serious number of technical people, and some of the AI companies have come out of Israel. Are you applying it or are you looking at it as something you can use?
Gil Matzliah: We know and believe that AI will be a part of digital signage. We know it's important. We know it's just the beginning of it now, so the value you can create with it, it's not big yet, but we know it's coming. So, at this phase, we didn't release anything or expose anything, but our technology team is looking at that and trying to do a few things. We might present something in ISE, which is coming at the beginning of next year.
And would you use it for… I moderated a panel the other night in New York about all this and I said the presentation layer of using AI for generated visuals and so on, is interesting, but to me, the truly interesting stuff is back of house automating routine tasks and creating marketing materials without a whole bunch of work involved, and one of the guys ran a media company was talking about data input and harmonizing data and all that sort of thing. So somebody looking at this from afar, they might think that's pretty boring, but it can be pretty valuable.
Gil Matzliah: We are less looking on the operation side, as AI will help us see the operation side of the signage. We're more looking at the content creation for the signage itself, for the inputs.
What about on the technology side? There's endless buzz about LED displays and new emerging display technologies on the display and the playback hardware side. Are there things emerging that you think are going to be important?
Gil Matzliah: We don't go into the display technology, the LED technology for us. It's more agnostic. So as long as it can get a resolution of a screen..
It's an output.
Gil Matzliah: The one that you get as an input or an output is the way you look at it.
What about on media players and just computing power?
Gil Matzliah: Yeah, the media player is the important stuff And the main question we all the time ask ourselves is, Is the world moving to a system on chip? Would it stay on the media players? Would it be a combination of them? Would the resolutions and the quality grow performance? And this is something we invest a lot of effort, thinking and development, especially working with all these different platforms which is a lot of maintenance to do.
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things and I'm racking my brain trying to remember who, but the idea of system on chip, but with an upgrade pass, so you could pop open a smart display and put in a new SOC three years out that has more graphics processing or some other capability that maybe that didn't have when you first bought it.
Gil Matzliah: That's an interesting direction.
Alright. So if people want to know more about your company, where would they find you online?
Gil Matzliah: You can look for NoviSign.com. All the information is there, the phone numbers, they can contact us, and we are looking for new partners all the time, that will work with us, innovate with us and take our software to maximum customers and locations.
And also, if you're an end customer and you want to learn more, you want us to support you with innovative technology and especially software, we'd be happy to have you visit at NoviSign.com.
Alright, Gil. Thank you. I hope things calm down there and when I see you at ISE in a few weeks or a couple months.
Gil Matzliah: Actually, we're planning to be in MEDICA in Germany next month and then in Las Vegas and then ISE in Barcelona. So wherever you're coming, I will always be happy to see you.
Las Vegas and Barcelona, I'll be there.
Gil Matzliah: Oh yeah. You have a mixer at both places. Me and my colleagues are looking forward to them.
All right. Stay safe and I’ll see you soon.
Gil Matzliah: Thank you very much.
Friday Oct 13, 2023
DSF Cocktails and Controversy, NYC 2023 - AI In Digital Signage
Friday Oct 13, 2023
Friday Oct 13, 2023
The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at Sony's NYC offices can have a listen.
Consider this a bonus podcast, and I have not added an intro or exit ... so it's a bit raw, but just fine for listening.
The topic was AI in digital signage, and you will hear from me, but much more usefully from Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, Jeffrey Weitzman of Navori and Jim Nista, who has a boutique creative agency out in LA.
We covered a lot of ground and tried to zero in, very much, on what AI means to digital signage and how it is already being applied.
Thanks to the folks at Sony for getting me the file!
Monday Sep 18, 2023
George Clopp, Korbyt
Monday Sep 18, 2023
Monday Sep 18, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant?
That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform.
Using computer vision and machine learning, the idea is that if the platform can get a sense of what's making people stop and watch in a defined environment, then content can be optimized based on that interest.
The system finds and schedules content to push to screens based on engagement metrics.
How it all technically works is a bit over my shiny head, but I had a good chat with Korbyt CTO George Clopp about what's going on and its implications. We also get into what the future looks like for AI in digital signage.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Geroge, thank you for joining me. We've chatted in the past. For those who don't know Korbyt, can you give me a rundown of what the company's all about?
George Clopp: Hi, Dave. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. Yeah, Korbyt is at its root an employee engagement company. So we've got roots in digital signage, but our typical use case is using digital signage at corporate campuses and to communicate to employees, to increase employee engagement as well as to communicate real-time mission-critical stats as well.
Is that pretty much the core vertical that you guys chase, workplace?
George Clopp: It is. We are heavily into the workplace, meeting rooms as well. We do a lot with retail banks, a little bit into the retail space, but it's primarily corporate campuses.
For those who don't know the company, it actually goes back a long way to Symon Communications days, right? You guys were doing workplace communications long before the digital signage industry discovered that.
George Clopp: Yeah, exactly right, Dave. It precedes me. I've been here for seven years now. I can't even believe it, but that's how much I enjoy this space and the industry. I enjoy the company so much, but we had Target Vision, Symon Communications, and we've just evolved. I joined at the tail end of 2016 to develop the Korbyt platform, and obviously, we have to meet the needs of the digital signage industry, but we've had a really heavy focus on employee engagement as well.
Is it interesting to see all these other companies who have more general offers, find their way into the workplace because they see that as an opportune vertical?
George Clopp: Yeah, I view it as exciting. I think it's definitely a macroeconomic trend with the pandemic, post-pandemic, the modern workplace, everything is reimagining and reinventing and re-everything these days.
I think it's good. It's a legitimate macro problem that everyone's looking to provide solutions to. So, I'm really excited. I love the industry myself.
In some respects, you guys have been doing back-of-house, a lot longer than most companies would have. I mean, you're not just working in the offices, you're working in production areas and so on.
George Clopp: That's correct. Heavy in manufacturing and heavy in the contact centers, anytime where you're doing mission-critical real-time data, you're connecting to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or yard management system, and you want to change or orchestrate the display and the surroundings based on data changing, we've got a deep background in that.
Yeah, for contact centers, if I recall, years ago pre-arrival with the company, you were doing low-resolution LED readouts that were just telling people in the contact center about the average wait time on calls and things like that.
George Clopp: Exactly, and that's matured over the years and now we're doing that on the desktop and on the mobile device as well. We still have some supply chains and some yard management systems in a warehouse, where we'll do the little blinky boards over the dock doors themselves.
We range from the dock doors all the way to your mobile device now.
The PR that came out about a new piece of functionality, your marketing talks about a million endpoints, 250 cloud migrations, and 100+ native integrations.
A million endpoints, that's like a lot.
George Clopp: It is. Yeah, scalability and being able to expand out to touch desktops, normal, typical digital science screens, and mobile endpoints. It's been a real focus on us for the last four or five years. So we're really proud to announce that, and then the back end, like you were talking about those native data integrations, I think that's really what sets us aside from a lot of our competition is making those really hardcore authentications and then that real-time pipe between us and the source systems.
I know a lot of other software in our space that we run into, they talk about integrations. A lot of times it's really just a file, they're taking data from a source system. They're putting it into a CSV format or any kind of other format and then they're pulling that in. So that's really where we shine with that real-time data integration.
Is that important in terms of a distinction when solutions providers and users are looking at data integration and they see that a CMS says, yeah we do data integration, we can integrate with your platform? It sounds like you're saying there are different tiers of that, and there's real integration and there's just like a baseline.
George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. That's the right way to pick up on that day, for sure. When you need to orchestrate and change things in a 911 center or in a manufacturing-type environment and definitely in a contact center, speed is really the key there. So having something on a five-minute loop that's pulling a file, it's just not fast enough. So you need that real-time data, you need that high availability so that something was to break that you've got a backup in place and you can make sure that contact center, that supply chain, that 911 center is rolling smoothly.
They're not just getting their data, but they're changing the experience of the data. That's another thing that we do, we pull in stats, but we also augment those stats and do value-added calculations on the stats, and then we trigger on those values to change the screen, or change the mobile device or change the desktop. So if you've got too many calls in the queue or you're running behind on this loading dock here, we'll change the entire experience for you based on that value-added stat that we do.
I also assume that when companies talk about integrations, for very logical reasons, they're going to go to the most used platforms out there, whether it's Teams or God knows what. But if you have a hundred plus native integrations you're probably talking about some pretty exotic things that nobody's ever heard of, and if a company went in and said, we can integrate with their systems and they say, what those systems are, their eyebrows are going up, because they're thinking, I have never heard of that.
George Clopp: Absolutely, Dave. There are some low-level protocols where we just integrate at a TCP level with a very proprietary protocol, but I would say the bulk of it is more modern, JSON-based RESTful interfaces, for sure and we like to distinguish between data integrations, business application integrations, and SSO integrations, in three categories there.
So, like a Power BI or a Tableau or something like that would be more of a business application integration, and when we're talking data integration, we're talking more low level, running SQL against a data store, running web services, running SOAP-based web services, and to that extent. And again, that's why we call it out in our marketing because we do think that's a core differentiator for us.
So just to go back to something, when you talk about a million endpoints, you're including desktops..
George Clopp: That's correct. Desktops and mobile devices, basically all of the endpoints that we talk to.
Good. Back at the start of summer, you guys introduced something called, Machine Learning Broadcast. What is that?
George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. We were involved with machine learning, and AI before it was really cool, so this was actually something we developed in 2018. We've been honing the model, and then we re-released it this year. But machine learning is a subset of AI, and we all know AI is a super big buzzword these days and when you peel that onion, there's levels of accuracy involved there, and there's a lot of hype around the world.
But the reason why we called the feature machine learning broadcast is really to focus on the ML aspects of it, and it's a great business problem to solve because, at the end of the day, what we're really creating is a recommendation engine. And I think everybody's familiar with the Amazon recommendation engine, Instagram, and other social media platforms that are just, they're recommending content for you.
That's essentially what we're doing here. We're using KNN Analysis, which is supervised machine learning to look at content that has some engagement with it, and that engagement could be measured by computer vision on a digital signage screen, it could be measured by interactivity with it on a desktop or interactivity with that content on the mobile device and then behind the scenes, all we're doing is we're finding out second, third, fourth-degree order content, that's related to the content that was engaging and then it's a feedback loop. We go ahead and automatically schedule that content and see how that content is engaged with so it's a self-learning feedback loop there and the whole purpose of it is to find content that's engaging and show more of that content to your employees.
Could you give me a real-world kind of example of how that might work?
George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Let's say a company's opening up a brand new office in Buenos Aires and for whatever reason, people really gravitate to that content. They look at it on the signage screen, on the fifth-floor break room, they're engaging with it on their desktop, they're looking at it on the mobile device. We learn from that engagement and say, okay, let's go ahead and find similar related content there. Let's find content related to office openings in Buenos Aires, and then let's go ahead and go further out and look at second, third-order tags. So that would be content related to South America as well. And then we automatically play that content, inject it back into the playlist, and our customers have complete control over whether it's automatic and which players actually get this content and which devices get it and then, we learn based on that content. So it's a feedback loop, and you might find in that case that your employees are really more interested in the geographic region than they are in the new office opening.
So it's relentlessly relevant.
George Clopp: Exactly right, Dave, and solving a real-world business problem because one of the challenges our customers have is, it's really arduous to constantly schedule new relevant content.
The first couple of times you do it, you create a scheduled playlist. Yeah, it's okay, but it takes a long time and then, with Attention Deficit Disorder in today's modern world, people grow immune, and they tune out that same content over and over again. So, you need that fresh content injected to keep the employee's attention.
I'm guessing that somebody's going to be listening to this and thinking, that's cool, but where on earth do I get, or how do I develop all this content so that I do have this somewhat bottomless hyper-relevant content available?
George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. Right now, in its current stance with our ML broadcast, you need to have that content in your media library. We're not automatically going out to like copyright-free areas and pulling in content. But with our release coming out next year, it's called our AI employee engagement. With that, we'll automatically be creating and sourcing content for you on your behalf.
Yeah, I saw a demo of something like that over in Germany a little while back with another company who, I'm sure you'll be happy if I don't name them, that was all about using what was available through an intranet and an extranet, and other resources to auto-generate content for screens.
George Clopp: Yeah, it's opening up the whole world of generative AI. We're actually looking at both. Whether there are generative images, generative video, or generative text. Obviously, in our space, images and videos mean a lot, and there are different systems out there. There's DALI 2, there's stable diffusion. They've all got their strengths and their weaknesses. But we're combining that with templated-based content as well.
So automatically generating content that's relevant based off of a text prompt is super useful. But in some cases, it might not be the right content that's generated. So we also will have a mixture of templated content as well.
Yeah, I think templates are a big part of that. I've farted around with things like Mid Journey and so on, and you could see how it could go sideways on you really quickly if you left too much up to the machine.
George Clopp: Exactly. It gets into that whole thing of prompt engineering.
You got to be really good with your prompts, and they've all got issues like generating hands and things of that nature right now. But we want to be on the leading edge of this, use it where it makes sense. An area where we think it really makes a lot of sense, a preview into our AI Employee Engagement, is on mission values and goals. We feel like that's an area where our customers just don't communicate enough to their employees, like, there's cake in the break room, let's recognize employees.
That's all part of it, but really just reinforcing, Hey, your goal in the finance department this week is to close your books three days earlier. And so, mix that text in with some great video or some great images that are created in the background using this generative AI.
Yeah, I saw something on LinkedIn last night, and I commented on it because I thought it is great that there's a company that's using KPIs and messaging right on the production floor, and the person who posted about it said, this is not very sexy, but it goes to what's needed on the floor for those workers. But the problem was, it looked like hell.
It was just black and white, and they were slapping up a whole bunch of Excel charts, like a stock of them and you'd need binoculars to even see them. So it's important to think about the presentation.
George Clopp: Yeah, totally agree, Dave. I say this at all my speaking events: content is king, content is queen, and that still rules the day.
When we're intermixing real-time data with content, it has to be visually appealing. You can't have 20 different stats on the screen; all of those rules of graphic design, I still think, hold true here.
Do you see a day when things like scheduling and trafficking of content are largely automated and handed off to machine learning or some variant of AI?
George Clopp: That's exactly what we're trying to build, Dave, with a release next year. With the ability, of course, to intervene, the ability for the communicator to come in and approve the content or really go ahead and bias the content and say, okay, I've got these 30 categories of content I see that I really want to bias, what the content areas could be.
“Hey, I'm a new enroll. I'm a new first-time line manager. I'm a new director. I'm a new VP, and there's content associated with that new enroll.” They might want to bias that and increase the weight on it, decrease the weight on it, or take it out altogether. So there's still going to be that human touch involved in the ability to approve content, but the AI itself will take care of making sure that content is fresh and relevant.
And the big problem we're solving there is just that, again, attention deficit disorder people have, if they see the same thing on the screen, week after week, they tend to tune out. So how can we think of innovative ways to display KPIs, display goals, display things that are really important to the company and give it a great background, give it a great video so that it gets employees' attention again?
We're going to talk about machine learning. You reference AI-driven camera optics. Is that basically a computer vision?
George Clopp: It is. Absolutely is, yes.
Did you guys write your own, or are you using something like Intel's OpenVINO?
George Clopp: Yeah, the two big ones out there, we've used OpenCV, that is, Open Computer Vision, and TensorFlow, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but there are higher order problems we're trying to solve here, and not reinvent computer vision so we're using some libraries for that.
Is that just part of the mix of doing this sort of thing? Are there other technologies you can use to get a sense of dynamics in a venue?
George Clopp: Yeah, I think so. Infrared detectors, pressure sensors that kind of tell you who's in that immediate vicinity. You're basically correlating that to human beings in the vicinity, how many human beings are there, and what was playing on the screen at that time. Yeah, so there are less technological ways to do this and still get some good results.
AI is being talked about a lot as you've gone through about its potential to automate presentations. Are there other aspects to a digital signage company, the way your company operates, that you can use AI to help with marketing, help with customer contact, that sort of thing?
George Clopp: Yeah, without a doubt. I'm sure you're reading everything. It's revolutionizing all traditional roles, right? Not just engineers writing code. You got a chat with a ChatGPT engineer. With Microsoft's Copilot, it's going to revolutionize the way we all use Excel and Word and PowerPoint and things of that nature.
It's definitely revolutionizing marketing. Building product brochures for you automatically, things of that nature, and then, that naturally progresses into, is AI going to take all of our jobs, which I don't think so, going to help us all become more productive. The employees that really change and adopt the AI, I think they're going to be even more valuable than they are today.
It's just the employees that just say, I'm not going to do this, and they refuse to allow their cheese to be moved, those are the ones that I think you have to watch out for.
There’s an increasing number of companies. I just wrote about one today that has gone down the path of headless CMS. The idea that you can leave the final presentation later, the interactive element, whatever it is to software developers at a large company or who works with a large company as a services company and the digital signage CMS is just the infrastructure, the foundational platform that does device management, scheduling, trafficking, all that sort of stuff.
Are you seeing that demand in the marketplace?
George Clopp: We're seeing the opposite. What you're saying absolutely makes sense, especially with my background and the way we've architected our product with microservices. What we're seeing, especially with our large enterprise customers is, they want a little more white glove service.
Taking on the arduous task of piecing everything together, even with a microservices framework, is putting a lot of ownership on them. But that is not to say that there's not a need out there. We just really haven't found it. We've actually gone the opposite direction on our side, which has really served us well because we've gone from zero revenue in the cloud to 2 million. We brought on a new CEO, and we quickly ramped up to 20 million. I think it's working for us so far.
Yeah, you're a very different company than maybe prior to you joining RMG Networks, that was a weird little side trip into digital out of home.
George Clopp: It was. We see the artifacts and all that, but I think it's a great group of people here now. There's not a leftover where people have bad attitudes or anything like that. So really proud of where the company's been, the talent we've acquired. We've acquired people from all over the industry. Really love working with the current team and cross-functionally, not just engineering and support, which is what I run, but in sales and marketing as well.
Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned you've gone in the opposite direction of headless. I've heard that as well, particularly when you get into, like Fortune 500, Fortune 100 kinds of enterprise-grade customers. They want to outsource digital signage, by and large, in the same way that they've outsourced a lot of IT services.
George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely. That's the same trend we're seeing, Dave too. It's a little bit of both, right? Everybody wants their cake and eats it too, right? Like they want you to have the ability to do it, but then when it comes time to actually execute on it, we typically find, Hey, we can help them get faster to market if we help augment their team.
How important is security?
George Clopp: Oh! It’s Huge. We all know that the disaster scenario in digital signage, someone compromises your network and they put up some content images or videos that are not appropriate. Even more so with us being more omni-channel with desktop, mobile devices. We've got a data privacy officer, we're SOC 2 compliant. We do a lot of work in Europe so GDPR comes up a lot as well, data privacy. So I think it’s super important.
When I think you look at the different offerings out there and the first tier, we look and sound the same. So I think what you got to do with new prospects or new customers, they just got to peel that onion more. What does that really mean? What does it mean that you encrypt your data? Do you do it at rest? Do you do it in transit? Those kinds of things, and I think that's where you can tell the difference between different offerings.
And are the people in the first and second meetings with prospective customers different than they were 7 years ago when you started? I'm hearing the IT people who used to come to meetings and sit there with their arms crossed, thinking, dear God, how long is this going to go on? They're now tending to lead these meetings.
George Clopp: Yeah, I've seen it in multiple ways. Definitely, IT is still the big persona of the buyer here. But I'm also seeing less and less about speeds and feeds and players and hardware and transmission equipment and scalers and more about the final purpose of what we're trying to do.
I'm just starting to see that shift. Seven years ago, I talked to people, and it's the AV integration guy. I don't really care what's on the screen. I just care that it's not dark. I don't want a screen that's down. That's their most important thing, and now I'm seeing that shift a little bit more towards they do care about the content, and they're bringing in more of the HR and the communications group involved and making sure that the platform can grow. I can create content on the platform or I can integrate with Adobe or SharePoint or something along those lines. But I still see it, especially AV/IT as a huge influence in the buying process.
Yeah, certainly going back seven, eight years when I was doing some one-to-one consulting with enterprise level customers, that sort of thing, I would go into a first meeting, and I would say, okay, why do you want to do this? And it was always intriguing to see how often people would lean back in their chairs and say, I hadn't really thought about that. They wanted this thing, but as you say, they didn't really know what they were going to do with this thing.
George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. And there's a little bit of power in that too. There's power to putting the latest and greatest screen technology in your office and giving you that modern technology look and feel but then just carry it one more step in the maturity direction and start focusing on the content too.
Yeah, you can demonstrate innovation by having a big ass screen in your lobby, but if there's nothing useful on there, you're not really demonstrating a lot of innovation.
George Clopp: Exactly, and I think there's still room for that super wonderful creative experience that's human-curated that graphic designers make, and they spend a lot of time getting just perfect in those high profile areas, like the lobby of a company, and then there's also opportunity for, new content generation automatically for me so that I don't have to necessarily sit here and handle this thing. So I think we're going to live in a world where both will be applicable.
So you mentioned you, you're working on new iterations of AI-driven content. Is that the big kind of roadmap item for your company over the next year?
George Clopp: Yes, it really is. Yeah. We've got a huge, large-player ecosystem, all the data integrations, and omni-channel platforms. So where our new development team is focused on is automating the content creation, automating that entire feed, if you will, so that it really takes that arduous process away from our communicator.
How many folks do you have in the company now?
George Clopp: We're a little under 70 people right now. So still a small company and I love it cause everybody has to wear multiple hats, do multiple roles. You have to bring a lot of energy to the company, and I just love that. I've just grown so fond of it over the last seven years.
And is most of the team in the Dallas Fort Worth area, or are you all over the place?
George Clopp: Since COVID, we're mainly in Dallas, but since COVID, a lot of us have moved out a little bit. So I'm actually in Colorado. Some of my engineering leads are in the West Coast, some are in Pennsylvania. So we're really practicing what we preach, the hybrid workforce.
All right, George, thank you for spending some time with me. It was good to catch up.
George Clopp: Yeah, it's fantastic, Dave. Thank you so much for taking time out.
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Andrew Gould, Ditto (Squirrels)
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
Tuesday Sep 12, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A lot of technology companies have bolted digital signage capabilities on to their core software platform. Often, that means the end-products don't do a whole lot beyond playing out some files on a screen.
I'm a bit guilty of making that assumption about Ditto, a wireless screen sharing platform that also works as a digital signage CMS. In chatting with the company that develops and markets Ditto, and now in this podcast with co-founder Andrew Gould, I've learned Ditto is much more than an add-on. Some customers get Ditto licenses for the signage functions, and then don't even use the screen mirroring.
Based in Ohio, the company spent its first dozen or so years selling screen sharing into the education and workplace verticals. But it started getting a lot of requests from end-users about adding functionality that made screens useful during downtimes. They wanted to get more bang from their hardware buck. So the parent company, Squirrels, spun up the digital signage component in 2020, and Ditto is now a tandem offer.
Gould concedes there are maybe some things a pure-play, enterprise-grade digital signage CMS can offer that Ditto can't, but there's an awfully big user base out there that's never going to need or use a lot of those more exotic and elaborate functions.
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TRANSCRIPT
Andrew, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of the company? Is it Squirrels, the company, or is Ditto the company or is Ditto the product?
Andrew Gould: Ditto is the product. Squirrels is the company. We founded the company in 2008, and we've been mainly focused on wireless collaboration in classrooms, and huddle spaces in higher education and then, in 2020, we expanded our Ditto offering to include digital signage and emergency alerts, which is something a lot of our K-12 customers were requesting.
So when you started the company back in 2008, was digital signage on the roadmap way back then, or is it purely one of these situations where you had the K12 people asking you about it and eventually realized okay, we should do this?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, it was a situation where we were focused on the collaboration, and then in the feedback channels we had with the customers, they started asking or suggesting, It'd be really great if we could show things when we really weren't showing things. When the teachers weren't mirroring their screens and sharing things, it'd be nice if we could say, here’s what today's homework is, or here's what's going on at the school or for higher ed, here's upcoming events, things like that.
So we saw it as a natural evolution of, “We're already on that screen. It makes sense to allow users to utilize that screen when it's not being used for the primary function of collaboration.”
That primary function, could you walk through how that would work in a typical scenario?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, so we have an application that runs on a device connected to the screen or TV in the front of a room. Be it a projector, a flat screen, doesn't really matter. It runs on Apple TVs as well as Windows devices so there's some flexibility there of whatever device they wanna have connected to that main screen. There's just a piece of software called Ditto Receiver and that handles all of the functionality of showing what's being shared by students and teachers in the classroom. It handles displaying the digital signage and it also handles displaying critical emergency alerts, if they're fired and all of those things connect back to the cloud.
The IT staff manages that from a central cloud portal, and then it periodically checks for updated settings, digital signage, configurations, et cetera, pulls those down, and caches them locally, so if you do have a little blip in the network or the internet goes down temporarily that functionality can continue to run even if it's not connected to the internet for a moment.
So, in essence, whether it's a teacher or a student or in a working environment, whether it's the person leading the meeting or somebody who's a participant, they could pull up their phone, their tablet, whatever it may be, and if they have the Ditto app, they can push their screen to the main screen in that room?
Andrew Gould: Exactly, and our big focus with the collaboration part of Ditto is that device agnostic approach. So we want any kind of device that's coming into a space to be able to share, not just if you have an Apple device, it'll work to this Apple TV, or if you have a Google device that'll work to this Chromecast.
We really push hard to make sure that each device that comes in, whether it's from a browser or from a native app on a platform, can connect and quickly share.
And that's important in a number of ways. A, it doesn't slow down the meeting, but it removes a lot of IT support and AV/IT support within an organization, whether it's a school or a business. Because I've been in those meetings where somebody says here, I'll just share my screen, and then 15 minutes later, it's still being sorted out.
Andrew Gould: Yes, and we've all gone into those rooms that have the laminated sheet of instructions of, “If you're using this device, it's these seven steps, and if you're using this device, you have to be on this network. Then you have to do these three steps, et cetera, et cetera.” All of that goes away with Ditto which means far fewer support calls for the IT staff, and just a more pleasant experience is that we have people come into our offices, accountants, lawyers, just general non-technical people, and they're blown away at how easy and fast it is to get their content up on the screen, which is all anybody wants.
We don’t care about how fast or how crisp it is or how cool it looks once it's up there if it takes you 10 minutes to get it connected. So quick, fast, easy is always our guiding light as we mature the product and move it along.
On the digital signage side of this, the way it's marketed from what I can see is, it's a tandem product, as opposed to, we are a collaboration product that, oh, by the way, we can also do this. You seem to be saying, “It's a full-fledged product on its own. If you wanted, you could just use it for digital signage.” Is that a fair statement?
Andrew Gould: Oh yeah, for sure. We have customers that turn off the mirroring capabilities and they just use it for digital signage. Menus in the fast dining have TVs over the counter where people order. We have customers that are just using it for that, that don't even care about what the original purpose of Ditto was, which was the screen mirroring stuff, and then we have customers that only use it for screen mirroring and we haven't got them up and running on digital signage ye. They haven't realized what the value add is.
But there are more customers doing both. They are mirroring, and then when it’s not mirroring, they are showing important information to the users. Whether it's connection information, things going on at the organization, stocks, or just the kind of stuff to keep it feeling more fresh, utilizing those screens. But yeah, it's definitely a product that can just be utilized as a standalone digital signage solution.
I'm guessing that you and particularly your customer-facing folks fight a perception problem in that there are other products out in the marketplace that were started as one thing and added digital signage on, and generally speaking, the perception I have and the feedback I've somewhat heard is that, “Yeah, it can do digital signage too, but we're not talking about robust digital signage. We're talking like we can run a set of files on a screen in an order and that's about where it begins and ends.”
Andrew Gould: We are not an industry-leading digital signage solution when it comes to features. There are incumbents that are far more feature-heavy than we are, but what we've tried to focus on are the things that the customers truly need to have a good digital signage experience. So it's being able to create signage lists, as we call them, which are basically playlists of media, ease of use of setting all of that up in the configuration portal, so that it doesn't feel like an add-on or a thing etucked into a corner. A lot of time and energy is spent on the part that actually the end user never sees, which is configuration managing of all the media files and also providing templates for people who don't want to or don't have the resources to create their own digital signage assets. Providing some really easy turnkey solutions as well to say, hey, if you just need to get some basic information shown and you don't want to have to pay a designer or something like that to create something, here are some really cool templates that we've put together for you and they're just WYSIWYG, change this line, change the subject, change the body, upload an image, add a video, and you're ready to go with really nice looking digital signage.
So I wouldn't say we are innovating digital signage by any means, but we're trying to create a package that doesn't feel like we just bolted something onto the side of it. That really feels like a first-class digital signage solution.
In a lot of cases, while there are certainly feature-rich software options out there, I suspect a hell of a lot of end users don't ever use more than 15% of what's available to them with those platforms.
Andrew Gould: Yeah, absolutely. We poll our users frequently about, “Hey, what do you like about the product? What don't you like about the product?” That's the most important part. We wanna make that better, and we ask, “Hey, here's a whole list of different things. How much would you use this?”
The feedback nears that there is 10-15% of features we don’t have that people say they might use, and most of the people say that they probably would never use synchronized digital signage across eight different screens or things that kind of fall into the more high-end solutions for digital signage. They just want ease of use, things that look nice and reliable. Those are what they care about the most.
Yeah. So if somebody comes to you and says, “We're putting a huge LED video wall in the lobby. Can you drive that?” You might say, I suppose we could maybe do that, but that's not what we're here for.
Andrew Gould: We've certainly had those requests and we've said, “Hey, here's how you would do that if you are ready to do it. But, to be honest, there are better solutions for that problem.”
Digital signage is not a one-size-fits-all problem. There is very high-end hardware that drives large billboards and there's our end where we're just trying to drive it on a 70’’ screen in a room. So we don't have to solve everyone’s problems. We're fine saying, that sounds really cool. We wished Ditto was designed to do things like that. You might be better served with something that's from the ground up built to power stuff like that.
You can stay in your lane, and it's a pretty decent-sized lane.
Andrew Gould: Correct. Yeah, it's a huge market. So there's plenty of room for lots of people to all be swimming, doing different things, and not really stepping on each other.
One of the problems I find with some entry-level, and I'm not saying yours is, but just in broad strokes, entry-level platforms don't have much in the way if they have anything at all in terms of device management, and I gather that your device management is done through third-party device management modules, like the Jamf and so on.
Andrew Gould: Yeah. So early on, we explored building Ditto with MDM capabilities. But what we experienced in talking with our customers is that most of them already had a solution to do those sorts of things. So we would have to convince them to switch to our device management platform and 90% of what MDM does has nothing to do with what we would need to do with it. So we'd be building out this whole lump on the side of Ditto just to be able to replicate the service they were already using so they would switch to ours.
So we ultimately looked at that and said, this isn't the right fit for us, rather than trying to fight upstream and convince all of these customers that already have solutions to switch to ours. Let’s just partner with all of these solutions and make it work really well. So we've partnered with the various Apple TV MDM vendors to make it really turnkey to mass deploy Ditto to hundreds of Apple TVs with literally just pushing a couple of buttons. So that's been our approach to it and that seems to be what the customer's like with us.
Yeah, if they're already using it, why would they go to something that's just dedicated to your application?
Andrew Gould: No matter what I do, I will always be inferior to a Jamf. They're a huge publicly traded company focused solely on MDM. I'm never gonna make an MDM as good as theirs, so why try?
What is your footprint, and what would you say are your core vertical markets?
Andrew Gould: The core vertical markets definitely K-12 and higher education in the United States. We have a footprint all around the world. We're in Europe, Asia, Australia, South America. We have a lot of business users as well, whether that's in office space or co-working spaces have been a big business for us lately, as people are working from home but wanna get out of the house occasionally and go somewhere else. Those office spaces are looking for easy mirroring as people come in and out.
But we’re really focused on the K-12 and higher education market because this solution just fits so nicely into that environment. It works great in business. It works great in fast casual dining and all these other places that people use Ditto. But what's cool about Ditto is that it is so universal as a tool. It can plug in all kinds of places. We have churches that use it to show the lyrics to songs as people are singing along. There are all kinds of really interesting applications that we set out to get into flexible and adaptable tools and put into a lot of interesting environments.
When it comes to education, how is it being used in classrooms?
Andrew Gould: So you've typically got it running on the screen at the front of the room, whether that's an interactive whiteboard or just a TV mounted on the wall or projector, whatever. It's usually connected to that, and then primarily, the teacher is using it to push her screen from a laptop device up to the screen, and then we can support up to four devices sharing at the same time. So then students will connect and we have an add-on application for Windows and iOS where the teacher can manage who's allowed to be sharing. She can approve or deny connections to hide somebody if she wants to emphasize on her screen and not the other students who are connected to that.
Then typically, when nothing is being shared, there's digital signage that's usually managed at the school level, but we do have some schools that allow the teachers to set up their own digital signage per classroom. So you're seeing that digital signage there and then it's spilling out into the hallways. They're putting TVs into hallways of even K-12 schools, higher ed common areas. They're running mainly just digital signage in those areas versus the hybrids that they're running in the classrooms.
Are school districts mostly using Apple TVs?
Andrew Gould: It’s about two-thirds Apple TVs and one-third Windows devices, that’s how our users break down. So it's not quite 50-50. I think it's trending more towards that 50-50 blend. Early on, it was very Apple TV heavy, and we're seeing a bit more of a skewback towards Windows devices.
I'm not sure exactly what's behind that trend, maybe it's the drive down of cheaper and cheaper Windows devices that can actually run 4k video and kind of stuff, the nooks, and the likes But yeah. So right now, the blend is really two-thirds Apple TVs.
What about collaboration displays that have systems on chips embedded in them, can you work with those?
Andrew Gould: So we've looked at the Android TVs and Samsung's OS and those sorts of things.
The feedback that we've got from customers is that they are not really interested in that capability. The limitation of that is usually given the horsepower on those devices; we can usually only show one or two screens at a time. It ends up making Ditto, a hobbled product for it, and most of the time when people come to us, they've already got Apple TVs purchased or they've got a Windows device, they're already looking to use, and they're coming from the, “I picked my device, now I'm looking for the solution” approach, and the Smart TVs don't come up in the conversations that much.
We're not opposed to it. If that's the way the market wants to go, we can surely adapt to that. All our technology is really flexible, so it's quick for us to repurpose a new platform, but just not what the customers are asking these days.
Yeah, and it's not like an Apple TV is expensive.
Andrew Gould: It's $150, and it'll run for probably 10 years before you have to worry about replacing it. They're really rock solid.
When you're selling into K12 in particular, are you selling district-wide or do you have to sell down to the school level?
Andrew Gould: It's typically district-wide. It's usually the IT coordinator or applicable semi-related role there that's looking to roll out an agnostic solution, and that's another place where we really shine is that schools are not one-to-one all the same type of device. You're typically seeing iPads in the lower grades, and then you're seeing Windows surfaces or Chromebooks as you get more into typing and writing papers and those sorts of things. So they want one solution that's going to work across the board for all of those things, and that's what Ditto's bread and butter is.
So that starts the conversation off right away: one solution, you're supporting one product across, whether you have three schools or a hundred schools in the district, it's all the same solution, and then we can start the conversations if you realize digital signage, you've got all these screens in the cafeteria or the hallways, how are you putting information up there? And a lot of times it's, oh, there's a USB drive, and we go around and collect them, and we update them once a month. Somebody's job is to update the USB with the media and plug it back into all the TVs, and there is a much better way to do that.
With a lot of schools using Chrome devices, is that problematic at all, or does it work with your system just fine?
Andrew Gould: No, it works great with Chrome. So Chrome OS used to have applications; they called them Chrome Apps. So we originally had a Chrome app that did all of this. That was in the store.
And then Google wound down Chrome apps just because they weren't really being utilized all that much on the platform. So we went to a pure browser experience. So you just go to our goditto.com website, and you enter the room code that's being shown on the teacher screen, and then we just use the web RTC built-in technology to capture the screen and send it over to Ditto receiver and show it so you can actually share without installing anything on a device, and that works on all platforms that support the browser capture technology.
There are other options out there for certainly higher ed. You've got companies like Rise Vision that's particularly strong in K to 12 in churches and things like that, and some others How do I describe them, CMS software companies that are focused on that market, and then you've got the companies like Zoom that have video collaboration that have added on some digital signage capabilities and the Air Teams, where people who do similar screen mirroring. How do you match up against them and how do you sell against them?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, so the Air Team and Immersive, they're selling proprietary hardware with a subscription service on top of it. So if you're looking for, “Hey, just give me a turnkey solution, give me everything. I'm not really worried about the price, I just want it to work.” Those are great solutions. But what we see in schools is they care very much about the cost and the pricing, and some of them have already made investments into hardware with Apple TVs or Windows devices, and they're saying, look, this is just extra cost that I don't need to do the same thing.
So how we position against those is just, “Hey, you can use whatever hardware you want. We're happy to run on either of those platforms and if you've already got them, cool, just buy our subscription, and you're ready to go. You don't have to worry about buying a five, six or eight hundred dollar hardware device, deploying it, or managing it differently than how you manage other things.” So that's how we match up against those.
The more CMS type things that are focused on, digital signage in those very specific things. Again, those are the incumbents, those are the people that have been doing this; some of them have been there for decades doing this type of stuff. So we're not here to try and outcompete those companies. We just see that there are certain niches that maybe those companies don't fill as well, and we're content to come along and fill those in and keep improving our product, and one day, maybe we'll compete with them. Maybe we'll have a platform that we've decided, hey, we should just make it do everything for everybody and look at going after competitors like those.
But like I said, the market is big enough that they can have that niche. We can have this niche, and it's a very healthy business for us, and we're happy to keep doing that. There are a couple of things that we know how to do really well versus, maybe, trying to get too big too fast, trying to do everything all at once.
Was having the digital signage component added to it pretty important because you've got companies like Google that have Chromecast that costs 35 bucks or something like that, that can do some degree of screen sharing, and it would be people who are really cost conscious, they could just go down that path?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, for sure. We don't really see many Chromecast in school-type approaches. For whatever reason, they still don't have basic security like onscreen code or passwords. They've only recently rolled out the ability to remotely manage those types of things. Adding digital signage wasn't really about competing with any particular thing.
The customers that we have and the ones that we're trying to get all value this functionality, and we saw it as a natural fit. It wasn't like we had to completely reinvent the product and take it in some radical new direction. It just seemed like a natural complement to what we were already doing and we talked with some customers. We're running two different solutions on an Apple TV, and they were trying to use Ditto for screen mirroring, and they were trying to use a different Apple TV application for digital signage, and they were trying to do crazy MDM scheduling, based on the class schedule, lock this app for Ditto, so it's open, and then when it's time in between class, walk the digital assignment solution, and we said, there people really want it that bad, maybe we can just be all of that in one and not force our customers to have to run two things like that. So that was the natural genesis of it versus we need to protect our position or something like that. It just made it evolutionary to move in a new direction.
So, how seamless and intuitive is it?
Let’s say, it is running in digital signage mode, the screen is, and the teacher decides, I want to push something to the screen from my laptop or my phone or whatever, and launches that session, does its thing. To then go back to digital signage, what's involved?
Andrew Gould: You just start sharing your screen and stop sharing your screen.
So it's directed from the device that wants to share their screen. So, when you open the app, you enter the room code. We make them fun, easy to enter, like red apples, big pineapple things that are easy, not like random numbers and digits that are hard for kids to type in.
And they push ‘Start sharing’ and boom, their screen's up there, digital signage fades out, screen sharing fades in. It's an instantaneous switchover, and then as soon as the last person stops sharing their screen, if you've got multiple people connected, it goes right back to the digital signage slide it was on when the person first connected. So it's very easy. There's no mode, nothing you have to tinker with on the screen itself.
So the management, whether it's the school, the district, or the individual teacher, they’re using a browser to plan out their digital signage side of what the screen's doing?
Andrew Gould: Yeah. It's all a cloud-based portal. So you can be in the same building, or you can be in a different state. We have businesses that are deployed with Ditto in offices around the world, and there are a couple of people that sit in California and they manage all the digital signage worldwide. So it's super easy right from the portal.
And what's the commercial side of it? What are you paying? Is it a SaaS?
Andrew Gould: Yeah, it's a SaaS model. It's a yearly subscription. We offer a monthly if people are using this in bursts, but obviously, you save money by purchasing for an annual versus monthly. And it's per screen that's running Ditto.
