Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Robert Johnson, PAM

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There's been a steady stream of announcements in the past couple of years about new sports and entertainment venues going up in the US and elsewhere, and one of the notable attributes about these developments is that they are not just stadiums and arenas - they're big commercial developments anchored by that kind of building but surrounded by retail, residential and infrastructure.

They're sprawling, at times, and with that, not necessarily easy to navigate and use.

An Australian software company called PAM has a tag line about transforming complex spaces into loved places, and it does that mainly through what people in digital signage would call wayfinding. But there's more going on with PAM than just maps. The company blends that base capability with a digital signage CMS, mobile, analytics, and integrations with business systems, including Ticketmaster. It also intertwines all these components so that they're reactive, with data from one component informing another.

The company already has some big name, high profile clients and venues to reference, including SoFi Stadium in LA and the F1 circuit for Las Vegas.

Robert Johnson is VP Sales for North America for the company, and he has a deep background in both wayfinding and digital signage. He got into the sector years ago, in the early days of Four Winds Interactive, and I've known him for ages now. So it was great to learn about PAM, but also just great to catch up.

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TRANSCRIPT

Robert, great to catch up with you. I haven't seen you in years. 

Robert Johnson: Likewise, Dave, it has been a while, and we go way back and it's great to reconnect with you. 

I knew you from your time at Four Winds Interactive, where we were involved in a couple of pretty big deals. I was on the consulting side, and you were on the sales side when you were doing sales for that company. Could you give a background on your journey in digital signage? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, happy to, and you nailed it right there. You and I had a really exciting, fun opportunity to work on a couple of very large enterprise projects with some big names, great folks, and great clients and yeah, you and I cut our teeth together. That's where our relationship really spawned, but yeah, I was really fortunate, I got to start working with Four Winds Interactive when they were very quite small. I think when I started, there were somewhere between 25, and no more than 45 employees there.

Were they still in the house or had they moved out by then? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, I was in the original mansion, the Parkside Mansion, right off of City Park in Denver, Colorado, and that was a trip. They had weddings on the weekends and we sold software during the weekdays in there until we had to break down our desks. But that was a startup life right there. 

Looking back is interesting because that was 16 years ago when I took that job with them and looking back, there's a piece of me that says that you can make a Netflix story about the rise of the software company because the economy was crap, it was 2007-2009, and the housing market crashed. I remember my parents asking me like, how do you have a job? How was the company doing? 

What on earth is digital signage? 

Robert Johnson: Why are people spending money on digital signage? And I remember telling my parents, I was young, I was in my 20s and I was like, mom, dad, this is amazing. People are buying this left and right. It was the kind of product that if you could just demo it and talk about it, you were selling it. 

I was fortunate that I got to move up in the ranks and work on a lot of large enterprise deals, selling very complex digital signage solutions with incredible integrations to Delta Airlines and JetBlue Airlines, Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Staples, just massive digital signage implementations and yeah, we had lots of integrators and hardware involved and it was a ride, man. It was awesome. 

So as it happens, people move on and you went to a new company but could you tell me what they were doing? 

Robert Johnson: The connection is this: In the world of digital signage, I joke and say, I sold TVs for a decade, but on the TVs, on the screens, you're selling communications platforms, employee communications platforms, retail solutions, touchscreens, and wayfinding.

Wayfinding has been a part of my life for a long time. We sold many wayfinding solutions, helping guests navigate stores, retail, malls, airports, and other places. I then moved to a company called Concept3D, which when I started, only had one product: a mapping product, but no signage, and for me, that was a breath of fresh air.

I was able to eliminate all the hardware complexities because hardware fails, PCs and displays fail, turn on, turn off, and get vandalized, and for me, this was amazing. I could sell wayfinding without having to implement any hardware, and they have a phenomenal platform, but then their main focus was or is higher education and I was brought on to try to sell into enterprise solutions, and we had a few good deals in there, but then COVID hit and we launched another product for virtual tours and we did a bunch of other things in there. So they actually have five products now, all heavily focused on higher education, but the wayfinding piece always stuck around.

We sold maps to anybody who wanted to visualize their space and anybody who wanted to enhance their space. If you're on a college campus and campuses are huge, they're square miles large, and so you need to navigate those environments. 

Easy to get lost in them. 

Robert Johnson: It's easy to get lost, and a lot of faculty, students, guests, and parents are frustrated trying to make that experience better, and so that was the plug. 

So you were with that company and then I think you went on a hiatus or something, and now you're with a company called PAM.

Robert Johnson: PAM, yeah, and this is not the cooking spray company. It's not spam. It's not Pam. Funny enough, and this is like an accident, but PAM is actually the word, map, spelled backwards. 

Oh, okay. I was trying to figure out what an acronym was.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, but that was not intentional. We actually had a customer bring it to our attention. Did you know that PAM is MAP backward? Anyway, it's Project Asset Management. That's actually what it stands for. 

But PAM is really unique because it combines the last 16 years of my life into this amazing software platform that has been in development for the last seven years, and so we're still in the ramp-up phase, the startup phase. We're not quite a startup. We're in a kind of launch phase right now in terms of our trajectory with adding clients and growth, but they do a couple of things. We have a digital signage component where we power hundreds and hundreds of screens for large entertainment districts, sporting facilities, stadiums, and arenas and we specialize in interactive wayfinding. 

We don't go to market as really either one of those. We go to market as a smart navigation platform helping cities, visitors, bureaus, and entertainment districts have a more frictionless, guest experience, and as in your world, Dave, the frictionless experience can be anything from how do you get parking? How do you find something? How do you get information on screens or your mobile device? We touch a lot of different communication mediums. It's a perfect fit for me. I've been there for two months now, and it's just been super exciting. 

Were you looking around, or did they come to you? 

Robert Johnson: A little bit of both out there when you've been in the space for a while, as we chatted before, you get approached by people, and certain things become a fit and, every day on my, on LinkedIn and stuff, I'd probably get hit up by a recruiter every day for something, or you get someone reaching out to you.

So yeah, this just came across my plate. We chatted and chatted for a while. It wasn't one of those light switch things where you just turn on and jump ship. When you're our age, my age, your age, everything's pretty calculated at that point. 

We're not our age. 'cause I'm way older than you. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, you're older than me. 

I could be your father. 

Robert Johnson: Fair enough. 

I could even be your grandfather. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, wife, kids, all that stuff, and play, and I'm never just like making a brash decision to just jump because the technology is cool but yeah, it was a calculated decision, but once I got to dig into the software and see what these guys are about. Hindsight's 2020 and I'm just super, super glad I made the change. 

This is an Australian company? 

Robert Johnson: They are headquartered in Sydney but have an office in LA. Right now, I'm heading up the North American sales efforts, and they are very, very, hyper-focused on sports and entertainment districts. So yeah, we are taking a smart city, smart district approach. 

It doesn't really happen as much in Canada because it's much, much smaller, but from what I can tell, any new sports venue that goes up is not just an arena, it's a district with residential, retail, dining, hotels, the whole nine yards.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. Like I joke and tell teens, yeah, you might be on a football team or a baseball or basketball or hockey team, that's fine. But you're actually in the business of pro entertainment. You just happen to have a hockey team associated with you or a basketball team associated with you and if you're football, you only have 8-10 home games a year. If you're basketball, you've got 40 and hockey 40, but there's another 200 to 300 days a year that you need to be putting on events. 

So if you Google, there are 200 stadiums currently being built, planned to be built, and contracted to be built in the next 24 to 36 months and if you just follow a few of the blogs online every week, every month, there's a new stadium that's being announced or a new district that's being announced to be built, and all of these are now very integrated in the city. They're very much funded by voters and the city council and the visitors bureaus. It's a fully integrated approach these days. 

I would imagine they pretty much have to say this is a commercial property development, and not just a stadium for that very reason, with the exception, maybe, Texas, where there are high school football stadiums that will see 20,000. 

Most cities don't want to spend 200 million or whatever the number is on something that's only going to get a handful of days of use. they really need to justify that. This is going to create a whole bunch of other jobs. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah. Nowadays, when a stadium is being built, they look at the entire infrastructure. Do we need to bring internet lines? Where's transit? Where's the parking? Where's the bus situation? If that stuff isn't considered, then the project just won't happen. It's a fully integrated approach, and there are Oakview Group, Legends, and Populous, and there are these massive architects and developers out there who are building these for them, they're managing these event centers and stadiums for the teams and the cities, and it's a huge business. 

That's actually the way that PAM approaches the market. We go one to one and we sell our software and platform to the teams and the arenas. But we also are working the angle very heavily with the architects, and so we're talking to these projects right when they're breaking ground years ahead of time. 

Yeah, I assume that what's important to them is that they may understand they're going to have digital signage, directories, and some degree of wayfinding, but they don't want a gallery of different technology providers to do it for them. They would likely greatly prefer that there's one service provider that can do the screens but can also do the wayfinding, the phone app for navigation, and everything else, right? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, a hundred percent. We work with Gable and we work with Daktronics. We work with ABI SPL, the tech providers so that when ABI SPL is recommending a solution, that way they have one wayfinding provider that's for mobile, that's for web, that's for the digital signage, and when they would need to make an update and communicate… I use this example on some of my calls, I don't know if a year or two ago, Dave, you were up in this area, the Buffalo Bills at the end of one of the games had a massive brawl and there was a fight, and that's like an incident, right? So immediately safety, security, and people like that are trying to get involved, and if you need to communicate to 50,000 people leaving the event that there was an incident taking place, you don't want to update your text message provider, your mobile provider, your web provider, or get on the phone with your web management team security.

You want to be able to go into one place and update. All your digital signage, all your communications, your mobile, everything with a click of a button, and that's the kind of stuff that we have the capability of doing. Just as an example, there are so many other things. Another cool thing that our software does when you think about planning and working with these different technology solutions is we have this really amazing data analytics platform where if there's an event happening on a Saturday, we can then show you this heat map that actually shows you all the dead zones. So if there's a dead zone on the South side of the entry and there's no internet right there, we'll actually be able to show you on the heat map that shows, as somebody was walking, there's a dead zone here and you may want to actually put additional, WiFi connections or routers or enhance the call-up Verizon or AT&T, your provider because there's a dead zone right there. So, our platform has the ability to do all these different things, which makes it really unique, and again, one of the reasons I'm grateful to be here. 

Does the fact that you're working with stuff that's going to be on mobile phones as well, give you some sense of analytics as well, in terms of how people move around those kinds of spaces?

Robert Johnson: Yeah, that's one of our value propositions, which is the ability to provide data crowd management so that you can make a better decision. So think about this: I live in Golden, and I'm actually going to do one of the playoff games on Monday with my wife. We're going to go to the Denver Nuggets game. If I open up the Denver Nuggets app and I get a no before you go message, and it's, hey Robert, you have prepaid parking at this lot over here, and I pull up my app and I use the PMA app to get there.

The PAM app will then show that Robert Johnson because I'm logged into the, I got my profile set up with the Nuggets. It'll say that, Robert left his house in Golden via car, or Robert got on the train, went to Union Station, and got there. The team can then take that information back and say, look, you had 18,000 people at a sold-out game, and 4,000 of them took transit, they took a train to the game. You can take that back to your sponsors and your advertisers and Lexus and Toyota and those guys and say, look, you need to be advertising between the hours of five and six o'clock to all the people coming to the game and letting them know about the merchandise, food, beverage, coupons, parking, all of these things.

So yeah, our platform can give that data to the team so they can make literal, actual business decisions that drive revenue and sponsorship revenue and value to their sponsors. It's really cool. I have been in the wayfinding space for 16 years, and none of the companies I've seen have the ability to do that.

Yeah, I've always liked wayfinding, but the challenge I've always had with the stuff that you find on touch displays in shopping malls and so on is that you look up what you want, and it'll show you how to get there, but then you walk 10 paces and you can't remember where to turn or anything else. The next step is to put it on a phone, which gives you a little bit more, but it still seems a little disjointed from the rest of what goes on in a big space. 

Robert Johnson: You'll like this, Dave, and I think you can probably validate it, as we're the only mapping platform that integrates with Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster Ignite.

So again, using that mobile example, if I'm leaving the Nuggets game and I just had an amazing time and there's another game because there will be another playoff game. If I'm like, honey, let's do it, let's buy the tickets for Wednesday night's game. Right there. I can do that transaction, and if it starts on the map and I say, yeah, I want to buy tickets right here and get my parking, we can follow that journey, go back to the Nuggets at the end of the game, and say, look, you had 4,000 people buy tickets, and their journey started on the map. 

There goes 600 bucks. 

Robert Johnson: Exactly, there goes 600 bucks.

But, like that's the thing that I, as a sales guy and sales professional, have always wanted to go back to my clients with and say, look, the map is generating revenue. We can see that people scan these hotdog coupons. We can see where people came from. You can go back to your sponsors.

All of this and more, Dave, just makes PAM; it's the belief inside me that knows that PAM is going somewhere pretty spectacular in this space. 

Yeah, I'm sure that, some of the entertainment districts and so on that look at this, and say, the experiential side is very nice that this helps people get around, but if you can take another couple of hops and say, and it'll generate incremental revenue for you or boost the average attendee profile in terms of what they buy and so on, then that gets them a lot more interested.

Robert Johnson: It goes from a map turning into a really nice thing to have to, hey, this is something we really need and it provides value and impact. 

So you mentioned that the company is ramping up, but I'm looking at the website and I don't want to rattle off names in case they're not accurate, but you're deployed in some fairly significant familiar areas, right?

Robert Johnson: Yeah, I'd say the company has really been fortunate in the last 24 months. The Australian Open was massive. It covers a huge ground in Melbourne, where the city is almost shut down for that event. Hundreds of thousands of people come in. We've been contracted with SoFi Stadium since the stadium's inception and went live.

That's the big one in LA for people who might not know that. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, they've got the Rams and the Chargers playing out of that stadium. Plus, it's a venue that hosts FIFA and the Super Bowl. I didn't realize this until a couple of months ago. The Super Bowl was just there, and the Super Bowl was the highest revenue-generating Super Bowl in the history of the Super Bowls because of the capacity and the venue drove so much revenue; the Super Bowl is going to be back there, not this season, but the following season.

It is not normal to have back-to-back Super Bowls within two or three years of one another at the same facility. And yeah, we're powering the navigation experience for that as well. Our relationship with Formula One is super strong. We just knocked it out of the park with Las Vegas, and yeah, before this call this morning, I just had a call across the world with another Formula One venue because of our relationship with Vegas. So yeah, it's been a gift. I appreciate that you kept on giving. 

Yeah. Let's talk about Vegas because that's an interesting one in that it's a facility that's built for three to four days as opposed to a fixed venue that, if you like, you might go repeatedly. If you're a season ticket holder, you know your way around. But with this, everything was somewhat temporary, with the exception of the PADEX. How did it manifest itself?

What would be the PAM experience if I went to that I wouldn't because I just wouldn't want to deal with all the crowds, 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, you nailed it. There are a couple of them out there. Miami is similar to Vegas because it's a semi-temporary structure.

There are now some permanent structures at both venues, but there are a few of them out there, in the world, but yeah, Vegas, in particular, was really unique, and they had a lot of challenges that they were very proactive in trying to solve this. You had to walk through Caesars Palace. You had to walk through the Bellagio. You had to walk through some of these hotels to navigate to your seat, to your area, maybe the party, or the venue that you needed to get to. 

I didn't have the ability to attend the event, but I know, for example, the Formula One Las Vegas hat sold out. It's an interesting fact that they didn't make enough. They didn't realize that, but that was the one piece of apparel that everybody wanted to buy. 

Probably because it was the one thing they could afford. 

Robert Johnson: It's the one thing that they could afford, but everyone wanted to walk away and wear their Formula One hat, and as a takeaway for the event, they're like, okay, we need to put more hats around, we need to allow people to buy this apparel easier, we need to help people get to those locations easier. 