So the other thing that we allow is, if you have multiple screens in a classroom, obviously, you can show digital signage on those, but we actually allow one device to push their content to multiple screens. So we're seeing, especially in some classrooms, you've maybe got a screen in the front or to the side or behind as they set up classes less like when I was in school where it was just rows, everybody facing the front now that these little pods of kids are sitting at tables and not everybody's facing the same direction, so they've actually got multiple screens in the rooms. So we just charge per screen that runs the software, and that's it.
What's the fee?
Andrew Gould: So, it's $12.50 per month annually. So it's $125 per month if you're at 10 or more receivers in a school.
Is that just for the screen mirroring, or is that for the functionality, including the digital signage?
Andrew Gould: Yeah. That's for everything. That's one price for everything. We don't charge more for that. We view it as, “Hey, we took this thing that we charge this price for. It made it even better by giving you all the stuff, and it's the same price.”
And that includes the emergency alerts as well. So that ties into a protocol called CAP, which is how the National Weather Service and School Alert Systems all can send alerts. So we have a CAP server capability, where we can receive alerts from other servers, whether it's the National Weather Service, an alert system that, unfortunately, a lot of schools are having to deploy now, where it can push one button and text the parents and send a push notification and send all the alerts out to Ditto and Ditto immediately takes over and shows that alert. You get all of that for that one price.
Yeah, it sounds very much like this isn't a constrained compromise limited solution for the K to 12 market, it's gonna do pretty much what an average classroom and what an average school is going to need.
Andrew Gould: Yeah, we really tried to put everything in there because, again, we don't want people having to be like, “Well, Ditto almost does everything. It'd be great if it just did this one other thing, and then we wouldn't need this other solution.” The hope is that we can provide that one solution that everybody needs.
Tell me more about the company. It's been around since 2008. Is it privately held, or are you listed?
Andrew Gould: We're privately held. I'm one of the co-founders of the company, started it back in 2008 with my business partner.
When we first started out, we weren't doing collaboration. We were doing iOS app development. We had one of the first 50 apps in the iOS app store. We could actually get to the bottom of the list.
It was a TV guide app where you could put in the code and see what was on TV. It sounds like an archaic technology today but it was pretty cool back in the day, and then we got into the collaboration space in about 2012 when we released our first collaboration app, and then we've been focused on collaboration ever since.
Where's the company based?
Andrew Gould: North Canton, Ohio, about an hour south of Cleveland but we have a diversified team present in a lot of states all around the country, but all the within the United States.
Is the majority of your business in the US?
Andrew Gould: Yes. That's where mainly our outbound sales are focused on. But, like I said, we have a really big following actually in Australia. A lot of ditto customers there, and we are working on expanding into Europe this year and into next year to really go after that. There's a lot more regulation and requirements, and apps have to work certain ways and those sorts of things that we want to make sure that we're compliant and respectful to those things and come into that market appropriately, but it's a big focus for us because we think the same needs exist there as they do everywhere else.
Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of US and Canadian companies think they can just make the jump over, and then they get asked about things like GDPR and they're looking at the other person, “What?”
Andrew Gould: Yeah, or even just common things like in France, everything has to be localized into the French language.
If you have one string in your application that's in English, they typically won't purchase. They value that. So we want to be respectful to those things, and they're not hard things for us to comply with. It just requires us to pay somebody who knows French to translate a list of strings, and then we can sell into those markets as well.
Are you selling direct, or do you have channel partners?
Andrew Gould: Mainly direct. We have some channel partners that we started with right before the pandemic, and so we've seen a lot of that market move around, and so some of the channel partners that we originally partnered were more business-focused and the world has changed for business where people just aren't going to the office as much anymore, and those channel partners just didn't make sense.
So we're actually working through a sort of reset of that channel partner program to be more education-focused with the channel partners. But we have some really great channel partners in the US that we work with, whether they're distributors or they're resellers, whether they're just purchasing on behalf of the school and passing that through, or taking our solution and bundling it up with, “Hey, here's the screen you need and here's the speakers and the WiFi and everything,” and including us as a full technology rollout. We like to work with both of those.
If people want to know more, where do they find you online?
Andrew Gould: Our website is goditto.com. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial there. You can set up as many screens as you want, and play with digital signage as much as you want for 30 days, and then, as I said, it starts at $150 per receiver for a single license, and then we have volume pricing above 10 and it scale scales down from there.
Great. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Andrew Gould: Yeah, thanks, Dave. Appreciate it.
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
Tobias Lang, Lang AG
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
Tuesday Aug 22, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Germany's Lang AG is a family-owned and run business that has developed through the years into one of the larger and more influential players in the pro AV market - operating as both a supplier for rentals and staging market, as well as a distributor for systems integrators.
The company is run by Tobias Lang, who based on a couple of chats, clearly has both passion and deep knowledge of the sector, business demands and both the state and opportunity of emerging display technologies.
We had a 30 minute-plus conversation that flew by, getting into a bunch of things - including the potential for a projection systems, which these days don't get anywhere near the attention of LED displays.
We also spend a lot of time talking about LED, and how he thinks that technology isn't necessarily supplanting LCD. From his perspective, he thinks LCD and LED technologies are actually merging. Have a listen and he'll explain.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Tobias, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your company is all about, what it does, and its background?
Tobias Lang: Yeah. Thank you, Dave. Lang AG is a video-only company, which is doing only B2B, which means we cover both verticals, which are rental and staging and system integration.
We supply mostly the European rental and staging market with big projectors, LED screens, cameras, converters, whatever you need in video, and as a distributor, we supply both rental companies and system integrators with the staff of the manufacturers we work with such as Epson, Panasonic, several LED manufacturers to supply the modern technology to them in a good way to consult them, which is fitting to each other.
What amount of your business would you describe as being involved in digital signage?
Tobias Lang: First of all, if you look at the turnover of Lang AG, we do have companies in Switzerland, Spain, the UK, and Germany, which is the biggest. Germany did more than 80 million last year, and 60% of this is done by sales. If you look at digital signage, which is part of sales, this is a significant number, maybe 15 to 20% of our business.
The business itself is in the orbit of Cologne, that area?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, we are spotted in the western part of Germany. We have everything in Germany in one warehouse, as we have in Zurich, Switzerland, Barcelona, Spain, and London, UK because it's very important for our customers to have the opportunity of a one-stop video strategy.
How long has the company been around?
Tobias Lang: We are now 45 years old. My father, when my brother was born, said, “Hey, I have three kids now. I should start something serious.” He founded a company in 1978 without any other ideas because he loved stuff like projection at this time. With the evolution of technology, we ended up being where we are today.
Were you groomed to run the company one day or were you doing other things and decided to go into the family business?
Tobias Lang: I worked for the company as a child which is typical for a family business, then I tried to step away a bit. I studied mathematics. I founded a software company. I did some interesting things.
This stuff is still existing and I still have my chairs, but at one point, I decided that it was a great opportunity to join the family business Lang AG and to be honest, this was maybe one of the best decisions in my life. I love what I'm doing.
That always helps, doesn't it?
Tobias Lang: It does, yeah.
Is there a particular market where you're seeing a lot of activity right now and is it evolving?
Tobias Lang: Over the last two years, this immersive art experience vertical projection was said to be dead or going down five years ago, ten years ago, and what we were able to see over the last months is that projection is growing, and we enjoy this because we love projection and this is based on all these immersive experience setups which are done worldwide mostly based on art, but we believe other verticals can follow.
So these are effectively entertainment venues?
Tobias Lang: So far, yes. But we believe that corporations will use similar setups for brand experience and stuff like that.
I've been to at least a couple of those venues, they work because they're darkened, they're purpose-built and you can control the lighting and everything else.
When you get into a corporate environment, that becomes more challenging but is the technology catching up in terms of laser light brightness, the projection engines getting smaller and detached, the projection head being away from the rest of the equipment, and so on?
Tobias Lang: This is a challenge for sure, but if you look at most installations, most of the projectors are around 10,000 lumens, and you could use brighter projectors, and there are opportunities from the technology side to set up even brighter projectors than we have today. The brightest projector at the moment for the event market or the integration market is 50,000 lumen. You could easily go above.
It's a question about the demand, how much it will rise. But, I believe we will see this too because if you look at the Pavillion of Dubai Expo, 2/3 of these pavilions used projection over LED because of the flexibility of the technology. LED is a strong technology and a strong growing technology, but there will always be room for projection because of its flexibility. For example, the setup time of a projector, don't underestimate that.
Yeah. It used to be for projection mapping and edge blending and everything else. That was like a lot of work and a lot of mathematics and everything else, and now you can do it in software quite quickly from what I understand.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's fantastic. That's true.
Yeah, makes a huge difference. The thing I like about projection is the way it can just arrive and be unexpected versus if it's fixed hard physical displays, you know that there's something there in most cases with the exception of places like the Comcast Tower, but the projection, you can have a wall that all of a sudden is a digital canvas.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, and our understanding of the word, “screen” will change.
Mapping is a good example, we use buildings as screens. Decades ago, we had a television at home and this was the screen for us, and yeah, we see changes happening and we see different dimensions of screens and in this flexible world, we will use projectors more. But in our world, we'll be LED, and we'll be covered with some kind of display, but where we don't have a display, we could add a projection screen to add some value.
Is the partner reseller market and as well as the end user market getting more sophisticated, do they understand this technology more or is part of the role of your company doing education and holding their hand?
Tobias Lang: I think it is both. This is always about technology that has different layers. First, you have to train the experts. You have to give an understanding of the possibilities, and then you need to set up a discussion about opportunities for creative people, and then demands rise, and there's some latency in this process as you could feel from the immersive art experience and the change to other verticals, and I believe that they're by nature and you can't change it.
From what I saw on your website, you have a lot of technical people on board. People who can pull apart devices and get down to the board level with them and everything else. Is that a bit unusual?
Tobias Lang: I wouldn't say this is unusual. What may be is unusual that we have technical staff who can decide every single day what they want to do, because of some service and stuff like this, it's necessary sometimes, but we drive an R&D team, which is absolutely free to make a choice of what they believe is important for us tomorrow.
The market expects us to give feedback on future technology and therefore we have to look deep with our partners into product planning and technology, and this is what we love, and I think that's within our organization, a great job opportunity if you join one of those teams.
So when you say you're doing R&D, you're not coming up with your own products, I assume, or am I getting that wrong?
Tobias Lang: No, we are not a manufacturer, but we have to set up solutions sometimes. So what we try to do is, we add value to a product. For example, in the US market, most people know us as the cage company, as we did all the projector frames. They almost thought for a while, this is our business.
What we did, in reality, is that we looked for a solution for our projectors to use them in rental, and we added a mechanical solution on top. For other products, we add batteries as a solution to run wireless. Now, we added some drone business because we believe if you're strong in mappings and you supply media servers and high-brightness projectors to the markets, you should cover the pixels in the sky in the future too.
It also means you're future-proof.
Tobias Lang: Future-proof is a hard word. Let's say we are interested in the future, and how it will go.
Yeah, I guess you can never be totally sure because it moves so fast.
Tobias Lang: That's true.
I would assume that when you're doing all this value-added engineering work, it's in part that in order to service a customer and address a project, you can't wait on the marketplace for the suppliers to just develop something and put it on their roadmap to serve your needs.
Sometimes, you must do it yourself to make it all happen.
Tobias Lang: You have to bring together the information of the need of the market on the one hand and the possibility of, what's on the technical side thinkable on the other hand. So we have to bridge between our customers and the manufacturers, and it depends on the demand or the project.
To be honest, in the first project, you understand the need, but the solution is not available yet. But you learn from it to bring it back to the discussion of product planning, and future roadmap, and then you can return with the right solution for the future because if there is a need in AV for a solution, this will hit you a second, a third time and so on.
Are you in front of end-user customers at all, or your team, or is that something that you stay at arm's length?
Tobias Lang: We try, and I believe we are mostly invisible. Most of the end customers in the European market have no clue that we exist. If our customers rent material from us, it's just a gray case without any brand of Lang AG.
I assume that your business partners prefer it that way, they want to own the customer?
Tobias Lang: Yeah. We always say we are behind, we let the show to our customers and I think those who like this come back to us and we understand this as one of our values.
When we were talking ahead of turning the recording on, you were talking about one of the things that your firm does is you work hard to try to forecast what will be possible and what matters and what the need is of the marketplace. That has to be challenging just because of the way technology shifts, and also, there are so many different factors as to what the marketplace wants including, the war in Ukraine and supply chains and everything else that has happened in the last couple of years.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, around 10 or 15 years ago, it was much easier to drive a mid-size family business.
But today, with the experience of a pandemic, of such a war influencing the supply chains, you have to make sure that you have an understanding of the global world and the effects which are happening for your industry. So we try to be in shape around this. For the actual situations, we handle this quite well. It is easier if you always love to ask yourself what's new, and what's next, because, then you are flexible and agile enough to change fast.
Some of the trends that I've been hearing a lot of discussion about are moving manufacturing out of China into other countries, having storage warehouses, different methodologies for shipping, and everything else.
Has that been critical with the weather the last two, or three years?
Tobias Lang: I wouldn't say critical, but it is part of the game. This is mostly a discussion around LEDs, and in the end, you have to understand that even if you produce an LED panel in Europe, there will still be parts that will be supplied from Asia.
So it's only bringing the challenge to different classes regarding customs rules. It is a bit about politics because it depends on what the European Union will change in the rules of customs, I think there is a similar story in the US.
When I was at the Munich Digital Signage Summit Europe, one of the areas that was discussed quite a bit was green signage and sustainability. Is that factoring into how you do business?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, a lot, and this is rising fast, and I believe there's no stopping it. So it will continue to rise.
In every single supply chain, you will have to report what you do regarding sustainability. You will have to explain yourself in the future much more intensively, much more often how you face this challenge. As a company, it's very important that you have to accept these circumstances and then you should work on it.
Energy management and conservation and cutting energy costs were something that was around prior to the Ukraine War and everything that kind of bubbled out that, but has that really heightened in the last year and a half?
Tobias Lang: Yes, there is a different pace of this change. I'll give you an example.
Last September, there was a new rule by the European Union that all signage displays had to be turned off in Germany between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, and most LED screens were never built to be turned off, so they just used a black image to be turned off. But in reality, they were still running.
So this was a challenge, no one was prepared for and I think it's sustainable and good that we now have the discussion of how to manufacture an LED screen, which is easy, honestly speaking, that you can turn off every day.
Yeah, I didn't even know that until I was at the Munich thing, because you just assume it's a display, there's an on-and-off. Why is it difficult for them to be turned off and then turned back on gracefully?
Tobias Lang: Honestly, in most installations, those screens were done modular, which is no surprise because it's cheaper in transport, and then you set up the screen, and you do some kind of dressing, and not all screens understand the dressing once you turn the screen on.
The result is if you turn the screens off, you can turn it on again. You need to have an LED Technician too, because the dressing is no longer working. These are just simple things, but this is a different way of thinking because, in the past, people were consulted to let the screen runs.
And are there workarounds? Is this all being addressed?
Tobias Lang: Yes, there are some workarounds out there. There's a lot ongoing and I believe this story will be done in 12 to 18 months completely.
It is a learning curve, and it also shows the strengths of our industry that we can adapt fast. We can do a lot regarding sustainability because we can save energy quickly if we focus on the right questions. In an absolute way of thinking, we are maybe not the greenest industry, but in relation from year to year, we improved so much that we can be proud as an industry of what we are doing.
Is it a hardware fix that puts an intermediary device, or is it a software fix, or is it like the new generation of Nova Star controllers and so on that will get around that?
Tobias Lang: So, in the first step, it is a hardware fix, what is done now, and in the second step, it will be mostly a software fix.
One of the things that I read in another article that was attributed to you was, and we were talking ahead of this discussion, you were saying how LED and LCD will merge, and I was thinking it kind of is because LCDs are using LEDs as their backlighting and so on, but you're talking about something different here, right?
Tobias Lang: First of all, I have to mention that it is tremendous what is happening in 2023 in the LED market. When I went to ISE, I was surprised at how many manufacturers talked about micro LEDs…
And some of it actually was true micro LED.
Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's true. But before this year's ISE, it looked like all the manufacturers of high-resolution LEDs were going to chip-on-board technology, and then the semiconductors offered a micro LED package, so a package again with where you could do pick and place like with SMDs to produce an LED panel, and a lot of companies looked into this and announced that where they will have a product in future based on this technology. And I wondered, okay. Is this even before COB has started to come to the top the end of COB because there is a superior technology?
This is still an open question. I can't answer it by today. But it shows how interesting it is, and the comment about LED and LCD merging is based on the fact that now nearly every former LCD manufacturer, like the Chinese BOE, is joining the LED race because everyone is accepting that there will be a lot of replacement from the LED or former LCD installations and based on this challenge, a lot of LCD manufacturers ask their health how to use the stuff they did in the past, and they found out that if they use the transistor film, they have an LCD, they could supply active matrix solutions based on LED as the video source. So driving every single pixel by a transistor to get a value as a product that is superior to what we know.
So I believe we will see screens that are more flexible, and more transparent than we used to, and this is incredibly interesting because it will change our understanding of the word display and screen to have just one dimension in a 4:3 or 16:9 screen. We have to start to think completely differently, and the funny thing is that the concept of active matrix and passive matrix, I don't know, maybe 30 years old or whatever, was there as long as I am in the industry, but it was always too expensive to drive every single pixel and there were no advantages, but now it seems like an active matrix became reachable in a price range, and there are supplies added values because you get such light and flexible products and for example, the hype of the transparent LED from Muxwave we saw at the last shows was one of the rising stars, gives us a first look in the first understanding of what could be the future, what could be possible and I’m pretty sure we will see many more products based on this technology.
Not everyone, to be honest, agrees that this is the way to go. There are some manufacturers which believe passive matrix is still the way to go, but there are also a lot of manufacturers which believe in active matrix. It is very interesting to follow this discussion and to see every single move of the different manufacturers, and this is for example, for me, a strong argument why it is wrong as a market player just to visit one show a year. That's the reason why you have to show ISE and InfoComm, Display Week because the different levels of information you get at the different shows by the different timing is helping me so much to face these questions.
I'm trying to wrap my head around this. When you're talking about TFT, does that limit the dimensions and shape of the displays to how LCD is made right now in terms of having mother glass, and the largest display you're going to get is 105 inches, or does that not really in play here?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, I'm not an expert, to be honest, on LCD factories. What is the limitation of the size? Is it the glass? Is this the Tft? Is it a combination? But for sure, this will have an influence on active matrix products.
For example, at Muxwave, it's about the drivers, the number of pixels, you can reach, it’s not about the transistors. So this question will be answered by yes/maybe if you have really high-resolution products, and maybe by no, if you have lower-resolution products.
Because you do a lot of work in the rental market, equipment is going to be put up and torn down repeatedly. You have to think a lot about durability, right?
Tobias Lang: Yes, that's true, and redundancy. This is one of the main challenges. If we face AV over IP, which will come into our market for sure, and we believe based on XMTP and IPMX but it is a change, and people in the event, want to be sure that everything is working out because if you look at a modern event what kind of amount of setup timing those professional players have left, it's quite tight, and they need to be sure that everything is working and therefore, we have to understand that our role is to make their work as easy as possible.
Having chip-on-board and things with hardened or more durable surfaces and having lightweight, grid-based systems, even down to something like the Muxwave product, which is super thin and would go up and down pretty easily, that stuff, I assume, is pretty attractive?
Tobias Lang: Yeah, that's one of the arguments we believe you will see those solutions in rental and staging too because there are advantages in rental and staging regarding transport cost, which is also a question which is regarding sustainability, and then it is an advantage quite often, in setup timing.
There will be a mix, and this is somehow in our life so incredible that you can always learn from one vertical to the other, so sometimes technology, which is done for integration, will be helpful in event and staging and vice versa.
Last question. I'm curious if there's a project that you've seen in the last year or so, digital signage or pro AV in some way where you thought, okay, that's really good, that's where this is all going.
Tobias Lang: As you can imagine, I was involved in several projects, and I don't want to mention any particular out of this, but I can tell you I'm really looking forward to coming to Vegas to see the fair by myself in real life because I did some running when they were setting it up while different shows in the morning and I always pass by, and when I saw the first images on social media, I was excited and this is for sure a big thing, and like I think everyone in the industry, I would love to see it in real life.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that in December when I go to Digital Signage Experience. I've been watching it for a while now and actually trying to do a podcast with them, and maybe one day they'll say, yes.
Tobias Lang: I will for sure listen to this podcast.
Yes. It's the company that's the LED suppliers, the same one that put the LEDs on the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, Montreal Company. Alright. Tobias, thank you very much for spending time with me.
Tobias Lang: Much appreciated, Dave. Thank you for having the interest, and I enjoyed every single second.
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Tim O’Malley, E Ink
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
Tuesday Aug 08, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Lifers in this industry have been watching the slow but steady evolution and maturity of electronic paper products. and are now seeing them get to a state that they start to make sense for certain display applications, while also looking good enough to satisfy marketers.
Taiwan-based E Ink is by a large margin the best known company developing and marketing this technology. While the big volume is in simple black and white displays for e-readers and electronic shelf labels, E Ink has been steadily improving its capabilities with color.
There are now premium e-paper displays that arguably look as good as what comes off a conventional four-color printing press. And there are also now larger format single and multi-color displays that won't get anywhere near matching a specific Pantone color, but can do the job of adding green to a parking sign, to better indicate availability of spaces.
E-paper products are particularly attractive for some applications these days because they nicely address concerns about sustainability and energy usage. A lot of information signs that get printed and shipped to site can get replaced by e-paper versions that are updated over networks, and use a fraction of the power of more conventional public information displays.
In this episode, I have a great update chat with Tim O'Malley, or Tim O as he says he's most known. He leads commercial activities for E Ink in the US market.
Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Tim, thanks for joining me. In the context of digital signage, what would you see as the main applications for e-paper displays, E Ink displays?
Tim O'Malley: Yeah, great question. So, the e-paper display has two main characteristics that we leverage into those applications. The first is that it's paper-like and it's reflective. It's not creating light, it's reflecting the light around it, and it's very low power; it does not use any power when the image is not changing.
We really want to look at applications that have been using paper traditionally, and improve that experience, create new functionality, and create more sustainability instead of replacing that paper all the time but enabling it to change. So, a big one for us is in retail applications, whether that's shelf tags on the shelves next to the product or even some of the slightly larger ones that are indicating sales and special promotions about the product.
Right, so the ESL market.
Tim O'Malley: Yes, the ESL market. In many cases, you'll go into a store, and you'll see they all look like paper. But they're not, they're actually E Ink enabled shelf tags.
And in that sense, there are a lot of installed signs, over 900 million tags installed in the world, and most people don't even know they're seeing it. Similarly, most of the out-of-home signs that are installed on street corners and bus stations are actually paper. All of the attention, of course, goes to the digital ones that you can update and show the latest movie posters, but there's still a lot of paper out there and if we can bring more sustainability but also run on renewable power and the ability to update it remotely, that's an improvement. So, those are the types of applications.
If you set aside ESLs and digital fact tags, that sort of thing, and then the e-reader market, what would commercial displays represent in the overall business for E Ink. I would imagine it's still pretty small.
Tim O'Malley: It's relatively smaller, that's correct. Our two big applications are the ones that you identified. That means to me of course, that's our growth opportunity, that's a big area that we can help the world, but also grow the company. As we introduce our new color platforms, we have a color that has high saturation and looks like a 4 pass printing press color, and we have color that's perhaps more muted, but it's faster and easier to use and has wider temperature.
We're coming out with a range of products that can go into those different configurations and be more appropriate for larger installations of digital signage.
Yeah, I remember, God! It was probably like 13 years ago, going to Computeex in Taiwan and seeing one of the first E Ink color posters. It was like a 32-inch poster or something like that, and I thought that's pretty cool, but it had a color filter, so the colors were quite muted and over the years, those color filters have gotten a lot better, and as you mentioned, you have E Ink products that look like 4 pass color printing.
Tim O'Malley: Right, the color filter approach does have physics limitations, the lights pass through the color filter, and so you do lose some. We still take that approach, and that's still great for some installations like a lower lift in terms of scalability in order to make a display like that…
And more cost, I would imagine.
Tim O'Malley: There's extra process stuff, so it's the same. The material difference for us was taking those colors, those particles of cyan, magenta, yellow or red, green blue, and moving them into the electronic ink material so that we could move away from adding this filter on top, and that’s where if you print on paper, you get the full saturation. If we use the same particles and move them, then we get full saturation. There was a material challenge in 2013, we hadn’t solved it yet. But some of the stuff that we've shown in the last couple of years, and certainly this year in the Society of Information Display Conference, people would sit in front of it and just stare at it for 10 minutes, and then they would say, “How do you do that? It's pretty good.”
Although I haven't seen it in person, it looks like a very rich, detailed, fully saturated color.
Tim O'Malley: It does. We need to get you to see one in person. We can probably send something that you could look at and send back.
Oh! Do I have to send it back? Damnit.
So, what is the status of that thing? Is it still what you're showing at SIT and things like that, or is it a commercially available product now?
Tim O'Malley: So, in April this year, we announced that the product will be commercially available to purchase early next year. So at this point, it's getting partners and downstream ecosystems on board to be able to support that. So that should basically say the technical risk is in a reasonable place, and it's more about scaling and configuration than it is about solving any technical problems.
So, we started with black and white, as you noticed, so we added red, so it was black, white, red. We added yellow, so then it was black, white, red, and yellow, and now this gets into full color. So it's been a progression for us over the last decade, and that progression has given us the tools and confidence to say the platform has come together in a very reliable way.
Would that be something in fixed sizes, or would it be like custom manufacturing according to whatever the end user needs?
Tim O'Malley: Yeah. So that gets into the business model and how we approach it. The right way to think about it is that most of what we make is a meter wide and a kilometer long, so we make it by a role process. Then it gets cut down to the appropriate size. However, we're all familiar with the mother glass and the gen fabs that go through on this TFT. So there are efficiencies by different sizes, and that's where you get this 16:9 cut. So, we are typically selling sheets of this that someone else downstream from us can cut to size. But then they're still limited by efficient cuts of glass, or we're making modules ourselves, buying in TFTs where again we look at the efficiency of the cuts of glass. So technically any size is possible, practically most people coalesce around standard sizes.
Okay. So it would be the same kind of sizing range that you might find for a flat-panel LCD display?
Tim O'Malley: Yes!
I guess what I'm angling towards is trying to get an understanding of this premium full-color e-paper display. If it was a 55-inch e-pap er display reflective display versus a 55-inch QLED or OLED display, what would be the cost difference? Would they be comparable, or would you be paying a lot more because the volumes are smaller?
Tim O'Malley: So we try to characterize the cost into total cost of ownership.
Yeah, I understand, it's a salesy thing to do, but I get it.
Tim O'Malley:. Yeah. So straight up, It's typically more upfront, but the installation costs are typically much less. So a lot of our installations are running off solar panels. So, there is no digging up of the concrete or running a power line in order to supply it. You put a pole on the ground, you put a solar panel on top, and it works.
So that's where even on the installation side, just the cost of the display itself isn't the only factor, and then if we're using 1% of the energy over the lifetime of the display, or if it's renewable, practically zero because it's not drawing energy then we want to be able to factor that in as well. That's why I try to characterize it as looking at the total cost of ownership because we do want to factor in installation and renewal.
Fair enough. It just becomes a sticker shock issue if you're just selling completely on MSRP or something.
Tim O'Malley: And I also said at the outset that we're looking at paper primarily as our way to improve things, and it turns out that paper's kind of cheap. So yeah, the people who are used to paper pricing will get a sticker shock as well, but the value is there. We think it makes a big difference. That's an education project for us.
I was thinking more of this premium fully saturated color, E Ink displays being indoor products, but you're saying they could go for digital out-of-home applications.
Tim O'Malley: Right now, the highest saturation color is primarily indoor. So again, that's part of our progress to continue adding the capability to do outdoor activities. In the outdoor signs, there are both low and high temperatures and a little bit of the rugged UV side of things.
But UV is not that bad, as you can add filters. Low temperature is relatively easy because heating is small and easy to put in. But cooling is a pain and so making sure that we get the high-temperature right, which we're working on and is very close. It will unlock even more locations for us outside. We do have other products, like we've announced Spectra Six, which is the highest saturation and mostly indoor. Kaleido 3 Outdoor, which is the color filter we talked about, is our other product that was announced in April, and that really is giving us the temperature range for the outdoors that does get into match the configuration of the application.
What's the refresh rate on that?
If it's a transit schedule and it's showing that the next bus is in three minutes when it goes to two minutes, is it pretty snappy, or does the image get a little wobbly for a few milliseconds?
Tim O'Malley: A little wobbly, interesting choice of words.
To use the kid's term spazzes out for a few milliseconds. I've certainly seen that in demos of e-paper displays.
Tim O'Malley: Sure. But I'll take a little wobbly over spazzed out. So the Kaleido 3 Outdoors is built on our black and white platform, which switches very fast. We only have to move white or black particles up or down. So, that's typically a second, let's say. Maybe up to five seconds depending on temperature and other factors. So, it's pretty quick.
The higher saturated sets that we talked about, that's more like 15 seconds to update, and obviously, if you're standing in front of it, 15 seconds is longer enough to notice. So again, we still talk about fitting the configuration to the application. It can be faster, or it can be up to 10 or 15 seconds.
I'm perhaps weird, but I think it's actually interesting in a way of attracting viewers in certain respects when it's going through this change, because you're looking at it going thinking, what the hell's going on there, and then you see what turns into and it's almost like you want to see that happen again.
Tim O'Malley: Yeah. So, you've got a lot of experience in the industry, and you know that motion attracts attention. So there certainly is an element to it, you can use that motion, and in some cases we've tried to add that into the retail application where not just showing that static, say, price of the product, but sparkling a little bit or highlighting a little bit in order to draw somebody's attention as they're walking by in order to attract them to that product. So that is something that can be done, and it's an advantage of moving from paper to a display but still keeping five-year life on the coin cell battery instead of having to connect it to power.
How important was going to color filters for your transit or municipal displays?
Was that something that the end user said, “We like this, but we need to show a no parking sign or whatever with a red filter on it?”
Tim O'Malley: Yeah, it was important feedback from the market and consumers, whether that's a public transportation subway line where you want to be able to show each of the line colors with red, green, blue, et cetera, appropriately, or the bus lines often have colors associated with them as well, or red means no parking, is a common thing. Red is used to indicate something of special importance. That was definitely based on the feedback.
That's where we started with the color filter because that was the integration and that was the easier technical challenge and then moved to built-in particles in order to make the color more saturated over time.
Is that where you're at now with the, I think you said, Kaleido 3 or something like that?
Tim O'Malley: The Kaleido platform is the color filter platform, and then Spectra is our higher saturation, has traditionally mostly been for retail platform, right? And with the reaching of full color, we're looking to expand that into broader markets.
Is there still R&D work going on to introduce video?
I saw low frame rate E Ink displayed at Touch Taiwan about four or five years ago and thought, that's interesting, but it's got a long way to go before that's commercially viable.
Tim O'Malley: Yeah, so there's a couple of things there.
Recently we showed, again at that same conference in LA, a display running a video. I think it was around 15 frames per second just to showcase that it was possible to have a display running a video and that was using a color filter on the display to do it.
In general, however, the main advantage of replacing paper with an e-paper display is the low power when the image is not changing. So most of the applications that make sense aren't using video because they want low power savings. Like I mentioned, the shelf tags are five to seven years on a pair of coin cells. You could shorten that to three months if you did video on the coin cells. But why would you?
So if someone wanted to try and do video, it would lose some of the key benefits of low power. It could technically be done, but that's probably not the best fit for the technology stream that we've been focused on, and the application we are focused on.
It turns out there's a really good solution in the world for video. As you mentioned, QLED or OLED. So that's a fine choice for that application and for paper replacement, and for things like that, we're developing a differentiated approach.
So you can go down that path with R&D, but it's not a core focus, and you stay in your lane, so to speak?
Tim O'Malley: That's a great rephrasing. Little shorter. That was good. You're hired.
I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago for a conference, a digital signage conference, and Europe's very different from North America in a whole bunch of ways, but particularly when it comes to the mindset and the requirements around energy conservation and sustainability.
When I was asked, while I was over there, “What's the mindset in North America?” And I would say they're starting to talk about it, but it's nothing like it is over here. I know your company talks a lot about energy savings and sustainability. Is it more of a discussion in other parts of the world than perhaps in North America?
Tim O'Malley: Yes, absolutely. I agree with your impression of Europe. There was a regulation passed in Germany, and I think one also in France, limiting the amount of time that a digital display for non-public information, so an advertising display can be operated during the day. So I think it's six hours.
Primarily that regulation is intended to save energy. My general observation from looking at the retail market where we were working in shelf tags, it started in Europe. They were maybe leading the thoughts on the benefits that you can get with low power displays, particularly on labor savings because the labor situation in Europe is a little bit different than in Asia and North America.
But the trend to use e-paper displays in retail migrated from Europe, then to Asia, and from Asia over to North America. You might have seen earlier this year Walmart announced they were adopting it. I expect the same thing to happen with this type of focus on sustainability and energy usage, and signage. We will see that Europe will lead, and then eventually, as the configurations are more mature and the benefits are clearer, it'll start to migrate around the world. So I do expect that the stuff that you saw at that conference will be a trend.
Is the mindset around being socially responsible and environmentally responsible, or is it more calculated that this is going to save us money, or is it simply they're doing it because regulations are forcing our hand?
Tim O'Malley: I expect that when it turns into a trend, which I think it will be all of the above. I mentioned that the initial push to put shelf tags in retail was primarily for labor savings, and it was primarily in Europe. But now, if you look at the recent interview that the Walmart CFO did, there's a return on investment by making these changes; we can update prices easier, we can compete online, can do supply management, and it helps us with logistics. Also, we still have the labor savings, and it looks better.
When the configurations start to mature and come online, it'll still be about sustainability, but there'll be other aspects that are beneficial as well. We can use it for communicating with the public during emergency situations. That will also lend to the trend. Right now, it's a lot about sustainability and energy savings. I think as it gets better, more and more attributes will start to be recognized and feed the trend.
I'm curious again about mass transport.
I've seen and written about a number of pilots and initial deployments of e-paper displays as real-time transit schedule information signs at bus stops, and so on. I'm curious whether you see those turn into full deployments or, for the most part, they are still early-stage pilots?
Tim O'Malley: Most installations we've been working with today are city by city, shall we say? Each city is typically doing a pilot before moving to a larger installation. So we're in the process of that earlier stage. In some cases, there are signs hanging from handles in subway cars in China. That's an installation.
Late stage pilot is maybe a reasonable answer, but also it's part of the process of getting it through these stages of government bureaucracy approval, figuring out how they want to make infrastructure investment, and validating that these different applications and new cases make sense. So bus stations, bus signs, and bus shelters are a strong category for us, but it's still early days.
Yeah. Is there any mass transport system globally that has fully deployed?
Tim O'Malley: There's not a fully deployed global system that I'm aware of, but there's a number of, especially cities, that are interested in what could be done with the right configurations, and this is where we are getting to a full-color product is also helpful to those installations. Instead of talking about it being limited to black, white, and red, it can do everything. Let's figure out how we adapt that in a way that makes sense. So it turns the conversation from talking about potential limitations to talking about potential solutions.
Yeah, I think Sydney, Australia, and transport for London and the UK have both done pretty substantial pilots, right?
Tim O'Malley: Yes. Very impressive.
There you go. I haven't lost all my marbles yet.
Tim O'Malley: You have been in the industry for a while. You must follow it.
Yeah, that's what I get up in the morning and do.
What about the medical market? I think that's an area that's really got a lot of opportunity in big healthcare institutions for information displays, like outside of patient rooms, at the nursing stations, on and on, and I know on your website that's talked about. I'm curious, what stage of adoption is that? I suspect early.
Tim O'Malley: It's the earliest stage, a fine description. We identified that opportunity and started working towards it. It's a little bit ahead in Asia. Right at the time when Covid was starting, it turned out not to be a great strategic moment to really be focusing on healthcare. The worldwide healthcare hospital industry started to focus on something else at that time, and it has taken a little bit of a reset for us to engage in those conversations.
Nevertheless, whether it's an information board in the patient room where it's displaying key statistics that are relevant to the patient, such as their doctor's name or their schedule for the day. And we've done a pilot with Brigham Women's Hospital in Boston, where there's positive feedback on that type of board in the room. It's nice in the sense that it's not giving off light at night, it's not like keeping you awake as if your TV showing the same information, and it's unobtrusive if you decide you did want to watch TV, it just sits on the side of the room with the information if and when you want it.
Yeah, I suspect, though, it's an incredibly long sales cycle.
Tim O'Malley: Everyone tells me healthcare is extremely lucrative and extremely hard to break into. We're working on the break into it at the moment.
Yeah, I don't think there's any deal that you do in a couple of meetings.
Tim O'Malley: But there's real value there. We think it's a potential solution. We are starting to see the conversations change now that the world is getting back to more normalcy.
We might be seeing a little bit of adoption on the inventory management front first, where you take the same shelf tags that are being used in retail and bring them into those stock rooms in the hospitals and connect that to the inventory management system. So if something starts to run low, you push a button on the tag, or maybe it's even automated by a scale, you can have a significant savings by managing your inventory better. So we're seeing in the back room, maybe not seen by all the patients, that might be a pretty good application. So, we're still exploring ways to add value there.
Yeah, I chatted with a company called Freshwater Digital in Michigan and their digital signage solutions company, but they also do ESLs, and they were describing how they were seeing some activity around things like e-paper fact tags in research labs for the cages for and trying different medications on lab rats or monkeys or whatever, and I thought that's interesting.
Tim O'Malley: Exactly. I've also heard and seen some of that. It's leveraging that combination of this cloud communication infrastructure and the fact that you don't need to connect the tag to power. It can sit there, it can be in communication, it can update when it needs to, but it can also go for a year plus on a coin cell. That's enabling us to go into places that might have been more difficult for traditional solutions.
There's been a lot of noise the last couple of years coming out of CES with, I think it was a BMW that had E Ink, some sort of an E Ink overlay that would make the car changeable. Is that like trade show bling or something that's real and one day might be out there?
Tim O'Malley: Absolutely real, and one day might be out there, but also a little trade show bling. So working with BMW has been awesome. They're great designers, and taking a technical mindset and engineering and matching it up with some design thinking created what was really a wow concept car. And so, the goal was to create a concept car to show what's possible, and what was shown at CES this year was a car covered in E Ink material that could switch between 32 different colors and show different patterns and different segments and create a lot of wow factor.
Ideally, over time we'll start to work this into some simpler parts of the car, maybe inside the car. We also have some integration with the front lights and with the headlights and then work towards that full-color car covering; the exciting thing about that is it's moving away from what we think of as digital information into something that's more like personalization. Now, you can change your clothes every day or from one venue to another depending on whether you're at a barbecue or a formal dinner, and you could change your car too in order to reflect either location. Hyper personalization seems to be a trend. That was part of what BMW was leaning into we have a sustainable solution, but also a digital solution for personalization.
What about building materials? I think it was near San Diego airport, or at the airport, they had a parking garage that was collided in another E Ink material.
Tim O'Malley: Yeah, that was based on an old battleship design from World War II called Dazzle, where it would break up the lines. So you didn't have quite an outline on the horizon, and they wanted to bring that same feeling into the rental car center, because they have the naval base out there. And we did have a whole bunch of signs on the outside of the building that could change and pre-programmed patterns.
You said it did that. Is that no longer active?
Tim O'Malley: Oh, it's still there. Architecture is not a primary focus, so if we start from that first principle of looking at places where people use paper and then bringing added benefit. Paper isn't widely used on the outside of buildings as a material. You might have some signs or some advertisements, and we did talk about that.
Architecture, there's a lot of it. It might be interesting over time, but it wouldn't be my first step from where we're today.
That's also a very long sales cycle.
Tim O'Malley: It's also a very long sales cycle, yes, and it's not traditionally an easy way to bring a high-tech material in. You really need to make the configuration simple to bring onto the site for people to install and use.
This flew by. Just one last question. What can we expect to see what kind of announcements can you hint out over the next six to twelve months for E Ink?
Tim O'Malley: We're heavily leaning into applications that are color, and we want to bring full color into all of our product lines. So the thing that I would be looking for is more announcements by customers and partners that have E Ink displays that are upgrading them to those full color solutions and in many cases I think that will help us unlock another round of excitement as consumers become aware of what can be possible, and hopefully, smart cities start to look at that and adopt it as well.
So full color in more places is those type of announcements that I'm looking for.
Alright. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Digital Signage Yearbook 2023
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
Wednesday Jul 26, 2023
In this special episode, I chat with Balthasar Mayer and Antonia Hamberger of invidis Consulting, the Munich-based firm that has for many years produced an annual yearbook that takes a deep dive into the digital signage industry.
The new yearbook for 2023 is out, with versions in German and an international one in English that includes quite a bit of copy and input from Sixteen:Nine.
This podcast goes into the story behind the yearbook, its growth beyond first Germany and then Europe, and what readers will find in the 2023 version - which is some 200 pages of editorial (not advertorial) content, including regional market analyses.
The good news - it's a free download.
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Shane Vega, Userful
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Using existing network infrastructure has long been talked up as an efficient way to manage and deliver digital signage solutions in large companies, but the concept has been clouded by concerns - like the cost of additional AV hardware and the impact of all that video on the company network.
But we now live in a world where companies support countless video conferencing sessions with piles of users, with little or no latency. Other technologies have also caught up, and computing just keeps getting more powerful.
Which is why I was interested in chatting with Shane Vega, VP of Marketing for the Silicon Valley software firm Userful, about his company's AV over IP solutions. The company has its roots in Calgary, Alberta and still does a lot of the R&D work there.
Userful first showed up in digital signage circles talking about a different way, using software and endpoints, to drive video walls. But in the last few years it has been much more focused on a broader IP-driven solution that tends to start with control rooms and operations centers, but can also drive things like meeting room displays and digital signage around corporate campuses.
There's been a lot of discussion about AV needs converging with IT interests, but from Vega's perspective, that convergence is already firmly in place.
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TRANSCRIPT
Shane, thank you for joining me. Where are you today?
Shane Vega: I am in sunny Tampa, Florida, where although it's not all that sunny today, we've got some rain, but that's per the norm now.
Now, Userful is in Silicon Valley, but a lot of the developers are in Calgary, right?
Shane Vega: Yeah, that's correct. All of our R&D, engineering team, and the like, they're all up in Calgary, Canada.
So you're missing the Calgary Stampede this week?
Shane Vega: I am missing the Stampede.
But you know what, I believe they deserve a bit of some good time because they spend the majority of the time avoiding the minus 30-degree weather.
Yeah, I spent a number of years in Calgary, and it's an interesting weather city.
Shane Vega: Yeah. You know it's bad when they've developed an entire infrastructure of walkways between buildings to avoid having to go outside.
Yeah, just like Minneapolis.
Shane Vega: Exactly.
All right, so we had a quick chat in the LG booth at Infocomm, and you explained what Userful was up to with its Infinity platform and AV over IP and AV as a Service and so on, and I've seen that. I will wholeheartedly admit I don't totally get it, but how you explained it to me was very interesting, and I thought this would be useful for a lot of people to understand the infrastructure and distribution side of digital signage.
We spend so much time talking about the content and business strategy and all those sorts of things, but behind-the-scenes stuff is awfully important, and maybe we could start out by just explaining what Userful is and does and where you came from because when Userful first came out, it was presented to me as video wall software, and I had a hell of a time wrapping my brain around what it was all about. But I know you guys have evolved quite a bit.
Shane Vega: Yeah. I appreciate that, Dave. To answer your question, Userful has grown exponentially in the last 5+ years. John Marshall, our CEO came on board about 7 years or so ago. My timing might be a little bit off, and when he came into the organization, we were a perpetual software company, so we weren't software as a service, we weren't selling subscriptions. We were selling perpetual software…
You'd buy a license and then get that supported?
Shane Vega: Yeah, you'd buy a license then we support it for the duration of however long you wanted to use it, and the license for the software was pretty siloed, right? It was, “Hey, you can buy this operations center license.” Where, to your point, we were just managing content on a video wall.
And it was mostly control rooms, right?
Shane Vega: Mostly control rooms, almost exclusively for a time, and then we evolved into the digital signage world, and it was cloud-based digital signage exclusively. So what most folks are familiar with is hosting up in AWS, giving you some access to dynamic tools for creating templates and the like.
During Infocom, what we've launched and from the time that I just mentioned until about, maybe two and a half years ago or three years ago, we've pivoted the company from perpetual to subscription-based software as a service, and that's who Userful is. We are a software company, and we've been a software company tailored to the needs of the AV industry.
Most currently, we've just released our newest platform, and that's really been the biggest evolution, which is moving away from application-specific deployments into more of a platform approach for AV over IP and that is really the biggest breakthrough development that we've had here, because in the older version of our software, we were a monolithic code base. Again, we were just selling either the operation center software or we were selling some digital signage. Everything was monolithic. It was difficult for our engineering team to manage updates, firmware, bug fixes, and the like.
We've now moved to a distributed code base that has given us exceptional flexibility with how we develop our software for the various use cases and applications in the AV industry. So if you think about what you've seen in the conversations you and I have had, essentially, and you hit the nail right on the head, this isn't just about fancy software managing content on a video wall. Can we do that? Of course, we've got feature sets for various different use cases, but there's also the infrastructure piece, and this was my “aha moment” through a different lens at Infocomm.
AV over IP has matured through the years from IP addressable matrix switchers where everything was still very much centralized into IP addressable nodes, encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers, and all the different AV manufacturers out there have now standardized on this proprietary hardware version of AV over IP, and I started to ask myself the question: what is their value proposition in doing that?
And I overheard quite a few folks during this past Infocomm talk about the value of this distributed architecture: enabling flexibility, scalability, augmenting workflows, the total cost of ownership being lower, and I sat there a little bit baffled because these are all the same things that we talk about at Userful and so it really opened up an area where I feel like we do need to evangelize a little bit more about how Userful do AV over IP differently, and that we don't necessitate all of the hardware infrastructure. We truly are a software platform, but because of the IT protocols that currently exist, that's how we developed our software.
So when you think about Userful, I've actually positioned us a little bit more as an IT solution than an AV solution, even though our entire solution is built around the AV industry and its needs. The reason I say that is because we're literally a server, non-proprietary, and an endpoint, and that endpoint is software, so our uClient application.
In between the two is network infrastructure. There are no end encoders, decoders, transmitters, receivers, and the list goes on. Because we are able to transmit content and aggregate content, meaning we can pull in sources of visual information and audio information into a data library or data store that we manage on our server and distribute that information to any destination or any screen and we do that all with IP protocols.
The same IP protocols, by the way, and this is how I usually get people to have the “aha moment.” If we were having this over a Teams meeting, Dave, or a Zoom meeting, we would be transmitting video two ways. In many cases, multiple participants from multiple regions of the world share two-way audio and video. We would be able to share content from our local computers into that meeting, and nobody would have to go out and buy a proprietary encoder and decoder to make that happen. So using that same infrastructure or those IT protocols that are currently at work, IP protocols like WebRTC for instance, we're able to build a solution that leverages those same advancements for the purposes of AV over IP.
It’s a bit of a mouthful, but that's what we're doing.
So you wouldn't have been able to do some of that 10-15 years ago because the network infrastructure is a lot of larger corporations hadn't really caught up with that, so you would flood a network if you were using a lot of video and so on, but things have changed.
Shane Vega: Things have changed substantially, and I would even say it's been not even 10-15 years ago, just 5-10 years ago, and the reason I say that is because there are the laws of engineering and physics like Butter's Law, Kryder’s Law, Moore's Law, which talks about how rapidly the advancements of, let's say, fiber optic networks, which are doubling every nine months, the amount of bandwidth that you can get between the fiber optic cable or the amount of processing speed that you can get out of a CPU and how fast these advancements are happening.
What we're doing and the way that we're doing it is taxing the CPU of that server. It's also taxing the GPU of that server, the graphics card because those are the two major components that we use for our solution. If you think about just two years ago, Dave, our servers that we were deploying in the field were 8 cores of processors. Right now, I have a server that we've certified that's 192 cores of processors, so we're able to do exceptionally and exceedingly more on a single server, which is why we've actually built our solution to be a data center solution by and large, where you take a big beefy server, you put it in your data center, and you're virtualizing all of the traditional hardware that you would need, and you're managing a wide range of AV endpoints, whether it's digital signage, meeting rooms, operations centers, or what have you.
Is there a baseline for what you need in terms of the network infrastructure?
I'm definitely not an IT Architect, but do you need a CAT6E, or can you do this over Wifi, I don't know, and I suspect a lot of people don’t know.
Shane Vega: Yeah, so it's a good question. So again, because we're optimizing for IT protocols, we're able to do a lot, right? From the screen to the switch, we're just really looking for that one-gigabit uplink, which is standard. Most folks are going to have that. From the server to the source to the server and all that infrastructure pulling into the server, we're looking for the 10 gigabit uplink.
So there are some requirements for the network, but nothing that is outside the realms of standard network topology. The real intricacies or the real areas where we get into some deeper discussions are when they have multiple networks that we have to traverse. When you start getting into DOD environments where things have to be air-gapped and there's no internet connectivity and when networks start to get a little bit more complex, that's where we have to begin to get a little bit more intentional about how we design it.
Now that said, we haven't yet met a deployment that we couldn't meet the network requirements for, even though some of those were those complex ones.
There were two things that particularly interested me.
The first was, as you laid out earlier, that you don't need all these encoders and other bits of hardware to layer into a network to make this happen. So you're cutting out conceivably a lot of capital costs and a lot of potential fail points, and I guess the other thing that intrigues me, and you can talk about that next is or after.
The first question would be the idea that you can use this for multiple aspects. I suspect there are control room data dashboards, and software platforms out there, but one of the things you talked about at Infocomm is that you can cascade this out to do all kinds of different things from operation centers to experience centers off of the same platform.
Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly, Dave, and to answer the first question, you hit the nail on the head with one of my areas of confusion when I was at Infocomm, and I heard people talking about the low total cost of ownership, and they were tying it to these encoders and decoders.
We don't require those things. So when I think about the total cost of ownership, I think about the hard work upfront costs that you don't need to have and the additional BTU output from all of that hardware that you would normally need, that's no longer going to be there, which is going to drive your HVAC costs, right? You don't have all the power consumption. So for green initiatives and companies who are looking to do things, and this is a big one moving forward, folks want to be more green, and get green initiatives going like lower carbon emissions, lowering power consumption by not having all that hardware is yet another total cost of ownership benefit for Userful.
Again, our encoding happens at the one server that we require in that Nvidia graphics card. The decoding is done by a piece of software we developed called the uClient application. Now, where that uClient application resides, we give you tons amount of flexibility. We have integrated it into certain endpoints like Web OS or Tizen or Android. And that gives us the flexibility to be able to load that client application in various different environments and use cases, depending on the display type if it's an LCD, if it's a direct view LED, and how we manage that.
In some cases, we do have a small appliance that you might need at the edge, and that would be one additional piece of hardware per display, depending on the display type, and that's an Android box that we load our uClient application onto if the display doesn't have the ability to integrate with our software.
So if it's a smart display that already has a system on a chip on it, conceivably you don't need that Android box?
Shane Vega: Correct. So now what you're left with, as I said, is just a server with software at the edge, and network infrastructure in between.
So ongoing maintenance costs are substantially lower. Initial hardware costs are lower. Your total cost of ownership around all the things I mentioned earlier is going to be lower. Therefore, your refresh costs are going to be lower. Because with hardware, every three to five years, in some cases five to seven years, you're having to do a hardware refresh. It's always tied to CapEx because it's usually proprietary. They have to budget for CapEx renewals of all this hardware.
Because of Userful's deployment model, we can take on an OPEX model for those folks who would benefit from that because your hardware refresh can be built into your standard IT refreshes because you own the hardware. In many cases, as many as we can possibly, push for, we don't provide the server, we want the end user to provide the server, and that way, it gets built into your traditional OPEX refresh, and that way, the only recurring cost is the software.
To your next question about what we spoke about and the benefits of the platform. This is where our software really begins to shine, right? Because our platform is accessible through a web browser, so no proprietary software needs to be downloaded for a user to access it. You access our software through a traditional HTML5 web browser.
Once you access the software through a web browser, the first thing you're going to notice is we have six applications that any user can take advantage of. In most cases, folks aren't trying to eat the elephant hole, right? They'll have a use case like digital signage, or they'll have a use case like meeting rooms or experiential centers or what have you, and that's one of the reasons why we are licensing the server. We're licensing the CPU cores and the number of graphics cards that you need on that server so that if you have a smaller use case, your out-of-pocket costs are gonna be lower because you need a smaller server. But when you log in for the first time, you're gonna see, “Oh, I got this for digital signage, but I didn't know I could run my meeting room here.” or, “I didn't realize that I can do these artistic video walls,” or “I didn't realize I can incorporate these data dashboards from Power BI or Tableau as a native source and share those to any display that Userful is managing.”
The value is seen almost immediately, and so what we do is try to help people understand the peripheral or parallel use cases. So I use digital signage quite a bit, and I gave you this analogy regarding airports at Infocomm, Dave, where at least half a dozen times in the last six to eight months, I've had conversations with various airports, and most of them are pulling us in because they have an operation center. Airport operations center, or security operations center, or what have you, and they'll say, “Hey, we want the Userful software to run the content on these displays and video walls in the operation center,” and when we have these discovery calls, I'll typically ask, “Hey, have you guys thought about the advantages of using our platform to help you with the signage?” And I'm usually shot down rather immediately, and most folks know Airports are convoluted in the way that they deploy their technology. They got various different groups. They're typically siloed, but specifically the airport operations centers, I'll just say, “Hey, look, I get that, but let me just throw this use case out there and see if it lands and hits you as showing value.”
You're in an airport operations center. Wouldn't you want to be able to manage the entire network of screens that are currently being used to show baggage, arrivals, departures, signage, and all your wayfinding screens? Would it not be valuable to be able to manage those as part of your airport operations, also, I've noticed in many cases, they'll incorporate security into their AOC. Some of them have independent security operations centers, but in either event, I would tell them. What happens if you have an incident at the airport? Wouldn't you want to be able to take over those screens from the command center that's responsible for monitoring and sending strategic messages to people, depending on what the situation is? If there's a fire, “evacuate.” If god forbids, there's an active shooter, “take shelter in place,” and be able to send strategic messages to various screens all from within your operation center? Well, you can't currently do that because you've got multiple systems driving all of these different AV endpoints.
If you had a single platform, it doesn't just give you the ability to scale your deployment, it gives you the ability to scale your workflow and become more flexible to augment those workflows where I can send strategic messages to screens, I can manage arrivals and baggage from my AOC, if that's such a thing that I need. In addition, we could help you with your meeting rooms. You can walk into a meeting room, and I can help you cast some content in a meeting room and have an impromptu meeting on a drop of a dime, as just a few use cases of what our platform can do.
Sometimes, when you have these platforms that say they can do, in your case, at least six different things, there can be compromises. In other words, “Yeah, we can do all these things. That's just none of them are particularly deep, or maybe one of them is deep, and the other ones are so so.”
Do you get that question at all?
Shane Vega: Ironically, no. We don't get that question. But it's a question most people should be asking David, and I'll tell you that when that does come up, and it's only come up a handful of times, I'm always very candid about what we can't do as well as what we can do. And there is truth in the fact that we are software as a service, and so there are certain applications that still have roadmap features, candidly, that we're going to continue to augment and build them out.
If you could probably imagine the top three or four of our use cases would be: operations centers, digital signage, meeting rooms, and data dashboards. We do those very well. With experiential environments, we manage those artistic video walls very well. Now when you talk about experiential environments, there are some things that some folks might want to get involved with, but we might have to have some deeper conversations, right?
And that really is around interactivity. Do you want multi-touch video walls, like in a museum for kids or something like that? Where we have some roadmap items to help ensure that multi-touch is what people would expect, where you don't want to have the lag, you don't want to have any of those issues when people are trying to have that fun experience as a child or what have you.
So there are certain features that are still roadmap items, but what I will bookend that with is, before coming over to Userful, I worked with one of the larger AV firms globally, and while I worked there, part of my interaction with customers was, “Man, I wish I could do more of these things with a single solution, I have to farm it out to so many folks.”
But more than that, I would have feature requests for the stuff that was out there, and it was always in one ear, out the other. I don't care which manufacturer it was. If I went to some of these larger manufacturers and I said, hey, you really would benefit if you did this or this. It just didn't go anywhere, and then I had a similar conversation with the Userful back in about 2018 at a trade show, I said, look, your software is good, but it really needs these four or five things to really be a competitor in the space that you're looking to deploy, which at the time it was operation centers.
I'd say if it was six months, it was a long time. So within six months, I got a call from the then VP of Sales who said, “Hey, I want to have a meeting with you, Shane. We've incorporated all of your requests into our software,” and that really pivoted my approach to looking at users as, alright, these guys are the future of AV and, little FYI, we actually got that award at Infocomm, the Future of AV award.
But the reason for that was, look, if we're going to be software as a service, then we have to prioritize feature requests from our customers above our own market research or our own gut check, and so that's part of my role here at Userful as VP of Marketing is that I'm also over Product Marketing, which is over the roadmap, and so I get involved in customer calls quite a bit, and I'll hear some of these features that to your initial question is, “Hey, how do you go deeper with these applications?” I look for that feedback, and then I get to go back to the roadmap and go, “Hey, we need to prioritize this, this, and this feature. Push out the other features to the next release. Let's get these done because it's revenue dependent. We've got customers who would value this. Let’s get it done!”
We take that very seriously here at Userful, and we're at four releases a year, so you'll never have to wait all that long.
So you referenced Airports. I'm curious, in the context of third-party software development, if there's a software company that works in the Airport realm but isn't doing digital signage or some of the things you do, but they want to visualize information on displays, is there an API or something that they could develop to work with Userful or does it have to be Userful development to add that capability on?
Shane Vega: We have an entire program around API. So we do have our own API, currently, it's A REST API, so we can receive tons of different messages and calls to trigger certain reactions within our software.
But additionally, that's got its own roadmap in and of itself. So we have our software application roadmap, and then we have our API roadmap where we're going to be developing even deeper integrations and capabilities including, but not limited to, even wanting to create possible easy configuration tools for customers who can use our API to do whatever they want, onsite.
Are control rooms and operations centers the gateway for the initial point of contact, the thing that gets people interested, and then other things cascade out of that?
Shane Vega: That has been our experience. We call that our land. So we're land and expand through our platform. Let's find the use case. Let's land where it makes sense, and then let's show the power of our expansion, and just because of how the company has evolved, operation centers have been kind of the tip of our spear, and it makes sense because operation centers will use two or three of our applications out of the gate, right?
They'll use the operation center software, they'll use meeting rooms for war rooms or situation rooms. They'll also use our trends for dashboards and Power BI integrations, depending on what type of operation center it is, so they usually get value from several of our use cases and applications out of the gate. And if it's a large enough organization and we're typically targeting LDOs (large distributed organizations), they'll have multiple operations centers, which gives us multiple points of connection and interaction and engagement to open up opportunities to talk about the meeting rooms beyond your war room and situation room, or some operation centers are fishbowls, where they want to bring folks in their data center and they just want to use it as a showpiece to show their customers how well they manage their data, and so they might have welcome screens outside, and we'll let them know, “Hey, we can manage those welcome screens for you as well,” and that evolves into a larger digital signage strategy, corporate communications, so on and so forth.
These large organizations, do they have separate AV and IT departments, or are they pretty much hiving into IT now?
Shane Vega: So more and more, IT is taking over, but what's happening is it used to be that they have AV specialists on staff, and by and large, it was for the meeting rooms, and in some cases, the digital signage where they had AV technicians or AV specialists on-site, and those were the guys were the gatekeepers to decide what technology gets deployed.
Yeah, and get everything working before the meeting starts somehow.
Shane Vega: Exactly. “Who's got HDMI? Who's got DVI?”
So to that point, people keep talking about the convergence of AV and IT, and I don't know why. That convergence happened years ago. People are now starting to realize that because of that convergence, the IT organization or the IT departments within these larger organizations are going to be the ones holding the budget and are going to be the ones responsible for managing any AV resources on the network.
And so, we have intentionally built our product to cater to those IT stakeholders in the organization. When you say things like, “Hey, you can centrally monitor the entire platform from a web browser,” they really get that right. When you say, “We're an IT solution, we're not an AV solution, which means we're not going to put all this IP addressable hardware on your network,” a lot of the walls come down from their security concerns. You then begin to tell them that, look, you can augment your roles-based access control, and integrate with LDAP. Plus, we give you tools that are IT specific to help you monitor things like, what is the impact on my network? What is my current CPU utilization, or what's my current GPU utilization on the server that we're licensing? We give them all of those tools built into our software. So it's not just AV end-user tools that we're giving. We're also giving those IT tools that help the IT stakeholders manage deployments because we recognize these are going to be larger in scale. They're going to be responsible for a lot. Let's make it easy for them.
When you talk about AV as a service, it's a term I've heard for a while, but you guys go at it quite a bit differently from what you're saying.
Shane Vega: Yeah, we do, and Dave, I struggle with that, because we were flirting with the term AV as a service, and we started to use it quite a bit. But I know, coming from the integration world, that AV as a service historically meant we're going to just finance this stuff, right? We're going to get a leasing program, and we're going to build in the hardware, the software, the services, whatever we can into a monthly payment that makes it nice and easy for you guys.
We approach it differently by saying, we are software as a service that's for the AV industry. Therefore, we are AV as a service, meaning, we don't have all that hardware that you have to purchase. You're truly able to deploy all of these AV use cases and manage an entire host of AV applications from within our platform. And we are a software that you pay for based on subscription, typically three-year plans.
That's what we mean when we say AV as a service. It's exactly that. It's a software as a service, which is which is the actual term, which is software as a service for the AV world.
This strikes me as something that probably has a learning curve, as every software platform does, but it is almost something you kind of have to ease your way into?
Shane Vega: Believe it or not, not really, and I think that would be more pertinent if somebody was wanting to say, “Hey, I want to use your entire platform right now.” But as I said earlier, most folks are saying, “Hey, I want this operation center,” and they're familiar with Operation Center softwares. They know what they want. They know they want to be able to build custom layouts. They want to manage big, beautiful video walls. They want to be able to interact with sources with soft KVM functionalities so that they're not just visualizing the sources but they can engage with them because they've got tools, right? They got video management tools, and they've got access control, what have you, and so that software that we're providing isn't going to look and feel a whole lot different than a lot of the other softwares they're used to using.
Now, we do it differently. So the real benefit, rewinding all over to the beginning of this conversation, is, yes, we're giving you all these software applications and features, but it's the infrastructure that really differentiates us.
Along with removing different hardware components from this kind of a network, you're also removing potentially different software applications that you'd also need because you've got this stack of different things you can do?
Shane Vega: Yeah, exactly.
To that point, Dave, when I showed this at Infocomm, when I gave my demos there, typically when you deploy an AV solution, let's call it digital signage, that's the background that you're most familiar with.
In digital signage, let's say, you use it for corporate communications; you'll have screens all over the office. In some cases, they'll want to be able to integrate that digital signage into their meeting rooms as well, and when the screens are in standby mode, they want to be able to have some of those corporate communications as part of the digital signage strategy, managing those meeting rooms. But when you go into the meeting room, they'll typically need some type of infrastructure to support those meetings and local collaboration. Usually, it's a network of AV infrastructure, HDMI cables, or what have you, go into some form of a matrix switch that's going to be some type of tablet controller that can give you the ability to manage what laptop is being viewed on what screen.
With Userful, because the software does so much, the screens that we manage are not tied to any one specific application, and that's really the beauty of it. So I can walk into a room where they're showing corporate communication. I can sit down, open my laptop, and immediately start a meeting by screencasting whatever's on my laptop onto the screen in that room without connecting a single AV cable. I could then open up my operations center software on that same screen and turn it into an impromptu war room or situation room where I'm pulling in multiple sources and building out customized layouts, and navigating through a crisis. So there are a lot of things that we can do, and it's not dependent on the screen, and, to your point, we've reduced not just the hardware need but the software as well.
All right, Shane, that was super interesting. I know much more about this space than I did half an hour ago.
Shane Vega: It's been great talking to you, Dave. I appreciate it.
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Francesco Ziliani, SpinetiX
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
Tuesday Jun 27, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The Swiss technology firm SpinetiX has evolved its go-to-market approach through the years - positioning itself much more as a software solutions firm than as a manufacturer of very nice media layout boxes ... that also came with software.
The company has end-point devices that have been operating flawlessly for years, but to grow and meet demands, it had to look at what it wanted to be and what it wanted to do.
Now, founder and longtime CEO Francesco Ziliani is talking in terms of SpinetiX being a SAAS software company, and happily showing how carefully selected partners - like Taiwan's iBase - are also now making hardware that works with the platform.
I met with Francesco down in Orlando, where the company had a stand at InfoComm and was also doing off-site meetings and demos with partners. We get into a lot of things, including where he's seeing a lot of market growth. As is the case more broadly, workplace communications is a big growth driver.
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TRANSCRIPT
We started out by my asking him about company priorities right now ...
Francesco Ziliani: Look, this year, the priority is to remind people that we are still hardware because we believe hardware is important, but software as a service is really what I believe is the right strategy, the right vision for us, and to make this model SaaS for an indirect sales channel work, because if you think about most of SaaS, they are a direct business. Microsoft and Adobe sell direct; we do not.
We have two levels, distributors and resellers. So to make this model work, you need active partners. So you don't need only an opportunist or someone who once has an opportunity and starts selling SpinetiX. You really need someone who says, I share the same vision. I like the product, and I keep learning it so I can bring more over time, and it's through that AV channel; only some are ready for this step. Many people like box-moving types of business, right? I buy something, I add the margin, I install and resell. So everything I can do to inspire resellers to ask themselves, is SaaS for digital signage, for my customers, and for me, interesting? Am I ready to explore it seriously? That's something there that can help SpinetiX.
Yeah, the company has, in certain respects, pivoted, not really, but when I think about SpinetiX, I think about these gorgeous little boxes that are ultra-reliable, and you get the software with it, and now you are talking much more as a software company that has its own purpose-built boxes, and as you were telling me before we turned the microphone on, getting partners.
Francesco Ziliani: Yes. Our tagline is: We do everything except scrapes because it's true. We have the hardware. Now, we use partners to manufacture, but we co-design. We have the operating system, the DSOS, and the rendering engine all integrated, and that's also quite unique because, let's take BrightSign, for example, they have their operating system, but they allow others to install the rendering engine, and now you have two people responsible. BrightSign is upgrading the operative system, the CMS might not follow up or vice versa. The CMS needs to do something, and BrightSign is not there yet.
In our work, that cannot happen. It's like Apple. We control everything. So every update is tested and comes with everything you need. That's why the reliability is so high. So that's also an advantage. Now this is still there. It's available on GP 400. Now we can also install the same DSOS on an SDM module. Sharp NEC is a partner now that we signed, and we are going to have a Sharp NEC display in the booth with the SDM. So that's integrated.
What’s an SDM?
Francesco Ziliani: Smart device module. So SDM and IBASE have the same philosophy. So now I'm not forced to manufacture myself. I can ask someone, you are good at manufacturing, you manufacture and install my operating system on it. So we work together. The operating system is very reliable, we cut everything useless for digital signage, so very compact, and then rendering engine with all the APIs, and so we basically make all these players like a zombie for SpinetiX., and as a zombie, they can talk with IO.
They're zombies because it's a defined, tightly contained operating system.
Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely. You cannot install any program on it. You cannot change it. Everything is locked. Yeah, and that is for security. You cannot jump on it and say, okay, now I install a program or install something else. This thing comes natively compatible with ARYA CMS. Aria is a highway of data to players. But when we work with banks, the player is within the bank's network. We talk to ARYA through http to know what to display and to get the instructions. But once the instructions are on the player, it locally talks with sensors, databases, and whatever services. So it's fully secure. Even if I cut the internet, the player has the capacity to get data around him autonomously on the local network.
So it's not streaming video; it's really like a CMS as an application. Easy to use, made for the end user, no training needed. That's the value of it, and every time you need to do something more complex, our partners use Elementi, which is our offering tool. They create the widget, customize it, and have a button to upload on the right ARYA account. With the button, ARYA has an additional asset, which can do whatever it has been designed for. So connecting to an SMTP or doing whatever. Now this set in ARYA is like a video, it's like an image, so it's a programmable element, so the end user cannot look inside. It's just there, but he can put it in a layout in a very simple way. So you understand that we make the end user autonomous with a tool that always remains simple, and we give our partners a tool that makes them able to program whatever they want, and now this is a combo. So we integrated this, so when you create a project with Elementi for using widgets, you know that you need to have an ARYA widget.
When you create a more complex project with Elementi, you need streaming—that system type of license in Element. We have the planning system in ARYA, so we simplify this combo with integration, and we can offer the right tool to the right audience.
So if I'm an end user and I'm interested in this, I'm getting an IBASE box, and it's going to be connected and managed via ARYA. Is Elementi opt-in, or is it fundamental too?
Francesco Ziliani: It's an option. So let's see the path. You buy an IBASE, it comes with our operating system, and it comes with everything you need to connect on ARYA. The first step is ARYA Discovery which is free of charge. You can have one screen, you can have 1000 screens. You create your account, you pair your players, and your screens on your account and you can start publishing images and videos, and that's all free. You don't spend anything on the cloud right now. At a certain point, you get stuck because you need more users or more storage, or more functionalities, that’s when you need to upgrade to ARYA Enterprise.
ARYA Enterprise is an indirect channel. So you need a SpinetiX partner. You need someone who knows how to set it up, and how to help you discover more. So you contact a partner and the partner comes to you and asks, “What do you want to do?” And if your needs are basic, you just upgrade to ARYA Enterprise by paying an annual fee. The partner will call you at the end of each year saying, “Is everything fine, do you need more?” Then let's say you need more, because you now understand that you are responsible for spending two hours per day updating images and all these images are already in your database, so you would like this to be automatic. So your ARYA Enterprise is now upgraded to ARYA Enterprise Widget and in the widget, you are compatible with Elementi widget projects. So it means that your supplier, your SpinetiX partner is designing for you with Elementi, which is the right tool, programs you, whatever you like, and once he has created that content shows you say, “Hey, is that what you want?” “Yes.” And with one click, it's in your account, and now as an end user, you can use that widget, and decide to show it in the lobby or in a certain location, with a certain background, with a clock or a countdown, whatever you like. But you are autonomous because that thing has been designed for you.
And like this, we value the services of our partner who is fully autonomous with Elementi. They don't need us. But we also protect the end customer, who can still ask them to do the job because they don't need to understand what's behind, and before, when we only had Elementi, it was not like this. We had Elementi, which was a complex product in the hands of an end user. So some end users love it. But most of the end user we're saying it's too complex.
Yeah, I don't have time to learn this!
Francesco Ziliani: “I don't have the time, and I'm using it perhaps with my intern and the guy is not trained, so he's making mistakes and he is gonna leave.”
So ARYA is simple for that type of user, still we are not limiting the experience. Now what I want to fight is leveraging down. I want to leverage up, so that's why I am calling partners to say, “You cannot just sell ARYA Discovery for free or just our enterprise for an annual fee for basic features, you need to upsell your services, customize it.” Because if you don't do that, then the hundreds of CMS that will beat us one day. So instead, if I'm able to create this local relationship with the supplier, and the end user. Instead of being in a relationship, I supply once and I go away, I'm a partner with you, so I'm with you with the evolution of your needs, then I'm making my customers loyal, and that's the secret of SaaS, because every year you add something and we double every year the number of new things but if we lose the previous one, then it's like having a bucket that is leaking. So you add water but it's not growing. And I want to remove leaks, and to remove leaks, you need to create this loyalty, this relationship
We're sitting in at InfoComm and historically the integration companies that come to InfoComm are looking for products and they're thinking about margin and how many of these can we move and everything else and, historically at least, it’s been a bit of a struggle to get a lot of these companies to understand, you also should be in service. There's recurring revenue in that. With shrinking margins and everything else, this is something you need to do.
Is it hard to find those companies that understand that or that a lot of them are waking up to it?
Francesco Ziliani: There are many that are ready to do this, but it's true. AV is not IT yet. They are blending, converging, there are good things in both communities. But I think the opportunity AV has is great because they have the relationship with the end customer already, because they are selling services of support. So it's just a click in their mind, in their mindset, to say, “Hey, now, I'm not selling you a box, I'm selling you a service. I'm with you supporting, training, inspiring you”, and of course I understand that perhaps they tried solutions that were not reliable yet, or not delivering on their promises and it's true that if you are not protected on that side, you are in trouble, because you don't have actions to take. So you want a solution which is reliable, secure, and you want to build your services there, on top of that type of solution.
But we see people that are, I'm not saying afraid, but they have an attitude of, let's see what's for me, and probably start one project after the other. I'm going to give an example of a company in Switzerland who started four years ago with ARYA with a few units at the beginning, few customers, they start calling existing customers they have, proposing the new model, and now it's a small company, but they already have more than a $100,000 in record revenue and now if you think like this, a hundred thousand means that you can have a part-time employee developing more, and the hardware is very reliable, so the end customer does not have reason to stop. The product is evolving, so you don't have reasons to look for competition and they’re running in parking lots, they’re running in schools, fulfilling different types of needs, and the solution works very well. They’re very happy, and I'm using them as an example to say, “Hey, you can start, even if you're a small company, there are local opportunities to you that might start with just one screen the first year, and then double, and then upgrading to more powerful plans and the solution is open, you can upgrade, you are not forced to stay three years, five years, every year. You can choose. So yeah I think it's a modern app approach to digital signage.
When I think about SpinetiX, historically, I think of these beautiful little boxes and the stories I hear about how they're still in the field 10 years later, 12 years later, and so on. So reliability, durability is a big thing.
I'm sure that's still the case, but it’s not what you lead with anymore, right?
Francesco Ziliani: We want to do more. But by doing more, we are not forgetting where we are coming from and so the hardware remains reliable, the know-how is in the team. But I think, yeah, we would like to scale up a bit more.
And is that the driver behind, like you've always manufactured or contract manufactured, or designed your own boxes, but now you're adding hardware partners, more partners. Is that just for scale?
Francesco Ziliani: Scale is one reason. The second reason is that we live in a complex world where supply chain manufacturing, finding chips are a challenge for everyone.
We learned many things in the past three years.
Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, and despite the fact that we had a very good relationship, so we have been able to go through difficult times, I realize we are not in the position to guarantee right availability for whatever type of project. So we need to have Plans B, C, and all the work we have done on the Intel platform opens us to a lot of opportunities, and then if you think about it, we have a product we are launching, which has four outputs. So that's ideal for video walls. Four outputs, perfectly synchronized. You just plug in, you use it as a single screen from ARYA or from Elementi easily.
So you could blend an 8k LED wall?
Francesco Ziliani: More. It's four times 4k. So you could have 2x2 8k video walls if you want, or 1x4, or even just 1x2 and we can already do this with the synchronization feature of our players. That you only have one device, so it's more convenient in terms of price. One license, one device. What is the volume behind? I don't know. It may be a hundred units, a thousand units. If I'm manufacturing that device, I put myself in a niche of a niche. And there are people that are good at doing that. That may use the same product for other applications. So why not collaborate with them, helping them learn why we need POE in digital signage, right? Or why we are asking them for a higher capacity battery. So there are specificities in terms of synchronization, security that are of our industry, but I can share that with this supplier, and, at the end, we come with a product which they manufacture for us to fit the needs of our industry, from our perspective, of course.
Now this, I think, it's the best we can do for our customers, offering them more options and not being limited on the investments that we can do ourselves.
Are you challenged at all to service the - I don't wanna say lower end of the market, but small to medium businesses, the kinds of end users who are maybe using an Amazon Fire Stick or a cheap Android player or something like that - can you even compete with that or is that not who you're after?
Francesco Ziliani: No, today, that's not our target, and we understand that there are customers that have really big constraints in terms of cost or budget. But we are really focused on long-term relationships with our partners. So we want devices and hardware and software that we can master. I don't want to find myself in a situation where I'm asking you one question and I don't know how to answer. Of course our support is best, but we cannot guarantee a result every time, but we want to have tools that we control.
Now Intel Ecosystem has devices, which in terms of budget are much more accessible than our HMP 400, which is, inducer design made for wide range temperature, supporting POE. So we have been able to offer that flexibility to some of our projects. What I'm satisfied with is often the customer is challenging us on price, then I offer them the alternative, which is budget compatible, but they still buy the HMP at the end, because they realize that CapEx is important, but operating costs are also there, and if you have a product that is designed to live two, three years, it will fail statistically on that period, and customers are smart. They know where their money needs to go. If they have a long-term vision, they will buy more reliable devices. It's better for them.
Has the end user profile changed much through the years? Are you seeing new vertical markets and new kinds of customers showing up?
Francesco Ziliani: Yes, corporate and education are booming for us. We also see a lot of requests in manufacturing environments, and plants where basically you have a production line that uses screens to motivate the people working on the lines with videos.
Shows KPIs, dashboards, etc.
Francesco Ziliani: Not only that, motivational videos are triggered by the KPIs they measure. So you don't have a sterile gauge or red-green level, right? You really have someone that is based on, is it Friday? Is it at the end of your turn, to understand the KPIs and give you the message that is relevant for you where you are.
I think digital signage is a narrow term for us sometimes. I hope you can visit our new building in Switzerland. We have this corporate building where we rent spaces to different companies, and we have a lot of digital signage there from the parking lot to the roof. We really see the impact that digital signage has in a corporate environment to inspire people, to inform them about services, about what's going on where, before going home at five o'clock, six o'clock, we display the map of the traffic, so you can make a decision, should I take a drink before going with colleagues or is it the right time to leave? We have the timetables of trains, and buses appearing at the right time. Little things that make the user of the building achieve an easier life. That is growing a lot. We sell a lot to military campuses like Fort Knox in the US and place like that.
Yeah, I was about to ask about security. If you're doing Fort Knox, and you mentioned before I turned on the microphone that you're also doing NASA, so obviously, you're pretty solid on security.
Francesco Ziliani: Yes. I think our team really designed products with security in mind, and that's a game changer, and it's challenging. Still, I think it's important because you put a lot of information, you put your credibility on the screens, on your network of screens. If someone is able to bypass your security, then you risk a lot in terms of image or terms of trouble, or continuity of service. It's really the customers we have that consider the investment as business critical, so security is definitely important, and then, GDPR in Europe is important, so everything related to how you protect your personal information and we have corporations that are asking us, what are the logs that we can access to know who has used the data, if the data remains in the cloud or not, where is it a store? Is it in Europe, in Germany, or in the US? So that means a lot of infrastructure work, a lot of tools that are only sometimes seen by the end customer if they're not interested, but a large corporation, know what they need. SSO (single sign-on) as well, these are all tools that facilitate a lot of the deployments and acceptance of our solution.
You're European-based, have you seen shifts in terms of where the business is?
I've heard from some companies who've said Europe is going along okay, but the real growth is in North America. is that what you're experiencing as well?
Francesco Ziliani: Yeah, North America, I think we are just scratching the surface of opportunity. So today, we are, more or less, half in terms of our business. But I see a huge potential in the US. That's why we have invested in a team of three people. Before, we didn't have anyone. We only had distributors, but now we have three local people, and Europe is doing well. They are indeed asking themselves a lot of questions about the impact of power use for digital signage. But at the same time, they realize that. The benefits are there as well, right? So you need to inform people. You need to keep this communication channel open, and of course, it has a cost, but if you do it right, the benefits are higher. So I think we passed that period where everyone was saying, switch off because we need to save.
I advocate if you use this tool to do the right communication, then the investments are worth, it because the impact is big, and in the end, you can change bad habits. I'm 16 years into digital signage, and I'm a believer in the benefits of digital signage for many, many sectors.
What you're talking about on the factory floors, I think the same thing could apply in healthcare environments as well, where there are just so many ways that you could be communicating with people, and these are people who either don't because of their job or don't have time because of how busy they are to sit down and read stuff, they're going to see stuff when they're zipping down a hallway or along a corridor, and if there's a screen there that's going to motivate them or inform them or tell them, “There's a gas leak, go that way, get out!” That has incredibly valuable.
Francesco Ziliani: Absolutely, and it's true that hospitality in the large sense, whether in a hospital or a restaurant, in a hotel chain, or a campus, it's all about delivering relevant information, and our product, our solution, is made to automate. Of course, you need someone to know what to do, but the technology is there. And you can really take into account all the parameters. You can add artificial intelligence. You can imagine a world of possibilities, but it needs to be simple, and I remember we made an audit some time ago, and we were asking our customers what they think about Elementi, our software, and half of the customers said, it's the easiest software that we have been using, and the other half was saying it's the hardest software we have been using, and that is because basically, we were providing one tool to two audiences.