I think you'll find this interesting too, Dave. I talked a little bit about the data, the heat maps, and the journey maps that we provided a second ago. That was a huge win for Formula One and the casinos. We were able to go back and show them. I'm going to make the numbers up because I don't have them in front of me, but let's say throughout the weekend, 50,000 people needed to navigate through the Bellagio or the Caesars Hotel to get from point A to point B, and we showed it, we could visually show them people were going and why they were going there and what the places they searched for. But because it was the race's first time, we didn't do any interiors for the Bellagio or Caesars. We just had the exterior of the building. 

So now we've contracted with those properties to do the interiors so people can more easily navigate those facilities and get to where they need to go because they were like, we spent way too long trying to get through this hotel. We didn't know how to get through. 

Yeah, and Las Vegas is a textbook example of where navigation is incredibly valuable. I've been to Las Vegas 40+ times, and if I go into something like Caesars, I'm going to get lost. There are no straight lines. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, there's no straight lines at all.

Our integration with Ticketmaster also played big into that one as well, again, if you're Dave and you bought a pass for you're going to be sitting at Turn 12, you're going to have parking around Turn 12. Your entrance is only going to be at Turn 12, and so when you want to scan your QR code or you want to get directions, our integration is going to say, we know Dave, bought parking here. We know he's staying at this hotel. We're going to get him to his property. Again, that integration with Ticketmaster was a really big value-added feature for the curated content experience. 

So, how does the digital signage component work? Typically with a wayfinding application. It's a file that's going to sit in a digital signage schedule and that's how the two kind of sync up with each other. but I'm thinking it's probably a little different here. 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is a little bit different. As you would expect, we have a content management system that allows us to manage the content on the map and the digital signage as well and so if you have a non-interactive sign, we can control the content on there. We can control the content if you have an LED parking sign. But there's a connection between the two, an integration between the two, where if parking lot G gets filled up, we can say it's full, and we're going to go ahead and let the digital sign or the LED board say it's full.

We're also going to provide that update on the map as well or the interactive kiosk so that all of that content is married up into one kind of seamless user interface. 

So it's all integrated as opposed to, I'm going to do something with the mobile app and the wayfinding component of this, then I'm going to back right out of that and then launch the digital signage piece and do other things.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, exactly. The name of that platform with the digital signage is called 360 Live. That's what we call it. It's like a full 360 experience, but that's the idea. You don't have to go into two or three different systems. We don't have multiple content management systems. We've got one that has its parking application. We've got one that just handles navigation. We've got one that handles the digital signage, but when you make an update on one, it updates across all of them.

You mentioned Daktronics and Gable. I'm assuming you guys avoid the hardware side of it.

Robert Johnson: Yes, thank goodness. We do. I would have nightmares if I had to get back into the hardware game. So yeah, we work with those guys to partner with them on the hardware piece. 

So is it something that you license via SaaS, or is it an on-prem thing? 

Robert Johnson: Yeah, it is SaaS. We're a software as a service company.

We have managed services as well, but yeah, like a lot of companies nowadays, we have an ongoing recurring annual software fee that includes software support, maintenance updates, all the features we roll out. We've got initial set up fees for us to build out the beautiful artwork set things up and get it integrated. but once it's up and running, our clients can manage it on their own. 

Formula One's done a great job of that. SoFi has done a great job of that. But a lot of these teams have really small marketing teams, and they rely pretty heavily on their vendors and so we do a lot of hands-on management of their applications for them. 

We've known each other for a long time. One thing that I've noticed on LinkedIn in the last, I don't know, two or three years is a lot of posts by you about something called the Robert Johnson project, and it seems like you've been on something of a personal journey and the undertone of, it seems to be that you realized I was working my ass off and maybe not paying enough attention to my family. 

Robert Johnson: You nailed it, Dave. You really did, and that probably just comes from years of experience that you have ahead of me. I've always been big in professional development and training and things like that and I started working very closely with a coach and coach, Townsend Wardlaw. I don't, Townsend Wardlaw. A good friend of mine, who I have known for 20 years, came back into my life, and yeah, I spent a lot of time working with him, I used to think that the number one thing in my life was work and success and money and getting up the food chain and I did a lot of that and I, and there was a kind of a cost to it, and the cost was a lot of travel. What you and I did together on occasion, a lot of it was late nights and dinners and president's club and all that stuff was awesome. 

I had two kids while I did all that, and man, it's tough because without having done all that, I wouldn't be the person I am, and I wouldn't have a lot of the success maybe that I've had, but I pumped the brakes as I got close to 40. I joke, Dave, and I say I could write a book called 38-39-40, and when I was about 38, this all kind of came to a head, and I realized, the number one thing in my life is my kids, my wife, then sales and me. If I can work on all those things and put my family ahead of everything else, everything else will follow, and I'll still be able to have a really successful life. Yeah, I posted a lot about that on LinkedIn, and I still do occasionally because it's a big part of what I'm doing.

Now when I think about LinkedIn, I've got three kinds of things or passions, and one is my life. One is sales. I love posting about just sales, and then one is PAM and those are like the three buckets of things I enjoy talking about and posting about, and I don't have to try to do it. It just comes out naturally.

So a lot of people have that journey and realize, you know what, I need to pay more attention to my family and not be so obsessed with work, but they don't call it a project, and they don't put it up on LinkedIn. That's not a criticism in any way. I'm just saying I'm curious why you did that. 

Robert Johnson: Wow. Why did I do it? Everyone's different, but for me, when you say something, you hear it, and you put it out there, it just becomes real. It becomes really tangible and real, and it becomes something that you live by, you wake up, and you know it is there, and you can come back to it every time something bad happens, you have a bad day, or if something didn't go the way you wanted it to.

When you go back to what your purpose is… I have a purpose and my purpose, it goes, actually goes in this order. I misstated earlier, but it's my wife, it's my kids, it's me and it's sales. Those four things are my purpose on LinkedIn. I've got another mission statement, and it's to connect with, motivate, and inspire as many people as possible. I come back to those things. If anybody asks, what are you doing on LinkedIn? And I said, look, I just. I just want to connect with people. Why do you want to connect with people? I want to see, if maybe I can motivate somebody. Maybe I can help somebody. Maybe I can inspire somebody.

It hasn't been quite two years, Dave. I started my journey. It was like September, almost 18 months ago, and man, I helped a friend. I said, now she's a friend, a woman at the time who really wanted to get into Formula One, and I made a couple of introductions, and literally about four months after I made some introductions to her, she was on a plane to the UK and gave a live in-person talk about UX and UI design to Silverstone. And that's inspirational and motivational to me and it all started with a connection, and LinkedIn serves a lot of purposes. That stuff just makes it exciting and fun, and I'm going to keep doing it as long as it's still exciting and fun. 

As you know, running a podcast and stuff can sometimes feel like work, and when it becomes work, and it becomes really hard, and it's not fun anymore, I'm sure that you would probably just turn it off and walk away if it became really painful and crappy. 

All right, Robert. You talked about connecting, and it was great reconnecting with you. We need to stay in touch more.

Robert Johnson: Yeah, Dave, really appreciate the reconnect here. This has been great, man. I'm just so happy for you with your business and everything you got going on and, yeah, thanks again for having me on. 

Jay Leedy, Videri

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Jay Leedy probably had a bunch of options open to him when he decided he'd done his job with Sony's pro display team, and it might have surprised some of his industry friends when he signed on with a much smaller company, New York-based Videri, as its Senior VP for Strategic Alliances.

It didn't surprise me, because Videri has been on a bit of a tear in the last few months, hiring well-connected and respected senior people away from other companies active in digital signage. That came out of a $20 million fundraising round announced late last year.

I did a podcast about a year ago with Videri CEO Wes Nicol, so I didn't want to spend too much time talking again about Videri's product and services. We get into that and what attracted Leedy, but what I was really interested in hearing about was his point of view on the CMS software market. His prior role with Sony was building up the digital signage software ecosystem, which involved talking to and looking at scores of different companies. He eventually onboarded some 90 in his three-plus years there, about 70 of them CMS software firms.

So Leedy has a pretty unique perspective on what's out there, and how companies differentiate themselves in what remains a very crowded CMS software market.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jay Leedy, thank you for joining me. You've had some big changes in the last few weeks. 

Jay Leedy: Thank you. I have. Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to hear your voice. 

Yeah, you don't want to see me. 

Jay Leedy: It's been a couple of months since I saw you last at ISE, but yeah, some changes that were on the horizon at ISE kind of came to fruition over the last several months, and I'm happy to say I'm in my fourth week, almost complete with my fourth week here at Videri.

Wow, you're almost past probation. Are you going to make it? 

Jay Leedy: They haven't kicked me out yet. My wife told me that the paycheck showed up in our bank account yesterday. Yay! 

Things are rocking. I knew you when you were with Convergent and Diversified then you went over to Sony. Am I missing anything there?

Jay Leedy: I think that's the extent of my career in this space. I got introduced to integrations prior to moving to Convergent through a company that had point-of-purchase display manufacturing as their core and had a division that focused on, what we called Intelligent Loss Prevention. We were basically importing a lot of technology solutions to solve theft prevention in retail and that's how I got exposed to systems integration, and when I saw digital signage as a part of that, I naturally gravitated toward that. I saw there was going to be a big growth arc and fortunately, I've been right so far. 

We can get into what you were doing with Sony because I'm intrigued by the role you had and the unique perspective that was offered, but I'm curious because when you started thinking, okay, I've done my job here with Sony and what's my next thing?

What compelled you to go to Videri, I suspect you had a number of options. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, it's a good question. The little background that I just gave you is in part why Videri was really appealing to me. You're right. I had really broad exposure to the market across a number of technologies, not just digital signage, and was considering options outside of digital signage, to be perfectly honest, but the reason that Videri was compelling for me was a couple of reasons. 

One is the, very strong push they were making into the market with some clear funding and a product offering that was differentiated in displays that were very thin and lightweight looking and appealed to the sensibilities of retailers and designers and the folks that I really like engaging with on the creative side of our business, combined with software that really makes it easy to make these things pop and, deliver what we call orchestration of content across multiple canvases of displays to unify those. 

But there were some other things that went into that as well. I met Rob Avery, who had recently joined the company from Scala, at your event at ISE. I'd already met Wes Nicol, the CEO, about a year prior, and then Steven Jenkins, who I'd worked with at Diversified, had recently joined as the CRO along with Nathan Jones, who I'd also worked with as a Managing Director for North America. So there are already some pieces in place, and when I met Rob and we chatted briefly about his point of view on where we are versus where he wanted to take the software on the roadmap, that really clicked with me. Then we announced Jeff Griffin coming in as a retail technology guru and a guy who was at the genesis of what we called Walmart TV. So it wasn't even digital signage when he was involved with that deployment. So he's had a long history of selling into that market, and really the last piece to fall into place for me was, we secured, Tom Ross from NowSignage and I think he must eat energy bars constantly. He has the most energy and passion for the channel of any guy that I've met in this industry, and I've met a lot. All of those things coming together was really a big part of making that decision for me.

Yeah, it's interesting. I've told the story a few times of couple of years ago at DSC in Vegas, some company called Videri had reached out to me and said, could you come to our suite at ARIA and have a look at our pots and pans? And I said, I'm super busy, and so on, and they bugged me and on the last day in the afternoon, I was dead tired, but I said, okay, fine, because I was staying next door and I didn't know a damn thing about them and met them, walked this endless hallway to get to their suite and they showed me these flat panel displays. 

I thought, oh, dear God, I've walked all this way to see some skinny displays, but then they started to explain what they're up to, the business model and how they were working with a very large Austrian energy drink brand that they're not allowed to officially talk about, and I thought, now I get it, and over those, intervening two years, the company has really grown in terms of marketplace visibility and everything else and they have a somewhat unique, not entirely unique, but somewhat unique product. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, I agree. In fact, I was registered to go to that same event but couldn't get there because I was super busy that week. I also didn't have a relationship with them yet. So I didn't yet feel obligated, but I didn't see their product until Digital Signage Week, or maybe it was NRF, one of the two where they had a hospitality event at their offices in New York and I made my way there and I was as compelled as you were because of what they were doing but also where they were saying they were going.

And you're right. The visibility for Videri has been exponential. I think as contemporaries in our sphere of the industry have gotten more visibility to their hardware and a better understanding of whether software can cause the entire industry to really lean in and that's been the case. I think when I announced that I was leaving Sony combined with two days later announcing that I was joining Videri, I never had as much web traffic on my LinkedIn as those two days. I think it was something on the order of 15,000 impressions between the two posts and that tells me that there's a lot of people who were really intrigued about what this new company is and as I've gotten deeper into the organization and started to really look around at the core architecture of our software, which is an Android-based SoC. So all of our displays run Android 12, which offers a lot of opportunity for third-party solutions to run alongside ours, or in some cases, in place of our software with our firmware being the glue that binds the delivery of that software, and I think there's a lot of opportunities in that regard as well, right? 

My goal will really be to build out an ecosystem and a partner strategy very similar to what I was doing at Sony and fortunately, I have a lot of existing relationships that I was already working with that can parlay right into that, that are all dialed into that Android approach, but I think Android, in particular, was compelling for me because it has become a de facto standard in many respects and in a lot of cases with retailers, because of the security components to it, and our particular flavor of Android is locked down, which is really appealing. all the stars really aligned there. 

It's interesting because Android, if you asked people out five years ago, they would probably say no, not going anywhere near that.

Jay Leedy: I know when I was Diversified, it was an absolute non-starter, but the market's changed, and fortunately the strength of Android and the security protocols have changed, and I think it's you and I've talked about a little bit, right? The impression and kind of point of view on Android Deployed in enterprise environments has changed as well.

I think largely because of the broad use of MDMs or device management solutions and familiarity with those tools, with IT admins having a level of comfort with those. At the end of the day, displays for digital signage are IOT devices that have to be managed and locked down in a similar fashion. So something that's familiar just resonates with those decision makers. 

You mentioned a couple of minutes ago third party suppliers or providers. 

Are you saying, and you can correct me if I'm getting this wrong, that if I'm another CMS software company, I could, in theory, drive Videri displays?

Jay Leedy: Absolutely, and we've already tested a handful of them. I think we've got about five so far. We've also tested some lift-and-learn solutions that are quasi-CMS but would also be able to run in concert with our CMS. 

That'd be like Glass Media stuff?

Jay Leedy: It's more like Sign Metrics. We're on ARC over at Pick‘n’Watch. He's got a really interesting solution that's all Bluetooth and UDP-based. We're also looking at wireless solutions for audience measurement, the likes of Blue Zoo or Movia Media. 

Some of the CMS platforms that we've tested, run the gamut of the kind of those that are known more heavily in the space, like Spp Space and Corbett, and then others that are maybe lesser known like Play Signage or one of the newer ones that, as you mentioned earlier, the idea of a hobby business that's not yet full bore or fully funded or has a sales and marketing team behind it, what have you… There's a company called AbleSign that's got some pretty capable products.

Largely a lot of these are available as progressive web app options where the device management capabilities of their full-featured apps are stripped out and therefore don't present a conflict with some of the remote capabilities that are the device management capabilities that we bring to bear. But, in the longer term, we'll also test scenarios where maybe a full-featured solution could be used or what we see more as a trend; why I was looking maybe outside of digital signage, in other technology providers, is that, especially in North America, and I think that this will cascade to other markets is that enterprise clients, in particular, have a point of view on device management.

So, it was really important when I was at Sony to be compatible with whatever infrastructure decisions had been made upstream so that we could just say yes to projects and be specified regardless of what the requirements were. To some extent, that's a consideration with Videri's approach as well.

It's interesting, with this idea that you can work with other CMS software companies. I'm trying to envision that phone call or that meeting on their end, wouldn't they be saying that you have a software that competes with our software? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, but I think we also have a really attractive line of hardware, right?

The kind of customer that will gravitate towards our hardware may, in some cases, already have an investment and an existing state of software that they don't want to deviate from. So it may make sense for us to offer our hardware with some recurring fees for the support and device management components while also being able to enable content management on a familiar platform that is more broadly used across their estate. Those are scenarios that we're gaming out. 

What drew my attention in the tippet area is how the square displays in particular were something that could replace old beverage brands’ neon or plastic backlit signs in bars and restaurants. It was something that was dynamic, the quick ROI that would come out of that, but I've seen Videri in particular marketing, multi-screen video cone matrix. I think there's another word you guys use. 