So simplicity is a relative concept. If you understand your audience, you are able to provide the right tool, then you are delivering a simple tool to them, but you cannot make something like programming simple for everyone. It's a lot of investment.
I think having the capability with the solution to really segment the stakeholders and address their needs, that’s at the end, our innovation is that we are bringing with this integration with ARYA, and that's what I believe is going to be the future for our industry and many other people will contribute with dedicated software for specific verticals like business management, building management, right? You have dedicated software for restaurants, and all this is going to be simple for the right audience, and our job is to collect the data from this software, to make it simple to animate the network of screens so that the information is delivered in a relevant way.
All right. Thank
Francesco Ziliani: You're welcome.
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Chris Grosso, Intersection
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
Tuesday Jun 06, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The out of home media company Intersection is probably best known as the operator of that network of smart cities display totems - called LinkNYC - on the sidewalks of Manhattan and New York City's boroughs. But the company has a much bigger footprint around the United States - mainly mass transport systems, but also the flashy Hudson Yards mixed-use development in New York, and United Airlines.
I had a good chat with Chris Grosso, who took over as CEO a couple of years ago, but had already been with the company for a few years, having come over from the broadcast and digital world.
We got into several things - like the state of the DOOH industry and the evolving needs and demands of the municipal governments who become business partners for Intersection. Smart cities needs, for example, are shifting.
We also get into Intersection's recently announced addition of AI-driven ad and content targeting, with the idea of making what's on screens not just relevant to the city, but all the way down to neighbourhoods and streets.
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TRANSCRIPT
Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Intersection Is all about?
Chris Grosso: Sure, and thanks so much for having me. Very excited to be here, Dave and I very much enjoy reading your publication and the newsletter, and the email all the time. I’m Chris Grosso, the CEO of Intersection. We are a leading out-of-home advertising company in the USA focused on major US cities. We really are differentiated from the other out-of-home companies in three ways. One is typically we put in consumer amenities in center cities, most notably things like the LinkNYC program in New York, so Wifi kiosks across the city of New York. We do customer information and advertising systems for places like Chicago Transit Authority and SEPTA Transit Authority in Philadelphia.
And we do bus shelters in many US cities as well. So very much driven by bringing consumer amenities and partnerships with cities and transit authorities. The second biggest differentiator for us, which is most relevant to this conversation, is our focus on content and programming. We like to put useful content on our digital screens, and we wanna put entertaining content on our digital screens, and that could be anything from what time your train is coming to what the weather might be to art or fun facts. We want to program these screens just as you program any other screen in order to make them entertaining and engaging for consumers.
And the last piece of our business we pride ourselves on is selling data-driven advertising. We like to be very focused on the data that helps our advertisers understand who they're reaching when they advertise with us, as well as what happens after the release.
So the idea of consumer amenity that I gather that the smart city-ish kiosk that you're putting on the street and other things like that, that’s a more modern version of the amenities, to use your term, that outdoor companies have been doing for a whole bunch of time with bus shelters, right?
Chris Grosso: For sure, and we're also in the bus shelter business as well. We do some stuff with Bikeshare, and I think it's a long tradition in out-of-home advertising to bring the amenity to allow us to get access to the public right of way to put the advertising in, and this is very valuable for a city transit authority because they're getting something that they don't have to put up the cash for. So it's a real value-creating event both for the communities as well as the advertisers.
Is it the price of entry now for particularly larger urban geographies like New York and so on, where if you want to play, you're going to have to provide infrastructure as well? Can't you just put in display totems?
Chris Grosso: I think it really depends on the municipality and the deal structure. In some cases, companies have to put up the capital and bring the amenity and bring the service into the community, and that can both be the infrastructure, but increasingly also the software and the services that you can bring. But there are also some cases where, you know, particularly with the Infrastructure Financing Act, that the city or municipality might want to put up the capital for the infrastructure themselves, in which case we'll partner with them to create the revenue stream as well as overlay the data and the software to really get the most out of the infrastructure.
In all cases, I think that it's important is being able to have these digital screens up, having software to put the right content in the right app at the right time a big is an important part of the equation and a big differentiator for us.
Does that happen much where you have municipalities that are making a capital investment?
Chris Grosso: It depends on the deal, but yes, and there's a couple of different ways you do that sometimes the municipality puts up some of the capital themselves. In other cases, in many of these deals, we recoup the capital through the revenues. So we might if we put up the money and then recoup it out of the payments to the city.
So there are many different ways you can do a deal.
Chris Grosso: There are many different ways you can do a deal. There are a handful of companies, of which we are really good at this and have built a strong team that knows how to work with cities, work with transport authorities, and create value, both for us and also for the cities.
I think one big differentiator for Intersection is we are a mission-driven company, and we are very focused on making cities better through our products.
You came out of Broadcast & Online, which is very much a digital entity, and now you're running a company that has to do a lot of infrastructure and has to do these sorts of capital-intensive deals. Was that a big adjustment?
Chris Grosso: It's a different business. There are a lot of similarities between being in the digital media space and the Intersection space. But certainly, in the last few years, I've learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about trenching and conduit and coin fiber and a lot of construction.
I like to say I was in consulting, and then I was in media and software. So this is the first job I actually had, physical things to deal with, and it's an interesting and exciting part of the job, and it's a real differentiator for us at Intersection. Because we have people who are very good at digital media, but we also have people who are very good at working with cities. And we've got an extraordinary team of folks who really understand how to deploy and operate these things in physical space, and that goes for even the guys who are out, cleaning and posting. We've got a really great team of professionals and field operations who really understand work in physical space, and part of what makes our business both fun also gives us a leg up is we're good at these different disciplines.
You also, I assume, had to learn a lot about politics and about city bylaws.
Chris Grosso: We've got people who very much understand that world for sure.
Which is a bit of a labyrinth.
Chris Grosso: One could say that.
You have to deal with them, so you're being careful. I can understand that.
Chris Grosso: I think the level of talent in these city governments is really impressive and we benefited at Intersection when we started, we were put together by a historic business Titan, which was an out-of-home advertising company, and then Control Group, which was a digital innovation company, we put together to create Intersection in 2016, right before I started.
But we had the benefit of Dan Doctoroff being our chairman, who helped put the deal together and was an alumnus of the Bloomberg administration. We've benefited from some folks who come out of that world, who really understand that and did a great job in government and then can help us understand how to do stuff with the government in a way that creates value for the population and citizens, and people who live in the cities for sure, but also, creates economic value for our business.
When the whole Smart Cities thing bubbled up with LinkNYC and other initiatives like that, there was a lot of noise around it. This seemed to be the way that digital at home was going, that anything that was going into big municipalities was going to have to be a smart city initiative in some way. Has that really played out?
Because I don't hear as much and/or read as much noise about all that now, and I know that we can maybe get into this a little bit of the LinkNYC has had its revenue struggles through the years. I don't know where we're at with that now, but it doesn't seem like smart cities have the same kind of energy around them that maybe they did in the mid-2010s.
Chris Grosso: I think the definition of what a smart city is has evolved, and I think the parts of the smart city that are important people might not have thought of as smart cities but are huge trends in the changing nature of cities. You really saw that during the pandemic.
So what I mean by that is if you look at the evolution of mobility in a city, which wasn't the classic under the rubric of Smart Cities. Still, you think about how people get around cities now versus how they did 10 years ago with Bikeshare with Rideshare, with changes to how the transit authorities function, all of that is a much smarter way to run a city than several years ago and requires data and requires real-time information. So I think a lot of the ethos around the smart cities just got absorbed in how cities are operating, and particularly a lot of that got accelerated during the pandemic.
One of the biggest areas of smart cities is what do you do with parking? And that's outside of our world, but if you think about the pandemic that happened. It really made people reimagine what you do with street-level parking in cities because all cities, particularly New York and others in the United States, suddenly put restaurants on the restaurants due to the need for giving these restaurants the ability to run their business without indoor dining, and that reimagined the whole way people do parking. Is that a classic smart city type of initiative? I don't know, but it totally reimagined how the street works, and I think if you walked down the street on the Upper West Side today versus what you saw in 2019, it's a completely different experience with the bike share and the outdoor dining and other things of that nature.
So, are there still demands among municipalities to have these smart city kiosks/totems that are multipurpose devices that they're advertising totems? Obviously, there's an interactive thing, maybe there's WiFi built-in and sensors and so on.
Is that still being deployed and asked for?
Chris Grosso: I think the form factors are changing, and I think the needs are changing in the cities, and I think that there are a lot of fundamentals that cities need. So it may not be a totem, but cities need bus shelters, and now it's not just a bus shelter, it's a mobility hub.
Cities need advanced wayfinding to manage this multimodal transportation system that's coming out of the pandemic. Cities have always needed it, and I think we all underestimate going to smart cities. Still, we realize now that cities need the ability to broadcast content, localized content at street level. Whether it be what time my train is coming, emergency messaging, or just education around when the community board meeting is, that has a ton of value. So I think the original premise of Smart Cities is let's take an iPhone and put it at street level. I don't think that's turned into the right answer, but I do think there are applications and amenities in the right of way that are required that cities want and are ready to ask and get deployed.
And I do think you'll continue to see these kinds of initiatives. It just may not be in the form factor of totems. It may be a bus shelter because, you know what, you can put WiFi in a small shell in a bus shelter, and by the way, the bus shelter provides shade, and that's really important in certain municipalities, shelter from the rain, and that's important. So I think smart cities have evolved into what are the real needs of the people who live in the cities where before it was, “Hey, we've got a cool thing. Let us give you this.” and even if you look at the Link, the core propositions of Link like free WiFi and phone calling for sure are hugely used and hugely important. But what we also recognize is Link as a megaphone to broadcast real-time information to the city of New York is also hugely valuable and something that the community has been able to leverage effectively. Most recently, we played a big role in the we love New York campaign where, you know, if you put content on Link, we can reach, I think, 90%+ of New Yorkers a hundred times a month.
That’S a massive megaphone that can be valuable to advertisers, but it also can be valuable To the city. If there are schools that get shut down for a snowstorm, flip the switch and tell everyone the schools are shut down due to the snowstorm, that's a big value for a city. Is that a classic 2015 Smart Cities thing? I don't know, but it's a huge value. If you are a parent, figuring out whether your kid's going to go to school or not the next day.
So where is Link at in terms of rollout and viability?
There've been a number of stories through the years about revenue challenges and pace of rollout, and so on, but I haven't really seen anything for a year or more. So I'm curious where it's at, and as you said, it has its value, and people like it and everything else, but is it still the way forward? Would you continue to deploy this?
Chris Grosso: Yes, so during the pandemic, working with our partners ZenFi, we actually have a new form factor for a next-generation Link, which we call Link 5G, which has many of the original features of Link, like the free WiFi and the tablet to make phone calls, but it's taller, and it allows for multi-tenant small cells, to support New York City's 5G rollout. We are in the process of working through deploying those now with our partners ZenFi, who run Fiber and telecommunications.
So this would, this is a nice little partnership for you because they'd be able to share the infrastructure cost, I assume.
Chris Grosso: Exactly, and also they have the expertise in telecommunications. We are in the media content advertising space. We really understand media content and advertising software. But we're not telecom companies. ZenFi is a world-class telecom company. They understand fiber, they understand dealing with carriers and that kind of thing. So it is a good partnership. They've been great partners for us.
Your company recently announced, and you've been talking about localized content, that you're doing localization of content using AI. It strikes me as, great, this is something that absolutely should be done but it was also very reminiscent of stuff that was done, as much as 20 years ago when they would call it hyper-local.
But hyper-local was very difficult to achieve and very difficult to plan at that time, and it seemed more like an aspiration than something that was possible to do it in a way without a whole bunch of work. I assume that's changed hugely because of databases, APIs, and also AI.
Chris Grosso: Yeah, so we've always done localization, and given our screens are often deep in neighborhoods, it's a very effective way of doing stuff.
We've always done it, though, with structured databases, right? Weather: give me the weather in a zip code, right? Transit: give me what's going on at the closest train station when the trains are coming. Top 10 lists of the best songs in this neighborhood, but it's all very much tied around structured data, and rules engine and APIs, and we're very good at that.
We have a whole suite of dynamic advertising products. We've got a great product, for instance, that you're a retailer, you put the ad up for the retail and then a map at the bottom to tell you how to get to the closest retail location and that's highly localized, but it's all based on structured data—the big difference now what AI is that it allows you to do things with much more unstructured depth and much more visual creativity, which we're very excited about testing and rolling out. So, for instance, if you have an ad for an alcohol brand, how do you put that alcohol brand in context for a neighborhood? Maybe you show what's the relevant drink for this block, and the AI can figure out that this is the block that Edgar Allen Po lived on, so it'll be Edgar Allen Po’s drink. Trying to do that manually would be impossible. But you can do that using these AI engines and then on the visual side as well, which is very exciting. Maybe there's a mascot or character of a brand, and let's actually put that brand in context in the neighborhood and dressed up as someone from the neighborhood. You can do that kind of thing with these AI engines that if you were rying to do this yourself, you may not figure out the creative idea, and could never have the army of people who take to build all that creative. So that's why we're very excited about using these tools to do localization for unstructured data, and yeah, more creative types of ideas than the classic, “Hey, here's the top 10 songs being played in this neighborhood.”
It expands a lot of possibilities. But how do you do the gatekeeping on it? Because, as many people have described, AI can sometimes have these “hallucinations” and come up with a strange list that maybe isn't the top 10 songs in that neighborhood.
Chris Grosso: Yeah, for sure. One way you do it is to control the prompts and make sure you're being smart about how you're doing the prompting.
The second is: We still would envision having a layer of humans looking at all the creative before it goes on the screen to catch stuff that just doesn't make sense. Over time that problem might go away, but you still want some level of quality control, but it's very different to have creative designers take a look at a hundred pictures over the course of an hour and just check everything to make sure it looks good as opposed to trying to create all those mocks literally. It's a huge difference, and so I think, at least to start, we're going to have some level of human quality control in this for sure. But I still think the ability to use these tools to be able to do things you never could do before because you just didn't have the army pf people and it would not be cost-effective to work is really what we’re moving towards.
In the old days, my understanding of digital out-of-home was a media planner would develop the plan, and the media company would execute it based on the insertion orders for that plan. When you're getting into hyper-local AI-driven targeting and original content by the street, who's doing that plan?
Chris Grosso: I think it's often in partnership with the advertiser or the agency, right? There may be cases where the agency has a really good idea of what they want to do. There may be cases where the agency says, help us think this through, and we've always provided creative services to our clients whenever they needed it. So this is not far afield from what we do already.
When I mentioned some of these dynamic advertising, oftentimes, we build them on behalf of advertisers and our agencies as part of our partnership. So we envision it in the same way.
David:] I gather that programmatic is on the rise. The usage level is up. The last number I saw was like 15% of digital out-of-home ads are now booked out of programmatic platforms. Is there a bridge between programmatic and this AI-driven hyper-local stuff, or do they have to operate independently because it's just how it works?
Chris Grosso: I think to start, you have to build out these campaigns, and these campaigns will be more high-touch than your classic programmatic campaigns. So I think to start, these really have to be directlt sold because a lot of this is around the creative idea and creative concept, and there needs to be back and forth with clients to really get this right.
As opposed to programmatic, which is really about scale and tonnage and efficiency, and we spend a lot of time on programmatic as well, for sure. We launched a Place Exchange, which is an out-of-home ,SSP and we actually spun that business out because they did a lot of work with us, but they were doing work with all the other publishers, too, so it made sense to be an independent company.
We have very deep integrations with Place Exchange and several other SSPs. So we're very focused on programmatic and do view it as a growth driver. But I do think the creative side has to be much more, and I really think long term the way the business goes - I used to work for Tim Armstrong at AOL who used to call it the concept of the barbell - and I think you're going to see continued growth of programmatic, and then the direct sales really going to be about driving solutions for advertisers that are highly strategic and deep partnerships with advertisers. It could be something like the AI program, or it could be like other things we do, for instance, where we have advertisers sponsor train stations or whole train lines for multi-year deals where we work together to rename a station or a train line.
In New York City, the Bet MGM renamed the line that goes out to the Meadowlands, and we do this in other places as well. So I do think you're going to see the direct sale be much more solution-driven and working very tightly with the advertisers and the agencies to build these really cool things, whether it be AI or long-term sponsorships or big programs and then on, on the flip side, you'll see the programmatic businesses continue to scale as well.
Has the characteristics of venues and the type of venue partners evolved over the years, like the old Titan was about transit and street furniture, but you have other companies that are very active in airports and other mass transport hubs.
Is that evolving for you as well, or are you very much about kind of street-level advertising?
Chris Grosso: We're about cities and the the key thing is street level advertising in cities is really really important for us, and a big area of focus transit remains a big area of focus as well.
And then we've done a little bit in airports and airlines. We've also done work with some of the next-generation multi-use developments like Hudson Yards, where we put in the wayfinding directory system and the advertising system, and that's a great business for us. But our criteria for whether or not we want to partner with someone really comes down to being able to do something value creating in big cities, top 25 cities in the US. That's what we're good at. That's how we're differentiated and sure, the types of partners that we work with will continue to evolve just as the audiences are evolving.
If you think about the transit business, the transit business includes street furniture. It includes signage outside train stations, it includes buses, and it includes the train stations themselves. I think during the pandemic, what we found is the vast majority of our revenue, and where all the growth was is on the outside of the train station, the outside of the bus stations, everything that's at street level. And that offset the fact that the train stations themselves have fewer people, but there are still tons of people outside the train stations, and that's where we put a lot of our emphasis on the ad side.
Has the business recovered from the Covid era?
Chris Grosso: Yes. It looks different given our revenue mix, but we're largely back to pre Covid revenue levels. The bus exterior business and the street furniture business are well above. The train station part of the business is still somewhat below because the ridership is just not there. Then we're continuing to look at new types of inventory, whether it be multiuse destinations, as I said, like Hudson Yards, airlines and new forms of street furniture. For instance, we've got a great ad campaign on the bike share in some cities.
Do you have to look at municipal opportunities differently now? Because of the way Covid changed things and the urban downtown areas not being as heavily populated with office workers as they were in the past. It's different in New York or something, but let's say in Cincinnati or Minneapolis, or something where not as many people are coming into the urban area.
Chris Grosso: Yeah, we do the exact same methodology when we assess the deals that we look at, which always starts with where the audience is, and we've got folks who are really good at looking at GIS and traffic patterns and people patterns to understand the scale of the audience on all the different assets we might either deploy or take over the ad sales for.
That mechanism, we do exactly the same mechanism that we did in 2018-2019, we do today. What comes out of those models is a little bit different, for sure. But what's great about a lot of our business is we typically cover the entire city, not just the central business district.
And a good example of this would be in New York, the LinkNYC. If you look at the impressions, both ad impressions generated by the LinkNYC network before and after the pandemic on a network level, they're pretty close. However, the Links in Midtown Manhattan, where people are going to work three days a week are lower, however the Links on, say, the Upper West Side or in Brooklyn are actually higher because of things like outdoor dining and people working from home.
So the people are all there. They just moved around different places, and so the methodology we use, which is understanding where the audience is, works fine, we look at everything the same way. But what comes out of those models is different based on how cities evolve.
I talk a lot to people in Europe, and they have asked me where are things at in terms of what they call Green Signage and are there North American digital signage and digital out-of-home network operators that are concerned and doing something about energy costs. Is it something that comes up with you, or is it something you're trying to address?
Chris Grosso: We are definitely looking at sustainability to the extent it's part of our assessment for screens on how much power they use, and then we are also looking at how to make these networks more sustainable. Ways you do that. So, for instance, one is, we do static bus shelters, but they still need a backlight, and we will use solar panels on those shelters, which has the benefit of both being greener friendly, but also just cheaper because you don't have to pull power to the shelters. Regarding digital signs like LinkNYC, we've looked for opportunities to source electricity from green sources and that's been something we've done successfully.
But then also we look at our footprint on how we take care of our infrastructure. So we've started to test, for instance, electric vehicles in one of our markets. All the trucks that we use are electric right now. Running that as a pilot it's gone very well. The guys love the EV trucks to the point where we had a couple of EVs and a couple of gas guys just fighting over who got to use the EVs. So instead of being a half-EV, half-gas pilot, we put everything on EVs in that market because everyone's fighting over to drive the EVs.
Are you being banged on at all by municipal authorities or by public interest groups saying, you need to do something to reduce energy waste. These displays on the sidewalk are not mission-critical.
Just like Europe, where they were saying you need to turn these off for certain periods of time, they don't need to be running 24/7 anymore. Is that something you have to worry about, or are you hearing about?
Chris Grosso: I think municipalities want you to be sustainable, but I think we would argue our signs are mission-critical and should be up 24/7. But no, no one's asked us to do anything otherwise, but if you think about the importance of real-time information, if you're looking at when my bus is coming, or the weather and the sign's not on, that's a problem.
We like to think, and we would insist all of our signs are actually pretty mission-critical. Now that being said, there are things you can do around how much power you use and dim the signs at night, and that kind of thing to reduce the energy load and optimize that, and everyone consents to do that. And then again, to the extent we can source power from green sources, we do that as well.
Last question. What can we expect to see out of Intersection in the next year? You made that announcement recently about generative AI. What's next?
Chris Grosso: So I think we're very focused on product innovation around serving, meeting our customers on the needs that they want.
So I think you will continue to see more innovation around ad formats. You're also going to start to continue to see more innovation around measurement and attribution and our ability to help people, help advertisers understand who's seeing their ads and what they do after their ads and that's a huge focus for us and a big area of investment. I think you’ll hear a lot about it, and then, we're always looking at new partnerships and new deployments, and we've got some stuff cooking right now that we're hoping to be able to talk about towards the back half of the year as part of our continued expansion.
All right. Chris, thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Chris Grosso: Thank you, David. I appreciate it.
Wednesday May 31, 2023
Jeff Hastings, BrightSign
Wednesday May 31, 2023
Wednesday May 31, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
If you are going to the big InfoComm pro AV trade show, coming up very soon in Orlando, you'll undoubtedly see a very busy BrightSign stand, and a crowd around CEO Jeff Hastings.
I've spoken with Hastings a couple of times now for this podcast, but it had been a while ... and I wanted to catch up and get his perspective on the state of the industry, as well as find out what's new with his company and its little purple boxes.
The Silicon Valley company is pretty much its own category in terms of media players - as I hear and read about solutions providers weighing decisions on whether to use PCs, smart displays, set-top boxes ... or Brightsign boxes. The company now ships about 1,200 units a day - based on its reputation for having a range of durable, reliable devices that hit different price points and meet needs from simple to sophisticated and powerful.
In this chat, we get into the state of the digital signage market (It's growing across segments, but not at 2022's pace), how the characteristics of end-user buyers has changed, and the role of AI in BrightSign's business, and more broadly, for the industry.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mr. Hastings, good to chat once again. We've done a couple of podcasts, but you're a big shooter in this industry. I need to talk to you regularly.
Jeff Hastings: I don't know if you can call me a big shooter, but I'm definitely hooked on the world and live it seven days a week, but it's good to check in with you, Dave.
I'm just sucking up. I'm not sure why, but I am.
So where is the industry these days? I'm just curious because when I talk to people, they will uniformly say everything is awesome. While you can say that too, you're different in that you're supplying stuff to all kinds of different companies, so maybe you get a better sense of what's really happening out there.
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, I think one of the things that we do that's a little bit different is that BrightSign is really a horizontal platform, as I call it, so we work in pretty much every vertical market that has a display that's used. So we see from the broad market what's going on.
Last year was a great year of growth for us with over 20% growth. This year has honestly started off to be a little bit slow, and I think most people are reporting that. It's definitely been a little bit slow at the start of the year. I think a lot of things are going on with the interest rates and people being a little bit cautious about the recession, but overall, the industry is still growing. It's not growing as fast as I think most people predicted after last year. But it's a very solid market. We see more and more what people call digital transformations, I'm not a super fan of that word, but essentially it means people are putting in more digital signage and retail continues to be a great segment. People investing in retail to create better experiences after the whole pandemic of people wanting to get back out and people see the investment in that kind of real-world experience paying off.
Yeah, I guess you could call it phygital. Another term that I would be happy if I never saw again.
Why do you think retail's growing? Is it just simply that they understand the whole experiential thing and that you have to do more in a store?
Jeff Hastings: I think a few points. First, the whole idea that we're going to buy everything online and just stay in our house, I think most people realize, yeah, there's a lot of things that work that way, and I can just have it delivered. But the reality is we are social animals. We want to interact with people, and just being stuck in our house is not what we like to do, and I think most people are now seeing that with the results of the pandemic that, being stuck in your house is we’re not built for that. It's almost akin to being in jail. A lot of people comment on that.
So getting out is important for us as humans and having that social experiment and getting out and shopping and actually being in retail, part of it is actually physically buying the goods, but a lot of it is social. People just wanna be out in the environment. So now that you take that as a fact that people wanna be out in the environment, if you create a place where it's exciting to be in, and there are other people that are there, guess what? More people's gonna come to your establishment. So we really believe that's the fundamental basis of why people are investing in retail. That's the main reason.
If you look at a secondary reason. A lot of the big retailers, their businesses boomed. During the pandemic, a lot of people talked about how online boomed, but actually, a lot of the bigger retailers boomed and they got a lot of new customers. I think you look at folks like Walmart, lots of people come into the stores, but during the pandemic, they had a dramatic increase of people coming into their stores. As we start going back to the normal world, folks like Walmart wanna make sure that they keep those people coming to their stores. Back during the pandemic, maybe they were the only stores that were able to be open so they got new customers, and now what they wanna do is create an environment where they keep those new customers. So I think there's a lot of that going on of stepping up their game. Before it was just about price. “Okay, we'll just go there cuz it's got the best price.” Now people are like, “Hey, I wanna go there and I wanna enjoy my experience.” So that is playing into this investment in digital science and kind of digital experiences in retail.
Are you getting a sense from all the companies that work with you, that they're starting to open up new verticals? I've wondered when healthcare was finally gonna start happening.
Jeff Hastings: Oh all the verticals are growing. I don't know of any verticals that are not growing right now. They're all growing and some of them are growing faster. I think ironically, which I wouldn't have predicted, the corporate sector is actually growing very rapidly right now. I think people are coming back to the office, maybe not a hundred percent, but they are investing in it the same way that retail is investing in the experience. People are realizing that an office is no longer a place where they have to come work, much like in retail, where you have to go there to buy a product, but you want to get people in that environment for the social aspect of it and the collaboration aspect and if you create a nicer environment, more people come to work. So there's a lot of investment in that going on also.
And how does that manifest itself, like what are they doing? Big-ass video walls in the lobby or is it more kind of the operational side of it?
Jeff Hastings: It's literally all aspects of it. One, they create an impressive environment. So lots of LEDs, and lots of video walls going into these places to create a more exciting environment versus just a bunch of cubes. Secondly, more communications which are just kind of standard displays, ways of communicating with employees and more, I don't like the word infotainment, but infotainment, where they've got interesting things, are displayed to communicate with employees, but it's also a bit fun. These are things of just celebrating employees. We see a lot of that going on and kind of recognize the employees' communication about what's going on in the company.
This whole idea of an intranet I think most people realize that, guess what, when they have an intranet, no one actually goes to that website. So that was a great experiment. I think a lot of money on intranet sites which ended up being a massive failure, so the ability to communicate with employees is very important, and what they're finding is, guess what, if there's a display up there, and it's interesting, people will look at it and now you're getting across a message, and that could be whether it's a benefits program or you name it, you're able to communicate with employees and engage with them in a way, especially with the younger crowd, that the younger crowd doesn't want something kinda forced on them. They want to be able to kinda opt into it and the displays actually allow them to kind of opt-in in this passive fashion.
Has the buyer profile changed at all? We were chatting at some trade show or other, and you were saying how your guys are spending a lot more time talking to IT people than perhaps they did in the past.
Jeff Hastings: It's very much changed. I would say when I look back 10 years ago, maybe 10% of the deals that we did involved the IT group. I would say today, any large deal, the IT group is involved with, and this has to do with understanding how they're gonna maintain them because it's now moved from whoever was wanting to “buy” the digital signage, whether it's the marketing group or the HR group, that they're quickly realizing that the IT group is gonna own these things in terms of making sure that they're working every day, not putting the content on them.
So the IT group is now very much involved in that because they know they're gonna own them, so understanding what the cost of maintaining them is gonna be. And then secondly, security is just an enormous thing today. I mean pretty much every large deployment we do we go through large amounts of security reviews. The great thing for us is that it is kind of the backbone of our product is security, and we've built our own proprietary OS. We have put in the ability that the security is super high. Our devices are used on navy ships on the most secure network in the world. So it's a thing that actually benefits us, but just the interaction with the IT involvement, any large deployment goes through literally months of security review and if you can't pass that, it doesn't matter what the other organization from a content perspective wants to have, it'll never make it.
When you're dealing with IT and IS people, when you say it's our own proprietary operating system, does that present a problem or are you able to say it's derivative of Linux or whatever, and it's fine?
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, so at first, a decade ago, we would say that, and it would just make the hair stand up on their back rise up. But now what they've realized is there are a lot of these devices really classified as IoT devices, and they now understand how they fit into the environment, and it's not oh my God, we can't maintain it unless it's a Windows device. It's interesting that they now are able to classify these devices as kind of IoT devices with proprietary operating systems and understand how to run them. It's also that the larger corporations have now figured out how to understand the cost of a classic kind of PC. Not that's what everyone uses them, but they now really understand that and most of the companies are now, they use a number of around $300 as the cost to just have a PC in the work environment. They now understand what a cost basis really is for maintaining these and for us, they're giving much lower numbers in terms of being able to have one of these on the network.
And a lot of it has to do with the ability of these devices, if you're using Windows or Mac, these things are constantly updated, and each time those operating systems get updated, there's a percent of things that fail, and those are support costs. With our device, we don't do that, so it actually saves them a lot of money operationally at the same time, keeping the security level high.
So what happens when you do have a firmware update?
Jeff Hastings: So on our system, the first thing you can do is you can test those, and most of our customers do actually test those to make sure that they're not going to get a failure with their system. That's very different from something that gets shoved down the pipe automatically to maintain your security level. So by doing that, it's a very controlled rollout, and typically it's a very rare exception on our platform that something has to go out because a security fix came out immediately. A lot of it is just because of how our operating system is first cryptographically signed, and secondly, that people can't put random applications on our platform.
Those two things raised a security bar really high so that when you need an operating system update, a firmware update, you can be controlled about it, you can test it and roll it out, and that really is where a lot of the savings comes in, because most of these operating system updates, it's not that the actual operating system is causing problems, it's the whole ecosystem of applications that people use.
And one of those applications breaks, and guess what, they get hundreds of calls coming in to fix it. Each one of those has to be fixed and dealt with, and that's where kind of the burden of cost really comes up, and if you think about digital signage, 99% of those new features in the operating system are never, ever used in digital signage. In fact, most of them are actually being defeated. People don't want them. You don't want a desktop in digital signage.
Yeah. Is digital signage with the people you're dealing with now or your business partners are dealing with now, are they seeing it as a mission-critical application now?
Jeff Hastings: It's definitely moving towards that. I wouldn't say it's completely there. Some of them are mission-critical. We have folks in the F1 world that use our devices and I will tell you, they view our devices as mission-critical. The Navy uses our devices. They view them as very mission-critical.
Some of the marketing folks, maybe they don't view them as mission critical. They view them as very valuable, and anytime there's downtime, it's important to them. I'd say it's moved from a place where people would be like, oh, displays always go down, and they don't worry about it either.
Hey, those things should be working all the time, and that plays to our advantage.
Ten years ago when the first system-on-chip displays came out from Sony and Samsung and then LG and on, they weren't very powerful, they didn't do a hell of a lot. They could do the basics. They could show a menu, that sort of thing, but they've been around for a decade now. They're pretty powerful. I hear people saying they're pretty darn good.
Do these smart commercial displays now present a challenge that perhaps they did in the past? And are you looking at embedded solutions? I know you already do that with Bluefin, and you did a little bit with NEC Sharp back in the day.
Jeff Hastings: Yeah. So, the way I look at these is the range of devices that can create this experience. You can look at a $35 raspberry pie that's going to do a bunch of powerful things. So the whole content side of it, I really focus less on that. We have a whole range of players from simple to very complex with the new XC product, and it's interesting to look at the content, but what we see more and more from our customers is the ability to maintain these and control these because the long term cost is really what comes into play.
So it's becoming less and less about. “Oh, can this play this piece of content?” Because that's being more and more commoditized over time, and what we're seeing is, as we talked about, like the IT organization, the ability to maintain these, the sustainability. There's a lot in sustainability, what's the power consumption, what's the lifetime of a display? And one of the things that we actually see, which is a vulnerability in the built-in displays, is that their storage is fixed. It's soldered down on the motherboard, flash memory is a consumable, and it has a limited lifespan. So that's one of the things we're seeing with our players, you can replace that media with a display that has it soldered down. Once that memory wears out, which it does, then you have to throw away the whole display.
So that means that all of a sudden you're taking, instead of a tiny little SD card that weighs a few grams, now you're going to throw away a whole display that's going to go to a landfill. So we push a lot on sustainability. Clearly, in North America, it's a little bit behind Europe, but in Europe, that is a big deal of sustainability.
The bottom line is that the built-in definitely has some advantages. The operational ability to deploy it is simpler, but it's not the panacea. There are still lots of things out there. The manageability of it, the ability to update and control things remotely, and the ability to change the SD card when it wears out are very important. And I love to make jokes about that. If I bought a car that I couldn't change the tires when they wore out, I'd be really bummed to have to throw away my car because I can't replace the tires, and that's the same thing with flash memory. It's the same thing as a tire. It's going to wear out. You'd hate to throw away your car.
So with the Bluefin, I know they have a range of displays now, and they're not just little shelf-edge ones. They go up to, I think, 40-inch plus or something. In those cases, when you've got an embedded display that's got a BrightSign inside, is it swappable or upgradeable?
Jeff Hastings: Yes. So there are a few things about those displays.
So the first is that it uses the same architecture. So we'll use an SD card as the storage mechanism so that you can do that. Secondly, it's actually slotted. You can open up that display and can actually replace the player.
So it's like the Sharp NEC ones going back Five years or something?
Jeff Hastings: Exactly, and so we standardized on a different kind of connector to really make the form factor very small. So both the media is replaceable, and the player is replaceable. We've even had some customers already do that, upgrading their platform from an earlier one to their next-gen, and they're all backward compatible, so they'll fit into the same slot, and you get the newer performance.
So yeah, we see that, as a market there's a class of customers that want to see more and more people, and at every show, if you stop by, we have more and more people who are doing the BrightSign built-in, and you'll see that trend continue. You'll see it continue as more and more people realize that's a really good solution. The platform, the ecosystem, the upgradeability, and the remote management are really important, and they want to add that to their displays.
And it's a little thing, but the simple fact that if you can put up a display in an hour instead of 90 minutes or something if you're doing a big rollout, it adds up.
Jeff Hastings: It does add up, and like I said there's the upfront and then the ongoing. So yeah, there are absolutely benefits to it, but you have to make sure that you don't end up with a car that you can't change the tires on.
What about Apple TVs? There are three or four companies, at least CMS software companies, who heavily market Apple TV as their solution.
Is that not a concern, but do you see it as real competition or almost like a novelty?
Jeff Hastings: I see it mostly as a novelty. It's on the border of a consumer kind of operating system. It's a little bit different. But still, you're dealing with many of the same things.
You're fighting the platform. Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire, they're essentially all very similar. They're built for consumers. They're not built for commercial use, and what that means is that you're kind of fighting the platform. I routinely see people using the Roku TCL TVs, and they have their little digital signage application, and then when it reboots, it comes back to the home screen, and people are trying to beat that.
So if you look at large-scale deployments, that's where you get into this manageability and controllability, and those things are not optimized for that. It's not like I'm saying it, they're worthless. It's just in large deployments, it's difficult to deal with the little idiosyncratic consumer devices.
It's interesting when you talk about Roku because I don't think that many people know that BrightSign is, in effect, a spin-out of Roku, right?
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the BrightSign business was originally part of Roku, and in 2009, we spun out for them, and actually the core operating system is still very similar between the platforms, although we've taken it in the digital signage direction and added a lot of features and capabilities in digital signage and obviously the Roku guys have taken in their direction of streaming. But yeah, at the core of it, yeah, that's where the technology came from.
Is there still any kind of sharing of ideas or anything between the companies, or are they very much different tracks and you share DNA but that's about it?
Jeff Hastings: It's really that we share DNA and that's about it. I'm still on the board of Roku, so I actively participate in their business, but yeah, there's no official sharing. But yeah, with me being on the board, we get kind of informal sharing.
Yeah, I mean, you're sitting there actively listening and they say, we're developing this, and you're thinking, “Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe I could apply that.”
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, and the same thing goes in the other direction. Some of the stuff that we work on is pretty interesting, as we do a lot of out-of-home advertising. Their model is built on a big advertising model in-home. So there are definitely things we share that also.
You have high-end players that can go up to 8k. Are there customers using 8k or are they just buying those boxes with the idea of, okay, we're future-proofed?
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, the way I think about those players: 8k is a feature. It's not the only thing that you can buy those for.
Most of the people are not using 8k, and honestly, it's just a marketing thing because very few people actually use 8k. Most people buy them for the power of the experience. So very high-end experiences that people would've classically used PCs, for now, can get our device with the reliability of our operating system and maintainability, yet the power of a PC. So that's kind of what we see most people buy 8k for. The applications that we're seeing right now are kind in two sectors. One is people with consumer manufacturers of consumer TVs that wanna create an 8k experience that has all this interactive and all the great features they use. They're using our products and that, and then LEDs. So LEDs are probably the biggest area where we've seen the 8k as a single output. Those are very interesting cases because as the density of LEDs has come out and, folks like Nova Star now have 8k sending units, we can now plug in ak and instead of having multiple boxes of content rolling in, they can just have one big 8k pallet that they can split out to anywhere they want on the screen. That's a big market.
Then the last segment that we see AK being used in is having content that spans over video walls. So if you think about a four-screen, 4k LED wall, right? 8k is perfect for that, and with the hiring unit, it's got four HDMI outputs. So you can just plug four TVs and adjust the bezel compensation, and now you've dramatically simplified having a video wall. So those are the areas we see people using our XC product which does 8k.
I can't open an email list or go to any kind of technology site without seeing a couple of stories or a couple of pitches about AI.
How do you see AI fitting within what you guys do?
Jeff Hastings: o first, AI is super interesting, and especially with ChatGPT coming out, I think there are a lot of areas that you're going to see AI, at least in our world. So I see it as one, on the internal side, so helping our developers become more efficient. When you're writing software, there's a lot of what I would call mundane writing software that is done, whereas now, that can be automated. Actually, there's GitHub CoPilot that generates a lot of software inside Visual Studio for doing simple things.
Then using ChatGPT to do some of the basic frameworks that work really well. So those are tools that I can see, and maybe on the support side, being able to use AI to get a much better quality first-level support request. So I see those things as on the operational side of the business.
And then, when I look at the digital signage side, what are things that are going to be changing the world on the outside of digital signage? I think the biggest one that I see is content generation. I don't know if you've played with any of the tools on content generation. Let's be real. Many people need just kind of simple videos and imagery, and with these new content tools, you can tell it what you want. I was playing with one the other day and said, “Hey, I want an image with a hamburger in a retro look”, and it generates an image for me. If you think about what that would've cost to have a graphic designer, do that., I think the package I've paid for, it's 10 bucks a month. That one image would've probably cost a few hundred dollars for a graphic artist to do. So I think the content side is coming up there, and then the last part, which we're working on a little bit, it's still early, is for our integrators to be able to describe the experience they want and create a presentation out of it.
So that is one that I think is, it's the same way that you think about, giving our programmers and our software engineers a big head start, I think this is going to be the next step. So an integrator, instead of having to say, how do I use which tool to create this? They basically put this into an AI and say, here's what I want it to do, and it gives me the experience back. And at the simplest level, it's already working, which is, for doing some simple presentations, not that it's an enormous amount of work, it's just the learning curve. We've got it working where you can just tell it for a simple presentation, it'll put it together for you. So I think, and we're just at the early stages of AI, so I think it's going to have, over time, a profound impact on basically making digital signage easier and lower cost to do a lot of things.
Yeah, I've been saying to people that, yeah, the generative AI stuff is cool, and the ability to generate images from prompts, as you were describing, is really interesting. But I think where this is really going to get used is behind the scenes for things like you were saying with coding, generating marketing materials, doing smarter monitoring, all that stuff that an end-user customer may never see, but is going to, as you say, make doing this business easier.
Jeff Hastings: When you just look at it, all of these things lower the barrier to entry to having a deployment, which is just good for our industry, and I think the AI tools are just at the early stage of creating these experiences and content that just lowers the cost of doing it. So all of them are exciting for us.
So you're going to be at Infocom, which by the time this runs will be imminent. It already is, but what are you going to be showing? I know you've got new players, new Series 5 players.
Jeff Hastings: Yeah, we'll have the whole lineup of Series 5 players. They've been dribbling out since the end of the year. So yeah, we'll show the new XT5 for the first time in our booth, which will complete our whole Series 5 lineup. So all of them will be on display.
We'll have more of the, as we talked about, BrightSign built-in displays in different form factors. Some interesting ones will be there. If anyone's out there, stop by our booth, the new XT product will be out there, and it will be exciting, and more of these built-in displays will be there. That kind of plays in that segment of the market.
What's your booth number?
Jeff Hastings: I don't know our booth number.
I knew you wouldn't, but I had to ask.
Jeff Hastings: Those things are not on the top of my list. We're in the digital signage section, and you'll see the power of purple being out there.
Just look for the crowd?
Jeff Hastings: Exactly.
All right. Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Hastings: Dave, thanks so much, and good chatting with you.
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Steve Bernard, Ocean Outdoor
Wednesday May 24, 2023
Wednesday May 24, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
A lot of digital out of home media is marketed mainly on the basis of reach - essentially the scale of the aggregated network and the audience reach that's realized. It's more about math than science.
But the UK out of home media company Ocean Outdoor is very much interested in the science of advertising, and over the last decade, Ocean has commissioned a series of studies that measure brain activity and how people respond to the visuals of advertising and other mediums like social media.
While a lot of audience measurement is about counting people and characterizing behaviours, Ocean has commissioned five studies that take participants into a lab, put something like an electrode cap on their heads, and measure how they respond to campaign visuals.
The newest study, called Digital Out Of Home: The Vital Ingredient, looks at how digital out of home optimizes the use of social media. The research found that using socially amplified digital out of home, changes how brands are perceived, and the value of their role in the media landscape.
I got a rundown on the background and the findings of this research from Steve Bernard, the Head of Insight for Ocean.
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TRANSCRIPT
Steve, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't live in the UK and maybe aren't in the media business, can you explain what Ocean Outdoor does, its footprint, and that sort of thing?
Steve Bernard: Of course. So Ocean started its life about 15 years ago, and we exist in the UK out-of-home media industry. So what that means is that we are selling premium digital screens to a range of advertisers across the UK. As I said, the business started back in 2008 with just a handful of sites, but in the period between then and now, we've grown our portfolio sites significantly. We now have well over 600 locations in total, and that's largely digital out-of-home screens. So some of those are static digital screens that show static imagery on them. Some of them are moving images so we have the ability to display moving images to the public, and whilst many of those screens exist on what we call roadside locations, so typically to the side of roadways and also on pedestrian pavements, that kind of thing, sidewalks, we also have several screens within internal environments so shopping malls are one of our big sort of environments that we exist in and what marks Ocean out as different from its competitors is that it's very much focusing on selling to advertisers that premium network of digital out-of-home screens.
And indeed, the environments in which those Oceams screens are located, for example, those shopping malls I referred to a moment ago, are often the most premium environments that exist in the UK. So, for example, we have a contract with Westfield, which is one of the largest shopping mall brands globally, and they have a significant footprint in London. So we have the advertising space on the external side of Westfield's locations: two locations in London, one in Stratford and one in White City, and we also have screens in the Edwards and James Mall, which is a premium shopping mall in Edinburgh in St. James's quarter, and we also have a footprint at Canary Wharf Mall. So Canary Wharf, for those who don't know, is quite a key business environment within London which typically has financial businesses. So by having our advertising screens in a location like that, we know we're reaching a very high-end premium audience.
And very quickly we have just started putting screens in Battersea power station which is again, another new premium shopping environment in the heart of London. So what works us out differently is our premium in inventory, and it's very much about digital out-of-home screens.
We're talking primarily because your company has put out neuroscience research, and I'm guessing at least that one of the re reasons you're investing in that level of research is because you do have premium properties, and you're selling your advertising at a premium so there's probably a higher demand for proof of impact and proof of audience on all those things. Is that accurate?
Steve Bernard: Yes, very much so. We always need to identify different methods to measure the effectiveness of premium digital out-of-home. One of the things about the out-of-home universe, if I may call it that, is that it's fairly varied in terms of the formats, in terms of the size, in terms of whether they're digitized or whether they're static posters.
There's a variation in environments as well, and so we know that not all out-of-home sites are the same in terms of the kind of impact that they deliver, and because we specialize in the premium end of the out-of-home universe, yeah, we need a methodology, which not just marks us out as different from our competitors who use more conventional, if I can call it that, research methods, but also something that is going to truly measure the impact of that premium out-of-home space.
So with neuroscience research, what are you doing? I realize that you're not doing it and that you're commissioning a third-party company, Neuro-Insight to do that work, but what's involved?
Steve Bernard: So ultimately, what we're trying to elicit is how people are thinking and feeling about a stimulus that's presented in front of them and to move that into the out-of-home context, what we're fundamentally trying to show is that by running premium digital out-of-home prior to other media channels for any given brand or any given campaign, that primary effect, that first impact is going to have a profound outcome in terms of how the audience discerns those other media channels. And we call that the priming effect, and during the course of the neuroscience studies that Ocean has run over the last decade or so, it's always been about trying to elicit that priming effect of premium digital out-of-home on other oot-of-home formats, for example, which was the neuroscience one or on other media channels completely like television or mobile campaigns.
That's ultimately what we're trying to show is that by leading with premium digital foam, a brand is able to ensure that how people take away the message on the other channels that they've run is fundamentally different compared to if they weren't running that premium digital out-of-home beforehand.
So what happens? You're not taking people who are participating in the research out on the street or anything like that. This is in a lab or something, and you're putting a brain or a skull cap on of some kind?
Steve Bernard: Correct. These studies are largely done in laboratory settings and controlled settings. And yes, as you've described there, the participants are made to wear these kinds of headsets, which are able to measure the various cognitive functions that are coming to the fore, as I say, when that participant is exposed to a particular stimulus or stimuli, be that digital out-of-home advertising or a brand in digital out-of-home advertising or seeing a brand in another context entirely so a TV advert or other out-of-home campaigns or indeed social media campaigns, which will I'm sure I'll come on to in a moment.
So what did you learn? Did it validate assumptions, or has the research surprised you guys?
Steve Bernard: I think we've always had this view that the effect of premium digital out-of-home and not just, can I say pre premium digital out-of-home, but also iconic out-of-home. One of the sites we also have in the UK is Piccadilly Lights. So that's at London's Piccadilly Circus. It's like a mini version of. Times Square in New York, if you can imagine Times Square in New York, Piccadilly Circus is a sort of a version of that, and we've always had this sort of expectation and this view that those kinds of sites are clearly eliciting different emotional outcomes for brands advertising on those platforms versus other more conventional formats.
As I said earlier, it's a very varied sort of universe. But clearly, the way in which someone consumes a message displayed on Piccadilly Lights, for example, or any of these other premium digital out-of-home sites that I'm referring to is gonna be different from how they consume that message on a bus shelter poster, for example, or a more conventional roadside billboard. So we've always, as I said, had that expectation of difference.
So the research is validating. But I think in respect of the lace neuroscience study that we've just launched in the UK and in some of our other European territories, which Ocean is based, we're able to show actually quite an interesting relationship between digital out-of-home and social media and a relationship, which I think for advertisers has yet to be fully realized, and hopefully, with this study, we are drawing attention to the closer relationship that these two platforms have. Digital out-of-home on one hand, and social media on the other, and as a result, getting advertisers and their agencies to think more about how they plan these two media channels together.
Can you give me an example of how they, how the two mediums intertwine, and how digital out-of-home primes social media channels or social media interests?
Steve Bernard: Absolutely. So to set the context a bit on this, typically within the advertising industry, you can put different media channels. So traditional media channels like television or radio, newspapers, magazines, and out-of-home and newer media channels such as mobile advertising or social media, you can have those on a sort of access, and you can look at that access based on how strong those channels are delivering what's called performance. So highly measurable, highly targeted on one side, and the sort of more intangible effects, so branding effects, brand equity awareness, fame, consideration on the other end of that spectrum.
So you have performance on one side and branding on the other, and you would typically see social media at one end of that spectrum on the performance side, and digital out-of-home and out-of-home are widely on the branding side of that spectrum because the view has always been that they do very different jobs. One is highly measurable or highly targeted, and the other is about reaching huge numbers of people in a public space. So one to many versus one to one.
What we have noticed over the last two years, it's probably been going on for longer, but over the last couple of years, is more and more examples of famous people, if I could put it that way, celebrities, influencers on social media, et cetera, promoting out-of-home content on their social media channels. So you'll typically see examples of famous actors or pop stars or musicians generally Tweeting or Instagramming a picture of themselves on an out-of-home canvas. That could be a banner site, or it could be a digital out-of-home screen. but very much promoting themselves on that platform, and we would contend that they wouldn't necessarily do the same thing if they saw themselves on a magazine page, or even in a television advert because a television advert is overtly a marketing function. Whereas the interesting thing, the unique thing about the digital out-of-home and home more widely is that its public furniture, I guess you could say, it's a public message in a very public space, and so I think that's why there's this relationship between known public figures and communications in the public space and that's the out-of-home space.
So that was happening over the last couple of years, we really wanted to explore that more deeply. On the other end of that is that more and more advertisers themselves are promoting their content, their out-of-home content, I should say their brand from a digital screen, on their social channels and we've seen examples from Amazon and Meta and a range of other advertisers who are who are increasingly looking at these kind of really exciting executions that they can deliver on the digital out-of-home space, and rather than sharing on their social feed, on their Twitter or Instagram a conventional advertising message, they will utilize that out-of-home content within the social media space. So you'll get Amazon Prime Video, when they're advertising a certain program, they will have performed an execution on an iconic site or a premium digital out-of-home site, and then they will tweet or Instagram the out-of-home campaign on their social channel, and that's really interesting because that represents a significant step change for our industry.
It's not necessarily just about reaching all of these people who walk past our sites on the ground every week, every month, et cetera. But the opportunity for that advertising to be seen much more widely by people who have not encountered the advertising on the ground, and that leads to all kinds of interesting questions about what is the true reach of an out-of-home campaign and like I say, that's very unique to our industry, given its greater level of creativity that's at our disposal now, given the greater proliferation of high impact digital out-of-home sites, and given the proliferation of a greater level of technology, which enables us to bring these campaigns to life in new and exciting ways.
There's a lot going on there, and so wrapping all of that together, because of this idea, this concept of sharing the out-of-phone campaign on the social media channel, fundamentally, there is a strong relationship between the two. Again, this is something that we've wanted to explore for some time, and we felt that neuroscience, given that it elicits precisely how people think and feel about something that they're exposed to, versus another sort of research technique, like a survey or a focus group, we felt that neuroscience is the perfect way in which to measure the impact of this type of concept that I'm describing.
There's also this interesting phenomenon that's bubbled up in the past couple of years where you have brands commissioning motion graphic designers to create a digital out-of-home ad, usually some sort of anamorphic illusion of some kind on a building where there isn't actually a billboard, but they design it in such a way that it makes you think that there is a billboard there and those seem to get one hell of a lot of social media shares, even though they're not actually physically booking a digital out-of-home campaign.
Steve Bernard: Yeah, that's absolutely true, and again, it's this idea that as an industry in the out-of-home space, we have a unique opportunity to capture the imagination of the audiences that encounter the various creative executions that we deliver.
And it's no surprise when you look at how welcomed and trusted different media channels are, out-of-home quite often appears at the top of those kinds of lists when they're ranking different media channels, which as TV and radio and online, et cetera. Out-of-home does really well in terms of being more welcomed and more trusted versus other media channels.
And I think that's because we have, as I say, just a really strong opportunity to capture the imagination of people as they're going about their daily business in an unobtrusive way. It's also the idea that out-of-home generally is one of the most venerable media channels in existence. There were people putting up painted billboards and painted communication on buildings a long long time ago, and that venerability is everlasting. People will always want to see things in the public space, and seeing them in the public space gives an inherent notion of trust. In a way, we would argue that isn't necessarily the case with one-to-one communications and certainly not online communication, desktop ads, et cetera. We know that brands who are appearing in the public space are trusted because they're in the public space because it is seen as a public medium.
So yeah, we have a lot of opportunities to capture the imagination in welcome unobtrusive ways, and as I say, there's now an opportunity to take all of the benefits of using out-of-home in the physical space, moving those benefits into the online space.
Were the rationale and the budgetary argument for doing this kind of research different a decade ago than it would be now?
I assume that a decade ago, digital out-of-home media companies had to work a lot harder to sell the medium itself, there was still a degree of skepticism, and a lot of it was just being sold on gross audience impressions and not a hell of a lot else, versus today where there is all this level of sophistication.
Steve Bernard: I think that's an evolving story. Fundamentally, the medium is still traded very heavily on reach, how many people any given campaign reaches, the frequency of encounters, and ultimately the number of impacts or impressions that a campaign is delivered, and that's chiefly how it's valued really.
I think one of the great things about this study and any series of studies that Ocean has done with neuro insight over the last decade is that with each of these studies, we are communicating to the wider industry the value of neuroscience., which has a very unique value. Now the company we work with on these, Neuro-Insight, they're a global neuroscience business. Still, they started their life in Australia, and it's very interesting that in Australia because this is not the case in the UK, in Australia, they incorporate what they call a neuro impact factor into their audience currency. So how they value outflow medium in Australia factors in these types of techniques, so it's not just a case of looking at reach and frequency and impact over there, there is implicitly this role of neuroscience coming to the fore, and the data that you see for different out-of-home formats and environments over there, and this is something that here in the UK, we're yet to do with our own out-of-home audience currency, which is called root.
But the long-term ambition would be for this type of methodology, this kind of study to at some point be incorporated into the out currency because, as I say, the out-of-home currency is very robust in that there, there's an awful lot of heft that goes into its methodology and an awful lot of inputs, data inputs there. A variety of sources. As I said earlier, there is clearly a different role played by sites such as the Piccadilly Lights or premium digital formats generally versus more conventional out-of-home formats, which are traded really on reach. There's a fundamental difference in these different parts of the industry.
An advertiser would be able to buy a thousand bus shelter posters, for example, or 2000 billboards on the side of the roads, up and down in the UK, and the value of that is in the reach, in reaching literally millions of people in any given period of time. Where this kind of study differs and focuses on is the unique sort of relationship that a relatively small number but high-impact sites have with an audience, and these kind of sites, these unique sites enjoy strong reach. Still, really their difference with more conventional standard out-of-home performance is that there are relatively few of them. Therefore the impact, if I can use quotations of how it's making an audience think and feel is very unique compared to more conventional out-of-home formats, which are traded purely on reach.
They're not differentiated from each other at all. So a bus shelter is a bus shelter. The same in London as it is in Manchester or Birmingham or et cetera. This is very much about showing the value of these more unique sites, more premium unique sites.
Do you have to invest the time with media planners and with brands to explain this methodology and. what's coming out of it, or do they inherently understand it?
Steve Bernard: No. It's very much the former. We spend a lot of time explaining how we put these studies together. They're complex studies. There are lots of different elements within neuroscience here in the UK. It's growing. It's a developing research study. One we've pioneered at Ocean Outdoor within the out-of-home context, but we do have to spend a lot of time explaining the methodology, there is always a great deal of interest when we go out to present these agencies or out-of-home buying specialists, et cetera, or when we go to clients directly here in the UK because it's quite a unique method because it doesn't have, at this point, a more widespread adoption, I guess you'd say.
So that means its uniqueness means there is an awful lot of interest to hear what we have to say. But it is always an interesting experience, kind of communicating the different elements of the methodology of neuroscience. I mean with the social media study, the vital ingredient, as we've called it, is us looking at the priming role of digital out-of-home on social media channels. There are an awful lot of moving parts to this. All that always relies on that always requires a lot of expectation. Fundamentally what we're measuring, the outputs are cognitive functions, as I've mentioned earlier. These cognitive functions are a mixture of engagement and approach towards a brand, memory, emotion, attention, et cetera and it's these kinds of outputs that we show uplifts for when we're presenting results. But again, it requires constant explanation because these are not elements you could describe them as, which are talked about a lot in research. A lot of the time, when we're communicating, out-of-home research, it's very much in looking at the effect of a campaign on brand awareness, or brand consideration, that kind of thing, and those kinds of terms are much more widely understood on the part of the advertising industry. But these kinds of outputs, like I say, cognitive functions, attention approach, engagement, et cetera, require a lot more explanation.
Is it a differentiator? In other words, would you have a circumstance where a media company, not Ocean, but a competitor Decaux or whoever is seeing planners, and would they actually say, okay, where's your neuro research, or what does your neuro research say? And they would say, well, we don't have any.
Steve Bernard: So neuroscience study within the out-of-home context in the UK is still relatively rare. It's something, of course, as I've said, that Ocean has pioneered because it's particularly about measuring sites, which fundamentally it's harder for the out-of-home currency to measure. So the value of neuroscience to us at Ocean is that we need unique methods to measure the effectiveness of what we would call unique properties.
Our competitors would be less likely to involve themselves in this type of study purely because our competitors here in the UK have a much wider portfolio in terms of volume, right? So in some cases, thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of different out-of-home formats because they're selling scale, reach.
Fundamentally, they're selling size, and they're selling the idea that reaching so many people in any given period of time has an inherent value, which, of course, it does. But as I say, neuroscience is a complex methodology. Still, one which is particularly useful when measuring unique properties and Ocean Outdoor of any outdoor media owner here in the UK has the unique properties, high impact, and famous premium locations, which makes this the perfect sort of methodology to use to measure their effectiveness.
You've done five of these studies over the pace of 10 years, is there a cadence to it? Are you doing one every two years, or are you done now?
Steve Bernard: That was a really interesting question. Each of the neuroscience studies has focused on the priming effects of digital out-of-home on another type of advertising format, from Neuroscience One, which looked at the priming role of premium digital out-of-home on wider outer home campaigns, and Neuroscience Two looked at the television, and we've over the years looked at things like mobile and the effects of priming digital at home on mobile.
I think it's hard to say, but there's been one every, as you say, every two or three years when the time is right. We felt that with this study which began its life last year, we felt that because social media channels were playing much a much more significant role within the advertising industry generally, and not just in the UK obviously but globally, we felt that there was a particular value in looking at the relationship between our own medium and these platforms. Where do we take this next? That's a really interesting question.
This study has already garnered a lot of interest here in the UK amongst agencies and clients. It's also something we have communicated to our other Ocean Outdoor locations. We have offices in Sweden and the Netherlands and across Scandinavia, and there's a lot of interest there. My colleagues and I have been presenting this study at events in Europe. So because of the level of interest that this is generating again, not just here but internationally, I think there will be a lot of ideas that come from this, focusing on areas that we want to explore further. Things that we weren't able to pick up necessarily in the study that we launched last year, but looking at more specific elements within them. So it's hard to say exactly where we'll take this next, but I think there will be a lot of ideas being discussed with us as we take this more widely
For people who have been listening to this and thinking this sounds interesting, I'd love to see the data or see the findings or whatever. Is that accessible, or is that something that you only share with your customers?
Steve Bernard: So it's something that we will always share with our customers first.
It allows us to have quite in-depth discussions with them about their media planning generally. So that's the first aim. We always ensure that the findings are displayed on the Ocean Outdoor website. So if you go on the Ocean Outdoor website now, you will see the findings from the previous four studies and they're readily accessible, and this study, of course, in due course, will be communicated on the website. It's something that we're sharing a lot on our social media channels, as you might imagine on LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera.
We're always happy to talk to people face to face or on an online forum about the study in more detail. In terms of the data itself, we've found some really interesting things in this study, as I said, these are two platforms, digital out-of-home, and social media, which, in the perception of advertising planners, exist on different sides of the advertising spectrum. But we've proved with this study that there is a significant priming effect of digital from digital at home on what advertisers are already doing on social media. For example, we've seen significant effects on dwell time. So that's the time people spend with an advertiser's brand post. That increased by 32% when the campaigns were primed by digital out-of-home.
Where we've seen a really really interesting finding is what happens when the digital out-of-home content itself becomes a social media post. So rather than an advertiser doing a conventional brand post, they can display the out-of-home campaign on their social channels. We saw, again, a 54% increase in dwell time. So again, that's time spent with that social communication cause of the primary effects of that socially amplified content we've seen increases in emotional intensity, and we've seen increases in a specific cognitive function called approach, which is ultimately or essentially people becoming more positive towards a brand when they see the campaign begin on digital out-of-home, then on social media.
So what we're really saying is that digital out-of-home is making campaigns online more approachable, making the brands more approachable. They're pressing the emotional buttons, which emotion is key in turning attention into long-term memory. We're enabling more time to be spent on social media communication. That's a key role of the priming effect and, most fundamentally, at this point. Finally, it is the fact that if you see the campaign, so let's say you've got an advertiser who uses out-of-home and puts that on their social channel, there is a tangible benefit from doing that for that brand versus if that brand was to just do a conventional brand post on Instagram or TikTok without the participant having seen the campaign in the physical location.
A lot of what I've described here is about the priming effect. But if you take away that priming effect if you just look at an audience who hasn't encountered the digital focus screen and you just compare how they felt about seeing it, seeing that phone campaign, on their social feed in sit versus if they just saw that brand, that same brand doing a standup brand post. There is a tangible benefit for that brand in terms of approach, a 21% increase in approach and a 3% increase in memory. That's really exciting because that suggests a much wider audience out there for campaigns that go viral, and that's the raw power we have as a medium, we can make social content more appealing to that audience.
We can do that for a brand. We're not just giving a brand the great benefits of the physical location, but we are also making a social media campaign for that brand more positive. I'm a part of the audience. It's really exciting, and lots of different layers to this study. So like I say, the results will be fully available for people on our website, but we would also welcome the opportunity to discuss it further at any given time.
All right. Thank you very much for spending all this time with me. That was terrific.
Steve Bernard: Thank you very much.
Wednesday May 17, 2023
Mark Coxon, AVI-SPL’s Experience Technology Group
Wednesday May 17, 2023
Wednesday May 17, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
AVI-SPL is one of the largest pro AV integrators on the planet, but for the longest time, if I was asked if I knew anyone at that company specifically on the digital signage file, I'd say "Nope."
As far as I knew, and the same for a lot of people involved in digital signage, AVI-SPL was much more focused on traditional pro AV work like unified communications and control rooms. While AVI-SPL delivered some digital signage projects, it wasn't a real focus. But that started to change a few years ago when the Tampa-based company spun up a new business unit called the Experience Technology Group, or XTG. Now it has some 30 people working on projects driven by the impact of visuals, and directly involving other architects, designers and creative shops.
Now, that's 30 people in a company that has 3,700 other staff, but the group works with some 300 customer-facing sales people, and gets pulled in to opportunities and projects when clients start expressing interests or needs that are about more than just function, like whiteboards and conferencing systems.
I had a great, very thoughtful talk with Mark Coxon, an industry veteran who joined the company about a year ago and is one of XTG's business development directors. We get into both the science and emotional sides of experiential projects, and how these kinds of projects work when they're guided by ideas and desired outcomes, and not just the Wow Factor of big screens.
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TRANSCRIPT
Mark, what is your role at AVI-SPL?
Mark Coxon: I am a business development director in our XTG division, which is our Experience Technology Group, so what I do is work with our regional account managers as well as our partner ecosystem to identify opportunities to build amazing experiences.
So your regional people would come across an opportunity, let's say, it's a corporate workplace that says, “We want to put a big ass LED display in our lobby. We don't know what to do or what to put on or anything else. What do we do?” And your regional person might have a kind of deer-in-the-headlights sort of reaction and call you or somebody on your team and say, okay, I need help here.
Mark Coxon: Yeah. So a lot of our opportunities do arise within the regions themselves, right? Because AVI-SPL is a huge corporation. We have, I think, 300+ sellers out in the marketplace, across the world, talking to clients, managing accounts where they might do a lot more of the typical AV that you see out in the space: conference rooms and auditoriums, et cetera, and they'll come across customers saying, “Oh, I think we want to add a wow factor to this lobby” or “We're thinking about building an experience center to show off some of the new innovation that we came out with this year.” And so they'll engage our group, which is an overlay to the whole company, and bring us in, and we can really start to give, I guess, some form to that process and make sure they get what they want at the end of it.
So you have a BizDev role, but it sounds like there's a fair amount of sales, engineering, and front-end consulting involved in it.
Mark Coxon: Yeah, it’s funny. AVI-SPL isn't really known in the market for experiential work, but we've done a lot of it. We've done a lot of it in pockets over the years for these customers, but it was never really organized under a division, and so that's why XTG exists. We've organized this portfolio of work in this division and assigned it to a team of people. We have about 30 people on our team now that overlay the country, and that team consists of people like me, business development directors, and we come from different backgrounds, some come from fabrication, some come from the consulting world, some like me come from all over the place within the industry from an integration perspective, and then we also have technologists on the team whose job is really exactly what you said to be those people who are thinking about the art of the possible.
“All right, this customer's asked for this outcome. They have these people coming to their building. They want them to feel this. They want this actionable insight out of the space.” And they're the ones who actually come up with the ideas on what kind of technology could we use to execute this and if we were to pull this off, what would it take for us to do that? And then they start to come up with rough sketches of what the technology would be to execute on that outcome.
Yeah, it's interesting. Through the years, I've been asked who do you know over at AVI-SPL and I'll say nobody from the context of digital signage, and the company's been known as a very large company, and it’s very active. But doing more, if this is the right term, traditional AV work in the corporate workplace, that sort of thing, and as you said, pockets of activity in digital signage, but nothing organized.
So was it recognized within the company that we need to aggregate this and put ourselves forward as being directly in this as opposed to people discovering that, oh, you do that too?
Mark Coxon: Correct. XTG's definitely a targeted branding effort at consolidating this work and this expertise we have in things like executive briefing centers, museums, welcome centers, visitors centers, hall of fame experiences, et cetera, that we've done over the years for enterprise, higher-ed, and really creating some emphasis around that type of work that we do, for sure.
Is there some cross-pollination happening when you do that? What I mean is, if you do some sort of immersive, experiential environment for a corporate workplace. Do they then two years later say, oh, by the way, we need new video conferencing capabilities or new meeting room signs, that sort of thing. Do you do that?
Also, vice versa where you're already in there doing collaboration work, and they say, we want to do something in our lobby with Wow Factory. Can you do that?
Mark Coxon: Yeah, obviously, we see both of those happen. Places where we're brought in maybe to do some specialty work, and of course, the other work at that point seems like more low-hanging fruit because it's work that we excel at already and have a huge portfolio of as far as auditoriums, meeting spaces, et cetera, and then, yeah, like you said, vice versa. We're coming in, and we're doing a lot of work, and you walk through this amazing lobby where people are going to come in their first experience before they come there to meet.
So let's say somebody's bringing a customer into their building, and they're going to pitch a multimillion dollar sale with this customer that they have. How are they defining what that experience is gonna be within the building and just asking that question sometimes, who's doing this space? This looks like a customer-facing, marketing-driven space, and a lot of times they don't know that we do that work, and yeah, we stumble upon it that way as well.
Do you guys go into prospective customers or existing customers pitching the idea of experiential spaces, or are you really operating off of their interest and initiative when they're saying we're interested in this?
I suspect it would be hard to pitch somebody saying, “You should have a big-ass LED video wall in your lobby.”
Mark Coxon: Yeah. I call that technology in search of an application, and that's definitely not what we do. There's a great quote by Cedric Price, who was a mid-century architect, that says, “Technology is the answer, but what's the question?” And that's really what my job is within the team, and the business development team's job is (we have a few business development managers), but our job is really what are you trying to accomplish in this space? What business outcomes are you trying to achieve when you're looking at building this space?
We're in this weird mode, right? Where a lot of companies are re-evaluating what it means to have an office in general, what it means to have physical space, whether that be retail, we just saw Bed, Bath & Beyond looking at closing up and citing online competition as one of the reasons, so what does it mean to have place-based retail today? And if we are going to build a space, what should it be? And really starting at that level. So I try to start with that level with people all the time, even in the enterprise.
The question isn't what do we do with the lease that we have or this space that we have? That's part, but that's the bridge. The real question is, if I had nothing, what would I build? And that's really the end goal of what you should be moving towards, and so many times we really start breaking down the problem of: what are the impacts that you hope to make by having a physical office or a physical retail location? And then how do we move backward from that into how does that now affect what we design into space, including the technology that will go into there?
It's really reversing that. If we go in and just start telling people how cool it is to have an LED wall in their lobby, we're selling from the wrong perspective. But if somebody says, you know what, when people come in here, they come in here, and they sit, and they go into their phone. So they're waiting for a meeting. They come and sit in our lobby. They start looking at their phone, and suddenly they're stuck in their email. They're thinking about the seven things they have to do when they get back to the office, and they're already moving past our meeting. We want to create something that actually creates some anticipation, some foreshadowing that tilts them into the anticipation of the meeting they're about to have and not pull them out of our space and back into their workday. How do we accomplish that?
And those types of conversations are much, much more fun to have and that could result at the end in having a 400-inch video while in the lobby, or it could result in maybe taking physical objects that the company's made if they're an aerospace company taking some of the innovations they have like rocket nozzles and things, and putting them on a shelf and letting people pick them up and play with them. And as they do, content launches, ambiently, around the room as they interface with these objects or whatever that happens to be. But really starting with who is here, why are they here? What are they interested in, and how do we engage them more? So that when they leave, they remember being here, and they actually take the actions we want them to take. So it's a much different approach than screens first, right?
Yeah. As you might expect, I get bombarded with emails and pitches and everything else every day talking about different projects and capabilities of companies, and I see the words experience and immersive overused and abused quite a bit, and I'm curious how you define immersive and how experience is defined because I get a sense that there's this idea that experiential and immersive means that, you have to have a video wall that's got gesture recognition and you're going to wave your arms in front of it, and all these things are going to happen, or they're synchronized lighting, or God knows what.
But from my point of view, there are times when an experience is just something that tells you if you're confused about which way to go, things like that, something that just makes the space better.
Mark Coxon: A hundred percent. So it's funny that you mentioned that because although I'm on an experience team, I'm a big fan of the calm movement. How are we decreasing the technology we use for mundane tasks or throughout the day to create these analog, tactile, calm moments. I agree that the best definition of experience I've heard, and one I tried to adhere to was by Brian Solis. He used to be at Salesforce, I think he's now at Service Now, but he's written a lot of books on the experience economy.
And he said, an experience is an emotional reaction to a moment in time, and as you said, that doesn't have to be an overwhelming jaw-dropping experience. It could be a relief like you said, that now I know where to go, or it could be a silent pause that allows you to reflect. I think there are a lot of ways that you can create an experience for a company.
For me, immersive just means that it's drawing the person in. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing. Are there ways to do that? Yeah. I've given, and I'm going to give a course this year at Infocom on creating the new connection center. I've given some talks before on utilizing biology to give a deeper connection to your message. So things like engaging peripheral vision work because more of your brain turns on when your fight or flight response is activated when your peripheral vision is being activated. And so are there ways that we can use, potentially waves of light to focus people inward on a screen or on a position in a room. Are there ways to draw people through space to a place where we want them to dwell? How do we create experiences where we don't, I guess, create congestion, right? Like putting a screen in the middle of a hallway, it could be a good idea as long as you're not encouraging people to stand there for 15 minutes, as long as the dwell time there is 15-20 seconds, et cetera.
So I think experience is also just how people interact with the space themselves, and immersion is a combination of all of those things. So engaging more senses always creates more memory, but that doesn't have to be an active participation either. I think the things that are often overlooked in experience are opportunities to create, if it's a movement of air, if it's gentle waves, if it's mechanical movement in a ceiling, if it's an ambient soundscape that fills the space instead of white noise, all of these things can lend to experience, but they're nothing that somebody stops and focuses on. They're things that happen in the background that enhance what's going on, without the person experiencing it really focusing on it, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I'm listening to that, and I'm wondering how the people on the other side of the table are responding to that. I suspect some of them are leaning forward and very interested, and other ones are going, that sounds expensive!
Mark Coxon: You do get that. You can definitely get that, and I think that's why the co-design process is so important and not coming in with an idea of what you want to sell. Like earlier, you talked about me coming in and telling somebody why this experience is going to be important for them. Again, that's me pushing something upstream that I've got an idea about.
I always say my best tool in a meeting is a blank piece of paper. Because if I sit down and really listen to what people do in this space, what they're trying to accomplish, all of those things, I'll pick up little notes. I had a customer the other day who, the architect, had put together a mood board of what this space wanted to feel and look like. They built a lot of these common spaces that they're talking about in architecture, We and Us spaces is what they're calling them where they're building these cafes with a lot of biophilia and wood and stone, and all of these things, and they're like we want to do sound masking in here, and you're like, okay, that's great. So obviously, you want to keep the sound from moving back and forth, but what you've really created here is almost an urban park or a community park type feel in this space so instead of just flooding this with white noise or paint noise, why not create a nature scape or something like that'll also keep the noise transfer down but really reinforce this idea that you're outside in this natural environment as opposed to the hush of a quiet office or the hush of a pink noise or white noise air chiller or something that a lot of times you put in a office space where maybe you're trying to focus on deep work and not on connection, right?
So it's just really listening to those things. When you start to identify those, when people start to, I guess self align with certain ideas as you're walking through what the different pieces are, they're more invested in that. Then when you come into that space where the cost comes, they really then weigh that against the impact as opposed to comparing it to what four speakers playing white noise would cost in the space.
Is it like that book about a village in terms of these kinds of projects where it's super important to have the architect involved, the engineers involved, all the different players who collaborate on a finished project as opposed to just the AV team coming in and executing this part of it?
Mark Coxon: A thousand percent. So many times, when we are brought in, what we end up doing and what I do with clients when they ask for an experience like this is one of the first things we want to do is almost a gap in overlaps kind of analysis with them. There is an ecosystem of partners that is necessary to create an experience. You're going to have somebody that's creating custom content. You may have two or three companies creating custom content. You may have to have a company specializing in video and live-action, live actors, et cetera, maybe somebody specializing in creating interactive user interfaces for touchscreens and all of those things. So you have these content creators. You do typically have somebody as an architect in this space that's obviously defining what the space looks like. Many times you have an experiential design firm doing the story, right? What's the strategy, what's the story? How are we walking people through this space? That's working with the marketing team in the company. Then you have custom fabricators building all this set work that the audiovisual goes into to create the look and feel that everybody has drawn down on the paper.
So it does take a village, and many times that's part of what we do, is we educate what it is that players are involved in a successful experience. Who are the stakeholders that you have involved with now? Do we need to get more stakeholders involved? Many times it might come through IT because they see it as a technology buying exercise and you really find out that marketing and the C-suite and human resources need to be involved because this is a system that's meant to reconnect the employees of the company to the mission of what they're doing every single day in space. And now all of a sudden that becomes a much higher strategy-level conversation on how it's executed, and so it does take a village and it takes a great ecosystem of partners. I know that word's overused too. I've used it twice.
But it takes this great array of partners, which is one of our core strengths is that we have a partnership manager that works specifically on making sure that we have a broad array of partners that we can introduce into these projects with our customers to make sure that none of these gaps are left untouched and that the experience we deliver at the end is not just a piece of technology installed on a wall because the technology itself, you don't get the value out of it when it's installed in the building, you extract the value out of the system. The ROI comes from the use of the system over time to drive the outcomes that you were looking for and thinking of this as a construction project where I delivered the 400-inch LED screen, so we're done, and the customer got what they paid for, they haven't actually extracted any value out of that piece of equipment yet. It's a depreciating asset until they play something on it that gets them the result that they want.
So we really try to focus on that instead of just our one part, and our, as I said earlier, we have our team. Our team, from a business development perspective, we walk through those things. Our technologists design the technology, but we also, when we take on a project, we have a program manager. And they're involved from the beginning, they listen to the intent, and just like in the programming phase of architecture, when you talk about what is the intent of the space and what are the ways that we're going to actually make some design decisions to facilitate that, the program manager really carries that spirit of the job and make sure that those partner handoffs, et cetera, are all going well and that everybody's involved in delivering the final result and so we built a process by which we deliver that, and we believe in it, so yeah, it does take a village for sure.
What is the breadth of services?
I'm thinking of one company much smaller than AVI-SPL, but they can do the full experience including metal fabrication and creative design, all that. So they can pretty much go from inception to delivery out of the same shop as opposed to using partners, but for a large company with a whole bunch of partners in play, how much do you want to own and how much do you want to cross-pollinate and work together on things?
Mark Coxon: We've doubled down on partnership when it comes to that. Our core strength is delivering technology. That's why our business was built, and that's what we do best, so we focus on the design and implementation of those technology systems, and for the other pieces, we partner. So you know, w don't build a lot of content. We do have a division called Video Link that does some content for video production for meetings, et cetera.
But are we going to create computer animations for how our power plant works? No. We're going to bring in a partner that knows how to do that every day to do that. Are we going to define for the company what their story should be based on their seven customer personas? No, we're going to work with their marketing department, and if they need some help really coming up with a storyline, we're going to bring in one of our branding and creative strategy partners to help with that because that's what their core skill set is.
So we try to focus on what our operational excellence is, and that is delivering technology systems. But from the standpoint of the way that we approach the sales group, we're not engaging in a process that's designed to sell a particular technology. So it's the difference between focusing on what we're really good at and letting the cart dry the horse. I love the Maslow quote, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We try not to approach this, well, we need to sell 600 extra square meters of LED this quarter so this customer will get a video wall. That's not the way that we approach this.
We don't approach this from a technology-centric lens, but we know where we play well and what we deliver value in the market with, and that's the technology portion.
I wrote recently about a company that was, maybe not pivoting, but evolving into doing AV as a service, with the argument being that a lot of end-user customers would rather just have the whole project done as an operating line item as opposed to all the upfront costs of capital, and they don't want to worry about recurring support and all that. They'd just rather pay a number and let somebody else do it. Is that something that comes up and that you offer?
Mark Coxon: Yeah, it comes up all the time. I think customers are always looking for ways to understand how much of this you want to own from a content update perspective, from how you manage refreshes, from even how you buy a system, as you said. Is it an operational cost, or is it a capital expenditure? Is it a construction project, or is it an ongoing cost month over month?
One place that we see this very specifically right now is we're doing some virtual production and XR opportunities for clients, especially in the corporate space where they're wanting to elevate their all-hands meetings or their product launches or any of those types of things. They're often already buying those services in an operational cost format where. They're going out and renting a studio, or they're hiring a production company to come in and do these meetings for them. So they don't want to take on a capital expenditure. They want that to continue to be an operational cost. So yeah, through things like creating a plan for leasing equipment by having a breadth of services onsite, like we have onsite managed services where we can embed an AVI-SPL employee in one of our businesses to run a center per se, or to run a virtual production studio for the customer so that they just come in, the stakeholders come in, they talk about the product they want to talk about, and somebody's running all the front house, back house doing the streaming out to the other participants, et cetera.
Yeah, we offer all of that, and that's one of the great things about working with somebody like us is because we do have such a large footprint, we do have such a presence, we have 4,000 employees across the world, and we have onsite managed services available. We have the ability to buy things on the customer's behalf and lease them, et cetera. That's one of the great advantages of someone with a big footprint like us is we have the ability to do those things.
What are the reference projects that you bring up? So you're sitting in a meeting, and they say, “What have you guys done? Impress me!”
What do you come back with?
Mark Coxon: Yeah. There are always a few that we show. The Museum of the Future in Dubai is an amazing project that we did, and people were like, you guys did that project? I'm like, yeah, we did that project and delivered it through our Dubai office, which is an amazing office. That team is, hands down, an awesome team. But we show projects like that because that's a space where people pretty much ride an elevator, like a space capsule, up into a space station and then come back to Earth in a future state, and the museum architecturally is beautiful, it's an oval with a hole in the middle of it. You even wonder how it suspends itself, as well as just all the different things that are in there. There's a touch interface where a half globe, a half spear actually swells up out of a flat table, and you can use it to articulate the earth. Who's ever seen an interface like that before?