Jay Leedy: We call it an orchestration, but yeah, it'd be a mosaic or a configuration of multi-canvas screens that, in some cases, we're seeing incorporated with other visual merchandising elements or other artwork elements in hospitality applications, for example.

You might like static, traditional artwork and imagery interspersed with dynamic elements that are part of Videri. The entire wall can very easily be mapped, and content pushed and split across the displays so that it makes sense visually without a lot of hardware to deliver that, and I think that's really a unique element of our software. 

Yeah, and I like the ability to mix and match squares and rectangles display canvases and I know Samsung had a square product years ago, and it came and went because they like to sell hundreds of thousands, not thousands of units, but it came back with this and because manufacturers in Asia are now able to natively manufacture square things instead of cutting a rectangle and turning it into a square, redoing the electronics and costing a lot of money. 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, the run rate on our square product versus the other ones is probably not as high, to be fair, but those unique shapes and, I think, more specifically, smaller form factors, the lighter weight, the bezels are only probably about three quarters of an inch thick. The fact that they're low-voltage offers a lot of flexibility. We've got a shop fitter or a point-of-purchase display manufacturer in Germany that's developed a unique bracket that allows these displays to be moved around in their modular system. The entire system is powered with low voltage. 

It's a company called Visplay, and they've done some really interesting stuff. These powered, essentially track systems or grids have ports, and the brackets are designed to automatically pick up power as soon as they do. Once they hit the Wi-Fi, they just start playing content again. So it gives the retailer or the shop fitter a lot of modularity, and they don't have to get a technician on-site to make these changes. It's something that they can do with store staff and that's really appealing as well. 

That's interesting. I've been doing a lot of reading and paying a lot of attention to the whole retail media networks landscape of late because it's obviously got a lot of traction, even though much of the spending now is not in the store but billboards and online, but it's going that way and I've said and heard from people that it's not going to be a second wave of stores, putting big ass LCD displays on every available surface like it maybe was in the 2010s when athletic wear retailers, in particular, were doing that. 

It's going to have to be smaller displays and interesting displays that fit into the design and are designed from the start or ones that don't get in the way of merchandising.

Jay Leedy: Yeah, exactly. I think we've seen that in various gestations over the last several years, especially in consumer packaged goods, brands will incorporate digital elements as part of a turnkey fixture package. It's one of the things I was working on with Diversified prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately, the pandemic killed the momentum on a project that was really promising for us.

But it was in partnership with Westrock, and the idea was that, as Diversified, we would be the integrator and managed service provider to support design, build, and ultimately manage and service these things once deployed. Westrock designed the fixture and also what they called kit packing. So they brought in inventory from their partner at the time, GlaxoSmithKline. They fully merchandised a display fitted with graphics and then added our digital elements with an LTE modem cradle point. As soon as the store personnel received it, which they wielded into place, they didn't have to have a technician. Essentially, they had a turnkey solution that, as soon as it was plugged in, called home and had a range of content that would be played based on a number of parameters. There was an integrated camera. 

So, I think there's a really appealing turnkey solution that doesn't have to rely on the retailer's data infrastructure, which is usually fairly constrained. This gives the brands a lot more freedom for placement but a lot more control over execution as well as the ability to, as you rightly said, put digital in places where you wouldn't expect it, and that's a hallmark of our approach, right? These smaller screens are unique form factors that are less obtrusive and don't detract from the merchandising but actually can complement it, and you're right, I think retail media networks will manifest in that way so that it's not an afterthought. It's not a screen that's hanging from the ceilings left in front of the end cap, but it's actually integrated into the end cap or into the merchandising fixture or what have you. So it really does the job of carrying the brand message, and I think there's a lot of appeal there, especially in lifestyle brands. Especially for a product where, through our orchestration, we could draw attention to an entire category or shop within a store rather than just having individual merchandising fixtures, each with its own message.

The adoption barrier that I've encountered when I've talked to brands about this, what you were just describing is they like it, but they only need it for six weeks or four weeks or some defined campaign term, and even though they may be a big CPG brand with all kinds of products they're so siloed that you couldn't just say, “This shampoo digital fixture could be a body lotion fixture for round two, and you could share it across different ones.”

They’d say, “Yeah, but that would never happen.” 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, that was actually the concept of the one that we were working on with Westrock and GlaxoSmithKline. So the idea was that it'd be a seasonal product that was focused on at the time, Flonase and Claritin, and then once the season for allergies was over, they would pivot to another product that was better suited to the next season. That was exactly the concept.

I think you're right. There is a seasonality to these activities, but the beauty of digital is that you can effectively reskin these things and repurpose them. So long as you have an intelligent design and the rest of the fixture to accommodate a range of products, and basically send in another kit of graphics and merchandise to correspond with that in partnership with a kit packer like Westrock.

You can clarify your role with Sony, which you were there for two or three years, I think. But what I found intriguing now that you're not there is that your gig was basically developing partnerships for Sony to use its smart displays. When you started, there were, I think, one or two, maybe, and by the time you left, I think you were past 80 different partners. 

So you had this unique perspective of talking to a whole bunch of CMS software companies about what they had and analyzing whether there was a fit, and I'm just curious, having seen all these different ones and now somewhat detached from them, what your impression?

Are they all the same, which is, I think what most people would think? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, I was there for three and a half years, and you're right. When I came on, there was exactly one product that had gone through any kind of formal due diligence or QA, and so my program was really about building out that ecosystem with some formalities and processes, and I was fortunate enough to talk to and onboard roughly 90 different technologies that were, I'd say maybe 70% of those were digital signage and the rest were spread between unified communications or AV over IP as a software-defined solution. We also had a range of telemetry and UCC solutions as well.

I think I had exposure to roughly 140 companies or so. On the CMS front, I know Invidus recently did a report that you commented on in your blog as well, and you're not wrong, for the most part, a lot of CMS platforms, at their core, do the same thing. The difference is how they do it. For me, the flexibility in their architecture, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of progressive web apps that decouple some of the real differentiation early in the market, that was an all-in-one solution with device management, has kind of evolved to the point where customers want flexibility and deciding and decoupling that device management from CMS but there's also, I think, the extent to which these companies have invested in APIs and manage those APIs and other data connectors and understand interoperability sets them apart. 

I think for me, with Videri and our clear focus on retail and creative agencies and optimizing and enabling workflows that would be API dependent, as well as a cloud-based SaaS that has the flexibility to be able to grow and evolve, in that direction, that was what was appealing for me. It's not to say that Videri was the only one with all those marks ticked in their offering, but as we talked about earlier, had some other organizational considerations that really were the determining factor for me coming over here.

Without naming names or anything, did you see companies that were clearly more advanced versus ones that were maybe building on something that they've had for many years, and they're just incrementally bolting new capability onto an existing software stack? 

Jay Leedy: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's true for any company in the tech space that, at some point, you have to acknowledge that your technical debt load is too much and completely re-architect the solution. We've seen that happen with a number of companies in our space. There are a number of others that continue to struggle with that technical debt and architecture that just doesn't lend itself to meeting the expectations of the market. 

Were you recommending the key things that, whether you're a solutions partner or an end user, they should look for if they want to be future-proofed and really modern? 

Jay Leedy: First and foremost, these days, it's an API-first strategy. We need to ensure that There's a robust enough set of APIs to enable baseline telemetry and interoperability with a number of other API-first solutions. I think about, in particular, what's happening with digital transformation in large consultancies like Accenture, EY, and Deloitte. A lot of those hinge on moving from on-premise to cloud-based solutions for a range of business applications. 

If anybody listening to this podcast is using Office 365, for example, there are a number of third-party solutions that plug into those, obviously with a fee involved. However, to enable that, you have to have the right architecture, and digital signage isn't that different. 

We talk a little bit in this industry about headless and the idea of headless means, I think, escapes some people. I think the idea of no or low code development also, I think, escapes some people, but both of those are similar in that they enable. A much lower cost of entry to get a lot more functionality because the architecture is built in such a way that it can just essentially plug in like a Lego, and you can create building blocks that are predefined, versus having to have a linear development approach that can be really cost intensive.

Yeah, I was on a call yesterday, and it was interesting. They were talking very much about that. From my perspective, if you have a solution that has a distinct login and you have to do everything digital signage through that login, with no real hooks into anything else, that's a big challenge, particularly for larger organizations that want to use one tool set. 

It's going to push out to whatever the endpoint is and whatever that endpoint is communicating.

Jay Leedy: Yeah, and also just thinking about all the different ways content can be generated now. There's been a lot of buzz around generative AI, but the rules for content and distribution largely have been in most of these CMS platforms for a long time. But a means of automating those rules and creating if this, then that scenario or ingesting data that can then drive outcomes and content. that's not necessarily core to a lot of those platforms, or leveraging API calls directly from digital asset management tools and leveraging all of the metadata tagging logic that is built into those, and pulling those directly into the content strategy also necessarily isn't native to a lot of CMS platforms.

So I think those are all kinds of key things to consider when making a selection or at least knowing, if it's possible downstream, should your company mature to the point where they want to leverage those types of tools. 

If people want to catch up with you and talk about what you're doing with Videri, I know they can find you online, obviously, but you'll be at Infocomm? 

Jay Leedy: I will be at Infocomm and the Digital Signage Federation mixer in Tampa in about two weeks. Either way, I'd love to see you and continue the conversation. 

All right, Jay. It's great to catch up. 

Jay Leedy: Great to see you as well, Dave.

Ross Noonan & Larry Zoll, LED Studio

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I have invested a lot of time in the last six or seven years trying to educate myself on LED display technology and terminology, but sometimes it feels like I have mountain to climb and I am still at base camp looking for my oxygen bottle stash.

Manufacturers and their marketers keep coming up with new terms and acronyms, and they often play pretty fast and loose with their descriptions and assertions. Exhibit A are all the companies who are marketing microLED products that aren't microLED, and Exhibit B is the crowd of Chinese manufacturers saying they have Naked Eye 3D LED displays, when all of those visual illusions seen on displays lately are the result of clever creative and have nothing to do with the display technology.

So I have a lot of time for a UK company called LED Studio, which has made the conscious decision to educate its customers and broader market, instead of blinding that market with piles of specs and marketing  terms that few people understand. The company has resources on its website that explain the technology and clear some of the technical fog, and people who know their stuff, speak openly, and aren't in perpetual Always be Closing sales mode.

I had a great chat about LED technology terms, what's going on in the industry, and what really matters. My guests are Larry Zoll, who runs US operations, and Ross Noonan, the UK-based Technical Sales & Marketing Manager and the guy leading the education effort. The accents will give away who is who.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Larry and Ross, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a quick introduction of who you are and what LED Studio does? 

Larry Zoll: I'm Larry Zoll, the president of the LED Studio's operations. 

Ross Noonan: I'm Ross Noonan, the technical sales and marketing manager for the LED Studio.

Larry Zoll: We are a UK-based LED display manufacturer with a growing presence worldwide. 

So just for clarity, Ross is over in the UK, and Larry is in the United States right now, so they can't look at each other and go, now you talk or whatever. 

So, I've known you guys for a while. I've been to your little demo center in London, and I know LED Studio is based in the West of London. I had a good chat with Ross at ISE, and one of the things that really struck home for me was that there was a company that was actually trying to educate the market on more than just their product.

You know, Ross, in particular, was trying to clear the fog through blogging and videos and everything else, explaining to people what this is all about because it's a very confusing little space, is it not? 

Larry Zoll: It's a very confusing space. I mean, Dave, you and I have known each other for a long time. I've always been very focused on technology and the education of technology and making sure that people understand what's really out there because it's so confusing. 

You know, a big part of our initiatives is making sure that we're able to educate the market and simplify what's out there because for a long time, this has been an alphabet soup of different options and different availability, and really more often than not tends to be more confusing than it needs to be. One of our goals specifically is to help demystify that and help people understand what they need and, almost more importantly, what they don't need to implement successfully an exciting project. 

Is it confusing because I'm stupid or… Well, don't answer that!

Or is it just that marketers are trying to outdo each other, so they come up with acronyms and push aspects of their products that maybe don't matter all that much but make them sound special? 

Larry Zoll: I'll let the marketer answer that question. Then, I'll give you my perspective. 

Ross Noonan: I think you’re definitely not stupid. I think we've got people who have been in LED for a long time, and they even have to get into the nitty-gritty as to why they're offering a product for a particular application.

You know, it is not like any other kind of technology. It doesn't just come out of a box. I know that some brands are going down the all-in-one route, and that's fantastic. It opens up big screens to off-the-shelf items. Still, it's a very small part of the market, and as soon as you move away from that, there are so many different ways to do something with an LED display. There are so many different applications that basically mean that the specs are ripped up and started again. I think I mentioned this on a blog previously. You know, a consultant came to me and said, why can't you just give me a data sheet? And the reason sometimes is that, well, because you've asked for a particular thing, we've got to go away and kind of rip that data sheet up and start from scratch.

Does it need different receiver cards? Does it need to have a different pixel technology? What is the function that you need? Where do you want to see and how do you want to see it? And then we'll go away and create that and that can be confusing, and it's why you're starting to see the emergence of companies like the LED Studio who are taking the time to try and make sure the customer understands why they're buying something and why they need it or why they don't need it and maybe that's a good point for Larry to jump in a little bit more on the sort of the project management side of things, and delivery. 

Larry Zoll: One of the things that keeps me very excited about this industry is that it is very high tech and it does move very fast, and that can create some confusion in what the different technologies are capable of and what they're not capable of and why you should choose one thing over another, especially on the indoor, although the outdoor has started to make some big leaps in technology as well.

And I think that allaying that confusion and clarifying that understanding is really the responsibility of the manufacturers, or else it just becomes a mishmash of stuff, and it makes people feel like they're stupid, even though they've been in the industry for as long as anybody else, but it's a lot to stay on top of. 

When you're dealing with customers or reseller partners, that sort of thing, are they appreciative of the effort that you're making to kind of explain things as opposed to just kind of blinding them with terms? 

Ross Noonan: Absolutely. I mean, we sat down as a business, Larry from a strategic point of view, Rob as the owner, and myself as marketing, and we said right at the start of this two-year journey that we've been on to get the business.

In people's minds, we wanted to be thought leaders and try and educate people on the response to that has been nothing but positive. You know, people are starting to come to say now I understand why I need to specify this particular product. Well, now I know the difference between what a COB pixel means for energy consumption versus an SMD because before, I would look for a diagram, and there would be 100 different versions of what an SMD and a COB pixel look like, and now something that I can digest and understand, and that's been really exciting for us, to see people coming back and feeding back positive information, all the way from consultants to end clients.

Yeah, when I started really actively following this space, SMD was the primary way that these displays were being built and marketed, and then COB came along, I started hearing terminology like four in one and split chip and it just goes on and on. 

Is there a dominant, primary technology that is now being made, marketed and demanded by buyers? 

Larry Zoll: I think it really depends on the application like you said, but SMD, I'd still say, is the dominant general technology. But there are now a number of variations on SMD that can change the way that you implement it, whether it's GOB that gives you that protective coating, or maybe it increases contrast. You know, it could be a flip chip that reduces power consumption and increases brightness. You know, there are a number of different common cathodes, right? There are so many different ways that you can vary that one technology. Just saying SMD is the dominant technology is a little misleading, but it's a little understated, I guess. 

But I think very quickly, we're also starting to see that for the narrower pitches and for micro LED displays, which we define and hope sort of the industry lands on a definition of anything under a pitch of one millimeter, you're starting to see more and more COB and COB is becoming more prevalent because there's more manufacturing starting to happen with it. It's been a challenge for some suppliers to date because of the difficulty in starting up the manufacturing lines and keeping them going. But that's becoming less of an issue. So that's starting to ramp up. 

So what's the core distinction between an SMD surface mounted and chip on board or COB? 

Ross Noonan: The main thing is that with surface mount diodes, it says exactly how it is. You've got a pixel in a package, which is then mounted onto the PCB. There are a number of components that make up that package. 