So obviously, there were some great creative partners involved in the content and in that fabrication. But that's obviously a showcase project that we talk about a lot, and then we have visitor centers and executive briefing centers. A lot of our executive briefing centers are very impressive, Honeywell and Charlotte is a beautiful center with everything from transparent LED to kiosks to volumetric displays with physical artifacts to a full four-wall cave immersion room with a touch interface in the middle to navigate through 3D environments.
And so we show a lot of those pieces. We try to show projects that have, I guess, a variety of execution styles because not everything needs to be a touchscreen. It's to show someone that you could have 3D printed objects on a table, and as you pick up those objects, the video changes, and as you articulate that object, you can actually affect different parts of the video to launch. Those kinds of things are really cool and just show people that it doesn't just have to be a touch screen on a wall. We're not looking to put a big black rectangle on the finish you spent six months working on with the architect. We're going to make sure that's integrated into the space in the proper way.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of subtlety and just little things like present sensors that cost a few bucks to incorporate into a design. But you walk within a certain range, and it changes what's on a screen, and “Oh, how'd that happen?” It's great, but it's not fancy, you're not issuing a press release about it.
Mark Coxon: Yeah. We've been working on some projects where they're talking about using real-time location services as people walk through the building. So they get badged in, or they get a card, and that card has a profile that maybe they've entered in, and as they walk through the space, the experience is personalized slightly to them, based on their profile or using things like data generated art. Humans are great at pattern recognition, and so if you're putting audio/visual in a space that people work in every day, or people go into the office every day with these screens are in the background, you don't want them to be counting down 15 seconds to read and then 32 seconds until the screen goes blue with white text and then: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, cue the video of the kid running through the park.
That almost becomes like water torture at some point, right? It's just the constant dripping of this repetitive content that goes on in the background. So how do we use things like occupancy sensors, and time of day weather outside, all of which create effects on these screens that are more ambient in times that they're not being actively used for customer communication or employee communication?
A lot of those things are really cool. So what you said, that subtlety, and really thinking of just the different moments. These are canvases that we can use for multiple things. Sometimes they need to be quiet and soothing for people to do their work. Other times they need to be loud and inspiring to get somebody's attention and be able to design something that does that and know who to partner with on the backend from a hardware perspective for something like a content management system that can be on a schedule or can use sensor-based inputs to trigger different modes is really important.
Are you sensing or seeing any kind of a shift in the marketplace in terms of rising interest in a particular thing?
I know you mentioned experience centers, but those have been around for a while, that's an area where I get a sense because of the pandemic and everything, they're elevating in importance because you don't have as many people in the offices.
Mark Coxon: Yeah, I think experience centers are becoming more and more prominent. Companies are seeing if they can bring their customers in and create a memorable, relevant experience around their value story, that pays dividends for them.
I think we're seeing more and more interest, as I said, in virtual and extended reality, virtual production, and extended reality stages for elevating corporate communications. Suppose every single one of your communications goes out in 16 squares on a VTC call. How do you punctuate those meetings so that the important ones are elevated and look different, feel different, and actually engage people differently? We're seeing more and more of that.
I will say, honestly, the big push is this: The challenge of physical space in a world that becomes more and more online, we have to get away from the idea of just utility because utility is going to be provided more conveniently, virtually. I can easily join a meeting from my kitchen table. I can easily buy a pair of pants on Amazon. So if we're just looking for the utility of work or the utility of shopping or whatever that place is built to do, if we're focusing on utility, we're always going to lose to the online experience because it's more convenient and the utility is the same. So we really have to focus on the personal experience.
Gensler did an experience index on public space a few years back, pre-pandemic, but people are in multiple modes when they go shopping, right? People are in the task-based mode of finding something to buy, but they're also in a mode of exploration. They're in a mode of connection. They're in a mode of aspiration. Who do I want to be? What do I want to be? I want to be inspired. They're looking for cultural connection. There are all these other motivations at play, and it's the same when people come to interact in an office, when they join their team, when they go to a movie theater versus watching something on Netflix. There's a reason the movie theaters haven't died. It feels different to watch a movie in a movie theater, not just because of the scale of the screen or the audio, but because it feels different being in a room, having a shared experience with other people, hearing their reaction to something, hearing when they go silent, when they laugh and when they cheer.
Those are things that we can really build an experience around, and I always say technology has advanced to a space where technology is usually not the limiting factor, so technology's no longer a huge challenge, space isn't a huge challenge, to design a space or to be able to build a space that facilitates these things. So really, now we are in the challenge of getting somebody back to the office, getting somebody in a mall, it is a human-centric problem. That's a human-centric exercise, and if we don't start with experience design that addresses the human motivation of why they would go somewhere, and we just address the utility of how big a store need to be and how big a screen need to be for somebody to read the text? We're never going to solve a human-based problem on why space is relevant, and so I think companies and customers are starting to see this more and more if we can start talking about: what is the human experience, and then how do we use space and technology to facilitate that? It's just a different way to solve the problem.
We have to flip the model in its head. We can't start with a square building, add technology, and then hope people come and use it in the way that we designed it. That's not experience design.
All right, Mark, thank you very much—very interesting chat.
Mark Coxon: Hey, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Brett Crossley, FanConnect
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
Tuesday Apr 25, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There are a lot of screens at sports and entertainment venues, and when it's possible to buy a 4K TV the size of a bus for a few hundred bucks, team owners and venue operators are having to work harder than ever to compel people to get off their sofas and come to games.
Whether it is college football or pro basketball, there's a big emphasis on maximizing the game-day experience for ticket-buyers, while also optimizing the investment sponsors have made in being at the venue and part of everything going on.
A Charlotte, North Carolina company called FanConnect is very specifically in the business of providing and supporting a platform and services that drive the game-day show, and the information on most or all of the flat screens around a stadium or arena.
FanConnect does in-venue TV programming that enhances live game broadcast feeds with things like real-time stats and sponsor messaging, and it also does IPTV for the suites and loge areas, as well as digital signage around the concourses and at concessions.
That last component is something most or all venues want and need, but the digital signage capabilities also track back to the roots of the company. I had a chat with Brett Crossley, FanConnect's VP of Product.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brett, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what FanConnect does?
Brett Crossley: So what we do is we work with the corporate partnership teams in sports venues, so in college and professional sports and we work with the partnership marketing, the sponsorship team if you think about it that way to put something on the TV screens. I'm talking about our primary product, so our biggest product is FanConnect TV. We make other things, but that's probably the biggest thing we have. It's also our biggest footprint, and what that does is it makes a private TV network for use in the venue that plays on all of the TVs that are in the venue that would've been showing just the live game feed. This feed was being produced for probably the video board in most cases. We turn that into something that fans are gonna want to look at because it's good looking and that fully integrates what the sponsors and what the corporate partners need into that experience.
So that's the main product that we supply, and then I'd say that all the related products are similar, right? They're all designed to operate inside of a large sports venue, inside of a stadium or an arena, and they work with TVs or video technology of some kind inside of that venue.
Do you get any pushback at all from venues saying why wouldn't I just use the broadcast feed that's already coming in that I've already been using on the TVs?
Brett Crossley: No, I don't think we don't face that pushback, and the main reason is if you think about our primary customer is a corporate partnership team. On the college side, that would be somebody that's a Rights holder, like a Leader field, a Playfly, a JMI, typically that's who that is. On the professional side, it's a group that's titled something like Corporate Partnerships for the Chicago White Sox, and prior to us getting there, they either didn't have any way to include their corporate partners in the TVs or what they had just wasn't working for what they wanted to do.
And so yeah, I don't think we faced any pushback there from people saying why not just use the existing feed? I think the other part of it is too tough, in our opinion, when we are done, it looks a lot better and it provides a better fan experience than before we got there. And I know we're on a podcast so you can't see this, but if people go to our website or if they look us up on LinkedIn. we're FanConnect.TV so that's our domain name. But if they look at what we do, it's designed to mirror a lot of what you would see with a professionally produced broadcast. So imagine somebody's in a truck and they're using tools from Ross and Grass Valley, et cetera, and they're building something to make it look broadcast quality, we're doing something similar. We just do it in software and without having people do it in real-time.
I assume one of the drivers here for the corporate sponsor people is they're looking for as many ways as possible to give their corporate sponsors some love and avoid any minefields of a TV broadcast, if, let's say, I don't know, Chrysler is the sponsor at a stadium or a sponsor at the venue, they don't want a Ford ad on TV or a Toyota.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what they're trying to do is they want to create something that works for a partner, and I will say, because we probably lead the world in this and I know that sounds like blowing our own horn here, but as far as companies that are really invested in understanding how corporate partnerships work and the needs of the teams that work with them, I think we probably do more of that than anybody.
I'm not talking about just the pure technology people doing an L bar, creating something that kinda adds to the video. But the other part of what we do is education about the best use of that technology to actually do what it's supposed to do, and so oftentimes prior to us getting there, if they did have something like, think just like an L bar, going back to Cisco Stadium Vision days. If they had something, there wasn't a lot of thought put into it, and in most cases, the experience wasn't great. It really looked like what it was, which is you just shrunk the amount of video space available to show the game and you put an ad wrap around it, and you're showing kinda nothing but a wall of ads, and if you see what our product looks like, if you saw it in the NFL, you're gonna see passing statistics and rushing statistics, and we're gonna interleave in photos from the team's official Twitter feed when those are appropriate, and just pulling in a lot of stats and engaging content and then embedding that with the sponsor assets in a way that looks really natural and not like we just put a wall of ads up there.
I've certainly heard through the years of very large technology companies like Cisco buying their way into these sorts of venues, and in order to do that, you have to use their technology. Are we past that where the venues realize, yeah, that was great, we got that for free, or very little money, but it didn't actually work for us?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say that is still something that is evolving. So if you look at the landscape today, certainly you've got teams that have invested in one IPTV system or another, right? So Cisco was one of the first of those. There are plenty of other technologies that do that, and that's something that we make as full IPTV as well. But if you look at the people that do it, I think that in most cases they certainly would show in their marketing something that looks like an L bar and they're all going to say words on their website like make more money from sponsors. But in terms of actually doing that, it's an exercise left to the reader, and so you see teams that have had some of those newer technologies and have had them for years, and we know because we talk to everybody that we work with and people that we don't, you'll see people that have had it for multiple years that have not gotten that to where it does something close to what we do, not even just a basic version of it.
So the content's hard. I think you probably know that as well as anybody, right? In the digital signage industry, content's also hard. But it's especially hard on the side where we play because you have a lot of things that you have to do well to make it look like what we're trying to make it look like. We want the scoreboard embedded in the same way it would be on the broadcast TV feed. We want the live clock that's coming, it's the same thing that's tied to the scoreboard controller that's in the stadium. We want to be able to show out-of-town scores. We want to highlight when something significant has happened in those out-of-town scores that lead to changes. We want to show sort of detailed stats, like in major league baseball, hit and pitch data, and so tying all of those things together and making it work well is not something that's easy, and so I would say that currently the positioning by. Most of the vendors that make something like IPTV is yeah, you can just use our stuff and go build something to your liking. In reality, we certainly work in a number of places where the vendor that is there would much rather that experience be them than be something created by us.
I'm curious about how deep you have to stitch your way into the operations of the venue and of the sports franchise, whether it's football, baseball, hockey, or whatever the case, you have to work with the scoreboard systems, like the statistical analysis systems, the people are doing things like reading how fast that fastball came in and all that sort of stuff. Is that a lot easier to do now than it was even five years ago?
Brett Crossley: I would say that parts of it are easier, but there are new technologies that come out and then essentially new APIs that you're having to deal with on the regular. It was much harder for us when we first started. So we started doing this way back in like, 2010, and I can share this now because it's just been so long, and it doesn't matter, but we really bluffed our way into it, and at the beginning, it was like, yeah we want to make something work here, can you work with our scoreboard controller? Yeah, sure. What is that? What brand?
And it was difficult, right? I think that when you think about the vendors that are in sports venues, a lot of them do not want to play well with others, right? Think about the people that made the scoreboard controller, and the people that made the stats, and I feel like there's another barrier to entry there, which is that the professional sports side, all have pretty tightly codified APIs that distribute all of their data. But if you haven't already got a team that's your customer, you won't get access to that data, and so it's not if you came up with a product idea, you can just build it, and they will come. You have to have something in the door to be invited to use the data. I think for us, it certainly got easier over time because as we saw one of every type of scoreboard controller, we would just chalk that up and write it down. We're like, oh, okay, they've got Dactronics, they have an OES, or whatever the thing was, and then we would figure out how to work with it. You can imagine some APIs represent abstraction for that so that t no matter which one of the controllers we're working with or which stats API, we can kind of create something more unified and easier to manage.
Sports entertainment venues are turning into experiential venues in many ways. Are you now having to also work with almost like show control systems?
Brett Crossley: So that's interesting. We do, in some cases, work with control systems, but interestingly enough, more of that is done during a live sports game for example, if you think about working with the production crew, they might have a Ross tool that is designed to trigger things on the video board, on the ribbon boards, et cetera and we can make it to work on the TVs that we operate on are one more thing that can be tied into those control systems and so imagine, somebody's just hit the third home run of the game, and so they want to put a special message up, they can send that message, and it'll activate all of the things at once. It's kind of a TV takeover, video board, and ribbon board. So that's where we see that.
On the sort of mixed-use venue side, I think that the requirements in general on the TVs are a little, and when I talk about the TVs, the bulk of the TVs, I'm not breaking it down to the very specific ones that are doing a job that looks much more like digital signage, right? Like concessions, menu boards, and sort of those things. But if you think about it, the bulk of the TVs that would've had the game on in that venue during a concert is probably still showing the concert feed. They might be doing a simple wrap, and the wrap is just giving some day-of-event information instead. So it's a little bit simpler just because nobody has a big vested interest in doing something special for a one-off like a concert.
You mentioned digital signage. You also have that as part of your kind of product suite, right?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, sure. We originally were a digital signage company, so if you went way back when we started doing what we did originally in college sports and then eventually in professional sports as well, FanConnect was a wholly owned subsidiary of 10 Foot Wave, which was a digital signage company and was split off in 2018 as part of the acquisition of 10 Foot Wave by Spectrio and so our roots were in that space, to begin with anyway. It's natural that as we split off and just focus on sports venues we wanted to be able to handle all of the small screens, you can think about them that way that are inside of a stadium, and so that includes the TVs that are showing the game, TVs that do the equivalent digital signage which is just informational, et cetera, as well as the concession, menu board, those types of things, and then the other kind of interesting one is like what we do at Ohio State, which is we make a tablet that's used in the lodge area. And so it's purpose-built, it does, IPTV, so it does videos so you can watch them out of town game or whatever that you're interested in. But it also has a bunch of functionality used by the kind of premium seat holders at Ohio State. So if they need to call an attendant, if they're trying to figure out the pricing of the mixed drinks or whatever, they can look that up what to do and all of that, look at rosters and team data, et cetera, on that purpose-built tablet.
So there's one at every seat?
Brett Crossley: There's one at every table, is the way that it works. So if you think about a lodge area, it’s a hybrid, right? So it's assigned seats in grouped sections as opposed to just you're in these five seats, so you've got a shared table for every three people or something like that.
So there'd be a lot of client entertainment happening?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, there's a lot of entertainment, and then those people paid a lot of money for those seats wherever they are. I mean sports venues are expensive, and so just trying to create a premium offering for those people is something that a lot of teams are working on.
Is there a lot of pressure to do more and more from one company in a sports and entertainment venue?
I talk a lot about the importance of a company being known as the guys who do this kind of work, and I wonder if you were just going into sports and entertainment venues, purely doing the concession digital signage, are you pressured also to be doing IPTV in the suites and elsewhere on the concourses and all that sort of thing? Or are the venues pretty much okay with you doing this piece of it, we'll have these other five companies do these other things?
Brett Crossley: I think that really like every industry that matures, the buyers in this case, the technology side of the stadium, they would rather have a smaller number of vendors to deal with than a larger number, and so as a practical concern, I think you're right, which is the way we think about it, we need to be able to do all of the things you would want to be able to do on anything that looks like a TV inside of a venue. That's part of what we have to be able to offer because, again, you are correct that people would rather have a single vendor, a single interface, et cetera, to deal with.
One place where I think that does break down a little differently is the content side because that’s just so complex on its own, and so we certainly have people that are leveraging us for the experience on the screens and all of that, who already have another vendor in as the IPTV solution who may have somebody different for menu boards, et cetera. And the one thing that they truly can't get anywhere else would be something similar to what we do with the content that's created on TV.
So you might have an IPTV service of some kind, and they're quite good at video networking, but they don't know much about the presentation side of it?
Brett Crossley: To be fair, I'm not going to say that they can't make something that's pretty, I think that you'll see, and I think it's been true of digital signage forever, which people will show you really pretty screens and, use that, whatever's on that screen as a substitute for, here's what you're going to have to do to get that to work. And the example I always give is, you look up at a concession stand or a digital menu board, and you can't really tell what you're looking at, is it just a static image? Is it an image over just an animation background? Or is it truly being rendered dynamically tied back to a point of sale? It's hard to tell.
So I think that at least on the content side, it becomes something where you would rather have something that works than be given a toolkit, especially when it comes time to actually build anything that's as close to as complex as what we do. You could build it, but you'd be spending a long time. It took us a long time to build what we have, right? And so if you just sat somebody down and you gave them a pile of tools, building that is going to take a lot of effort, and you're gonna have to hire people to do it and it's not like you get to build it once, you have to continue maintaining it and working on it, changing it out and adding to it over time. I think it's just difficult.
What's the business arrangement that you would have with a typical venue? Where do you start and stop?
Brett Crossley: Yeah, so our contractual arrangement most of the time is with, like I said, the corporate partnership side, right? If you think about whoever is in charge of making money from corporate partners or sponsors, that's usually who our contractual arrangement is with, and then a side part of that and really it happens in every deal that we're in and every stadium that we're in prior to the deal being signed, they bring in technology and those guys grill us and ask us, how are you gonna work with our system, and how do you do this? And we pull up diagrams because we've seen a lot of that before. And we're like, yeah, this is what we would do to work with you guys.
Once that's all done, we are working closely with the technical team to just make sure that everything is still operational. But then our business arrangements are with the corporate partnership side and we are paid kind of the way you think about it, just like anybody else, right? We get paid for things we build and put on the screen, and we don't have weird arrangements, I don’t know if you remember those guys like Arena Media Network, et cetera. There were multiple companies that would try to do that. We'll give it to you for free and we will keep some percentage of the inventory. In some cases, it was more like, we'll give it to you for free, we'll pay you to take it, and we'll keep part of the inventory.
We don't do anything weird like that. We're more of a direct business relationship with whoever is the equivalent of the rights holder and then they are the ones that are bringing the corporate partners.
Yeah. The whole build it, and they will come to things where we're putting screens in the washrooms and everywhere else, hoping that they could sell media time around it, there's been a legacy of failure there.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, and you still see it, and not to pick on people, right? But the classic one for me was the urinal TV, where you mount these TVs, individual screens up, I like to think that what we do is the opposite of that. What we want to do is to make something that we're a corporate partner, and when they see it on the screen, they are like, wow, that looks great.
We're active on LinkedIn, and my favorite thing is when somebody that works for the sponsor takes a picture of the TV screen, and they are on it, and it's the game-winner. You've just won the big game, and then their stuff's up, and they take that picture, and they throw that out on their LinkedIn. They like what they see there and the company they're keeping. As I said, if you just look at our product, it really does look good. In addition to kinda all the things that make fans want to be on it and the technology side, and I'm not saying that we wouldn't build something to work in urinals if a team wanted us to build that, but we certainly wouldn't go out of our way to do it without somebody really asking for it.
Yeah. If somebody's in trouble, they become the field maintenance guy for that. Do you do the deployment, hardware sourcing, or anything, or are you strictly on the software and automation?
Brett Crossley: We work on the hardware side as much as we need to, or as little as we have to.
We're not in the business of making players. We're not like a Brightsign. We try to remain pretty hardware neutral. We have preferences, of course, I think anybody who's been in this industry does. But if you think about the FanConnect TV product itself, it's a hybrid cloud solution, right? So there is a server installed on the premises. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. The server is responsible for compositing, pulling everything together, and building out what is going to really be a show and that's how that's going to work.
The rest of the hardware for FanConnect TV would be the video distribution system, so we work with whatever is there. In many cases, we were replacing, let's say, you had your stadium, you had Channel 10.2 digital, or if you're using IPTV, it's an IP stream, and you've got kind of a symbol for it. We're often just replacing that. That's the first thing that we are doing at most places. Now there are places where we're doing more sophisticated things, where you can imagine, if you're in the suites at American Airline Center, every channel, no matter which channels you are tuned into, would still be wrapped in kind of an L bar wrap so that's an example of something that's different and does require a device behind every TV. But in most cases, pretty straightforward, we're tied into the existing distribution system, pushing that out, and as I said, we try to remain relatively hardware neutral. Our server is, of course, just one U rack-mounted server that's hardened and does what it's supposed to do. But we can work with various kinds of player technologies regarding digital signage, our IPTV solutions, the things we do in suites, et cetera.
Yeah, I would imagine you're seeing a lot of smart displays in suites now.
Brett Crossley: It's starting to happen. It's expensive to replace everything in a stadium, and you’d think replacing TVs would be something that would be something done more actively than it is. Still, right now, I think what are people wait until there's either a big renovation or they're just going to build another stadium, and so they're waiting on one of those two things to go in and do the big upgrade on the TVs. But yeah, smart TVs, things with a system-on-a-chip capability are certainly starting to move out there, and I’m starting to run into them. And venues would like you to use them if you can, right? They would rather just have a smaller number of things to break and manage. If you can avoid putting a box behind every TV, then that would be better.
Does it make any business difference to you guys in terms of whether you're working with Major League Baseball, which is gonna have 80+ home games a year, versus football that might have six or seven home games?
I just wonder about some of these massive venues that really don't get used very often. Are they more reticent to invest in technology?
Brett Crossley: I don't think that's the case. I think that what you'll find is, if you take an NFL stadium or a big college stadium, right? That would get you closer to your six or seven games. The fact that there are so few games means that the games that you have are extremely important and really in their minds, they want to make sure that nothing is going to go wrong. Whoever's in charge of the technology side, just wants to make sure that it's going to work. That's their number one concern.
The corporate partnership people, again they care the way that I put it, and this is true of really anything in sponsorship, not just us, but if you're a baseball team, if something goes wrong and you don't do the activation for that corporate partner that you were supposed to do, you have a lot of other games to make that up to them and comp them. If something goes wrong at a football game and you mess up what you've committed to a corporate partner, then you're in a different position because that game represented a significant percentage of what you were trying to do for them for the season.
I don't think we've ever faced any pushback because of the number of games. It's more on the technology side. They just want to make sure that it's rock solid, and we've been doing this long enough, we can point to that, and we can go, we've done so many games, we can't get an accurate count of them. We've tried, but it's thousands upon thousands of live games that we've produced at this point and so I think it's really a trust issue probably more than anything else.
Is it a challenge for something like an arena that may have an NHL team, an NBA team, a WNBA team, and they all have different sponsors, and they may change from night to night?
Brett Crossley: So we do support those. If you think about a complex example of that, it would be Capital One Arena in DC, where we were working with the Washington Wizards, The capitals and also Georgetown is in that same venue, and so you've got, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and then concerts, things like that, and the way that we operate the way we operate FanConnect TV is a little different from the rest of the digital signage. So today, we operate that as a managed service for them, and so they tell us what they are trying to do, what they want to do, and then we just help fulfill it and actually make it all work on the screens.
The needs for the different sponsors are really a byproduct of who is running corporate partnership at the venue and for the teams as far as if they need something different. So we do something similar at Acrisure Stadium, right? We work with the Pit Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers, and there are two totally different corporate partnership teams. In some cases, it is the same team, whatever way they want us to work, we will work with that.
Tell me about the company. You're privately held?
Brett Crossley: We are privately held. We're not VC-backed. We have investors, and then many of us that are there are also investors, and we were as close to profitable as we want to be, right? And so if we're not profitable at any particular time, it's because we are intentionally spending more money. It's not because we have not yet achieved some measure of success.
Has all the weirdness of the last three years affected your industry or your business at all? I mean obviously, when nobody was going to games, that was a bit of a challenge, but it’s back.
Brett Crossley: Absolutely. Looking back on it, it was very difficult. I think when Covid hit, a bunch of people we worked with just shrugged to put their hands up and it was not good. One thing that was nice about that was we'd been working on kind of a full ground-up replacement of our core technology, and we went ahead and did that, and now we've seen that through to where we finalized that, right? So it's the third generation of this technology.
And we had the luxury of being able just to take our time, building it from scratch, knowing everything that we'd learned over this time, and so in some ways, I'd say that maybe was a little bit of a blessing, although it didn't seem like it at the time, watching the P&L statements for that time. But yeah, I'd say it was crazy for everybody.
Yeah, I've heard that story a few times. It's interesting when they say we didn't plan on this, but suddenly we have time to tear up the platform and start over, or do v3.
Brett Crossley: That work had already been started, right? And technology moves forward, right? And then we'd been looking at a number of things that we wanted to be able to do better in a kind of fully integrated way, and so the timing was good. We'd already started working on that effort. It's a lot of work, right? Replatforming is a significant amount of work.
What it allowed us to do, though, was to take our time and get everything right. There was no rush to try to get something in because the season was getting ready to start. So I'd say we've found some benefit. The one side note, though is things are bigger than they were pre-Covid in terms of what we do in live sports, in terms of attendance, in terms of the interest that we're getting, in terms of the way people view what they want to do inside of a stadium. I'd say that things are better now than they were pre-Covid.
I live in Canada, and I don't live anywhere near Toronto, but the Blue Jays just had their opener, and they did a huge refresh of a lot of the technology in that building, and one of the drivers said they have to up the game day experience. That's what people expect if they're going to be spending $14 on a beer and $80 on a ticket, that sort of thing.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, that's right, and it's not wrong when people say that sports venues are not competing with other sports venues. They're competing with the big-screen TV that's in your house, right? So putting something in front of the fans that is very impressive is really important, and we fit in well with that. During the off-season, when I say off-season, I'm really thinking of kinda the fall sports off-season, because we are running some games throughout the entire year, but when we had a chance, we went back and did a redesign of sort of the core of FanConnect TV, and we worked with graphic designers that have done work with Fox Sports, FX1, et cetera, to come up with something that was really polished and professional and look broadcast quality, because, that's what people wanna see, right? Especially when we come in, and we're like, we've got something that's better for your TVs, and they're like, okay, prove that, and that's what we ended up with.
I think one thing that's neat about our design is unlike an ESPN or somebody like that who has to essentially be neutral, right? Our broadcast is definitely themed for the home team, right? If you saw this at the University of Georgia, it is nice, and it's red and black, and it is bulldog television, and if you saw the same thing at the Chicago White Sox, it definitely looks like the White Sox, right? It's not trying to be neutral.
All right, Brett, thank you very much for spending the time with me.
Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it.
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Brad Koerner, Koerner Design
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
Brad Koerner is a Harvard-trained architect who has spent decades looking at how technology affects and defines built environments. He has a specific interest in technologies like lighting and digital displays.
An American based now in beautiful Amsterdam, Koerner works with both end-users and technology companies. By his own admission, he's obsessed by the question of how digital and interactive technologies are starting to disrupt centuries-old thinking about architectural design.
We met recently at Integrated Systems Europe, where he did a well-received talk on his ideas and observations. He later sent me the presentation deck, and it was pretty clear I needed to get him on this podcast.
In our chat, we get into a whole bunch of things - but focus quite a bit on the terms immersive and experiential ... what they mean and how they get applied.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS
TRANSCRIPT
Brad, thank you for joining me from Amsterdam. Can you give me a background on what you do and what Koerner Design is all about?
Brad Koerner: Yeah, thanks, Dave, for having me. It's really an honor. So Koerner Design is my own design firm, and I focus on the future of the built environment, iSPAN, architectural lighting, digital signage, and circular economy product design.
What would be a typical engagement? If there is such a thing as typical.
Brad Koerner: A typical engagement for me is working with lighting design companies to create sustainable products. I've been engaged with a few digital signage and marketing firms looking at trends in digital media. I'm also working with DC Power folks, thinking about sort of infrastructure-level improvements that help lighting and digital signage.
So a company would come to you saying, we are thinking about doing this, but we don't have our heads wrapped around how it would all come together?
Brad Koerner: Yeah I speak a lot. I talk about the future of the built environment through a variety of different channels, and a lot of people find inspiration in the pieces that I do. For example, I just spoke at Integrated Systems Europe on immersive digital environments, and an earlier presentation I gave was called “Every surface is a screen, now what?”
The year before that I presented at Integrated Systems Europe, also on DC Power Systems. These videos go out there and they get people really inspired. They start to see these industries in new ways. They look at their problems with a fresh mind, and they really want to engage them in an innovation process, right? A proper design-driven innovation process. So I help them do a future envisioning session: what are the trends, what are the options, what do they have? Then we turn that into a sort of proper wishlist of product concepts or new business concepts, and then we drive it into the roadmap where it's scoped and prioritized, and they focus on that.
I also then take it all the way out and help 'em with product marketing and marketing communications for those new launches.
So they would come to you because you're not selling them anything other than your insight and expertise as opposed to trying to angle them toward how they're gonna use a fine-pitch LED wall?
Brad Koerner: Correct. I'm agnostic when it comes to all the technologies and equipment.
You talk in your presentations a lot about immersive digital experiences and I'm very curious about how you define immersive because I just wrote the other day about a company that described a billboard along a roadway as immersive, and I thought, boy, that's really stretching to call that immersive, but maybe I'm wrong.
Brad Koerner: I think it's helpful for your audience to understand by background. I'm an architect. I have two degrees in architecture, and when I was young, I always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer as a kid, and that's what drove me into architecture, and then as a side interest, I took up theater lighting and stage set design.
So I really think of immersive digital experiences from that sort of the architectural point of view where you are in physical places, you are surrounded by six surfaces and in today's world, all of those can become digital, they can become luminous, they can become a portal to the internet or to the digital world in some form or another. I've said this because I cross over between architectural lighting and digital signage a lot in my work.
Every pixel is a light source and every light source is a pixel in these modern building projects. And a lot of people still don't quite understand that concept yet. An immersive digital experience is becoming how you design an architectural space, and I think particularly a lot of architects and interior designers are really trailing behind the technology. They look at signage as a thing that's applied after the fact almost like a typical signage project, non-digital signage. They don't yet understand how to take everything they've been taught about architecture placemaking, creating thresholds, creating progression, creating a sense of space or wonder, efficiency or economy for working environments, or branded retail experience. They don't know how to take what they're so good at and apply digital to it and mix digital into that and use digital to create something really engaging placemaking. That's what I mean by immersive digital experiences.
You say they don't know how, but is it the case that they do want to?
Brad Koerner: Some for sure, some absolutely not. I saw Michael Schneider from Gensler speak at the Integrated Systems Europe show a few years ago, and Gensler has a whole group now that's called the Digital Experience Design Group, and this is exactly what they're focused on.
Gensler hired the Head of Imagineering at Disney.
Brad Koerner: Bob Weiss, right? So they get it. For every Gensler, that's out there, There are a lot of architects that think of digital experience design as well, “Don't put a TV on my wall that's gonna show a Coke ad”, right? And they don't get it right. They still think of architecture as concrete and steel and glass and like Le Corbusier's famous quote, “It's the magnificent play of forms bathed in light”, and I've inverted that many times and I've spoken and I said you know what happens when the forms themselves emit light and they become digital, how are you gonna design that? How do you design the element of time?
And with the element of time, you get this sort of very active storytelling capacity within architectural placemaking. So it's no longer enough for you to design a wall and it just sits there forever. You have to think about how that wall will change over time, right? These sorts of cycles of time, whether it's days, weeks, seasons, hours, minutes, or whatever that is, that wall can change dynamically. So why will you change it? How will you use that for placemaking and creating engaging experiences? I don't think most traditionally educated architects and interior designers can really get their heads around that yet. Even lighting designers have this sort of classic preset scene notion when it comes to controls. They're struggling with getting their heads around digital media and that live data stream, live media, and sort of interactivity.
But you seem to be suggesting that this is a matter of time as opposed to maybe it'll happen because I keep writing and talking about how that time is coming fairly quickly when architects and people who design physical spaces are thinking about LED and projection and other technologies as design materials, as design considerations.
Brad Koerner: Yeah. I think it's inevitable. The best science fiction has shown this for decades now. It's shown this amazing potential world we can live in, both the positive and the dystopian use of it like Children of Men. I just spoke in Integrated Systems Europe and I started my presentation by saying, “The future is now!” You look at Blade Runner, you look at Minority Report, you look at Star Trek, and all of those things that everybody still thinks of as like out there decades away in the future, now in fact, is decades behind us, right? And people haven't admitted to where we are, right?
The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed and digital signage is definitely a world where that is super true, right? You go to the trade shows and a few years ago Sony had an 8k native-resolution digital wall that was eight meters wide and four meters tall, and it was hyperrealistic. That technology exists, but then you go to clients out there and you know they can't afford at any budget, anything, or they simply won't choose to do that, and I think it's inevitable. These architects that are afraid of it, I think what happens is somebody will put a digital sign in their space whether they like it or not for other reasons, and the worst-case scenario is it does become an ad, right? And that's not what they want in their space. So they better get their head around it and integrate it actively into their design concepts and really look at the poetics of it. How can they use simple things like beautiful motion graphics and beautiful textures?
Just like an interior designer would make a material sample board, a swatch board, they need to think of the digital media like that. What is the sort of swatches of digital media that they're presenting to their clients when they're designing these grand lobbies or offices or retailers or whatever?
I wonder though, with Gensler, they are an extremely well-established company with huge clients and everything else, and they work with Fortune 100s, fortune 500s, giant airports, and everything else. But there's a whole bunch of designers that are working with like a regional insurance company or something like that, and they're just saying, we get what you're saying, but our customers aren't gonna spend that money. They want a defined ROI. They don't want something that's just artistic and ethereal and vague in terms of what this does.
Brad Koerner: I think you're talking about a couple of things, right? So first off, there's just cheap, right? You'll always have customers that can never be cheap enough, right? But you have to segment the market, right? There are always customers at the high end of the range that wants the newest, the coolest, the hottest things at the beginning of the cycle. I joke that it's the sort of corporate lobby art budget crowd that always seems to have the money to do those sorts of fanciful things.
But the technology keeps plummeting in price, right? A lot of this technology was indeed available even 20 years ago, but it was at such a price point no one could afford it unless you're like U2 going on a concert tour with a LED screen with the width of a football field. They could afford it but no one else.
Or Comcast and their lobby because they were a cable company before streaming!
Brad Koerner: Yeah, the Comcast lobby, right? What is that already 15 years ago, right? It's like I said, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. So the price points just keep coming down until they become more and more common.
Could you have imagined even a decade ago that every little restaurant and coffee shop, and donut shop would have digital menu boards? It's amazing how fast that swept through the market, and right now we have these sorts of virtual production spaces, right? I think it was, what, just three years ago, the Mandalorian showed sort of the first instance of that, and there was that movie First Man Before, I think was the first that used an LED screen in camera on film. Now it's everywhere, right? Every studio around the world is installing these virtual production facilities within a year.
The accelerating rate of technological innovation is a term that’s thrown around, and I don't think people understand what accelerating rate means. AI image generation six months ago exploded onto the scene, and now everyone is using it every designer is thinking about how it's gonna disrupt them, and every content producer is thinking about how they can suddenly reduce the cost of their content generation using this sort of AI image generation, or increase their margin.
That was just six months ago, so I think with the technology becoming so cheap, it's low cost to visualize the concepts. It's such a low cost to design, commission, and program them. The hardware is continually plummeting in costs, so you to open up new opportunities, right? The menu boards in little mom-and-pop restaurants. There will always be the high end of the market going down into the middle end of the market, and they will use these, right? And they will have very smart design teams that come up with real ROI stories for why these things work, and it becomes fanciful and sci-fi today or yesterday, tomorrow just becomes normal and accepted. People don't even think about it anymore. The bottom end of the market will always be cheap. There'll always be people who can never save enough money or be stingy enough. That's in every market, right? Lighting, construction, you name it. It's always like that.
You're suggesting in your presentation that the digital and physical worlds are fusing in that with physical spaces being portals to a virtual world. I'm curious about what you mean by that, and maybe you can give me a couple of examples of how that's actually playing out.
Brad Koerner: Let me go back to when I was in school. I have a Master's in Architecture from Harvard, and when I was there, I did a thesis titled ‘Active Object Surfaces and Zones’ I looked at using physical interactive controls for retail displays and lighting, and this was in 1999. So I was a bit ahead of the scene on that one.
But in the early 200s, I believed that physical spaces would become the best interface to the internet which is, I know, a wild concept for many now. But you have to remember back then we were still using 20-inch Sony Trinitron screens were like the hot technology, and people were still using three-and-a-half-inch floppy discs and dial-up modems but the internet showed so much promise and there were a lot of designers doing really amazing websites and that was very spatial, right? And even just the notion of hypertext itself is very spatial.
So I kept imagining that physical spaces and using your body as the control and creating progression and threshold and a lot of the sort of architectural principles that you see in the internet experience could be combined. But then, in 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, and little black mirrors hijacked our internet experience, right?
Now though, I think people are over that, and we're saturated with personal devices and little black mirrors everywhere, the retailers are finally waking up to say, Hey, we need that digital in our physical experience, and so are the hospitality providers and healthcare providers. And they're starting to think, wait for a second, now we can tie all this digital data o tour spaces, right? And we can take all these great media that we have on our little black mirrors, and we can put it into our physical spaces. We can create these great experiences, and we can complete this cycle of gathering data from the real world, using it to drive great media content creation, live and interactivity and use it to drive behavior back in the real world, right? And it completes that virtuous cycle, and that's what I mean when I say architecture becomes a portal to the virtual world. A portal you can go back and forth between, right? The digital might come from into the space, and the spatial actions might drive digital data, right?
Can you give me some examples of where you've seen this applied and you think it really works because I've walked into some spaces that retail spaces and other spaces that are called immersive and experiential and thought to myself, being an old fart, cranky and everything that that's nice, but I don't see the point of this and I sometimes struggle with how they're gonna see a return out of this?
Brad Koerner: Yeah, I haven't seen many. Long story short: I think you just have this great divide where you have, for example, a lot of startups doing smart buildings, right? And they're deploying all these sensors, and they're gathering up all this data, but then they don't return that data back to the spaces. The data does very little to act on the physical space. Then you have all this great media content that's out there and you'll throw up media content on these screens, and it's not tied to anything that's happening in the space, right?
So it has no recognition of if somebody's even looking at it or not, much more if that person is gazing at it or wanting to engage it. There's been a lot of crazy stuff. There's indoor GPS positioning using lighting systems and apps. That was a flop. People have tried to tie app experiences into the real world. Not a lot of that has any real success story. You see a lot of these sorts of art-driven installations where I call it the be in Me and My Shadow problem. You can put a stereo vision camera system in space and track people exactly, but then, all they do is show the person's presence on some huge digital wall, and it's like me in my shadow, and there's no other point to it, so you have to think about why you need interaction in a space, right? I say for lighting and digital media, you can deliver the right light or the right content at the right place at the right time. You can use it to create really memorable human experiences, or you can use it to drive action, right? And those are areas that are not well explored yet, right? You don't have a lot of good designers out there connecting all of those systems together to create genuinely good experiences.
I actually worked with a startup called Digi Valet that makes a hotel room control system for luxury hotel rooms. So they make an app that sits on an iPad, but the other half of their system is this black box that interfaces with every physical control system in a modern hotel room like the thermostat, the blinds, the lighting, the media, everything that's Bluetooth, the Bluetooth controlled faucet on the bathtub, the Bluetooth coffee maker, the Bluetooth perfume/scent sprayer, and all that stuff.
And it was great because they asked me to help them. This had a lot of customers, these hotel chains wanted to develop a brand of digital media and lighting experiences as part of this iPad app, right? And it was a fascinating way to think about it. So you're in this hotel room, and you click, I want to watch a movie. It immediately says on your iPad, okay, can we set the cinema lighting? Yes. Can we lower the blinds? Yes. Would you like us to order you champagne and popcorn? Yes.
It totally changes the way you think of the room, right? You don't have lighting control pads and blinds, and you don't have to find the remote control for the TV. It's all about having this really smart butler that just knows what to do when you want to watch a movie.
So if you're a frequent flier or whatever, you travel between different Marriotts, and you use your loyalty card, and it just sets it up in your room. So you don't even do anything; that's your configuration.