I guess the biggest difference between the two is that with COB, you're effectively mounting the diodes directly onto the substrate. So you're removing that little building block that mounts onto the PCB. The biggest benefit of that is obviously a reduction in componentry. That means a reduction in resistance, which then has a knock-on effect on heat output so the screen is generally more energy efficient. 

When you add a common cathode and flip chip to the COB array, you're starting to remove things like copper bonding wires and all of the other little bits and pieces that add to resistance. I think we worked out that on, a 1080p SMD display, there were millions and millions of bonding wires. 

Larry Zoll: I think we said 20 million in an HD display, and they will add resistance. Whether they're copper or gold or whatever, they add a lot of components and physical electric resistance.

One of the things that I sort of lean on when I'm talking to customers about this is that when you're powering up a display, the electricity has to go one of two places. It's either heat or light and obviously, you want as much of that to convert to light as possible because that's how you make the display more efficient. So the hotter the display is, the less efficient your display is at creating light. So, really, what it comes down to is that by eliminating a lot of those components, COB becomes a much more efficient technology in creating light, which is good for everybody.  

I assume it also removes points of failure and does it remove cost as well?

Larry Zoll: To be honest with you, that depends on who you're working with. I mean, a few minutes ago, I mentioned that there is a large cost associated with starting up and shutting down the manufacturing lines for COB. It takes a substantial amount of time and effort, and if it's not something that you have dedicated space for in the manufacturing process, then it's going to impact the price. Suppose you have dedicated manufacturing resources to COB, where you're not switching lines and switching manufacturing processes frequently. In that case, it does have the potential to save you money on COB, even over SMDs. 

Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess one thing that we did as a business sort of a year ago was sit down and look at that fine pitch trend, which Larry mentioned. The long-term trend suggests that COB is going to be the dominant. Potential technology in fine pitch was that we needed to start offering COB at a price that was attractive to people who were potentially considering SMD versus COB. You know, in the past they were vastly different in price so we needed to ramp up our production line to be able to bring that price more in line with one another and make that decision easy.

When you start to add things like COB comes with a protective resin as standard as part of the pixel encapsulation process whereas with SMD, that's an additional cost through GOB resin, all of a sudden the ROI starts to really stack up for the client. They're really starting to see the benefits of that. Not only am I getting a more energy-efficient display, and in a lot of cases, maybe a better one in terms of image quality, but also my pixels are better protected against outside forces, accidental damage, lumps and bumps and things like that. So that's a huge benefit that COB has as part of its standard offering that clients are really starting to see the benefit from.

How protective is the GOB or the coating inherent with COB? 

I asked because TSI Touch, a company in Pennsylvania that has started marketing an acrylic shield that you would put in front of a display. They showed somebody throwing a basketball at this shield, and I've always thought the GOB and the coding are terrific in that they're going to offer some degree of protection, but they have their limits. Correct? 

Larry Zoll: Of course, it has its limits. I love the guys at TSI Touch. I've done a lot of work with them over the years. I don't know if putting a shield in front of the display, if you have a GOB is necessary. I mean, we have one customer we work with that has a lot of family activities around them where kids can easily reach the displays and we've got with this one client, we've got over 15,000 modules deployed, and over the past two years, they're all GOB and over the past two years, we've seen 20 of those 15,000 returned for service, which is like a 0.02 service rate, something like that. 

So, I think in reasonable settings, you know, I wouldn't go and hit it with a baseball bat but it is certainly well enough protected for most general settings. 

Yeah, I tend to agree, but I do wonder if in public concourses in places like arenas and so on, a GOB display may be fine for people coming and going from a Taylor Swift concert. But maybe not for a Norwegian death metal concert. Different demographics? 

Larry Zoll: It's a fair assumption. That's a great question, though. I think everybody would really benefit if we could put together some metrics on what that protection really looks like.

One of the things that struck me walking around ISE was looking at all these gorgeous displays that were all COB or other technologies like that, in various stands, some very high profile, some you had to find kind of if you walk more towards the back of some of the exhibit halls and I started concluding, maybe right or wrong, that I don't know that the industry really needs to get to micro LED or displays that are called micro LED, because the fine pitch, sub one millimeter, more “conventional” and all displays look absolutely fantastic. So are you benefiting that much more from the additional cost of going to micro LED? 

Ross Noonan: That's a very good question because, obviously, as humans, we're always in the pursuit of improvement. You know, technology was about driving the next best thing. You know, it was 1080p, then it was 4K, then it was 8K. There comes a point where this is, of course, my opinion, I think many people who have been in this industry and done what I've done would share that there's going to come a point where having a smaller pixel pitch really doesn't make that much difference. 

I mean, how often are you going to go and stand less than a meter from a screen, especially if it's a big one? That's just not really what's intended for there. There are obviously some cases where maybe an immersive and interactive where you want people interacting with large format displays that perhaps a sub 1mm pixel pitch might make sense, but generally speaking, Larry and I spoke about this before the call. There are some 2.5mm is a fantastic pixel pitch for a lot of applications. 1.5mm is also fantastic. That's why many of those big screens at the show were kind of 1.25 or 1.5mm. 

When you start to get lower than that, it becomes extremely subjective as to whether it is worth that extra $200-400 that adds for not an awful lot of benefit? I'm sure Larry's got more to add, but yeah, I think you're right. I think that chasing that pitch may be similar to what Larry mentioned earlier, which is cameras, and I'm sure he's going to use that analogy in a minute, which makes complete sense. 

Larry Zoll: I think one thing that a lot of people don't realize is that when you move from a 1.2mm pitch product to a 0.9mm pitch product, you're doubling the number of pixels in that display. I don't care who you are; that is going to add a substantial amount to the cost of that display, and whether you're getting the benefit of that double the number of pixels is really a subjective question.

Yes, there are going to be applications where you're going to want something super tight, right? If you are trying to replace interactive LCD, right? In that case, you're going to want something that is tight because you're going to be within that arm's length, right? 

But if you're talking about a conference room, a lobby, or something similar, there are plenty of arguments to keep things a little bit wider, with no discernible detriment to the project whatsoever and Ross mentioned the cameras; I feel like we're at a point in this industry where digital cameras were 5-7 years ago where everybody was racing towards a number of megapixels, and at some point the industry, consumers in the industry realized that 20 or 40 megapixels in an everyday situation wasn't really going to make a difference and most of the major camera manufacturers could hit a reasonable number of megapixels. So that industry moved towards, well, what were the other differentiating factors? You know, is it sensor size? Is it HDR? Is it whatever? And that's where you're starting to see, especially in professional cameras, since the industry sort of forking is on those differentiators, and I think we're moving in a very similar space in the LED market. 

You know, most of the manufacturers out there now can hit a reasonable pixel pitch and do a good job doing it. So what differentiates Manufacturer A from manufacturer B is how you're doing it. Is it the components? Is it the epoxy that you're using for the GOB? Is it the lifetime performance of the display? Those are the start to think. Those are the things you need to start to look at in order to really differentiate the quality of what's out there.

With micro LED, one of the arguments I've heard from a company that's actually in that business is yes, right now it's still early days, but over time, because of the way micro LED is envisioned to be manufactured, when the yields get up there that they reduce the number of manufacturing flaws, you can hugely reduce the manufacturing cost per square foot of LED by using mass transfer and effectively, I guess, kind of printing these displays. 

Larry Zoll: Yeah, and that's one of the things I was referencing earlier about the cost associated with starting up and shutting down a COB manufacturing line.

That's where a lot of those error rates and everything else come from. So yes, I agree. If you can keep those manufacturing lines constant, then it does have substantial impacts on that part of the process and gives you the ability to lower your prices because your failure rates are so much lower, and I think you're right, the mass transfer is the next big. The next big, I don't know, golden egg, and we're seeing that now with a few small manufacturers who are coming out with, they're called MIP displays, micro LED in the package, and MIP displays take advantage of that mass transfer process, and just, very briefly, very high level. 

You know, traditional SMD COB displays, and even DIP displays are done using pick-in-place, where you have a machine that literally picks a component off of a real place on the PCB, and it gets soldered in place very fast. I've seen those machines. Yeah, it's still one piece at a time.

The big draw for MIP displays at the moment is that they can take advantage of this mass transfer process, where you're basically taking a piece of film that has X many diodes. It gets placed onto the substrate that way, and there are advantages to it. Still, I think eventually, with the micro LED displays, we're working towards that process there too, but that's going to take some time, and that's where I think a lot of the industry will eventually move. 

Setting aside really specialized applications like medical imaging, what pixel pitch is pretty much enough? I mean, I walked around ISC and saw AOTO marketing a sub-five millimeter pixel pitch, and I thought, well, that's interesting, but who on earth needs that? 

Ross Noonan: Yes, that's a very good question. You mentioned the screen on Langstand, and I think that was one of the main focal points because it was a fantastic screen with fantastic content. From memory, it was a 1.25mm. I don't think it was lower than one mil.

I think it was 0.9mm. 

Ross Noonan: Oh, was it 0.9mm? 

Yeah, I think so. 

Ross Noonan: I think there's an element that's something to be said there that the awe and wonder that screen caused is whether we are going to get much more amazement from a screen that then is twice the resolution. I just don't know how the costs and benefits stack up. The human eye can only perceive so much detail. 

We haven't even gotten into talking about the content creation costs and keeping that screen refreshed. You know, that's a high ongoing cost that many clients are not necessarily educated about, especially when we're dealing with clients who are now looking at 8k resolution screens, and they've got the budget for it; you have to have that conversation with them. We'll also have you get the budget and that content refreshed and then keep that content playing. It's not a cheap thing to do, and you're chasing a resolution that perhaps you just don't need. It's always a good conversation to have with clients. It's what you want versus what you need.

They're two different things, and sometimes we compromise with them, and sometimes we actually help educate them and help them pick the right thing. I mean, there's a reason why 1.5mm seems to be the fastest-growing pixel pitch of choice at the moment anyway, and I think that 1.2mm to 1.8mm is where we're going to see the most increase and longevity of pixel pitch sales. That's just based on the 7 to 8 years that I've been doing LED and seeing it ramping up and remaining or keep doing so. 

Larry Zoll: I think that comes down, Dave, to the education that you were talking about previously, too. I recently went to a meeting where a customer was saying they’re putting this huge project together, and they're saying, “We absolutely have to do this with 0.6mm displays. There's no way we can't.” We took them and showed them a 1.2mm COB, and they were absolutely blown away. 

Part of it is the education piece of it, right? I think a lot of people say they need to have the newest and the highest, the best, because it's the newest and the highest, the best without really knowing what the potential is for what may already exist and doing that education and exposing the market to what is possible and showing them what the range is, really can help people make very well informed decisions without having to as tight as possible. 

Another interesting thing I was struck by ISC was with one manufacturer, a fairly substantial one, walking around their stand and looking at the displays and realizing they're not even showing the pixel pitch, like, usually particularly the Chinese manufacturers, they'll say it's this and that, and it's 1.4 or whatever it is. But they didn't even have those little signs that called that out, and that struck me as, okay, we're kind of getting beyond this pixel pitch rate race, at least for some of the people.

Ross Noonan: Yeah, it’s an interesting perspective. From a marketing perspective, it's a great idea. Let the screen and the content do the talking, and then people will come and say to you, “Wow, that screen is fantastic. Give me some details,” and you say it's at 1.8 mil. 

It's going to, as Larry said, that's a great way of showing people that sometimes resolution isn't always the main thing. It's all about optimization and really good content. 

Larry Zoll: The install quality is a big part of that too, but I think you're right. I think you can potentially lean on that, and my guess is that if you had people coming up to your booth asking about the pitch of the display, it's typically not going to be as tight of a pitch as they think it is.

What really genuinely matters, if I'm someone who's relatively new to this as an integrator or an end user, they can be all caught up on the terminology that goes, I need a micro LED display, or as you've said, they need a 0.6mm, that's the only thing that's going to work, that sort of thing.

What actually does matter? 

Ross Noonan: What do you want to see, and where do you want to see it from? Yeah, it sounds simple, but that really is how you want to see it or how you want to interact with it? It's probably the next set of questions. I'll let Larry delve into it more, but that is how we always start a conversation.

What is it you want to see? Where do you want to see it from? And then let's explore the options that are going to deliver that, in the best way possible. 

Larry Zoll: My background was in design before I joined LED Studio and the manufacturing side. I was a designer. I spent a long time in the consulting world.

I still firmly believe that technology can't drive the design. You have to let the story drive the tech, and that's how we approach every project. I also think that, as Ross said earlier, there are more and more companies out there doing all-in-ones, and we do them too.

There are great applications for all-in-one displays, but just as frequently, if not more frequently, this industry is still as much art as it is science, and what that translates into from a project requirement standpoint really depends on the ultimate goals for the project.

I've said to people when they've asked me that kind of question, I'm nowhere near as deep as you guys are on the LED side, but I've said what can really matter is quality of support and responsiveness of support and having more than just salespeople in the same country as you, but, in this discussion, you've mentioned a lot of things about what components are used, how it's made, how the heat gets out, all these sorts of things that are much more technical and in the weeds, but maybe are things that people are looking for if they're really trying to make good, informed decisions, they have to get beyond how pretty it looks on the trade show floor and find out how it works and how it's going to last. 

Larry Zoll: No, that's absolutely right. I mean, we haven't even delved into the support part of it, but that's a huge component of it too.

I mean, there's so much out there and many different ways to buy products. I think people frequently underestimate the need for a good partner in these projects. They're living, breathing things; whether it's content refreshes or content management systems, they're ultimately all computers, right? Computers will do what computers will do. So you have to have a good partner who can support you throughout its life. 

At a very basic level, everybody who's involved in technology knows this: Yes, you can buy stuff really inexpensively from China, but whether it's computers or media players or other devices, you genuinely are for the lower cost of getting what you paid for.

Larry Zoll: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

Ross Noonan: Yeah, and I guess the support side of things is important too, for the fact that, as Larry touched upon, we know these project products are potentially quite complex. I mean, obviously, we've simplified a lot of them in terms of how they are installed, but sometimes you can't move away from the fact that you might need structural engineering; it's not just something that you slap at the end of the project. It's got to be project managed with architects and electricians and all these different trades. It all has to come together, perhaps to a grand opening of a large event, and so what we are finding is some of the bigger manufacturers, they don't want that headache of having the responsibility to do that level of support, which you could claim is quite granular, having to really get involved in the weeds and making sure that you're thinking of every potential outcome and then delivering that on-site and that leaves the door wide open to the smaller manufacturers like us who have built up a group of individuals who've been sort of working at the front end of LED displays. It means we can go in and offer a service that is perhaps a bit more personal, and of course, there are always problems with these projects. That's what technology is all about solving problems. 

But we like to think that we're quite proactive at solving those plans and innovative in how we solve problems with our technologies to make things easier, and that's something that we pride ourselves on.

All right. I said before we even started that this was going to fly by and it certainly did. I think we'll have to do this again because I don't think we really covered the waterfront. We just started our little walking discussion here. But I appreciate your time. 

Larry Zoll: Thanks so much, Dave.

Ross Noonan: Thank you.

Frank Hoen, Netpresenter

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When the pandemic hit and a lot of people started working from home, many digital signage CMS software companies started developing and releasing solutions that pushed the digital signage messaging more normally posted on screens around workplaces to the laptop and computer monitor screens in the formal or ad hoc workspaces created around houses and apartments.

It was a new but necessary feature for most companies, but something the Dutch company Netpresenter has been doing for almost 30 years. The software company started out with that problem in mind, borrowing on the concept of screensavers to create what it calls desktop digital signage. Over time, it added more conventional digital signage capabilities for workplaces - a solution that founder Frank Hoen says is not an add-on, but as robust as the many, many, many other CMS options out there.

Along with offering a lot of integrations with business systems like SharePoint, the Netpresenter platform is very deep when it comes to triggered alerts for things like emergencies. That was developed in the wake of 9/11, when Netpresenter's US office in the World Trade Center complex was lost in the terror attack.

Netpresenter has more than 5 million active users globally, from SMB to huge multi-nationals and government agencies that see screens on desktops and walls as the most effective way to reach and update its workers. While most of that footprint is desktop digital signage, Hoen says at least five percent of Netpresenter's software licenses are being used for conventional digital signage in workplaces.