Brad Koerner: That's the next level, right? That's future beyond that when you can add in the CRM systems on top of that so it remembers your preferences. Then the next level beyond that is there's almost this genie-like ability where they begin to understand your desires so well that they can start to add magic to your experience that you are not even expecting or the hotel can't do it at scale, right? I just think that's fascinating, like how could you take those principles of experience design and apply them into high-end retail or high-end healthcare, or even just a commercial office environment, right? It's a beautiful UX/UI experience in a space. We desperately need to see more intelligence and creativity around using digital in physical spaces.
Yeah, I wanted to ask about the discipline that needs to be enforced at the start of these things. When I've done consulting in my dark past, I would try to ensure the first question out of my mouth that I would throw at the customer or a client was: why are you doing this? What do you want to see out of it? And so on.
Is that the sort of thing that needs to be addressed super early so that it's not just, “We've seen these big video walls and other lobbies, we want one too.”
Brad Koerner: Usually, the first question I ask is, what's your budget? But that doesn't work too well.
Can you afford me?
Brad Koerner: It's both of those, right? It's what's your budget and why? I think that, first off, many of these companies have a lot more budgets if they want. They just don't want to at first, they don't understand what is possible, they don't understand what it would cost, and they don't understand the ROI on that investment. So it's a real uphill battle, and that tail is as old as time, that's an architect preaching an upgraded finish on the oak panels, or that's a lighting designer preaching adding dimming into the system. It's always like that in these construction projects, and you are right, about the why, you can have all this technology in the world, right? Anything you can dream, you can do, right? So technology is not the limiting factor. It's imagination, right? Imagination is the limiting factor and thinking is almost like a movie director or the early stages of any media content where you have to think in storyboards, right? You have to think in moments of time. You have to think about their journey, what's the user journey, and what's the user experience, right?
If you've seen any of these big design firms, they map user journeys, right? Throughout the omnichannel retail experience, they create these huge flow charts that take up a whole wall. You have to think about that in physical places now. So if you're walking into the shopping mall, do you put signage at the door's threshold? Classically, in retail design, you don't put anything really important at the threshold of the door because you need a sort of decompression zone where people charge into a space. Then they slow down, and then they look around, right?
There's just a lot of classic common sense design stuff that is not being employed in digital signage, particularly in any interactivity, right? You need these new combinations of skill sets that just don't exist yet. You almost need to take a game designer with a world-class architect and make them work together and see what happens, right? You need to take a Hollywood storyboard artist and combine them with a technologist and make them work together and see what happens., and that's what's missing right now from all of this, and I think you have companies like Moment Factory and Gensler and some out there are on that bleeding edge that they are trying to do that. Here in Amsterdam, there's Purple Storytelling, and there are lots of little groups that see the future that they struggle with, right?
I think they struggle to see, and get the clients to understand the potential. I think things like Unreal Engine and live rendering and that sort of starting with a game engine, which is so powerful with live rendering, is going to make visualizing these scenarios so much faster, so much more profound, instead of starting with a classic architectural sketch, and then you went to an architectural photorealistic rendering, but it didn't move. Now architects are using things like Unreal Engine to make these animations, particularly in the luxury real estate marketing firm. Have you ever seen what some of these high-end luxury real estate developments are doing for their marketing? It's unreal. It's Hollywood-grade special effects from just 10 years ago, and they're using it just to sell condos.
You start to take the power of that, and you add it into very specific segments. So, retailers, have their very specific sort of customer flows, customer journeys, and ROI expectations, and hospitality operators have their very specific desires, healthcare facilities, have very different customer journeys. With Unreal Engine, you can now tie together these professions. It's the first time in my career that I've seen this flow complete, that you can use architectural models in BIM in Unreal Engine, and you can show these scenarios. You can animate them, you can set up the interactivity, right? Cuz it's a game engine at heart, and then you can use that for commissioning these systems. I think that will be the next step in all of this.
But are people like architects and those who design physical spaces, are they conditioned and trained and understanding about the ROI needs of their clients? Is that something they've always had to address, or is this new because of this more mysterious ROI that you would see out of an immersive space?
Brad Koerner: It's a great question. I don't think they are. I have two degrees in architecture. I was never trained to think of a business scenario. Again, it's combining different skill sets, right? It's almost like you need to combine an architect with an MBA and think about why, what's the point? It's a real challenge, right? Obviously, if you're a high-end real estate developer and you're doing luxury condos, you know that if you add marble to the lobby, you're going to get a certain ROI. You might not have it calculated, but you understand your customers, and you understand it's going to help with sales. You understand that it's worth it, right? You can't just put chipboard and cheap carpet in, you have gotta do the upgraded finishes, but you also know where not to spend the money, and you know where it’s not going to get return value to you.
And there's an intuitive aspect to that you can never just set up in a spreadsheet, and $5,223.32 will be your ROI in 32 days. You'll never get that precise, and that's why you need a creative mind and a business mind, and they need to come together to figure these things out, but it will happen, right? If you create a great experience for a hospitality provider, right? They'll know it. They'll know it from the customer feedback, reviews, and qualitative comments on that, right? And eventually, that drives revenue for them. But those sort of attribution problems for ROI is vexing in every industry.
Marketing goes through this all the time, but it will happen more and more in physical placemaking with these systems, and I think it's a skill. Again, people have to get good at this. It doesn't exist now, and it's tricky because it combines several skill sets that have never worked together in the past and you have to fuse them to sort these things.
Yeah, I listened to a panel at Digital Signage Experience, and I believe it was somebody from Moment Factory who was saying that in terms of a return, they're now starting to hear from the HR departments of companies who are saying that having an experiential aspect to their lobby and their overall space is incredibly important in terms of recruitment and retainment of employees these days that particularly in technology jobs where you may have several choices as to who you're going to work for, what that space looks like and how you feel in it matters.
Brad Koerner: Yeah. It's like in the commercial office section, right? I forget the exact numbers, but it's $3 a square foot, $30 a square foot, and $300 a square foot, right? Three bucks are your cost of energy, and 300 is your cost of salary, right? So should you focus on saving a few pennies of energy, or should you focus on saving hundreds of dollars of efficiency for your employees and salaries? That's just the concept that has to be employed everywhere. There's this sort of scale of effect that is critical to ROI. Understanding that is often siloed, right? You get a salesperson running in with some smart building system. They're talking about saving energy because we'll turn all the lights off more. And they don't understand that will create a lousy experience for the workers, right? And it will really damage the effectiveness of the workers and retention and all that, right? Same thing with digital signage, anything, right? If you put a big LED wall into a commercial office, will you just put a waterfall on it? Is that going to help make your employees happy? Maybe, maybe it's as dumb as that. But could you do something more sophisticated with it? Could you recognize employee accomplishments live? Could you show employee performance live depending on what your business or industry is, do you give people a pat on the back instantaneously? There are so many scenarios that could be developed around these technologies when, again, when the surfaces you're surrounded by become digital. You need to think about what they do, how they react to you, and how people react to those surfaces.? What is that cycle of action-reaction?
It sounds like you're saying there's more to this stuff than eye candy.
Brad Koerner: Eye candy's great. I'm not going to argue against eye candy. There's a lot in this world that is just for eye candy's sake, and that makes a big difference, right? This is a classic design. This is architecture, this is interior design, this is a brand design, and retail design. Some of it is just eye candy, and people know how to justify that, right? That’s a tale as old as time, right? It's making a statement. It's making a brand, culture, making, and experience. Why does Starbucks charge $8 for a coffee when they spend 50 cents on it?
Because they've invested heavily in how their stores look, they feel and smell and sound, and there's just a lot of eye candy there, right? They consciously built all that so that they could charge that price premium. So yeah, it will just be eye candy for some of the digital stuff. I joke about the waterfalls, but can you beat the waterfall? In terms of your media content, it's mesmerizing, right? It's biomimetic, it makes you feel comfortable. I think humans have these deep-seated connections to natural effects. Maybe you just put a glorious force scene on your huge LED wall, and somehow the best thing you can show, right? I don't know. It could be as dumb as that. You have to test it.
I think the other thing people have to get savvy on is that you don't just build it and walk away. You have to build and operate it, and these teams that are developing these concepts will have to work with the operators, whoever it is to tweak it, right? To look at, we're going to make a whole bunch of assumptions, right? There are cycles of time, there's media content, there's interactivity, there are all these new things that people have to figure out. They can simulate it upfront. Nowadays, they can go into the virtual world during the construction project and get it mostly right or pretty close. But then, who will fine-tune that in the field over time or refresh it over time? Most people don't even think of the media budget. How many people forget about, oh wait, you mean we need a media budget for all these screens we've built? They can't even do that, and it's a long way before you're going to have clients actively spending the money to tweak this stuff and make sure it's optimal over time.
All right. Great conversation. I think we could have gone on for three hours, but gotta cut it off at some point. If people want to find out more about your company or perhaps bring you out to speak to their company or a conference, where do they find you online?
Brad Koerner: They can find me on LinkedIn just Brad Koerner or KoernerDesign.com.
All right. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Brad Koerner: Great. Thanks, Dave.
Wednesday Mar 08, 2023
Brandon Harp, Electrosonic
Wednesday Mar 08, 2023
Wednesday Mar 08, 2023
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
When I see an ambitious new visual display project lit up at a new or reno'd airport, office tower or attraction, I just about assume that if it's in the US, the company that put it in is probably Electrosonic.
The company is, technically, an AV systems integrator, and there are lots of them out there, of all sizes. But where corporate meeting spaces, control rooms and reception areas are the day-to-day work for most of those companies, the bread and butter work for Electrosonic is in locations where experience is the primary consideration and mindset.
The company - which has offices in the US, Europe and Asia - has a ton of experience and expertise in delivering AV and IT jobs that involve more than getting infrastructure in place. They work a lot with creative design and technology shops who are fantastic at the big ideas and compelling visuals, but want and need to hand off the install to a seasoned team.
I had a great chat about Electrosonic with Brandon Harp, a senior business development manager working out of the company's New York offices.
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TRANSCRIPT
Brandon, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on Electrosonic and what it does that's different from a lot of the AV integrators who are out there?
Brandon Harp: Sure. Thanks, David. I appreciate you having me on the podcast. I've been a longtime admirer of your content and so forth, so I've been following you for many years, so I really appreciate the opportunity.
So Electrosonic is a technology professional services firm. We design, build and support innovative technology solutions that create unforgettable experiences where people live, work, and play for many years. You probably know of us from the museum and the theme park world but we've expanded over the years and have really started to focus solely on immersive and experiential environments, and so for us, we're a bit of a specialized firm. We do consider ourselves still a boutique-style AV systems integrator, but the kinds of projects that we work on are global level and span a multitude of different industries, including corporate and retail and attractions and a multitude of others.
You said you expanded into this from museums and those kinds of attractions. Was that a conscious decision or is that just where the business was going?
Brandon Harp: Right after Covid, we made a decision to go back to our roots, which were always these complex sort of custom environments that we had been working in for many years, which our clients best knew us for. We've done away with just the kind of typical hang-and-bang conference room projects. We still do a portion of those if there is an element to a more project that fits better into our scope. But we've really done a good job, I think, as a company of being able to identify where our strengths are and where we can really add value for our customers. And that is really in that experiential and immersive sort of environment working with video walls, various different interactives, projection mapping, and things of that nature.
Is it a situation where you don't really want to do the meat, potatoes, boardroom, collaboration displays, all that sort of stuff because there's no money in it or minimal money in it, or is it just not terribly interesting?
Brandon Harp: I think it's a combination of all those things, Dave, I think with the standard corporate conference rooms, it's really become a race to the bottom, and we just as a company have recognized where our strengths are on delivering these projects and really our delivery model best lends itself to more of these custom really high-end engineering projects where we need a certain level of technical ability that not all integrators have, and so those are the kinds of projects that we're setting our sights on, and that's the ones that we continue to get hired for because of our ability to not only project manage, but engineer and design.
Something you might not know about us is that we actually have a full design consulting firm within our larger company, and we look at things through, I would say, a much more creative lens. So it's less about just engineering a system, and it's more about looking at it through a creative lens and saying, all right, what's the user experience? What is the story that you're trying to tell? How does that all get fused with the architecture? And then really thinking about at the end of the day, what is the human connection and what are they gonna feel as the system gets implemented and they go on to use it.
Yeah, you've found this niche and pretty lucrative niche in that a lot of the AV/IT systems guys can be very good at the technical side of putting something in. But they've probably not spent a lot of time with video walls or projection mapping or inversive environments, and you just start talking about that and they're looking at you like, could you say that again?
Brandon Harp: Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to our roots, working on dark rides and so forth in theme parks. If you can imagine some of the complexities of being able to projection map in an environment like that, we've been able to essentially replicate that and bring that same methodology, that same sort of design consulting and engineering into corporate spaces, briefing centers, visitor centers, lobby attractions, things like that where you've got this sort of experiential element that we're best known for, and then we help you think through it creatively and our creative technologists and knowledge experts can really help the clients think more about, okay, what is that user experience? What do you want them to feel? As opposed to just looking at boxes and squares on walls and trying to price technology.
So our approach has been a bit different, but it seems to be very effective with our clientele, and they like the fact that we're not afraid to take the technology away from them in order to really think through that content experience, to think through what is it not only short term but also the longer term for their environment.
It's interesting because so many places are now being defined as attractions. So 20 years ago, an attraction was a theme park or a museum but now, as you alluded, a corporate lobby is an attraction.
Brandon Harp: That's right. We've seen a big uptick in that right around the time of Covid, so 2020 and onward. What we're also seeing is that there are quite a few real estate developers now who are trying to take on these attractions. I think one that you're probably familiar with, that everyone has either been to or is aware of now, is SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, where SL Green was the real estate developer behind an attraction like that, which is an observation deck that spans multiple floors and is multi-sensory.
So working with real estate developers like that who have a good understanding of real estate and square footage, how do we apply that to an attraction-based environment and help them be able to have the very best system to create that guest experience, and that's what we've been doing and that's why we've continued to get hired for these large scale projects that seem to have those sorts of elements.
For that one in New York, what was driving SL Green?
Brandon Harp: What was really driving SL Green was the vision that their CEO, Mark Holliday had to have this observation deck that sits high above the clouds in New York, and as part of a major building that went up just next door to Grand Central Station, which is One Vanderbilt and so 90 stories up in the air, you've got this multi-sensory experience where people can not only come and see and enjoy the views of New York but also be immersed in these various different rooms and environments that really lend itself to something for everyone.
You don't necessarily have to be a tourist to enjoy it. You can also be a local or someone just passing through. But it really lends itself to something for everyone, and now we're starting to see more and more of these major supertalls that are going up, that are changing the New York skyline, having an element of an immersive experience in it, whether it's an observation deck or a lobby experience, an elevator experience, things of that nature.
And where did they see the money out of that? If it's an observatory high up, I assume they're charging for that.
Brandon Harp: They are. It's a paid attraction. So that uptick in paid attractions inside of corporate, what were typically fully corporate buildings is now something that we're seeing more and more of.
Yes, you may have, all the other floors in the building are corporate tenants, just like One Vanderbilt. But it also has this attraction there that spans four floors. So you're starting to see this mix of not only corporate, but attraction-based entertainment, and think about it, in New York City, it's not a theme park like a Disney World or a Universal, where you've got lots and lots of acres to play with. We're talking about going vertically here for these attractions that go up in New York City. So we're starting to see a real uptick in that and really being able to apply all of that methodology that we've developed over the years in how to deliver those projects successfully for the theme park business to these corporate institutions.
I'm assuming it's a bit of a delicate dance for these property developers if they do that sort of thing because if you turn your building into a tourist attraction, you're at the risk of a lot of crowds and people wandering around, and the regular tenants are fighting their way to get to the elevators and things.
Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think to combat that, what they've done is for example, One Vanderbilt, they have all the tenants have their own lobby, so they're actually utilizing their own elevators and so forth. So their day is not interrupted at all by anything in terms of crowds or anyone trying to get into One Vanderbilt. For the observation deck in SUMMIT, it's got its own separate entrance and it's actually very well thought through. I think what impressed me most about SL Green was their ability to adapt to the ever-changing kind of design and environment, and they really did a good job of listening to all of the consultants that they brought in.
Again, they're real estate developers, and so to take on a major attraction inside one of the largest buildings in Manhattan is something that was a bit foreign to them. But they really brought in great consultants to help them think through every aspect of this, which is why it runs so effectively and efficiently now.
You mentioned that you have a design consultancy. What is all that about?
Brandon Harp: So our design consultancy practice is based out of Las Vegas. We do have design consultants now that are remote as well. So we have a few here on the East coast and in Denver and a couple of other strategic places around the US and overseas in Europe.
But for us, it's very much about AV consulting. What you may not know about us is that we also do security surveillance, access control, as well as information communication technology, which is your structured cabling as well as acoustics. So oftentimes we find ourselves in these conversations very early on with architects and owners and people who are designing these experiences, and so they want us to be a part of their team to help steer the technology decisions, and so we're finding that we're being hired more and more early on in these projects because we look at things through that creative lens. We consider ourselves creative technologists, very true to our trade and very client-focused throughout, and being involved very early to help steer and guide the solution through master planning is very important to the outcome of these projects, and so now what we're seeing is an uptick in design-build as well, because we're working very closely with the owner and the owner reps at an early stage to really flush out the design and the intent, and then if we're able to come in and do the AV build, which we're finding is happening more and more, there seems to be a real desire to have one hand to shake at the end of the day when it comes for all design-build and all the way through to support, which is what we offer.
Do you find that the end users, whether they're property developers or just building owners or major tenants or whatever, that they are smarter or more sophisticated about what they wanna do than maybe they were 5-10 years ago?
Brandon Harp: That's a great question. I think it's still a mixed bag. Honestly, I think there's oftentimes when clients come to us with blue sky ideas, or maybe they have some sort of concept renderings that they had hired a firm to put together for them and then they ask us, "How do we execute this?” and “What do we need to be able to be successful?” And I think that's where our design consulting practice comes in. We help them really think about not only the technology but more importantly, what's the outcome, how the user feels and what are they gonna experience here that's gonna make them want to continue to come back and continue to talk about this.
So getting in early like that has really been very effective for us, and then the build portion of it as well, which we've always been very known for. Having a good understanding of the project from day one has really made it very effective for us.
How important is scale? We've seen all kinds of press releases about a LED video wall that's 60 feet wide or 100 feet wide, whatever the dimensions are. But I'm wondering if you're starting to see a more sophisticated approach where you are not just thinking about the scale, but how it fits, how is this gonna work within the environment? All those sorts of things.
Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think some of the clientele has thought that through or they've gathered information from other projects. Some do have maybe a bit of a more sophisticated approach, or they have someone who's a technology advisor who's been helping them think through things. I think where we come in is really to be able to help them take that to fruition, right? And take it to the next step. So I do think it's still a bit of a mixed bag.
In terms of the scale itself, it depends on the project. I think we do a number of projects that are gonna have multiple locations over and over again, and we create this blueprint for those, but we also do a lot of these one-off projects, as you can imagine, especially when it comes to museums and theme parks and briefing centers and things of that nature where it's one of a kind experience and we really have to be able to deliver on what the client's looking for.
Yeah, and that's a bit of a challenge I would imagine. One-off projects are awesome when they come along, but it becomes a bit of a roller coaster ride as opposed to the predictable recurring services you might be providing.
Brandon Harp: It is very much and we find with these one-off projects that because of the size and the scale of them, typically they take anywhere from a year onwards to be able to complete. So you can imagine that requires a great deal of patience and skill and making sure that we have updated schedules just strong project management, and strong design engineering early on to make sure that we have the very best system in place. But, also the supply chain is another thing, right? And so not to go too far of a rabbit hole on that. But if your projects are typically a year to a year and a half in length, often what we're finding now is that the client wants to know right out of the gates, are there any stumbling blocks in terms of supply chain challenges? And then we have to order this material, and equipment very early on in the process in order to combat that or we have to find something else that we can use in order to deliver the system on time and within budget. So it's a bit of, as you said, a rollercoaster is a great way to describe it.
You said a year and a half. With some airports and let's say hospital campuses, that's probably more like a 4-5 year planning cycle, right?
Brandon Harp: Certainly, yeah. I think the year to a year and a half seems to be average, but yes, to your point, we often find ourselves involved in airport projects and so forth where the delivery date is 2026 or 2028 even now. And again, I think it has to do with being able to get in early with the right people, make sure that we're providing them with what they need to be successful, and then staying in touch and in tune with what's going on through the life cycle of the project and the management of it. Project management in AV has always been a hot point, right?
And so for us, it's very much about the project managers being able to see through a project of that length properly and show it the adequate attention that it needs to be successful.
I'm also guessing that because you're sometimes looking that far out for an airport or something like that, you really need to stay on top of emerging technology and think about, okay, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to put in right now with what's available right now, I'm thinking about what's going to be out there three years from now, which might be micro LED or something else that isn't really commercially available right now.
Brandon Harp: That's very true and that's a great point. It's certainly something that we take into consideration on all of these projects.
I think you have to look at the manufacturers and the longevity of their companies. Are they gonna be around for many years to come? And what does the product roadmap look like? And I think that's why we have our key partners that we work with who are very good at understanding what's coming, what's future, making sure that they stay top of mind with all of our designers and our engineers to ensure that at the end of the day when the system is installed, that it is the most recent and up to date technology, and it's not something that's going to be phased out or end of life that just simply isn't feasible when it comes to spares or replacements, anything like that.
So Thinking that through, especially on these longer projects is really important and that's what makes us effective.
I've been intrigued when I've seen big design agencies like Gensler or content-driven technology shops like Moment Factory where they've worked with you guys a lot because I get the sense they know what they're good at, they know how far they can take a big idea, but at some point, they have to hand it off to somebody who's good at the execution.
Brandon Harp: That's exactly right. We have developed, I think, the kind of the secret sauce for being able to work with companies like Gensler and Moment Factory, because you're right, at the end of the day, they're the big thinkers, right? They're the creatives who ultimately generate the user experience that is on those LED video walls, or on the digital signage or the interactive, or the inside of the projection mapping, and so forth.
For us, we have to play that supporting role and not every project is exactly the same, but we do understand what their strengths and capabilities are And then we play a very supporting role in that, and we've now made it so that it's a well-oiled machine and as partners, we're very agile and limber enough to be able to say, we need to pivot a little bit, or we need to look at this a little bit differently than the last one. And again, not Two projects are all the same, and so I think it's our ability to work with them and adapt to ever-changing circumstances and projects and environments that allow us to be as effective together as we are.
Do you try hard to stay in your lane, so to speak, and not get into the creative stuff?
Brandon Harp: I think at the end of the day, you have to have a creative vein in you to work here, right? That's ultimately what we do. We're constantly pushing the envelope of what's possible, but we also have to put the trust in our partners, and I think we do a really good job of that.
We've never been a company that's done content or experience design, and the reason for that is that we have a multitude of partners who do and who do it very well, and so for us, it's more about playing that supporting role with making sure that the technology is something that they can work with when they're creating their content but it's also something that is gonna be easy for the end user to use if that's a requirement, and really just play that supporting role.
I think that, at the end of the day, what people see in what they view on these large displays, as you talked about, is really the product of the creative minds that go into the content and the storytelling, and we're there to play that supportive role.
I think that's more what I'm asking is: you guys conceivably could have a creative team that would produce the big visuals and so on, but because you work with some great partners, you do your thing and let them do their thing and don't get into a competition.
Brandon Harp: That's right. There's no competition there. Where I think we do is supplement them very well is our executive consulting. So we have Will Bolen, Chris Conti, and Chris Moore, who are executive consultants who work for us, those three individuals are super talented. They've got a great deal of experience, both working hand in hand with clients to help them think through what it is that they're looking to do with their space. But they're also very technical, right? So they come up with sketches and little drawings and things like that can really make them multi-faceted individuals within the company, and that's why they're so effective.
Oftentimes they get paired with the likes of Moment Factory or Gensler or an architect or an experienced design firm who's looking to help their client uncover what is possible with the technology and then from there, we work it through design consulting and into systems integration, and then all the way through to service.
Do you have end users who are coming to you and just basically saying, “I want that!” because they've seen something?
Brandon Harp: Yeah, believe it or not, they do, and I revert back to SUMMIT One Vanderbilt again because it's very unique. It's award-winning and it's just something that everybody, I think is aware of or familiar with now, especially in New York City and they constantly are saying, how do we create that, or even in the airport environments like we just did Terminal A at Newark, I've had multiple airports say to me, “We want that 232-foot long video wall right at departures or behind the check encounter” and our response to that, Dave, is often, do something different.
It's great to be able to pull inspiration from other projects, but no one wants to see the same project replicated. So how do you pull inspiration from something that's that unique, but then put your own spin on it? And especially in an airport environment, because it is high traffic, it's a public place, millions of people and users go through there. How do you do something that differentiates? And that's what we always try to coach our clients into thinking about, what is it that's gonna make you the next talk of the town? How do you get yourself to that point where people are taking selfies or people are talking about the technology and the experience that they had as they moved through the airport? So those are the kinds of things we keep in mind.
Yeah, there are really two tracks in airports. You've got the big immersive experiential, almost like public art installations, but then you've got a lot of LED and flat panel displays that are just about making the experience of getting your way through the airport to a gate and onto a plane easier.
Brandon Harp: I actually think there are three, Dave. I would add the digital out-of-home experience as well there, because there's the Clear Channels and the Intersections of the world all have these large contracts with these airports and real estate owners who have their screens as well And in a lot of these airport environments, like Newark for example, there are over 80 displays there that is specifically geared towards targeted advertising.
Then you've got your art piece, which you mentioned, which is more experiential and immersive, and then the third pillar is the typical airport communications, right? Because people have to know where their flight is and how to get from point A to point B, whether it's wayfinding or something of that nature. But there's really a multitude of digital endpoints that go into any airport or terminal experience.
Yeah, I have been blabbering away lately that if you really wanna see the state of the art of digital signage and how that technology is applied in different ways, go look at a renovated or new airport terminal.
Brandon Harp: It's true, and the government's flushing a lot of money into obviously the infrastructure and redevelopment of these airports.
That trend we feel is gonna continue and it's gonna continue to push the envelope for what is possible. I think at the end of the day, you're finding that these old, outdated airports really just need a refresh, something that's gonna make people wanna fly out of there. Something that's gonna set the tone for the trip that they're about to go on. But also just as silly as it sounds, put a smile on their face. If there's a way to make people feel at home or comfortable or keep them entertained so that they're buying more concessions within an airport environment, that's a huge win for that terminal and that airport.
I just wanna know where my gate is, how to get there, and how long is it gonna take me to get through the various lines.
Brandon Harp: And maybe where the bar is?
Never. (Laughter)
Is there a trend that you're starting to see emerge?
Brandon Harp: Yeah I think there is. I think, just at the start of 2023, we've seen a real uptick when it comes to experiential and immersive environments in higher education, but also in sports.
We're finding more and more of these higher education institutions wanna give students access to a big video wall that may have a multitude of interactive touchpoints and ways of being able to use the system itself and interact with it across a multitude of different tracks throughout the school.
So there's been a lot of that recently and then sports as well. These kinds of one-off experiences within stadiums and training facilities and things like that. There really has been an uptick in those through since the start of the year and we're expecting that trend to continue.
Is there a big project that you're allowed to talk about that we're gonna see in the next calendar year?
Brandon Harp: I can't really get into the specifics and the name of it, but the one that comes to mind for me is an immersive museum experience that's gonna be happening downtown in Manhattan, just outside of The Oculus, so a well-traveled area. It's a building that probably anybody who's from New York or has been to that part of the area is gonna be revamped and it's gonna be led by an immersive artist and a team of people who are really invested in not only the video but the audio portion of any given museum experience.
So you can expect upwards of 20+ video walls and large-scale rooms with huge projection-mapped walls, floors, and ceilings. Just a variety of different experiences as you travel through each room. So it's something that's on the horizon, and the scheduled opening date is right around Labor Day of this year. So we'll see if that holds true. But in any case, it is something that's upcoming and we can give you more information on it as it unfolds.
That’s led by a real estate developer?
Brandon Harp: It is another real estate developer, so much like we were talking about earlier in the conversation with SL Green, this is another company that's very prominent in New York. This is the first real venture for them into more of the attractions type of space. So they do need a lot of help, but we're there to provide it and the support that they need to be successful, and we really anticipate this being a game changer for them and especially for lower Manhattan.
All right, Brandon, thank you!
Brandon Harp: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on today.
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Gerhard Pichler & Zuzana Yalcin, Easescreen
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
Wednesday Dec 14, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
The roots of Austria's Easescreen are as a AV systems integrator, but when the company looked around in the late 1990s for software to use for jobs that weren't yet being called digital signage, there weren't many options.
So Easescreen wrote its own software, and the company is now, by far, a software company first ... though it still offers hands-on solutions work in its home country Austria.
Now Easescreen is looking beyond central Europe and actively developing partnerships and business in North America.
I had a good chat with CEO Gerhard Pichler, and marketing manager Zuzana Yalcin, about the roots of Easescreen, how it differentiates itself from the many software options out there, and why they now have their sights set on this side of the Atlantic.
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TRANSCRIPT
Gerhard and Zuzana, thank you for joining me. Gerhard, can you give me a background on what Easescreen is all about and how long you've been?
Gerhard Pichler: Sure, Dave. Easescreen started in the late 90s, so actually, my first company, which still exists, is an AV integrator, so we come from quite a strong technical background, and in some of the projects, the customer requested solutions, which we now call digital signage. So we started, more or less, as the second role on the market as a manufacturer of software, as I told you, more than 20 years ago and now this year, we have rolled out more than 10,000 projects in nearly 100 countries. So it developed quite well, I would say.
Would you describe what you now do as being software-first? Or do you still operate as an integrator as well?
Gerhard Pichler: Software-first, but in our home country (Austria), we have two offices there, one in Graz, which is in the south of Austria, and the other in Vienna, the capital. So in this home market, we also do AV integration so we still keep our knowledge regarding network, transmissions, protocols, screens, and so on quite high. My team does this kind of job but definitely, the most important thing within the company is the digital signage of the Easescreen.
I assume having that capability and current knowledge of the hardware market and the installation challenges and all those things is probably quite helpful in giving you insights as to what the end users and the resellers need versus just guessing and talking to people about it?
Gerhard Pichler: That's for sure. Especially one thing is the contact with the other manufacturers. So for our businesses, we have very close contact with two manufacturers: LG, and Samsung, and on the other hand, we know how the integrators, which actually are our customers with who we do indirect business, how their mindset is, what their pains are because we experience the same. So that's quite helpful.
I'm guessing that you got into the software side of this business, back in ‘99 because there weren't a whole bunch of software options out there at that point, right?
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, you're right. There were some dinosaurs, like Scala or Omnivex in Europe but the options for the customers weren’t many compared to now. I would say in the 2000s and on, there were quite a lot of solutions coming up and disappearing again so it maybe was not very helpful for the signage industry because many of these solutions were not really professional, so the customer had a bad experience. They didn't touch signage for long, but I would say 10-15 years ago, it started again when customers trusted in professional solutions, and now the markets as you know as well, it's merging and there are a lot of solutions out there and there's some kind of consolidation going on.
Of all those different deployments that you have, do you have some large ones?
I think I saw that recently you did some sort of a deal where you have, I think, roughly 8,000 displays for a tobacco company in stores in Germany. Is that correct?
Zuzana Yalcin: Yes. That was Japan Tobacco International. They carry brands like Camel, Winston, et cetera. I believe they're the third largest tobacco company in the world.
Yeah, and what are you doing with them? Are there screens at the point of sale?
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, point of sale. So each point of sale has, I think, between one and three screens and behind each screen, there's an Easescreen license. So this is one of the larger projects.
I told you we have 10,000 out there and the project means networks the small network consists of 1-3 screens, and the larger ones like JTI for example, with at least 6,000 or 7,000 screens. The larger networks have more than thousands of screens in one network.
So do you have a reference case or two that when you meet a potential business partner or customer, they say, “give some ideas on the kinds of projects that you've done.”
Do you have one or two go-to's that you tend to mention?
Gerhard Pichler: We go through the channel, which means our strategy is just all the know-how we have about our solution and all the things around digital signage software, we transfer to our resellers. The resellers are 20% AV companies, 60% IT companies, and 20% agencies, I would say from the creative side.
Every one of these companies has to go through a training and certification process. For many projects, we don't really know where our license goes because they can stand on their own feet. That's one of our strategies is to be able to multiply without having hundreds of employees. Usually, the customer asks for signage. In the meantime, digital signage is some kind of expression that the customer already knows, and if the project has some specialties, like integration of databases, or something like that, which is not which cannot be configured out of the box with our solution, then we work together very closely with our resellers and with the end customers, and we help them to integrate all solutions in their not only network but the environment, but most of the projects, we are not involved in it as a manufacturer.
So you stay behind the scenes and you're not even really marketing that you did this, and let your partners shine?
Gerhard Pichler: We call our solution the Austrian Army knife. It’s like the Swiss, but the Austrian Army knife. It's a toolbox for our integrators that is very full of features, and functions that now after 23 years can be used out of the box for various vertical markets.
The most important for us is definitely the corporate market. So most projects are in this field. Companies use our software to inform the employees and the customers, on production lines, for example, real-time data showing to the teams there, digital door sign canteens. So these are the kind of projects we do. The project with the many licenses, I mentioned before, 1000-10,000 are more in retail because these are the projects with a lot of licenses, but besides corporate and retail, we identified ten verticals where our solution is widely known and used, for example, higher education, transportation, healthcare, for example, is very interesting because we are certified in Europe with some kind of protocol so we can show patient names. So they can use our software for calling the next patient on one side, but also for showing their offers that the hospital has or some advice they give, or for wayfinding, things like that. It's quiet interesting..
I often say to companies that are marketing CMS software that I encourage them to find a vertical market or a specialty of some kind that has a lot of opportunity associated with it versus being a general offer because if you're a general offer, you are mainly competing on price because the functionality is maybe different across different companies, but in general terms the same.
But it sounds like you're doing fine with being a general offer because you've got 20-plus years in the business and established resellers.
Zuzana Yalcin: Yeah, so that's where our sales channel comes in because our integrators have specialties, so they are the experts on different vertical markets. They know how to customize our software to the end customers' needs. So it's also an example of where you empower the integrator, you empower the reseller, and then they're able to do amazing things.
Is the software white labeled?
Gerhard Pichler: There are some examples, yes.
So if a business partner, a reseller wants to say this is Brand X’s software, you guys are behind the scenes entirely, but driving it?
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, we are prepared for this so we can easily white-label it for partners. Usually, this discussion comes up with large integrators. They say, okay, I want to hide the name and I want to add my own branding to the solution. But when we talk to them, it often turns to the opposite. They say, okay, it's better that we have a very close relationship with you, and we can start with all the references we bring to the table.
Still, there are some examples where Easescreen is hidden behind the different names.
We met on the floor at a Digital Signage Experience in November and you agreed to do a podcast, and one of the things that intrigued me was that you're an Austrian company, but you are in the United States looking to expand into North America and build up partnerships here. I gather that's been something that's been an ongoing effort for the last couple of years.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's true. So from time to time, we do get some projects in the US. For me, the US is definitely the Mecca of digital signage. There are a lot of really professional companies there, which could be great partners for us. There are so many opportunities. The market is that huge. So for me, it's a challenge to start a business there, and I wished to do this many years before, and we decided I think two years ago to install some guy there to do market research, to find ways how we can sell it, through which channels, and so on. He is a very experienced guy out of the AV business and after we see that there are enough opportunities, there are chances for us with our solution.
The market in the US does not really have a lot of software that is comparable to ours. So then we decided, okay, we go to the next step. The next step was founding a company called Easescreen America LLC in Miami, which we did this year, I think it was in June. Because we have had success in the US for a long time, it's definitely important and necessary to have a company there, and I think 2023 should be our year. The pipeline is quite full now with projects.
So some of our guys were doing the DSE in Vegas, they were on the East coast visiting future partners or partners, which already signed contracts with us, and they brought I think five or six projects to Austria. So I think the start is quite successful up to now.
If you're an AV integrator or an IT systems integrator, whatever it may be, there are a lot of options in North America. There are a lot of companies selling software solutions and it wouldn't be that you'd get a meeting where they’d go, “oh finally, somebody's got software that can do this.” Why are they choosing to partner with you when there are other options out there? What's ticking their boxes?
Gerhard Pichler: One thing that we experienced is that we tell them and they seem to trust us. We only go through integrators. So many examples in the past, the integrators told us that manufacturer, they promised us they promised not to make shortcuts directly to the end customer, but they didn't do it. The integrators, they're waiting for, I think manufacturers who they can trust.
Other thingsinclude things like we have so many options in the setup, we can be installed on-premises, for example, which many other solutions are not able to be because they're only cloud-based. We have a cloud infra as well if the customer wants to use it, they can use a private cloud, and so there are many options for the integrators and multipliers, it seems for them very interesting, and besides that, we have technical feature wise I think so many things on board out of the box which nearly no other solution can bring to the table, and these are some of the reasons why they change because many of them when you talk to them, they would tell us about the bad experiences with other solutions. With us, it's always good if some company is experienced and tells us the pain and we can show him how our solution would do it, then you can win them very fast.
So it's interesting and very good for us if companies give us the chance to talk to them, they have already had experiences with solutions, then these companies are the best us and for them, we can be quite fast.
In terms of partners, do you have a kind of partner, like a profile that you would prefer to work with?
Gerhard Pichler: It seems the larger projects are done by IT companies. So in the US, they're large IT companies, they do the job for digital signage for companies, and so on. So the profile seems more to be IT-focused companies than AV. But we have experienced in the last months, the really interesting projects, they come up more from bigger IT companies.
So one way to the market was through reps, so they introduced us to the integrators there. So we cover now I think nearly 45 states, reps like Simco or BP Marketing, and these guys, who have a large network of AV and IT integrators behind them. For Easescreen, this is the way we can reach the integration network quite fast.
Is it a challenge on the educational side?
One of the things I've heard over the years is if you're going to have a reseller channel, you have to invest a lot of time in ensuring that the people who are talking about your product and solutions, fully understand what it is, and if they're an IT systems integrator, they're thinking about all kinds of things, including network security and bandwidth and so on.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, of course, it's a challenge, but since we have been so long on the market, there are so many slides and training programs exactly prepared for these kinds of topics. We can talk about the language they talk. So you have to talk to IT companies differently of course than to agencies, and in the end, in the US market, we have to learn our marketing lessons because the first step to the customer more than here is by a colorful brochure and things like this, which is quite old fashioned, but it's definitely necessary.
And here, I would say, comes in Zuzana again. So what has been your experience on the marketing side, comparing the North American market to Europe, and what homework we had to do?
Zuzana Yalcin: So definitely from a marketing perspective, it’s way more abot storytelling. Of course, at some point it's about the USP, it's about the features, it's about all the amazing things you can do. But the first story is always: who are you? Where do you come from, and how do you actually serve the people all around the world?
So for me, this has been a big lesson in trying to focus on the human side of software because in the end, our partners are human, the end customer is human. The user is human, so how can I translate that story in a way that makes sense to everybody from a professional integrator all the way to an amateur user? And I say that without any negative connotation, but just so they know what digital signage is, what the screen is, and what it can do for them.
This is something I'm noticing actually in Austria as well, most people see digital signage every single day, multiple times, if not countless times, but they have no idea what it is. They cannot label it, and if you talk to them about digital signage, they think it's maybe digital signatures or something like that, so just raising awareness in general is a pretty exciting thing for me.
Yeah, I was gonna ask about the evolution of all this. Given that you've been involved in it for as long as I have that, what have you seen changing through the years? Obviously, something's never changed. There's still a limited understanding of what it is, but I suspec I find in my own life that I don't have to go on and on at length to explain what it is I do and what I'm involved in. They get it pretty quickly versus it was, a five-minute conversation back in 2005.
Zuzana Yalcin: I think software is definitely becoming more accessible to the end customer in general, and it also changes customer expectations because they expect to be empowered more. They expect to be involved more. But I think, 10-20 years ago, you could be a genius technician with amazing software and rely on people coming in. Now you definitely have to tell the story if you definitely have to go out there and share the message.
Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, but you are right, Dave.
Of course, the awareness now is different than 20 years before. In shows like ISC or Infocomm and so on, we've been part of ISE, I think 15-17 times. In the first years, you had to explain even to the people in the industry, what is digital signage and so on, and that changed completely. Now, people quickly understand what it is. I would say that changed.