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TRANSCRIPT

Frank, thank you for joining me. I have been aware of Netpresenter for the longest time, but we've never actually chatted, and it's interesting that you're one of the oldest companies out there but not terribly well known.

Frank Hoen: We're all over the United States. We have hospitals like George Washington Memorial Hospital and big hospital chains across the US, for example, oil refineries in the Middle East, and military installations. There is just a lot of oil, a lot of industries, and a lot of offices across the globe that use our software, and it's been a while, so we have a couple of very interesting customers. 

One of the very earliest ones was the US Space Command, I believe, in 1995. Can you imagine that? Those were the days of PointCast, and everybody was saying it was the next big thing. 

I remember PointCast. 

Frank Hoen: Which was a dragon of a piece of software. It was terrible. 

Sucked all the bandwidth! 

Frank Hoen: Yeah, and it is interesting because, actually, the beginnings of Netpresenter could be traced back to the fact that we were selling one of the big brands of signage out there. I can tell you it was a Scala, Commodore Amiga, which was expensive as hell. They tried to bridge TV to the PC, and well, you know, they weren't that successful. Windows was not very multimedia-oriented then, and it didn't go that well, in the beginning, at least. 

We saw that, and we didn't want to build a signage solution or compete with them, but what we did see is that for the first time, all these computers out there with screens, which were managed, which were there, were available, and they were interconnected, and so you start to experiment. You put some images and videos on the server, and then the server comes down because of all the bandwidth. So we introduced some smart caching, and voila, Netpresenter was born. 

It was kind of an interesting beginning, but big companies like Nokia, Sony, and the early pioneers picked up on it, and one of our early customers was actually a US Space Command. And so I literally started going to the trade show. I came across a Marine who was in this battle group who used Netpresenter, and I never heard of the people. I didn't know they were using it. They might have copied it from one Navy server to other ships, but what can you do? It's a nice story now. 

So you have interesting roots in that since COVID became a thing, the pandemic bubbled up, and a lot of people were working from home. A lot of “conventional” or “mainstream” digital signage companies branched into making effective screensavers, pushing information to desktops for work-from-home people.

You, on the flip side, started as a corporate screensaver company that then evolved and expanded into doing digital signage as well, correct? 

Frank Hoen: Well, yes, and if I may add, and taking it a bit back from COVID, we had an office in Twin Towers, and when obviously that happened, and all the people who I knew had died, we were like, could we have actually maybe contributed in a positive way and then trying to prevent when something similar happens to be able to save more people? And that was the beginning of what we call our Emergency Alert Capability of Netpresenter. 

So, sir, you had an office in the World Trade Center?

Frank Hoen: Yes.

Wow. 

Frank Hoen: So, that was one of those pivotal moments. Obviously, COVID was as well, and I'll get back to that. But, imagine this, there, and suddenly boom, and it was, yeah, obviously terrible. But it was for us. We were like, let's introduce emergency alerts in our platform so that our customers can actually use this for emergency evacuations, fire, aiding and fire alerts, giving specific information, active shooter, tornado warnings, and the software has been with us since then, basically, and to this day, many us hospitals actually use our software for that specifically as well, for example. 

Still, we have whole countries that are actually running the Netpresenter software, including the screens, all these tools, apps, and push notifications. This is a full omnichannel emergency alert system capable of serving whole countries. They're running software. So if people are buying, and that's my point, if people are buying Netpresenter, they're buying something that literally whole countries depend on to address millions and millions immediately. So, we have seen quite a few copycats over the years, and I always felt, and so our developers, they had a very high shareware component in there. It was kind of like hack on the hack. Obviously, then those, what we have very often seen is people start off with that because they have rock bottom prices, obviously, because they can't compete on features. Still, eventually, those customers end up at us. 

If you need to run on corporate devices, mobile devices, PCs, and all these things and networks. The last thing you want is for that piece of software to be installed, which kills your bandwidth and causes all kinds of problems. There are big organizations, especially in hospitals and other places, that they choose for quality, and that means. You know, we're not the cheapest solution out there, most expensive either, but we've had many customers for 20-plus years. What IT company can say that? 

Not a lot. So, when you're asked to describe your company, do you say you're a digital signage software company or something else?

Frank Hoen: We're into corporate communications. Basically, this is a corporate communication platform. We do say that we have signage for the big screens, desktop digital signage for all existing PCs, app solutions, alerts, notifications, tickers, and all kinds of tools, basically any device in the organization.

I always use the parallel of a hospital. There are big screens hanging there. We provide those; we run on those. There's all the PCs, we run on those. We run on the tablets. We run on mobile devices. There's the alert notification as well. The whole thing integrates with things already available. In organizations such as SharePoint integrations, that's not many organizations that offer that.

So basically, organizations invest a lot in their intranets in their SharePoints and similar intranets, but predominantly SharePoint if organizations have Windows, but very few people are seeing the content. So that's problematic. There's a saying it's difficult to be famous if nobody recognizes you, and it's essentially here we are, they have invested a lot of money in that. So obviously, things like signage solutions, big screens, and being able to distill headlines literally, need-to-know, must-know information from intranets, that's a killer app that really is bringing the most elegant way and big heritage of push that's bringing content, throughout organizations, fully automated, and that's just beautiful because number one: organizations, they are popularizing the internet, but number two: they're the headlines of what organizations should know, everybody sees them, and that's just very cool.

Your website says you have about 5 million active users. I assume a pretty high percentage of that is desktop digital signage, as you describe it. What percentage would you attribute to the larger screens sprinkled around an office building? 

Frank Hoen: Well, it's actually relatively high—I would say somewhere between 5% and 10%—and it's significant.

So you got a pretty big footprint out there. 

Frank Hoen: Yeah, and the interesting thing is that we have customers who pay per annum or per month. The rule is, if it ain't broken, don't fix it. So if customers are happy and you keep adding relevant new features, they stay. 

Well, if you've had customers for 20 years, that's a pretty good endorsement.

Frank Hoen: Yeah, and that actually brings in the fact that IT revolutions come and go, and listening very carefully to your customers and then working from there, for example, integrating AI, obviously is omnipresent. That is crucial if you want to survive as an organization, whether you're in the signage or not.

So I'm working for an organization that's using Netpresenter. I'm, let's say, working remotely. How does your product manifest itself on screens? 

Frank Hoen: We use a couple of concepts. Basically, we don't want to be intrusive, so we do have pop-ups. However, I don't like the concept of pop-ups and things like that unless it's in your best interest that you should be immediately notified about something. So we have that, but that's not a mainstream tool. 

The mainstream tool is the desktop app, and we have an app that is for mobile devices that's basically an elegant reader where you can command, and things like that, kind of a smart social internet dish, and that can actually is typically often connected with a SharePoint. So it gets automated feeds, but the key component is actually, the home is the desktop signage, desktop digital signage. That is the good old screensaver. Obviously, screens don't burn in anymore, but the elegance of these new flat screens is basically that the difference between sleep mode and active mode isn't that big. 

Imagine walking through an organization, and every screen, every of those PCs displays the latest information and the latest headlines from your intranet automatically. You get so many impressions of the message. Then we actually measured that you can actually increase intranet, free fault, but more importantly, the retention to two and a half. So literally, a well-used intranet introduced Netpresenter, and a lot more people recall the key messages, and that's just beautiful. It elegantly brings without interrupting people in the core processes. We obviously want to give management from organizations a fighting chance of reaching their staff. 

So if I'm banging away on emails and there's some sort of message that Corporate needs to get out to its staff, what's going to happen on my screen? 

Frank Hoen: We have different levels of notifications. So you have a low, medium, and high level of notifications, and we can literally take over your whole screen if necessary. Think active shooters and things like that We call it an emergency alert, similar to the public emergency broadcast.

You get lower levels than that. You have partial screens; you have pop-up notifications. We can do things on your mobile device as well. If you're constantly hammering on your PC, the screens won't disappear. So there are all kinds of forms, and basically, remember old McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” 

If you have a big toolbox, you don't only have the hammer, if you know what I mean. So you have a lot more tools available at home, but the key tool is still the screensaver. 

I'm going to assume having done this for so many years that you have a pretty good sense of the balance that you have to strike. You mentioned the word intrusive before. You can cross that line, I suspect, pretty easily and just start annoying your staff as opposed to educating them and making them aware. 

Frank Hoen: You know, obviously, we both agree that people don't consider a signage screen intrusive. It's just there. It's the same with a screensaver; it’s there when you're not actively hammering away at emails.

You know, you grab a cup of coffee, take a rest break, and turn to the computer, you will see it several times a day, but it never is intrusive because, you know, it's there with your lock screen as well and we have solutions for that as well. So, basically, when you're returning to your computer or not using it for a couple of minutes, we're there on whatever screen that is out there.

And are those configurable at the user end, or is that something that's set centrally? 

Frank Hoen: The user has some capabilities, but most of them, obviously, you want to ensure that you have some control over internal communications. For example, the screens that won't appear when you're doing a presentation or having a team meeting wouldn't make much sense so you do have control over that, but the organization can determine which tools they use or which mixture of tools they're going to use. 

I assume there's a percentage of people who don't want to be bothered and would be looking for ways to disable the application. How do you fight that? 

Frank Hoen: That is easily done, of course, through configuring your PC. If it's an office PC, it's easy to do, but you know, I should state that it's ridiculous the amount of time people at work spend on their social media. It's getting crazy, and it's literally two hours or more at work.

And it's just not being able as an organization actually to have access, even simple access, to your staff. That's what we're talking about. So we're giving them back a little fighting chance. We're never going to be able to compete one-on-one against social media and all their algorithms and elegant persuasion mechanisms but with Netpresenter, you have a fighting chance of getting your need-to-know information, your must-know information well, between the years of employees, basically. 

How do they know it's that much time on social media? Is that IT department just looking at browser activity? 

Frank Hoen: Oh, no, these are studies.

That's easily googled. There are several big studies out there, and it's what I see here is from Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2023. It basically says that employees are disengaging. They want more recognition for their work, more communication from the leaders, more communication from the leaders, clear goals, stronger guidance, and engagement or culture.

How do you do that when working at home? So, how do you actually get culture across while working predominantly at home? Many employees experience stress often because of social media. They already overworked well before entering the office, so basically, there are a lot of studies out there. If you want to have the chance to keep connecting with your employees, your communication platform needs to be adapted to that so that you don't add to the information overload but basically bring some peace and quiet. 

But if you cannot reach your staff while working at home, you will lose out. There will be no connection at all at your organization. 

How much of this is integrated into other business systems? You mentioned SharePoint before, but you know, companies use Slack and so on. 

Frank Hoen: Yeah. We also have Teams connections, for example, and several other connections. Basically, if you have the data, we'll be able to intelligently deliver it to the screens. 

We're even able to analyze how much of that was read and understood through AI, through smart AI solutions. So imagine letting AI summarize the key headlines your staff or your management wants employees to know. AI literally analyzes it, compacts it, makes an abstract out of it, puts it out to the screens, and then actually keeps an eye on it, does small polls, two—or three-question polls, and checks whether they have understood it. 

So basically, we're seeing now the move from isolated tools or very smart apps into integrated systems, which are basically working like the director of a big news broadcaster. When information comes in, they determine: is it breaking news? Is it news for the app? Is it news on TV? Is it news just for a website? Is it no news? So you have our AI analyzing information, then deciding whether it will be how important it is, putting it out there on the right spot and on the right medium, but also, and that's really new, it can actually detect among these thousands of employees, we actually typically see that on big signage screens or on the screen savers. It can actually detect if they understood it, if they know the basics of, for example, cybersecurity awareness or compliance, and that's really cool. Basically we're bringing signage into massive learning systems without being intrusive, and to elegantly pull, if they know it, not everyone, just a couple and just enough, so, you know, okay, now we need to snooze this campaign that now we need to snooze this campaign or now we need to upscale the campaign and show it more on screens more frequently or maybe even on other channels as well. 

So that's awareness. Can you do training? 

Frank Hoen: Well, you know, it's not full-blown training in that you're sitting and having your course on C programming. No, it doesn't do that. 

This is meant for relatively small pieces of information, not whole ISO manuals or full compliance manuals. Still, the essence of the things the organization has identified is that nobody knows but they should. So, you need to know that those crucial pieces of information are crucial; you can put that in there. It can actually detect if the employees have read it, if they understood it, and it then can report back to management and say, “Hey, you know, did you know that your organization was 85% aware of the basic rules of cybersecurity awareness? It has gone down to 65%. As an AI, upon your instruction, I've decided to show more messages and cybersecurity awareness, and I'm happy to report that after two weeks, 95% of everybody knows cybersecurity awareness.” 

So yeah, it's basically bringing signage into the big world where because of all these PCs out there, added real estate screen, real estate is literally football fields more than the screens you have typically hanging out there if you're only using big screens. 

Right, and the screens themselves are physically bigger. As I'm chatting with you, I forgot the size of this curved screen thing I have here, but I could have a screensaver on one side and have a big desktop going anyway. 

Frank Hoen: Exactly, and basically, you can imagine how big of a screen it is while you are hammering away on emails, but while you're still working in the office or environment, you literally can see the screens to the corners of your eyes or colleagues, or when you walk through the canteen, it's basically, it's everywhere.

Your messages are omnipresent because you literally use every screen in your organization. 

So if I'm using this solution, is it a license that I buy, do I subscribe, or is it a bit of both? 

Frank Hoen: We have on-premise customers that's our current form, and that's preferred by, for example, defense and some of the large organizations, but we also have a new cloud platform, and that's license-based, so we have all variations of licensing. 

I assume the cloud side is pretty much essential for the work-from-home crowd.

Frank Hoen: Yeah. Although, actually, if they just installed it on their servers, then obviously the organization and the people have access to VPNs, and then it would be available as well. So it's that flexibility, which is really nice because some current customers don't need advanced AI integrations and things like that. However, they still want to be able to convey messages on their PC and rhe desktop digital signage, the alerts, that's all in there, and if they want the more advanced integrations with SharePoint, AI, and learning through signage screens, then they need to move to the Netpresenter Cloud.

Workplace has become a very hot vertical in digital signage. What was your reaction during the COVID era when all kinds of digital signage CMS software companies added some variation on corporate screensavers, desktops, and digital signage to their product suite? 

Frank Hoen: We saw plenty of them, and most of them were just one of them. “We have those kinds of features-ish” types of companies.

There have been no further developments. Some have been limited to an announcement or very basic functionality. It's very easy to hack a browser module, display something on it, and wrap it in there. Still, it's much more difficult to have a full-blown, reliable system that integrates with all back offices and middleware applications.

So, basically, it brings back vibes from the shareware days of some competitors. Unless you're committed to developing, keeping it secure, adding new features, making sure it's not an island, it's not something I would advise big organizations to invest in because, basically, it's just a side note for those organizations, 

Yeah. When you're talking, I was thinking it's the difference between a company saying, yeah, we can do that versus another company like you're saying, this is what we do. 

Frank Hoen: Exactly. It's the same with signage. Everybody can connect a big screen to PowerPoint. That's not signage. That’s like the Nike network and USB sticks. That's not signage. Well, I don't consider that signage, and it still is a thing. If organizations would simply calculate the total cost of ownership of the applications, which includes support, which includes messy things with drivers or special PC configurations and things like that, you don't have that when that with Netpresenter, you know, it has for 25 years, it had to run on anything out there, anything, and while being elegant in terms of PC resources and a network resource. With that much experience, no other competitor comes even close there. 

Sometimes, when a solution is focused on one thing, the other stuff it does isn't as robust as a pure-play digital signage CMS. How would you answer that?

Frank Hoen: We have an extremely robust CMS. Technically, it doesn't matter whether our signage is running on the desktop or big screen. It's even more difficult to run on a computer with dozens of applications open, and then we need to run reliably. Being able to run on those computer environments is so extreme, which means that Netpresenter software needs to be incredibly robust. So, I would argue that in terms of CMS, nobody can teach us lessons there. 

Again, whole countries use our software—the original Netpresenter software—and you would use it in your organization. They literally run it too; for example, we had a system a couple of years ago in the Netherlands that was addressing 50,000 public screens and millions of apps, and if you're able to do emergency public broadcast on such a massive scale and reliably run every day on millions of desktop computers abused by users every day, basically, that says something. 

Tell me about the company. How big are you? 

Frank Hoen: Truth be told, we're a relatively small organization. There was a very deliberate strategy never to go to the stock exchange or attract investor’s money, it was never necessary. We kept growing and have been profitable for 25 years in a row. We're very comfortable financially, very secure, and very robust. 

But yeah, I have a lot of friends. They did try to go to the stock exchange in the US, and some made it, but most didn't. So there are many organizations we see in our area that are just going bust trying to collect the big check on the stock exchange or investors becoming impatient and are downscaling. It's terrible, and it's killing the industry, and again, what kind of organization would you prefer?

Are you entirely self-funded, then? 

Frank Hoen: Oh yeah. 

So it's your company?

Frank Hoen: It's my company. 

And how do you sell? Do you go through channel or direct? 

Frank Hoen: Both, and there's a big opportunity for any of your listeners in the SharePoint or corporate world to connect with us for free. There's a big opportunity because how are you going to distinguish yourself from all these other internet integrators? 

So there's that. So we work through these integrators and there's direct sales as well for, if organizations are of such a scale that it becomes more comfortable to do so.

So, last question, what might we see over the next year or so from Netpresenter? 

Frank Hoen: Every new technology brings new capabilities, including the omnipresent AI and smart learning through signage, and that is our big focus right now. We want to be able to literally prove to management that through signage on your desktop and on the big screens, you can guarantee that your employees have seen and understood it. That's going to be our year. 

Yeah. I mean, that's made a big difference to the digital out of home community, the analytics and proof of view, and so on. So it makes sense that if you're going to make that investment in the enterprise, in the workplace, it'd be great if you actually knew it was working.

Frank Hoen: It's not just about counting views. That's not it. Imagine a piece of information comes on and is conveyed on signage, and a small part of the organization receives polls to answer a pop-up, for example, very small, as little as possible, and they're actually being asked if they understood the question. So it's not about counting views. It's much more than that. 

Gotcha. All right, Frank, thank you so much for your time. 

Frank Hoen: Thank you, Dave. It's been very nice. 

Tom Mottlau, LG Healthcare

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The health care sector has long struck me as having environments and dynamics that would benefit a lot from using digital signage technology. Accurate information is critically important, and things change quickly and often - in ways that make paper and dry erase marker board solutions seem antiquated and silly.

But it is a tough sector to work in and crack - because of the layers of bureaucracy, tight regulations and the simple reality that medical facilities go up over several years, not months. People often talk about the digital signage solution sales cycle being something like 18 months on average. With healthcare, it can be double or triple that.

The other challenge is that it is highly specialized and there are well-established companies referred to as patient engagement providers. So any digital signage software or solutions company thinking about going after health care business will be competing with companies that already know the industry and its technologies, like medical records, and have very established ties.

LG has been active in the healthcare sector for decades, and sells specific displays and a platform used by patient engagement providers that the electronics giant has as business partners. I had a really insightful chat with Tom Mottlau, LG's director of healthcare sales.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: Tom, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your role is at LG? 

Tom Mottlau: I am the Director of Healthcare Sales for LG. I've been in this role for some time now; I joined the company in 1999 and have been selling quite a bit into the patient room for some time. 

David: Has most of your focus through those years all been on healthcare?

Tom Mottlau: Well, actually, when I started, I was a trainer when we were going through the digital rollout when we were bringing high-definition television into living rooms. My house was actually the beta site for WXIA for a time there until we got our language codes right. But soon after, I moved over to the commercial side and healthcare, around 2001-2002. 

David: Oh, wow. So yeah, you've been at it a long time then. Much has changed! 

Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir. 

David: And I guess in some cases, nothing has changed. 

Tom Mottlau: Yep.

David: Healthcare is an interesting vertical market for me because it seems so opportune, but I tend to think it's both terrifying and very grinding in that they're quite often very large institutions, sometimes government-associated or university-associated, and very few things happen quickly. Is that a fair assessment? 

Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. There's a lot of oversight in the patient room. It's a very litigation-rich environment, and so there's a bit of bureaucracy to cut through to make sure that you're bringing in something that's both safe for patients and protects their privacy but also performs a useful function. 

David: I guess the other big challenge is the build-time. You can get word of an opportunity for a medical center that's going up in a particular city, and realistically, it's probably 5-7 years out before it actually opens its doors, right?

Tom Mottlau: That’s true. Not only that but very often, capital projects go through a gestation period that can be a year or two from the time you actually start talking about the opportunity. 

David: And when it comes to patient engagement displays and related displays around the patient care areas, is that something that engineers and architects scheme in early on, or is it something that we start talking about 3-4 years into the design and build process? 

Tom Mottlau: Well, the part that's schemed in is often what size displays we're going to need. So, for example, if somebody is looking to deploy maybe a two-screen approach or a large-format approach, that's the type of thing that is discussed early on, but then when they come up on trying to decide between the patient engagement providers in the market, they do their full assessment at that time because things evolve and also needs change in that whole period that may take a couple of years you may go as we did from an environment that absolutely wanted no cameras to an environment that kind of wanted cameras after COVID.

You know, so things change. So they're constantly having those discussions. 

David: Why switch to wanting cameras because of COVID? 

Tom Mottlau: Really, because the hospitals were locked down. You couldn't go in and see your loved one. There was a thought that if we could limit the in-person contact, maybe we could save lives, and so there was a lot of thought around using technology to overcome the challenges of contagion, and so there was even funding dedicated towards it and a number of companies focused on it 

David: That's interesting because I wondered whether, in the healthcare sector, business opportunities just flat dried up because the organizations were so focused on dealing with COVID or whether it actually opened up new opportunities or diverted budgets to things that maybe weren't thought about before, like video?

Tom Mottlau: True, I mean, the video focus was definitely because of COVID, but then again, you had facilities where all of their outpatient procedures had dried up. So they were strained from a budget standpoint, and so they had to be very picky about where they spent their dollars. 

Now the equipment is in the patient room, but at the end of the day, we're still going to get the same flow of patients. People don't choose when to be sick. If it's gonna be either the same or higher because of those with COVID, so they still need to supply those rooms with displays, even though they were going through a crisis, they still had to budget and still had to go through their day-to-day buying of that product. 

David: Is this a specialty application and solution as opposed to something that a more generic digital signage, proAV company could offer? My gut tells me that in order to be successful, you really need to know the healthcare environment.

You can't just say, we've got these screens, we've got the software, what do you need? 

Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Everything we do on our end is driven by VOC (voice of customer). We partner with the top patient engagement providers in the country. There are a handful that are what we call tier one. We actually provide them with products that they vet out before we go into production. 

We go to them to ask them, what do you need? What products do you need for that patient? I mean, and that's where the patient engagement boards, the idea of patient engagement boards came from was we had to provide them a display that met, at the time, 60065 UL, which is now 62368-1, so that they can meet NFPA 99 fire code. 

David: I love it when you talk dirty.

Tom Mottlau: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that. 

David: What the hell is he talking about? 

Tom Mottlau: Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. Basically, what it boils down to is we want to make sure that our products are vetted by a third party. UL is considered a respectable testing agency, and that's why you find most electronics are vetted by them and so they test them in the patient room. It's a high-oxygen environment with folks who are debilitated and life-sustaining equipment so the product has to be tested. 

We knew that we had to provide a product for our SIs that would meet those specs as well as other specs that they had like they wanted something that could be POE-powered because it takes an act of Congress to add a 110-amp outlet to a patient room. It's just a lot of bureaucracy for that. So we decided to roll out two units: one of 32, which is POE, and one that's 43. Taking all those things I just mentioned into consideration, as well as things like lighting. 

Folks didn't want a big night light so we had to spend a little extra attention on the ambient light sensor and that type of thing. This is our first offering.

David: So for doofuses like me who don't spend a lot of time thinking about underwriter lab, certifications, and so on, just about any monitor, well, I assume any monitor that is marketed by credible companies in North America is UL-certified, but these are different grades of UL, I'm guessing? 

Tom Mottlau: They are. Going back in the day of CRTs, if you take it all the way back then when you put a product into a room that has a high-powered cathode ray tube and there's oxygen floating around, safety is always of concern. So, going way back, probably driven by product liability and that type of thing. We all wanted to produce a safe product, and that's why we turned to those companies. The way that works is we design a product, we throw it over to them, and they come back and say, okay, this is great, but you got to change this, and this could be anything.

And then we go back and forth until we arrive at a product that's safe for that environment, with that low level of oxygen, with everything else into consideration in that room. 

David: Is it different when you get out into the hallways and the nursing stations and so on? Do you still need that level, like within a certain proximity of oxygen or other gases, do you need to have that? 

Tom Mottlau: It depends on the facility's tolerance because there is no federal law per se, and it could vary based on how they feel about it. I know that Florida tends to be very strict, but as a company, we had to find a place to draw that line, like where can we be safe and provide general products and where can we provide something that specialized? 

And that's usually oxygenated patient room is usually the guideline. If there's oxygen in the walls and that type of thing, that's usually the guideline and the use of a pillow speaker. Outside into the hallways, not so much, but it depends on the facility. We just lay out the facts and let them decide. We sell both. 

David: Is it a big additional cost to have that additional protection or whatever you want to call it, the engineering aspects? 

Tom Mottlau: Yes. 

David: So it's not like 10 percent more; it can be quite a bit more?

Tom Mottlau: I'm not sure of the percentage, but there's a noticeable amount. Keep in mind it's typically not just achieving those ratings; it's some of the other design aspects that go into it. I mean, the fact that you have pillow speaker circuitry to begin with, there's a cost basis for that.

There's a cost basis for maintaining an installer menu of 117+ items. There's a cost basis for maintaining a Pro:Centric webOS platform. You do tend to find it because of those things, not just any one of them, but because of all of them collectively, yeah, the cost is higher. I would also say that the warranties tend to be more encompassing. It's not like you have to drive it down to Ted's TV. Somebody comes and actually remedies on-site. So yeah, all of that carries a cost basis. That's why you're paying for that value. 

David: You mentioned that you sell or partner with patient engagement providers. Could you describe what those companies do and offer?

Tom Mottlau: Yeah, and there's a number of them. Really, just to be objective, I'll give you some of the tier ones, the ones that have taken our product over the years and tested and provided back, and the ones that have participated in our development summit. I'll touch on that in a moment after this.

So companies like Aceso, you have Uniguest who were part of TVR who offers the pCare solutions. You have Get Well, Sonify, those types of companies; they've been at this for years, and as I mentioned, we have a development summit where we, for years, have piled these guys on a plane. The CTOs went off to Korea and the way I describe it is we all come into a room, and I say, we're about to enter Festivus. We want you to tell us all the ways we've disappointed you with our platform, and we sit in that room, we get tomatoes thrown at us, and then we make changes to the platform to accommodate what they need.

And then that way, they're confident that they're deploying a product that we've done all we can to improve the functionality of their patient engagement systems. After all, we're a platform provider, which is what we are. 

David: When you define patient engagement, what would be the technology mix that you would typically find in a modernized or newly opened patient care area?

Tom Mottlau: So that would be going back years ago. I guess it started more with patient education. If Mrs. Jones is having a procedure on her kidney, they want her to be educated on what she can eat or not eat, so they found a way to bring that patient education to the patient room over the TVs. But then they also wanted to confirm she watched it, and then it went on from there. 

It's not only the entertainment, but it's also things that help improve workflows, maybe even the filling out of surveys and whatnot on the platform, Being able to order your culinary, just knowing who your doctor is, questions, educational videos, all of those things and then link up with EMR.

David: What's that? 

Tom Mottlau: Electronic medical records. Over the years, healthcare has wanted to move away from paper, to put it very simply. They didn't want somebody's vitals in different aspects of their health stored on a hand-scribbled note in several different doctor's offices. So there's been an effort to create electronic medical records, and now that has kind of been something that our patient engagement providers have tied into those solutions into the group. 

David: So, is the hub, so to speak, the visual hub in a patient care room just a TV, or is there other display technology in there, almost like a status board that tells them who their primary provider is and all the other stuff? 

Tom Mottlau: So it started as the smart TV, the Pro:Centric webOS smart TV. But then, as time went on, we kept getting those requests for, say, a vertically mounted solution, where somebody can actually walk in the room, see who their doctor is, see who their nurse is, maybe the physician can come in and understand certain vitals of the patient, and so that's why we developed those patient engagement boards that separately. They started out as non-touch upon request, we went with the consensus, and the consensus was we really need controlled information. We don't want to; we've had enough issues with dry-erase boards.

We want something where there's more control in entering that information, and interesting enough, we're now getting the opposite demand. We're getting demand now to incorporate touch on the future models, and that's how things start. As you know, to your point earlier, folks are initially hesitant to breach any type of rules with all the bureaucracy.

Now, once they cut through all that and feel comfortable with a start, they're willing to explore more technologies within those rooms. That's why we always start out with one, and then over the years, it evolves. 

David: I assume that there's a bit of a battle, but it takes some work to get at least some of the medical care facilities to budget and approve these patient engagement displays or status displays just because there's an additional cost. It's different from the way they've always done things, and it involves integration with, as you said, the EMR records and all that stuff.

So, is there a lot of work to talk them into it? 

Tom Mottlau: Well, you have to look at us like consultants, where we avoid just talking folks into things. Really, what it has to do with is going back to VOC, voice of the customer, the way we were doing this years ago or just re-upping until these boards were launched was to provide a larger format, and ESIs were dividing up the screen.

That was the way we always recommended. But then, once we started getting that VOC, they were coming to us saying, well, we need to get these other displays in the room. You know, certain facilities were saying, Hey, we absolutely need this, and we were saying, well, we don't want to put something that's not rated for that room. Then we realized we had to really start developing a product that suits that app, that environment, and so our job is to make folks aware of what we have and let them decide which path they're going to take because, to be honest, there are two different ways of approaching it.

You can use one screen of 75”, divide it, or have two screens like Moffitt did. Moffitt added the patient engagement boards, which is what they wanted. 

David: I have the benefit, at least so far, of being kind of at retirement age and spending very little time, thank God, in any kind of patient care facility. Maybe that'll change. Hopefully not. 

But when I have, I've still seen dry-erase marker boards at the nursing stations, in rooms, in hallways, and everywhere else. Why is it still like that? Why haven't they cut over? Is it still the prevalent way of doing things, or are you seeing quite a bit of adoption of these technologies?

Tom Mottlau: Well, it is, I would say, just because we're very early in all this. That is the prevalent way, no doubt. 

It's really those tech-forward, future-forward facilities that are wanting to kind of go beyond that and not only that, there's a lot of facilities that want to bring all that in and, maybe just the nature of that facility is a lot more conservative, and we have to respect that.

Because ultimately they're having to maintain it. We wouldn't want to give somebody something that they can't maintain or not have the budget for. I mean, at the end of the day, they're going to come back to us, and whether or not they trust us is going to be based upon whether we advise them correctly or incorrectly. If we advise them incorrectly, they're not going to trust us. They're not going to buy from us ten years from now. 

David: For your business partners, the companies that are developing patient engagement solutions, how difficult is it to work with their patient record systems, building ops systems, and so on to make these dynamic displays truly dynamic? Is it a big chore, or is there enough commonality that they can make that happen relatively quickly?

Tom Mottlau: That's a very good question, and that's exactly why we're very careful about who's tier one and who we may advise folks to approach. Those companies I mentioned earlier are very skilled at what they do, and so they're taking our product as one piece of an entire system that involves many other components, and I have full faith in their ability to do that because we sit in on those meetings. 

Once a year, we hear feedback, we hear positive feedback from facilities. We see it but it really couldn't happen without those partners, I would say. We made that choice years ago to be that platform provider that supports those partners and doesn't compete with them. In hindsight, I think that was a great choice because it provides more options to the market utilizing our platform. 