The trust in signage is there. That means customers who want info screens and systems for showing content, know that if they make the right choice they can buy systems that are stable and reliable. That is different than it was 5-10 years ago. I think what didn't change is that the end customers are not aware of which kinda tasks they have when there is a digital signage solution. When we are involved in projects, we try always tell the customer, I hope it's clear to you that there will be a technical, very perfect system for you, but in the end, you have to think about who do you want to reach? What are the contents? How is the way that content coming to the screen? Who is responsible? So in many projects, this didn't change. The customer is not aware that he has to give resources, that the digital signage system is successful and lives and is active, I would say. So that slightly changes, but it's the same story as many years before I would. But we help them in creating concepts, for example.
How is the company set up? Are you privately held or do you have a private equity backer?
Gerhard Pichler: Oh, private, a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the code is made in-house and we are privately held.
What's your headcount?
Gerhard Pichler: 25.
Has that grown much through the years? Obviously, it started with one, but...
Gerhard Pichler: Yes. I would say by one or two per year, so we are growing but not that fast
There's a lot of companies that are your size like you have larger companies, particularly private equity backed ones, actively looking at as potential acquisitions, I suspect you're getting those emails and phone calls pretty regularly?
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's right. But we didn't decide on one until now.
You're staying on your own path.
Gerhard Pichler: Yes, up to now. Our mission is not completed yet.
So if people wanna know more about your company, where can they find you? Obviously, you're going to be at ISE in a couple of months, but online they would find you find you at…
Zuzana Yalcin: www.easescreen.us, and of course we are on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Simply type in an Easescreen and you will find us.
Simply put, I like it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.
Gerhard Pichler: Thank you very much, Dave.
Zuzana Yalcin: Thank you. The pleasure is all ours.
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
Brian Nutt, Adificial
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
Wednesday Dec 07, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
There have been a few companies that have come along in recent years offering a platform that used templates, image library and stored data to largely automate the production of videos - but few if any of them had their heads wrapped around how that might work with and for digital signage networks.
A Louisville, KY start-up is taking a run at the concept, and the big difference with Adificial is that its CEO and co-founder started and ran a digital signage software company for many years ... so he has his head around the desire for content automation when it comes to videos that find their way to screens.
Some listeners will know Brian Nutt as the founder of Codigo, which had built up a strong and interesting business focused mainly on regional banking. That business was acquired in 2018 by Spectrio, which now also owns and publishes Sixteen:Nine, and Brian spent a few years away from the business, before thinking about and pulling together Adificial. It's a platform that uses web services and the scalability of cloud computing to enable HTML5-driven motion media files to be generated quickly and easily, by the hundreds or thousands. At scale, a motion file unique to a person or place can cost only pennies.
Nutt is a digital signage guy, but he's launching Adificial with a focus on media embedded in staff and customer emails. That makes sense, as the idea is that this platform can generate many thousands of custom videos for emails, versus the dozens or maybe hundreds that might be needed by a digital signage network that wants different messaging for, let's say, each store in a chain.
But the capabilities are there to make this relevant for digital signage. Have a listen.
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TRANSCRIPT
David: Hey, Brian. Thank you for joining me. For people who don't know you or maybe recall you from your past, can you give me your background and what you were doing with Codigo?
Brian Nutt: Sure and great to talk to you again, Dave. Codigo was a digital signage company that I founded back in around 2004, so set up kinda early on in the trajectory of digital signage. That morphed into us introducing a number of different retail media products, interactive kiosks, overhead music, on-hold messaging, all that type of, and we had a focus on financial institutions, really, like regional, local banks and credit unions. Although towards the end there, when I sold Codigo in 2018, we had installations around the world and all sorts of different industries from restaurants, universities, office complexes, and all the places that you would see a digital sign installed today, or retail media, as I said.
Did that and sold that in 2018, took a few years off and launched this new project which is pretty exciting.
David: So what is Adificial?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, so Adificial really began I guess in terms of me thinking about this back before I sold Codigo, so Codigo and I think like a lot of digital signage products, at least today, maybe not back then, but we had the pretty robust online content engine for creating content that could be either sent down to a kiosk or digital signage or any of the devices, whether it was on-hold messaging or any of those things, you could create the content on the web, and so I had this idea that might be an exciting product as a standalone product.
We never launched it, and it's probably a good idea because folks like Canva came along, and Promo and these other products came along, and they did a pretty good job so I’m glad I didn’t do it, but after little time off, I was still thinking about the product and just how video is forcing businesses to do things differently, and this requirement today to personalize content for folks that are your customers or are interested in the product.
So the idea of an Adificial is to solve the problem that's traditionally been around video, which is, it's expensive, it's time-consuming and yet the requirement of it by consumers continues to race forward daily, and then the age today where data, people are willing to share their data with brands freely and why is video passive still? Why is it that it's audience-based where I press play and I watch it and Dave gets the same video as I do, even though we have totally different lives and we live in different spots and have different ages and all those things.
It's this idea that you can make videos personalized with data. What I know about you, I should be able to map brand assets, audio, video, and language even, and insert interactive elements, calendar invites, pdf, downloads, buttons, and anything like that into the video. So it's fully interactive and engaging in ways that just really haven't been largely available and at reasonable rates.
David: So this is a content automation platform?
Brian Nutt: Yes. I would wrap it up by saying we're not in the marketing automation space. We're not trying to compete with Mailchimp or anything like that, what we're trying to do is automate the production of the video with data and available assets and return that piece of content back to the market automation platform that would then send it out, primarily via email, although I can see this transition to social and SMS in any other way that you communicate to consumers.
David: So if I'm running a digital signage network, and I have a hundred different stores and I want a video for each of those stores, but I want it localized to each of those stores, instead of getting an agency or in-house designer to generate a hundred different videos, you would run it through this and it would use data to generate those hundred videos?
Brian Nutt: That's a decent comparison, but this product's really not built for digital signage. So imagine a little bit bigger than that. You know the value of data on your consumer today is tremendously high. So if you have a CRM that has 10,000 people that are either current customers or leads or somewhere along the customer journey.
What we do is we could produce videos for all of them and you insert video into your marketing stack, into the customer journey and send it out via email.
David: Oh, okay. Are the files not big enough to run on a large format screen?
Brian Nutt: They could, and in fact, when I initially started this, the idea was to send content to any device, but we've narrowed that down and focused on market automation platforms. But there's no reason it couldn't morph into a digital signage play. It’s just not today.
David: Right, because there's more scale in those and it's just a bigger business.
Brian Nutt: Yes.
David: So it's one of those things like Poppulo, App Space, and some of these other companies that are starting to blend platforms, where it's one stock that can send to a digital screen, that can also send to a smartphone, to a tablet, to a website, whatever. It would kind of plug into that kind of thing.
Brian Nutt: Yes, and here's the other reason that I've gotten into this, and I'm a huge believer in power digital signage, obviously. But at Codigo, our growth was really built around this incredible drive to build more stores, more locations, more branches in the banking space, and so we leveraged that and grew off that and really benefited from it. But today what's happening is, in fact, I was looking just recently, they're suggesting that in the next five years, 50,000 retail stores will close.
Since 2009, when we were going into the great recession, banks and credit unions numbered about 15,000 total, that's not branches. Today, there are about 7,000. So it's this consolidation and push not including the number of locations that close during the pandemic, what 20,000 retail stores, something like that.
So what's happening, in my opinion, is the store or branch does a couple of things. One, it's meant to educate a person in person on the product, build trust, and sell products. But if stores are closing, people aren't going to the store, how do you communicate to them personally and to me, the conversation today is done in data. If I'm willing to give a brand my data, trust them with that, even if it's unreasonable. I'm not going to the store. I never wanna meet a person that's going to tell me about a shoe or a bank loan or whatever, but that doesn't mean I don't expect you to communicate back to me with things that are specific to me, to help me learn about products, build trust, and ultimately sell me something. So that's taking it from the digital science in-store installation, that's the next progression of what we're trying to solve.
David: It's another output.
Brian Nutt: Yeah, exactly.
David: So how does this work?
Brian Nutt: I guess, where do you want me to start? It did take quite a while to figure it out honestly. You start with this gigantic idea and then try to distill it down into something actionable. So that's where we are now.
But at the finest level, it's really not that dissimilar from digital signage. It's just one level deeper in how you're delivering the content, so you know the right time, right place, right person, all those things. And a large well of content that's either procured the third party ShutterStock, et cetera, or first party to the brand and then using technology to map these pieces of content to data, and data could be something like just knowing your name and having it be, “Hello Dave”, and so if the first name equals Dave, then show the text Dave on the first screen and if language equals Spanish, say, “Hola Dave”, and that's really what it is.
It's mapping data smartly to assets, no matter whether it's something as simple as text or a background image or a video, things like that, and then you stitch those together based on where you are in the process towards, or whatever it's you're involved in. It could be something like onboarding an employee. It could be obviously selling someone, onboarding them on a product, or following up with a customer service issue, and you do it at scale. Because you can automate it.
David: So if you have the data tables, you have the image assets, and you have maybe some core templates, you could conceivably generate 10,000 videos that are all tailored to each individual?
Brian Nutt: That's exactly right.
David: Are you dependent on templates?
Brian Nutt: Again, it’s very similar to digital science in many ways. So what we're doing, just like we did at Codigo, is leveraging a high degree of design skill and allowing folks to manipulate that as they choose. Now we've done a couple of things a little smarter this way, which is we're building in functions where we call it a branded function, which I guess is kinda out there in the market in software where you just click a button and it'll map your brand assets the best it can to template that we're building, but the same thing with Codigo is that we have a pretty high-end content editor that allows you to build whatever you want.
David: Do you need to have graphic design skills?
Brian Nutt: Not a high degree of them. As I said, it’s very similar to what we did at Codigo from a user experience perspective.
David: So you wanna have somebody using this who has some core design chops and knows not to use Comic Sans for a font, or use pink and everything?
Brian Nutt: Exactly. I can barely sign my name much less, create a piece of content that's gonna be sent out to thousands of consumers and I'll never do that. But the thing about this is not the design skills. It's meant to be, the whole set it and forget it attitude, which is once we have content mapped and I have the data that's associated with different pieces of content, and I have the story, we call it a story setup, and maybe I'll give you an example:
If they use a CRM and I have David Haynes who showed interest in Red Wine and you wanna join the wine club, the Friday Wine Club at the local wine establishment. So you show interest in that, and in their CRM you meet a condition that says, “Hey, Dave just joined the wine club” and what traditionally happens is when you meet that condition, you're sending an email and the email says, “Hey Dave, thanks so much for your interest in the wine club”, and it's got a picture or something of it, there, and maybe it shows people what the wine club. Well frankly, that's boring.
So what we wanna do is take that same approach and it's all that is: a form, it's all merge fields. “Hello, first name” - it just that it happens to be Dave. “Thank you for your interest in Product ID” - wine club, or whatever that it might be. Brian might be a white wine drinker, but it all comes from the same engine, so it's effectively a similar approach. We're taking data from those systems, current systems, we're not trying to be a CRM and mapping that to assets that we have, whether they're the first party to this, in this case, the wine club or something that we've provided you from a third party library, and then turning that into video, right? Stitching each of these assets together with dynamic fields that represent, “Hey, Dave, thanks for your interest in the wine club. All the red wine drinkers are meeting down the road on Friday afternoon. Come by. Would you like to attend?” You could click yes.
David: Gotcha. So this is rules-based, it's not AI?
Brian Nutt: Today, no.
David: So there's a plan?
Brian Nutt: There's a grand plan.
David: So what are the outputs like? What's the output file?
Brian Nutt: The output file as well as a URL, and so what we're generating is a PURL, a personalized URL.
David: So it's not an mp4, it's not a video file of any kind, it's an HTML5 file?
Brian Nutt: Yes.
David: Do you work in parallel with a CRM system or how do the two platforms play together?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, now we're going to beta in February. Today, there are a number of different ways to do it. You can either upload it yourself or you can, there are a number of systems that can automate the transfer of data, like Zapier, et cetera.
And you map these just like anything else. If you have a list of people that meet conditions, like the Red Wine Club, you take that data and get it to our system. As long as we understand what the fields are, then we can choose the correct content to weave together and return it back to you as a PURL, which can then be sent out as an email.
David: How seamless will it be?
Brian Nutt: It should be very seamless. Take any system, let's take Mailchimp for example. There are custom fields and automation that allow you to insert links into an email template or a landing page. So we're routing on top of those existing systems and the features that they have and so once you have that, you can have a custom record for each person, like Dave O'Brien or whomever that updates itself, and when those conditions are met, it knows to send the email.
David: So would you use APIs or would you use middleware like you were mentioning like Zapier?
Brian Nutt: That's the first way to do it. Oddly in the financial space, it's more of a security requirement. Rather than doing that, oftentimes I'll just use SMTP, which seems old school, but there are reasons to do so, like man-in-the-middle attacks, and things like that. But there are ways to do this. Now, do we wanna integrate with as many systems as we possibly can? We'll let the market dictate that.
David: Because it's HTML5, is it responsive?
Brian Nutt: Responsive to the size of the device? Is that what you mean, like web responsive?
David: The screen resolution, and if it's going out on Facebook, it's a 4:3 square and if it's going out on a larger screen, it's a 16:9 rectangle?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, again, it's very similar to the product we had with Codigo, which is, you can do custom resolutions, you can do whatever you want, but then again, it's gotta be responsive to the area of the device, or in this case, the browser, whether that's mobile or your laptop or tablet or whatever.
David: So when you look at this from financial aspects, what's the benefits argument of doing this versus producing individual videos? It's pretty obvious, but tell me nonetheless.
Brian Nutt: As I said, producing videos is incredibly expensive, and I've termed it the content gap, which is what I call, it's the distance between what consumers require in video - and they want everything in the video - and what businesses can reasonably produce. So it's not just the cost, a lot of times people outsource this stuff, and then it's got a shelf life.
But with what we're doing we think we can reasonably produce hundreds of thousands of videos, for pennies on the dollar, and I say video because that's what people understand, but it’s actually HTML that you render, that's the other component that is good. It's favorable.
Now, will that be something that every brand wants? Do they want rendered videos? Sure, there might be folks that require rendered video, and maybe we'll do that at one point we actually did, at Codigo, we ended up using a very similar approach. Then we built a rendering engine that rendered as HTML5 to true video. But today it's HTML5 and it's just from hosting to production to the delivery of it, it drives the cost down to prices that were impossible.
David: So when you go to market in a couple of months, two or three months, what am I paying? Am I subscribing to something? Am I buying an enterprise license?
Brian Nutt: It's a SaaS model, and it's usage-based too. So it's a tiered-based model similar to the digital signage space, there definitely be some content creation elements to it where we assist clients if they need the content made, and you probably remember at Codigo we did that as well. It’s the same approach here, and it really depends. It's hard to give you a specific pricing point. But I think most customers will probably land somewhere between $500 and $1500 a month. That's where I think it would be. It could be far higher, depending on usage.
I was at a trade show recently and there's a customer of mine, who said that they sent out emails last month. Well, If you make 140,000 videos, it might be a little higher, but that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to do the same thing as the last business, which may get a very attractive price that they can leverage.
David: So that's the scale argument why it makes more sense for a cable company or a phone company or power company, something like that, that has tens of thousands of subscribers and customers versus something like a digital signage network, which as I said, might have a hundred iterations of a similar ad, and you don't get the same economies of scale from.
Brian Nutt: That's right, and in a lot of ways I feel like this is very similar to when I started Codigo. I remember telling people, I'm going to replace printed posters on the wall with flat screens, and they're like, what? And I'd say it's called digital signage. They'll say, oh, you mean like those LED, those red blinky lights that go across like that? I'm like no. That's not what I mean, and I would go around with a 42-inch screen, and those things were heavy, and so it's almost the same thing where I have to show this to everyone so they can understand this, and go oh I can use this. There are all these different permutations of a relationship with a client or an onboarding of one or whatever it is and then they kinda get it so that's where we are.
David: Yeah, that's very familiar to me. Years ago, back in the mid-2010s, I had a little spin-out product that I did with a Korean partner called Spotamate, and it was automating videos based on templates and by far my biggest challenge was education. Because people just couldn't wrap their heads around it. So how are you gonna deal with that?
Brian Nutt: I think that today, the state of the consumer today around video is totally different, and the other thing is that I think Spotimate was sort of Adobe-reliant, right?
David: Yeah, it was an Adobe plugin.
Brian Nutt: Yeah, so we're skipping all that. So from a user perspective, it makes it a little easier to get started, since it’s a lot fewer steps to take, but from an education standpoint, I think people are starting to expect this. It's like if you log in to Netflix and you see all these interesting shows that you know, that makes you think, oh, wow, boy, that's something I would watch, you understand that there's a data-driven decision behind that, and whether it's content while you're scrolling through on Instagram or across the web, all these technologies exist and I feel like most folks understand that when they see something like this, they get it, where before it might have and it still can be creepy. I'm not saying it can't be, but depending on the use, before it was perceived entirely like that.
With the pandemic and, if you go back before the pandemic, or let's go five years back, a lot of people didn't wanna take videos. They didn't wanna do a zoom call or whatever. They wanted to do it on the phone or they shut off their camera. But today, if I have a Zoom call with you and you don't turn your camera on, I think something's wrong. What's going on? So it's this drive to video and the requirement of a personalized experience that when people get this, I think they'll be like, oh yeah they'll understand.
David: So I realized, as you've said that your core market is email marketing, maybe social media, some of those things. If you have digital signage, software platforms, or solution providers who are interested because maybe they do this whole omnichannel thing and they see this as an opportunity, how would they work with you? Would it run in parallel?
Brian Nutt: That's a sort of broad question to ask. I'm not sure I don't have that nailed down yet. But I'd take all inquiries, so to speak. Because again the idea is to insert this into the marketing stack. So whether it's digital signage or traditional email marketing, or any omnichannel approach, as you said, contacting a customer, why aren't you using video? And so it does seem as I said from my perspective, the growth of digital signage, which isn't anywhere, relies on footprint and as it declines or appears to decline at least from different ways. This is one of those ways to pick that up.
David: Yeah, and I think you're gonna start seeing a lot more screens, but in places other than what people thought about, which was, in stores and so on, but there are all kinds of operational messaging that could stand to be personalized based on location, not personalized to individuals, but to the dynamics of that, area of a building or whatever.
Brian Nutt: Sure, and the same thing holds true. The level of personalization is all really based on the quality of the data that you have and if you try to make it too deep and too complicated, folks I think will shy away because, yeah, it might not be possible, remember, it's the same thing with digital signage. You can make things super, super complex, and try to do all these really neat things, but the reality is a lot of people don't have that capability.
So you can only deal with what is reasonably available to you from a data perspective, but there's no reason you have to be specific to a person. Obviously, digital signage doesn't do that but automates it specific to an area, of the work floor, or whatever that's doable.
David: You've been out of digital signage for roughly four years now. I'm curious now having kinda left the industry, what's your perspective on it now?
Brian Nutt: I think there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation, including me, right? So a lot of the players that existed before have been rolled up in some ways. So it's like the wild west that existed when I really was looking back in the wild west, but it's gotten a little more sterile, at least that's my opinion. I think that the interesting pieces of it are in the hive stack arena with retargeting and programmatic ad buying, which I was never a really big proponent of the ad model. I think we talked about it before, but there are interesting ways to serve content and that's really more, kinda what, where you're going with what your comments were before, how do you serve that content to folks in a unique and timely way, and I think there will be, and there already has been this approach to multi-device from a screen, just one big screen, but honestly, since I got out, I haven't paid a tremendous amount of attention to it.
David: What you're doing is very current in terms of the shift more and more to using data integration and automated content so that it's always relevant, so you're doing what the industry's doing.
Brian Nutt: All right, there you go.
David: So if people wanna find out more, where are they gonna find you online?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, it's www.adificial.io - we're signing up beta users, although it'll be a closed group and already have a pretty good number that we've signed up from some past relationships.
But anybody who's interested, just go on there and there's a beta sign-up little form there, and you can learn about it.
David: And you're bootstrapped?
Brian Nutt: Yeah, bootstrapped in entirety. I've got one co-founder who was actually with me at Codigo as well, and we've got a team of six developers working on this thing full-time and are pretty excited about it.
David: All right. It was great to catch up with you.
Brian Nutt: Yeah, you too, Dave.
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
Alan Larson, 65cubed
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT
65cubed makes and markets a technology solution that has the triple benefit of making commercial displays, like big roadside LED boards, look better, last longer, and still use substantially less energy .
The company has a small box that plugs in between the media player and display controller box of a display set-up, using a ton of graphics capabilities, smarts and supporting technology to make, it says, even lower-end, lower cost product from China look great.
I had an interesting chat with 65cubed partner Alan Larson about the technology - which I suppose is a form of video wall processing. It gets a little technical in parts of the discussion, but Larson does a good job of not taking listeners too deep into the technical weeds.
Color reproduction and image quality are important to brands, but the really intriguing aspect to this is the ability to get another year or two out of the capital investment in a big screen, while also reducing the month to month energy usage bills.
Power usage is a much bigger issue in Europe at the moment, but it's something that every media owner with big, bright displays should be looking at, as energy bills rise and, in Europe these days, energy availability is constrained.
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TRANSCRIPT
Alan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your company 65cubed is all about? I just came across it literally a couple of days ago and don't know a lot about it.
Alan Larson: 65cubed is a color management server product designed for LED walls and other video sources. Its roots are better than a dozen years old in the high-end color management space that you might see in a very eclectic home setting, or more commonly post-production studios where color has to be absolutely spot on.
What we discovered a couple of years back as LEDs came on, was that as we modulated the color signature, there were significant changes in the power signature. So we started experimenting with that and discovered that we could apply our technology combined with some aggressive time of day, environmental conditions style algorithms to create an aggressive product for an environmental impact on LED walls and that's what sort of got us started.
We can make the color on a digital wall look very amazing, we've gotten literally cinematic events on walls before. We usually range between 18-20 to the low 30s on average for a digital wall, especially outdoor settings that are on 24/27 and it varies based on how the customer wants their image and what the foot traffic or automobile traffic might be.
So when you say 18 to 30, what do you mean by that?
Alan Larson: If you are using say 100 Amps peak on a digital midsize wall, the second we turn our system on at the same brightness and color correct it, it'll usually drop that peak amperage, down to 75-80% max, more typically it's sitting in the 60s, I would suppose because most people don't wanna blow their eyes out with the brightness, and a byproduct of that is we've noticed that a lot of people that sell wall time, the arbitrage people go through for the bids, is they request about a 10% grayscale on whites to lessen the risk of their walls being overloaded.
By definition, when we take the power signature down, the advertisers are free to do what they want. We don't care what they do because we're not on that side of the game. But that's a byproduct. You simply don't get the power swings that you would in a wall that does not have our product.
So the advantages are both energy savings and better-looking visuals?
Alan Larson: Yes, and the byproduct of energy is that because you're not stressing those LEDs as much, they run cooler. We contend that lower stress on the system and its ability to react to external conditions of interest that that'll extend the display life and what that means is that the display owner is in it for keeps, in other words, we've noticed that some people just flip the displays. They bring 'em up and they're looking for somebody else, like any property, those that use it as a long-term investment are very interested in seeing the net present value of that asset go up and know it's gonna stay up.
And our guess is somewhere around 12-15% increased display life. In a display the size of a roadside, that's a very substantial saving over time.
Yeah. So if you can lower the energy costs while extending the operating life, that's a double benefit there, right?
Alan Larson: The studies we've done so far on outdoor signage, to put in layman's terms, we estimate that the savings on an average wall, call it about 25% conservatively, because we can be very aggressive in low viewership time periods like overnight, is about the same as saving two average American homes electricity every year.
And the media company won't really care about that, but they will care about what it means to their bottom line.
Alan Larson: And to your point, Dave, when I get asked who is your market? My market is typically the guy that owns the OpEx and the EBITDA for the company. As we've found again, our roots are on the studio side, but as we've talked to asset owners the price point and fulfillment of their displays are market-driven. Their costs underlying, they're the only ones that really care about it, because they're gonna get what they can get based on the location and so forth.
So if we can take 25% out of their most consistent ongoing costs, by definition, that asset owner's gonna earn more money.
So would your typical customer then be somebody in Oklahoma, who has a small media company and they’ve got five digital billboards along a highway and they are looking for ways to save money on that? Is that most typical or are these big media companies?
Alan Larson: We don't care. If they have one sign, to us that savings are linear. Each sign has the same impact, of a given size. Our market is those asset owners.
For example, I'm working on a project with a company that owns, I think around 40 roadside billboards, and they can blanket it across. Now they're in the rural Midwest, and what's especially of interest to them is that in the overnight hours, we can turn the savings model into the 40+ percent range because of the way we can manipulate the pixels on the screen and drive down the power consumption even further.
How do you do that?
Alan Larson: It's probably best I don’t give away all our secrets because some of what I'm describing is in the patent-pending process. The underlying technology, I think, has around 14 or 17 patents in the color management space, and just by reference, the roots of this company come out of ex-Kodak people in their digital color division.
The actual author of most of the patents is the retired Chief Technology Officer for that division with a Ph.D. in Color Physics out of MIT, so it's pretty heavy stuff. When I talk about some of the concepts of the color gamut, most people's eyes go shut in about half a second. So we have to be careful to tone it down a little bit.
Count me among those!
Alan Larson: The overnight hours, basically what we do is we sit between the video player and the wall’s controller. So in a production setting, you unplug the HDMI into the video controller and insert our box between the player and that video controller, and then put another little segment of HDMI cable and we're in line between the two, and what happens is, because we know a particular color red, let's call it the OU Crimson color. That's a branded color. We can reproduce that color to that PMS standard if you're thinking of it as a paper representation. We've never seen it. If someone says, I want to bid with pure IBM Blue, I think we'd probably win the deal. Now, what that means is that we put a scope against a screen, and we measure upwards of 8,000-9,000 patches. We call them patches, but they're effectively samples. So if I feed that OU Red to the screen, I'm gonna make this up because the numbers are huge. Each digital pixel gets a digital command that tells it what colors, how to turn the pixels on, how bright it should be, and so forth.
But let's just say in simple terms, the color for that OU Red is the number 1234. We have a very nice reference scope that looks at it and says, we got 1234, but the best that screen could spit back, because all the pixels in the world are made in one big bucket over in China, it spits back 1662. “Why?” It's cuz it does. It has nothing to do with the controller. It has nothing to do with anything else. Then we know. Oh cool. So that means we have to send at the number 1553, whenever we see 1234 for any given pixel and it'll spit back the actual image of 1234, and poof, we do that for all the colors in the gamut and that's what brings out the true color.
Now, a lot of people talk about, moving the white point. That's a fallacy in our world because a white point is actually what's called D65 or 6,500 Kelvin is pure white. When you properly set red, green, and blue (RGB), when they're running to true calibrated and color-managed perfection, that white is the Venn diagram intersection of those color spaces. It never moves no matter how bright it is. So when we reduce the illumination of a screen, we're actually bringing down the mathematical values that told the LED to be bright, not the mathematical values that keep the color in perfect harmony, which makes a very nice cinematic look. In the evening, you can drive down the freeway or in Nova Scotia, a remote road with trees around it, and the colors are beautiful. And at night we take a much more aggressive use of the color black in a way that people can't see cuz black on an LED wall is electrically the value of 0 Amps. So if we query 20-30% of that screen in a mathematical way, no matter where we had it set, that amount of additional power is gonna disappear cuz those LEDs are physically not doing anything, but it really looks nice and we don't tell people how we do it because we can't do that.
And you're able to do more at night simply because you don't have to drive these things as hard, right?
Alan Larson: We've never actually put up a light meter, I know we could, but we use the absolute location of the display itself, and the nice thing is the geolocation of every place on the earth has an exact sunrise and sunset time that changes every day of the year.
So that means in Nova Scotia, the Sun's gonna set at 4: 28 this afternoon, which means somewhere around 4 o'clock or maybe a little before, we'll start taking the brightness part of that mathematical equation, slowly move it over, perhaps 45 minutes or so into a full post-dusk mode where it'll be in an evening setting and then when the asset owner says, there's nobody on this road, let's flip in the low viewership mode because from, say 11 o'clock till 6 in the morning, only three cars go by, but we're required by contract to keep that wall alive. So it's a combination of how the marketing people wanna see it and what's appropriate for the marketing setting.
When we do things like Las Vegas, we can't be as aggressive, because they just love brightness out there. But I will tell you that some of those absolutely huge walls that you see, I'm assuming you've been to the strip, it's nothing to take 50 grand a year and cost off of those walls.
So when I am buying your product, am I purely buying the box and the technology that's in there, or am I buying a service and a platform?
Alan Larson: Yes. The answer is the latter. The box is a computer. It's a very fast computer that has boatloads of GPUs and processors because it's creating absolute color, and saturation is different at each pixel level, which means we can maintain grayscale visibility in an almost black setting.
Most of the time they dither out and they're just a blob. You can actually see the changes in the subtleties of the shadows, and I'm gonna go back to your question, but a point I wanted to make earlier is because of that purity, that absolute control at a pixel level, your image will be more in focus, and it's simply because the processor captures the subtleties between each pixel to the point where the processor doesn't give up and approximate them as a cheap TV would, and all of a sudden you see what the director intended, not what a lower cost video display processor was able to produce.
Now, back to your question about pricing. We sell our product in a tier of four ways. For lack of marketing intelligence, we call it the base product. It's the kind of product you would use, say in a conference room or a church where you turn it on and you just want it to look nice and you're gonna turn it off. The energy savings piece is incidental because they don't care, and they plug it into a 110 circuit and call it a day. We sell that as basically the asset with the color management system and everything they want to use on it is basically a manual setting.
Then the next one, which we affectionately call our Energy module and pops in all of the automated features for geolocation time of day, anything you wanna do that is environmentally based or schedule based, it'll take over. In fact, when we take the color way down to the point where you go, gosh, it's dim, the color management system can actually pull, this is the patented stuff, out warm colors or blue colors or whatever would add a little zip back into the picture. Now is it absolutely pure to the King's English studio? No. Does it look better? Oh yeah, it does.
So that means you can create a very pleasant brand running it about 25 to 35% of the power signature, and I'd have to show it to you cuz once you see it, you go, huh? What do you know, those facial tones came out. So that part of the product is typically sold on an energy split, software as a service model, either as an asset purchase or as a software as a service, continued service. And it's based on an energy savings model. So technically if you were in Nevada versus New York, the price point for the same asset would probably be different in our eyes. But in all cases, the customer always wins. If they purchase the product, they will always be cash positive in less than 24 months and thereafter.
Yeah, that was gonna be a question was, yes, you could save money on this, but is the cost of the technology at a point where you're not really saving, you're just saving on your energy bill or whatever?
Alan Larson: No, our play is, I gotta be able to look a CFO in the eye and go, you'll be better off with us. End of conversation. I don't care if you give a damn about color, you'll be better off, and quite frankly, the entertainment companies that have a customer that comes in for three days and gambles, they honestly don't care, right? ? Cause their market is to get people behind a slot machine.
And other people, if you go into a boardroom setting or someone that cares about their brand, oh heck, they don't care about the energy. They want it to look perfect. They're there to impress their customers. So it depends on the market. And by the way, the device is always hooked via a very secure tunnel to our server farm in Rochester, New York, which means nobody can actually get into the server. It's impenetrable, and the only way you access it is through a web app that can run on any device and you can watch the behavior. You can see how much the machine is ready. You can see how much if you elect to put onboard storage and so forth, and you can do all the manipulation of the screen via the web, no matter where you are.
Since I brought that up, I'll shift to the fourth piece of our product, which is smart automation. Because we're keeping a heartbeat pulse on that machine, if the video path goes away, either to or from, the technician on duty will get an immediate alert on his cell phone. If we're hooked to a UPS and the UPS is alive, so we're alive, but the network's connection goes down, then more than likely there's a power failure somewhere else. Once again, we'll notify them immediately, and the reason we can do that is that the server farm is that which actually notifies the technician, not the device itself. So it's saying, “I lost my baby out there in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna tell somebody about it.” As a byproduct of that, the third tenant that we sell to, and this is for people that just have a desire for it, we've been asked and have done camera installations. There are a lot of controllers that do camera installations, which is fine. It's nothing unique, but again if someone is having a hard time with a consumer paying their bill because they want absolute validation of their display ads, we'll just have the server snap a picture every three seconds and log it both locally and up on the server, and if somebody asks a question, here, knock yourself out. Here's a log of everything that happened, and if we throw an error at the system, then if the camera's up, we would immediately turn a live feed on and make that feed available to the technician via that text. So in rural settings like where you live and a lot of the mountain states, these guys in bucket trucks drive two hours just to find out they didn't even need to go there.
For example, we were at a sports bar where the network went down for six minutes and the technician got an error. By the time he read the error, the system was back up. So he calls and says, What the heck happened? We go, go talk to your network people. That's exactly what happened. It's that kind of stuff. The idea behind this smart service is that we do not want the distributors that buy and resell our product to get a call at 11 o'clock at night because the consumer found something wrong. We want them to be able to call their customer and say, by the way, “if it's of interest to you, I remediated a couple of issues last week. No problem. That's just what we do for you because we care”, and that's why we built it. That was all based on the distributor. Because they have a business to run and every time they have to service a wall for no reason, it just takes away their bottom line above and beyond what the customer bought. This is a distributor feature.
So I've been to many trade shows, but trade shows that included booths for companies who were specifically in the business of video wall processing for LED video walls. I'm thinking of companies like Brompton and I understand at a base level, I guess at most, that you're running your signal through these boxes, which optimizes and improves the visuals that get pushed to the screen and therefore make it look better.
Is that essentially what you're doing here or is this like another component?
Alan Larson: No, it definitely conditions the video signal. In the high-end video market, a couple competitors I can think of, on a studio set, you'll see Black Box, where they actually condition the camera. I've seen Lumigen in high-end settings.
We're similar in those products. There's a thing called a LUT box. We are the highest-resolution LUT box on the market. We got our name 65cubed because we're a 65x65x65, that's the cube, RGB-based technology. The nearest competitor that does something like this, I think is 37 cube and most of them are like 17, and most of the calibration style activities we've seen from all companies are one-dimensional, not three-dimensional, and again, we're basically hitting the color management system for a digital wall with a sledgehammer because we happen to own the asset.
Our sister company is owned by the same investor as we are so we have untethered access to all the software assets.
So is this the sort of thing that you purely sell as a product or would you license it as well to a big-time, top-five LED manufacturer so it would just be incorporated in the overall product?
Alan Larson: We would welcome it because it's a lot easier to sell and implement, for example, there are two ways that our system gets installed. Because we can't control the quality of any given panel that goes on a wall, regardless of the manufacturer, we always scope the system to start with.
So if someone owns some walls along Interstate 10 and they said, we want these fixed, we'll actually go in a bucket truck for a couple of hours and scope the screen, and once done, it’s done and every display that's of the same bin of LED, they're done. But if it's an oddball, you go do it.
For a distributor when they receive their great big crates of panels from China, they take one out, they're usually like 6 inches x 12 inches or foot by foot or wherever there are. They just lay it on the floor, hook a controller to it, put the scope against it, and go home for dinner. And then that entire set of crates that came in the same shipment are all done, and so the customer never gets involved in it. But no, the underlying technology of our sister company is in thousands of high-end monitors that are used in commercial settings, high-end gaming, that kinda stuff.
Who's the sister company?
Alan Larson: The technical name is Entertainment Experience. Their trademark company is called EE Color, and it's embedded in our technology. We're both owned by the same group.
Is the product something that would be used across any manufacturer?
I mentioned the top five companies that perhaps sell a lot of this stuff at least to the major media companies, for the sides of buildings and roadside billboards, and so on. Or is this more the thing that's gonna really improve lower-tier, lower-cost products?
Alan Larson: I can't speak for the quality management of any manufacturer. The lower quality products, distributors that don't sell the top three or four name brands. They love it because they can go and compete for head to head. We have clever tools we give them. We give them an image that's basically duplicated side by side and play it in duplication on the screen, and then we tell our processor to physically not process the left side of the screen pixels and the right side we do, and it's visually impressive because the telltale evidence of digital walls that are pushing too much electricity and don't portray are people.
We went to the Infocom Show last June, I believe we went with a partner, a distributor that resells our product. We were the only ones that had people, not swirling colors and mountain scenes, right? Because we can produce the facial tones of anybody, whether you're Caucasian, of color, just as if you're looking at them in your face. When you get the people's faces right, I guarantee you the rest of the colors are in.
Typically what happens is people look like they sat under a sunlamp all day. Another telltale evidence of a screen often aging is that white looks turquoise. That just means the whole color skew is pushed way out, and when we bring that back in, and by the way, when it's pushing purple, it's pushing a lot more electricity too. When you bring it into white, the white is is the byproduct of the red, blue, and green in concert. We don't create white, white happens, is what I'm trying to say.
For the lower-cost products coming over primarily from China, one of the criticisms is that they use LED light admitters from a really wide “bin”, a wide assortment of bins with different Color properties, and everything else. Is the proposition here that that's not the same worry if you're using this kind of technology?
Alan Larson: No. We usually tell the distributors who buy those. You have to pay attention to the bin numbers as they come in because yes, they vary widely and you find that the distributors are pretty clever. If they pull some panels out that look odd compared to the rest of them, they literally sort them. It sounds like a big pain in the neck, but they don't want their customer to have a checkerboard on the wall.
But no, typically the rule is if you receive another shipment that the manufacturer declares is of the same bin, you hope that the manufacturer has integrity then you go with that. What you typically find is, let's assume the bins are off by 5% or 6% in the color signature, and it's on the side of a wall, along a freeway somewhere. The energy curve is gonna be taken care of. These colors won't be textbook, but again, you have a viewing discussion with the consumer for about two seconds when they look at the screen. otherwise, they're gonna hit that semi in front of them. So you don't have to be as particular on roadside displays as you do in company settings or boardrooms.
You mentioned coming out of the studio world and so on. Is this primarily a product for outdoor displays that you're gonna see from a long distance or is this the sort of thing that you could use indoors for 1.8-millimeter fine pixel pitch walls?
Alan Larson: Actually, today I'm going over to a manufacturer's US distribution center, and I'm gonna be working with their team to set up a 0.5-millimeter, 5x9 foot wall in their boardroom. Now, the finer the pixel pitch, the more amazing the product actually.
So last question: I was curious about energy savings.
I work quite a bit with a company over in Germany. We collaborate on things and they asked me about energy concerns in North America I say, people are aware of it, but it's not a point of discussion. Obviously, it's a huge point of discussion now in Europe. Are you getting questions at all about that and are the customers interested in that side of it?
Alan Larson: We're more interested than people we've found. In fact, one of the reasons I went to the DPAA shows a couple of weeks ago. One of my missions was specifically to look for potential distributors in continental Europe for that very reason.
I've traveled extensively in my career overseas and have put a lot of time into Europe and the Middle East, and it's a whole different world over there, and the weird thing about Americans, and probably Canadians too, is they've never been more than 250 miles from the day place they were born and like in Dallas where I live, you don't see any news about New York because it might as well be Germany. They don't get it, there's just not something that would register. So the European thing here is nothing more than news on the nationals every so often.
And you don't have US media companies or maybe Canadian media companies as well expressing concerns about the cost of energy and interest in your product primarily because of that. They're more interested because of the color properties?
Alan Larson: If they pay the bill for that asset, they care. When I was at DPAA, I got killed with acronym soup because I come out of the high-tech industry, databases, applications, and computers, and I could have given you the same three letters and some acronyms, and I would've thought it was something different. So I sat there and just listened and looked for the context and by and large the word “energy”, and the word “perfect color” wasn't mentioned once in the five days I was there, and hence I met with an architectural engineering firm that’s all about energy and they went, you have uniqueness here that we believe as we do these great big installations will give us a competitive advantage, and that was the most productive meeting I had all week, actually.
So back to your question about the majors. I have approached the likely candidates that are the big display owners, the people that make them and some have amazing products, don't get me wrong, We've looked at a couple of them, call it the top three or four, and we go, you know what the difference is between some of the cool things they're doing and what we can provide, that just validates our market. We don't care if we so-called compete against them because that's goodness. Because they're doing the right thing for the environment. That we're trying to do. We're sensitive to that. So the European piece is very important to us. We're just attempting to get a foothold to get our product supported locally.
All right, Alan. If people wanna know more about the company, where can they find it online?
Alan Larson: If they go to our website, they can fill out a simple form that says, “I wan to know more” and that's about all it does, and I'll call them right back, or I'll have somebody in our group call them back.
That's 65cubed.com, right?
Alan Larson: Right!
All right. Thanks again for spending some time with me.
Alan Larson: Thanks very much.