David: Well, and being sector experts in everything that LG tries to touch would be nightmarish. If you're far better off, I suspect I will be with partners who wake up in the morning thinking about that stuff.

Tom Mottlau: Yeah. I mean, we know our core competencies. We're never going to bite off more than we can chew. Now granted, we understand more and more these days, there's a lot of development supporting things like telehealth, patient engagement, EMR and whatnot. But we're also going to make sure that at the end of the day, we're tying in the right folks to provide the best solution we can to patients.

David: How much discussion has to happen around network security and operating system security? 

I mean, if you're running these on smart TVs, they're then running web OS, which is probably to the medical facility’s I.T. team or not terribly familiar to them. 

Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Facilities, hospitals, and anything that involves network security bring them an acute case of indigestion, more so than other areas in the business world. So these folks, a lot of times, there's exhaustive paperwork whenever you have something that links up to the internet or something that's going to open up those vulnerabilities.

So, Pro:Centric webOS is actually a walled garden. It is not something that is easily hacked when you have a walled garden approach and something that's controlled with a local server. That's why we took that approach. Now, we can offer them a VPN if there is something that they want to do externally, but these systems were decided upon years ago and built with security in mind because we knew we were going to deploy in very sensitive commercial environments. And so not so much a concern. You don't need to pull our TV out and link up with some foreign server as you might with a laptop that you buy that demands updates. It's not anything like that because, of course, that would open us up to vulnerability. So we don't take that approach.

It's typically a local server and there is the ability to do some control of the server if you want a VPN, but other than that, there is no access. 

David: Do you touch on other areas of what we would know as digital signage within a medical facility? 

Like I'm thinking of wayfinding, directories, donor recognition, video walls, and those sorts of things.

Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. I mean, we see everything. Wayfinding needs have been for years and years now, and those are only expanding. and we start to see some that require outdoor displays for wave finding. So we do have solutions for that. 

Beyond displays, we actually have robots now that we're testing in medical facilities and have had a couple of certifications on some of those.

David: What would they do? 

Tom Mottlau: Well, the robots would be used primarily to deliver some type of nonsensitive product. I know there's some work down the road, or let's just say there's some demand for medication delivery. 

But obviously, LG's approach to any demand like that is to vet it out and make sure we're designing it properly. Then, we can make announcements later on about that type of stuff. For now, we're taking those same robots that we're currently using, say, in the hotel industry, and we're getting demand for that type of technology to be used in a medical facility. 

David: So surgical masks or some sort of cleaning solutions or whatever that need to be brought up to a certain area, you could send in orderly, but staffing may be tight and so you get a robot to do it.

Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. And that is a very liquid situation. There's a lot of focus and a lot of development. I'm sure there'll be a lot to announce on that front, but it's all very fluid, and it's all finding its way into that environment with our company. 

All these future-forward needs, not only with the robots but EV chargers for the vast amount of electric vehicles, we find ourselves involved in discussions on all these fronts with our medical facilities these days. 

David: It's interesting. Obviously, AI is going to have a role in all kinds of aspects of medical research and diagnosis and all those super important things. 

But I suspect there's probably a role as well, right down at the lobby level of a hospital, where somebody comes in where English isn't their first language, and they need to find the oncology clinic or whatever, and there's no translator available. If you can use AI to guide them, that would be very helpful and powerful. 

Tom Mottlau: Let me write that down as a product idea. Actually, AI is something that is discussed in the company, I would say, on a weekly basis, and again, I'm sure there'll be plenty to showcase in the future. But yes, I'd say we have a good head start in that area that we're exploring different use cases in the medical environment. 

David: It's interesting. I write about digital signage every day and look at emerging markets, and I've been saying that healthcare seems like a greenfield opportunity for a lot of companies, but based on this conversation, I would say it is, and it isn't because if you are a more generalized digital signage software platform, yes, you could theoretically do a lot of what's required, but there's so much insight and experience and business ties that you really need to compete with these patient engagement providers, and I think it would be awfully tough for just a more generalized company to crack, wouldn't it? 

Tom Mottlau: I believe so. I mean, we've seen many come and go. You know, we have certain terms internally, like the medicine show, Wizard of Oz. there's a lot out there; you really just have to vet them out to see who's legit and who isn't, and I'm sure there are some perfectly legitimate companies that we haven't worked with yet, probably in areas outside of patient education we, we have these discussions every week, and it's, it can be difficult because there are companies that you might not have heard of and you're always trying to assess, how valid is this?

And, yeah, that's a tough one. 

David: Last question. Is there a next big thing that you expect to emerge with patient engagement over the next couple of years, two-three years that you can talk about? 

Tom Mottlau: You hit the nail on the head, AI. But you know, keep in mind that's something in relative terms. It has been relatively just the last few years, and it has been something that's come up a lot. It seems there's a five-year span where something is a focus going way back, it was going from analog to digital. 

When I first came here, it was going from wood-clad CRT televisions to flat panels, and now we have OLED right in front of us. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of progression in this market. And I would say AI is one of them, and Telehealth is another; I guess we'll find out for sure which one sticks that always happens that way, but we don't ignore them. 

David: Yeah, certainly, I think AI is one of those foundational things. It's kind of like networking. It's going to be fundamental. It's not a passing fancy or something that'll be used for five years and then move on to something else.

Tom Mottlau: Yeah, true. But then again, also, it's kind of like when everybody was talking about, okay, we're not going to pull RF cable that went on for years and years because they were all going to pull CAT5, and then next thing, you know, they're saying, well, we have to go back and add CAT5 because they got ahead of themselves, right?

So I think the challenge for any company is nobody wants to develop the next Betamax. Everybody wants to develop something that's going to be longstanding and useful, and so it's incumbent upon us to vet out those different solutions and actually see real practical ways of using it in the patient room and trusting our partners and watching them grow. A lot of times, they're the test beds, and so that's the benefit of our approach. 

By providing that platform and supporting those partners, we get to see which tree is really going to take off. 

David: Betamax, you just showed your age. 

Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir. That made eight tracks, right? 

David: For the kiddies listening, that's VCRs. All right. Thanks, Tom. That was terrific. 

Tom Mottlau: Thank you very much, sir. 

David: Nice to speak with you. 

Jonathan Labbee, SACO Technologies

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When I first spoke with Jonathan Labbee about the grand-scale media facades and displays being produced by SACO Technologies, the Sphere in Las Vegas was just yet another over-the-top  thing rising up from the desert sands.

Two years on, and a few months after the giant LED ball was first switched on, the Sphere is probably the most discussed and photographed digital display on the planet.

So I was very happy that Labbee was willing to carve out some time to talk about some of the technical details behind the display side of that project, and more broadly what it has meant for the Montreal company, and for the concept of buildings as media facades and visual attractions.

In this podcast, we get into some of the technical challenges and innovations associated with putting together both the attention-getting outside exosphere of the building, but also the mind-wobbling 9mm pitch curved display inside. We also talk about the larger business, and the opportunities and challenges of turning big structures into experiential digital displays.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jon, thanks for joining me. It's been a couple of years, but a lot has gone on with your company, and obviously, the big thing is its involvement in the Las Vegas Sphere. 

I know we can't spend all of our time talking about that, nor do I want to, but I would imagine your company's work on that has kind of rocked the industry 

Jonathan Labbee: It has, and thanks for having me back, Dave. The sphere has been an incredible journey for us. I think two years ago when we last spoke, we were just about to start on our part of the construction, and we successfully delivered that project, which is, I think there were a lot of people and projects that were in the waiting to see if something of this magnitude could be pulled off successfully and now that it has, it has awoken a new level of giant projects around the world. I'm gonna say mostly in the Middle East at this moment in time.

Why is that? Is it just about money, or is it also about things like zoning controls and available space?

Jonathan Labbee: Well, I mean, obviously, money and budget are always a concern, but I think when you get past the level of installing a giant television on the side of a building and where the building itself is a media medium, but the infrastructure to support that is so significant in your construction budget, I think this is one of the key aspects for these developers and these architects to understand if it could successfully be done. 

Now from a zoning perspective, I think that a project like the Sphere is quite revealing in the sense of how much control you have over brightness and the type of and quality of the content and secures the knowledge that a responsible owner can display tasteful content in the environment that it's designed to be in.

I know that there was a proposal to do a similar project in the east end of London and that doesn't seem to be going ahead, at least at the moment, and it struck me as one of the barriers to it was simply that you're putting up a very bright object within reasonably close proximity to residential and that's a challenge.

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, it is. I'm not a politician by any means, but I do think there's some politics there and also maybe some fear of new technology that could potentially be disruptive if used irresponsibly. Normally, people who spend this amount of money on a venue tend to have a very secure plan to fit within their environment.

So what was done for the Sphere was custom. Could you relate what was done on the outside and then on the inside? The inside is particularly interesting to me because your company's pedigree is not so much on fine-pitch large displays other than for touring acts, which are not as fine a pitch.

Jonathan Labbee: Well, yeah, so it's actually pretty interesting that this seems to be our persona; the reality is that most of our development is done on fine-pitch products. We just happen to have been doing quite a bit of low-res or wide-pitch products because we've been doing so many iconic buildings, it seems to be what we're known for. 

But if you take, for example, a lot of the touring acts or some of the video screens that we did for Orlando airport, for example, those are 2 millimeters pixel pitch and all these types of things. 

So if we go back to the Sphere, the exterior of the sphere, referred to as the exosphere, is made up of these pucks, I would say, that have 48 LEDs, and each one of these pucks is a pixel that is controllable for the client, and that's what gives you that beautiful imagery on the building, and it also has an aesthetic that the architects wanted and the client wanted, where it allows you to see through and see the base building through the exosphere. So, the performance criteria for the exterior was one thing, whereas the performance criteria for the interior were completely different. It needed to be audio transparent because if you go to the Sphere, there are absolutely no speakers or any kind of disruption, and on the media plane, everything is behind the screen. So it gives you a very pure environment. 

The screen itself is nominal nine millimeters, but it is 16K x 16 K resolution, and because of the distance, everything just works when you're inside of that environment, you feel like you're wherever the artist or content creator decides that you're going to be. So, if you're on Mars or another part of the planet, you feel like you're there. 

For the exosphere, because this had not really ever been done or certainly not done very often, was there an engineering thought process about how we make this work? Will it work? What are the sight lines, all that sort of stuff?

Jonathan Labbee: Oh, yes. And as much as I want to take a lot of credit for this, it was definitely a collective effort. First of all, we're dealing with a very sophisticated client that has a lot of knowledge and capabilities, the same goes for the architects and all the other trades that were involved.

So we had the opportunity to work with an expanded group of people that had a lot of knowledge and capability to visualize these types of things, and we have done mock up over mock up. So it's not just, oh, let's think about it and build it. It was: 

Let's think about it. Let's prototype it. Let's prove it. Let's adapt to it. Let's modify it, and eventually through the process of iteration, you end up with something that is functional for that particular mission. 

So, what was the big moment like? I think it was July of last year, or maybe a bit earlier when you first turned it on. Were their fingers crossed, or was it a big aha? 

Jonathan Labbee: Well, I can tell you when the client first turned on that exosphere, I think it was like a huge wow moment for everybody, including ourselves, it was spectacular, and then when we had the chance of going to the opening for you to for the interior, which was, the end of September, that, I gotta tell you, was pretty emotional. I don't think that any one of us could have imagined what it would look like in its finished format. 

Yeah, because you've done some grand scale indoor stuff for touring acts stadiums, and so on, which are pretty big ass screens, but nothing along these lines, right? 

Jonathan Labbee: Nope, there is, actually, nothing on earth and in our industry that exists at this level of magnitude. And again, we've been working on this for 5 years, and we see it in sections, and we see the whole master plan. We see all this stuff on computer screens or in real life as mock-ups. But when you see the finished scale on the interior, it is mind-boggling. 

How do you service something like that? Is this just like man lifts or lord knows what? 

Jonathan Labbee: Well, the venue is obviously designed with service capability. I mean, at the end of the day, how do you eat an elephant? It is basically one bite at a time, and it's pretty much what this is. I mean, it's a lot of the same type of stuff. So everything is broken down into sections and if you have a problem, you need to go to service. If you want to go look at something, you have access to that section in a particular fashion, and then you have access to the screen, and you can do whatever you need to do.

I'm curious as well about some of the meat potato stuff, like video servers. 

How do you develop something that can control that many LED modules and make it all addressable? When you went to your technical partners on that, was it a big, “Oh, boy, how do we do that?” Or was it, " Okay, we know how we could do that?” 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think, I think it was more of a “yeah, we know how we can do that because our video processors are scalable in nature.” They technically don't have a limit, but then again, it's not just our stuff that needs to function. It's everything up and down the chain.

So, we control everything from the video processor to the video screen. But everything upstream from us also has to function, and Here Against Here Studios, or MSG, design and create their very own control room with all of the workflow to function. So, from beginning to end, they have full control over the quality of the signal.

What about the creative? 

I assume that producing this stuff requires a certain set of skills and experience, which is very helpful. Is it hard to do, or do you kind of get instructions on what to do, and then you make it happen? 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, my understanding is that the Sphere studios put together some templating and also offers its own production services to clients to make producing content much easier. So people are not just thrown into the project. They're helped all along the way. 

One of the things that impressed me about the project is the type of content that's showing up on there that I think I, like millions of other people never would have even thought of.

Have you been surprised by it? 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. I have to say those guys have done an incredible job of coming up with some very interesting and creative ways of making that sphere look amazing, and you really never get tired of looking at it. I mean it's populating my Instagram feed and probably everybody else's. It's just incredible what they're able to put on there, and I think that they've been very clever in getting collaborations from different types of artists and collaborators. 

When I was through Las Vegas late last year, I made a point of walking all the way over to the Sphere. I wanted to see what it looked like up close, and I have an industry friend who did the same, and it's this weird sensation of, now I see how this works and what the technology looks like up close, but it was almost like, that's something you shouldn't do. You really need to see this from a distance. 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, and it was designed to be seen from a distance, but I think that it's very interesting. I can't say that this was planned in this way, but I mean, obviously, we're looking for performance criteria. So we designed around that, and a certain aesthetic, and probably the architects have thought about this, but as you approach the building and you start seeing how things are put together, there's a sense of revelation that you get when you approach the building, and it becomes even more personable to you. I thought that was pretty interesting because I had a similar experience when I went there for the first time.

So what has this spawned? Do you have commercial property developers coming to you, resort operators? Who seems most inspired by this? 

Jonathan Labbee: Well, yeah, I would say that the Sphere certainly awoke a new level of clients and types of projects. We normally work with the architects, so the architects who represent the owners and the property developers are coming to us with more and more intricate and large projects, which is super fun because not only do we develop technology, but we've designed an entire workflow, and toolset in order to design and efficiently manufacture and install and run these types of projects.

Yes, I mean, we're getting large resorts in the Middle East right now, which is in a big flux of change, especially in Saudi Arabia. So there are a lot of these giga projects or mega projects spawning all over the place, and we're getting a lot of inquiries on that side, which is great. 

Are they serious? 

Sometimes, you see these magic mega projects in other jurisdictions, and there's a lot of PR noise around it, but nothing ever happens. But I suspect because some of these are funded directly by the Saudi government through PIF or whatever, they're going to happen.

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think in the past, it was maybe a bit more true that there were kind of these big dreams, and then they would just never materialize, but I think things have changed a lot in the region, where projects are actually getting built. There seems to be a big sense of change in the entire region.

Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and that part of the world, continue to be very strong for us as well. So we're lucky that we're already out there and have delivered successful anchor projects. 

What is involved in doing these? Is this like a three or five-year project?

Jonathan Labbee: I would say that normally this would have been a three year project. Obviously the pandemic happened, which no one had anticipated, which drove all sorts of additional complexities in time. But I would say that a project like this, I believe originally had like a three year type of timeframe, and any mega project would have roughly the same type of timeframe. 

One of the things that's interesting to me is, as we were discussing before, that maybe people don't know the full scope of what your company does. I didn't realize you had off-the-shelf products that you manufacture and can order.

I kind of assumed it was all custom, but there, there is stuff that you can just buy, right? 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have a whole suite of products that you can either utilize the way that they are or customize with brackets and carriers and these types of things. It is actually the bulk of our business, although we publicize more of the iconic type of projects simply because people like to hear about those. 

Still, we do several hundred projects a year that are obviously much smaller and sometimes not as much talked about.

Are those fixed projects or do they, or are they more about shipping out material that's going to be used by touring acts? 

Jonathan Labbee: These are fixed projects. Although we do a lot of touring, we just launched Morgan Wallen last week with our new A5 series, which is an amazing product and show, but touring for us is, it's really great, obviously for recognition, but it's ALSO a fantastic place for us to try out new ideas. So it is really like an R&D lab, and that's why we continue to put so much effort into rental and touring. 

We get to try out new ideas with clients who are willing to take chances and want to be the first, and then once you have something great, you refine it, and you make it more robust for permanent installation because, in a permanent installation, the criteria are quite different. You don't want to go up 1000 feet to change the light bulb, for example, right? That becomes very expensive. When I was on a tour, it lasted for a few hours. You can take it down. You could address things if you need to so there's a method to our madness, I would say.

Is there linkage at all between, because you're a Montreal company, there's at least a couple of Montreal creative shops that have also done a lot of work with touring acts as well. Do those come together or are they kind of separate tracks and once in a while you bump into each other? 

Jonathan Labbee: They are separate tracks, and oftentimes, we bump into each other. So, for example, when we did Orlando airport, the content designer for that was Gentilhomme who we know very well. We obviously have Moment Factory and a bunch of other creatives out here. So there's a really nice hub here, and we're all friends, by the way, so we all have lunch together and these types of things, because it's fun to talk about whatever we're working on.

Going back to Sphere, the product that you developed particularly for the exosphere, is that something that you can turn around and productize, like turn into its own product that could, could be used, or is it really unique to that building? 

Jonathan Labbee: It is unique to the building and has certain features specifically designed around its geometry. So, I think that those additional features would probably be lost if we were attempting to use it somewhere else, but in any case, it's not something that we would want to do with it. It has not only technological criteria but also aesthetic criteria that are unique to the Sphere.

But the concept, though, of these pucks or discs of some kind that have LEDs embedded in them, I believe what you did at Burj Khalifa was kind of like sticks or something more. 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, exactly. Burj Khalifa, because it was a linear approach, used a product that we call V-Stick that we customized for that particular building. 

But if you take L.A. Stadium, for example, or SoFi Stadium, that has a puck format on the roof. There are, I think, about 35,000 of them, and you get a video image on the roof when you're flying above from LAX. 

So anytime you've got curvature, a puck is probably going to be a lot easier to manage than a stick because you'd have to custom bend each of them, right?

Jonathan Labbee: Yes, but it also depends on what the client is trying to achieve. So, if you take SoFi Stadium, they wanted to have an even spacing of the pixels, whereas Burj Khalifa had very different criteria. They were 30,000 pixels tall but only 72 pixels wide because we had to install them in between the windows. So, on the architectural things, each project kind of reveals itself in its architecture in terms of what product or what you should be designing to achieve their media. 

When you work with architectural firms, do you have to invest some time at the front end with the architects, particularly on the engineering side of things, as opposed to the big vision side of things for them to understand what's possible and what's physics-defying? 

Jonathan Labbee: I would say yes in the beginning, but we work with all of the major architect firms like Foster and Populous and those types, and the more and more projects that we do together, the more and more that we understand each other's criteria.

Now, on our side, what we did to make sure that we could have ease in speaking with the architects, we have an entire architectural division within SACO. So we have a Spanish office that has seven architects, BIM integrators, computational programmers, and so on, which mimics the architects' workflow. So, not only do we work with them to show them what's possible, but we also work with them to design the technology within the architecture. Then, we are able to produce the drawings at their level, which they then incorporate into their drawing sets. 

I'm guessing, I don't know the architecture business at all, but I'm guessing maybe a decade ago, there were one or two projects where people were thinking about architectural lighting of some kind, and it was this novel concept, and I'm wondering now if it's almost like a default concept for all flashy new buildings.

Jonathan Labbee: Well, it is. If you want your building to stand out, you have to have some level of technology on it or some level of color or something because if not, you just fade into the background. 

I guess I have come back to the whole idea of zoning that, I see skylines in China; it's just like the whole skyline; every building is lit up, and they're all animated, and they're all doing things, and I'm thinking, well, you can do that in China. I'm not sure you could do that in Long Island City in New York to face the Manhattan skyline with buildings doing that. Do you have to kind of factor that in?

Jonathan Labbee: Oh, absolutely. I mean, actually, obviously anything governmental kind of tends to move at a slower pace. So we have built it into our workflow, and in the architect's workflow, let's say, the sensibility of making some tools and visualizations for the city zoning people and a perfect example of that would be F.C. Cincinnati, which we did with Populous. So F.C. Cincinnati is a soccer club, an MLS team, and the entire architecture of the building is like these fins that are kind of slanted and it gives like some level of static movement to the building, and our job was to animate those fins at night to give the nighttime identity.

So we did an entire lighting study, and we have special filters built into the content so that, or into the content player, so that anywhere where it's facing residences, the light levels never exceed a certain amount. 

We produced all of that, all of those studies with the architects, to present to the city on behalf of the client.

What's the thinking around what level of, for lack of a more exotic description, razzle-dazzle is appropriate? 

I'm thinking in Las Vegas, the Sphere makes perfect sense. That's on-brand for Las Vegas. I'm not sure that would make as much sense in, I don't know, San Francisco or Minneapolis or whatever and I have a lot of affection for much more subtle architectural lighting. 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. But you have to think of the fact that Sphere is the extreme, right? It has a completely adaptive skin. So the skin, when there's no media on it, obviously, it's this dark surface, but the media at that point is designed for the environment. So, in Las Vegas, it's appropriate to have this very kind of flashy razzle-dazzle stuff. 

But if you were doing something in San Francisco, the UK, or something like this, where you need it to be more subtle, the content would move maybe at a different speed and be produced in a different manner. Maybe it'll be more focused on lighting effects rather than full crazy commercials and that kind of thing. So, having adaptive skin is actually a really good thing in any environment because you can tailor it and adapt it as you move along.

I'm assuming that it would be pretty difficult for more conventional LED display companies like the I don't need to rattle off the names, but the major manufacturers who put billboards up in Times Square and on the sides of stadiums, but it's not part of the architecture. It attaches to the architecture. It would be difficult for them to get into this because you've got a massive head start. 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I think it would be very difficult. I mean, also, there's a mindset that goes along with it. We don't choose the path of least resistance. I think the people that work here would get bored. But at the same time, you have to evolve over years, tool sets in order to accomplish these very difficult geometries because everything needs to support it from the back as well. You have to be able to do proper wiring diagrams and power layouts, and all this because it affects the entire architecture of that building, so we're doing it by choice, let's put it this way!

I saw a post last week on LinkedIn about a company that's made a sphere, I don't know, 25 feet tall or something like that as a product. how do you react to those things? 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, I guess I'll go with the analogy of trying to copy something is flattery. Again, it's not the first time that these types of things happened. Obviously, it's not on the same scale as the Sphere, but I mean, year after year, we see people trying to copy what we've done.

Yeah, that can't be easy. I'm also curious about media facades and the use of LED within glass or applied to glass at some point. Are you being asked about doing that? 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah, so actually, many years ago, we actually designed some technology and actually have a patent for LEDs within glass, and we actually tried it out, and in concept, it sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it's not that great of an idea, as we found out, and what I mean by that is that there's a couple things: 

First of all, if you need to replace something, you now need to pull the glass off of the building, which could affect the tenants inside. If it's a hotel, it's a hotel, you know what I mean? If it's an office building, it's an office building. You're not replacing the glass. But the other thing that it did is that it could have potentially put us in competition with some of our clients, which are the curtain wall manufacturers, and we work with all of them. So if we were to come up with our own glass product, and we were to try to go sell it, we're essentially either aligning ourselves with only one of them, or we're competing against all of them. So we had decided against that, but the serviceability of it was the bigger problem.

Where are you at now in terms of headcount, where you're located, and everything else? 

Jonathan Labbee: Yeah. So we're in Montreal still. We're just across the street from our old facility, which we were there for 35 years, and we're now in this beautiful 218,000-square-foot facility that we got into obviously with Sphere and other projects in mind, and we're 120 people strong, and when we're full project involved like with Sphere, we grew to about 380. 

So we scale up, and we scale down depending on the projects, and we have arrangements with different companies for that and that’s where we are now.

Is it hard to be that elastic in terms of your workforce, given the challenges of hiring?

Jonathan Labbee: Well, the pandemic certainly tested us. I mean, we've never had issues with it before, but the pandemic made it a bit more difficult. The way that we design our manufacturing and all of our testing—I mean, we have a lot of electronic aids and stuff like that—we, the core people that we have here, can be split up to become team leads.

So, when we hire people, it's for the lower-skill positions. So it's easier. You have a bigger pool to choose from, and then after that, we scale back down when we don't need to do that anymore, and then our core workforce takes on all the responsibility. 

So these could be logistics people who are just packing things up and so on?

Jonathan Labbee: Correct. Exactly. 

I assume you're NDA'd up the wazoo on a lot of projects, but are there ones that you can talk about that will be released in the next year or so? 

Jonathan Labbee: So I can't really talk about them, but I can tell you that we're building a beautiful project in Spain after having an office there for, I don't know how many years, finally, we get to do a project in Spain and that's very exciting. 

What part of Spain?

Jonathan Labbee: In Valencia. 

Oh, nice.

Jonathan Labbee: So right near the sea and stuff like that. So I can't say what it is yet, but it's going to be beautiful, and as I mentioned, we literally just delivered Morgan Wallen last week and that's pretty exciting as well.

What has the past couple of years meant for the company in terms of business? Has it just rocketed or is it just seen like a nice, healthy bump? 

Jonathan Labbee: Well, I'm going to say it's going to be a controlled rocket because we, again, dealing with the pandemic is one thing and then supply chain and all that kind of stuff, but the other thing that we needed to be very disciplined about is to not take on too much work as to not affect the delivery of the Sphere, and that was on purpose, and we had spoken with our customers and our architects and stuff like that, and we were very selective in the projects that we took on during the big delivery of the Sphere.

Thankfully, though, the pandemic did push a bunch of the projects into the future. So now those products are coming back to us, and we have a lot of bandwidth, and we're filling that up pretty fast. 

I suspect as well that the simple fact that you've delivered this and it's got the global attention that it has certainly made your architecture partners and other potential customers very comfy that, yeah, you can do this!

Jonathan Labbee: Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, and at the same time, we're not just a one-trick pony. We did deliver a very large project at Orlando airport at the same time and Delta the airfield at JFK and a bunch of other projects, the Rolling Stones and Lady Gaga and all those.

So we continued doing everything kind of caused an undertow, but Sphere was a really big focus, and now that we've finished delivering Sphere, we're working on many other very exciting projects. 

I'm sure there are lots of day-to-day headaches in terms of being the CEO of a technology company, but it sounds like you get some pretty fun road trips with all these touring acts and big venues.

Jonathan Labbee: Yes, and you get to meet very interesting people and like-minded people, and you get to see behind the scenes, but look, it's a lot of work. There's no doubt about it. I mean, every day we're trying to do something different and do something new.

So you're always kind of in that development mode, but when you see the results, and then you see the teams that you're building and the culture that you're building within the company, it makes you proud and makes it fun to be here. 

Absolutely. Congratulations on the product or the project and on everything else that's going on with you!

Jonathan Labbee: Well, thank you. Appreciate it.

IV Dickson, SageNet

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When I first spoke with industry lifer IV Dickson about his move from software to the managed services firm SageNet, the company was still in the relatively early days of getting itself organized to chase and then service digital signage opportunities. Five years on, digital in environments like chain retail and QSR are a core, what he calls consequential, part of the Oklahoma company's overall business.

SageNet's role has evolved from being an IT-centric managed services company that was adding digital signage to its deployment and network management capabilities, to having a main service line called SageView. It's a full-meal-deal suite of solutions and services that run from the ideation stage all the way through deployment and ongoing management.

These kinds of turnkey, all-in solutions are relatively common now in the marketplace, but the SageNet twist is its deep roots, experience and acumen in the hard-core aspects of networking design, connectivity and cybersecurity.

Dickson started out at SageNet as the digital signage guy, but as business has grown, and with it the staffing and skillsets associated with that work, he now has a role as SageNet's Chief Innovation Officer - looking more broadly at all the technologies that have a role in or influence customer projects.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

IV Dickson, how are you doing, sir? 

IV Dickson: I'm doing well. Thank you, Dave. How are you this morning? 

I am good. We haven't chatted in a while. We did a podcast back in 2019, so I would say it's time for an update. 

IV Dickson: We did. A lot has happened in five years, if nothing else, a pandemic, but also just a lot has happened in the SageNet, and SageView world for us.

Yes. The last time I saw you, we were walking up a very long hill to the Barcelona Football stadium, and you're probably keeping a wary eye on me to make sure I didn't have a heart attack. 

IV Dickson: Yeah, I don't know. It might have been mutual there, Dave, but I do know, though it was worth the walk. I will say that it was worth the walk. 

Every little bit of it.

So over those five years, quite a bit has changed with your company. I would say the big thing from my perspective is five years ago, SageNet was starting to get heavy into digital signage, but it was one of the things that a larger company did. When I look at the website now, I kind of see SageNet leading in certain respects with what it does in terms of digital experience and digital signage in general. Is that a fair assessment?

IV Dickson: It is a fair assessment. And, by the way, my marketing team will be very glad to hear that because I think that's a position that we want to take and have taken. But we've also positioned ourselves in the market to be that, but also executed in the market to be that, and I think if I think about five years ago, one of the things I think I probably even said it five years ago in, in this podcast was we're a managed service provider in an integrator world. That really hasn't changed in many respects. There are still great integrators out there. However, what really has changed for us is the way people are now coming and looking at digital experience, digital engagement, and pure digital signage, right? 

Call it passive or a kind of consumable digital signage. It's become more important today than ever to manage that in an ongoing fashion, and management is not just content. It's everything. Is the screen on? Is the player running? If it's broken, or when it's broken, how are you getting it fixed? And that's a big piece of the puzzle, and over five years, we've grown a lot. I mean, we've grown exponentially to be honest in this area. We were a few customers with a few thousand devices out in the world, and now we're north of a hundred thousand devices that are under management in that digital experience realm.

So, as a managed services company as a whole, what do digital signage and digital signage-sih activities represent for the company? I don't need an exact percentage, but I'm curious. 

IV Dickson: That's a great question because it's something that actually was a driver for me in my previous role at SageNet as the VP of digital signage and digital experience: to make it a consequential piece of our business. And so at this point in time, whereas five years ago, it was just a mosquito kind of on the sideline of our portfolio. It is now one of the pillars of our organization. So if you look at our organization, historically, we still track the traditional managed services of circuitry and router switch firewalls. However, now, the idea of IOT and IOT management, digital experience, and digital signage management kind of lined up in three pillars for us. 

I have heard a few times now that one of the things that's really changed in the last five years or so again is how, historically, the first meetings that you would have with a larger enterprise-level customer or prospective customer would be with the visual merchandising people, HR people, business communicators, that sort of thing, and the IT people would be there, but only begrudgingly. And, now they tend to lead these initiatives and guide them. 

Have you seen that? Does it help the case for SageNet because they're familiar with the kind of work that you do? 

IV Dickson: Yes, and yes. Yes, we are seeing that shift in who's leading the effort, and yes, that has been obviously fruitful for SageNet, but also just for the market as in general, to be honest. What I mean by that is that the marketing initiative has not been dampened; it's still the guiding light or the Northstar associated with the effort.

Now, you're getting buy-in from the organization about the importance of this type of infrastructure in a distributed environment. So if you have a thousand restaurants or five hundred or a thousand stores, all of a sudden, when you have a director or even a CIO-level IT person in the room saying this is something that's consequential to our business, that changes the level of investment from a general brand perspective. The other thing that we've seen, to be honest, is that we've seen its scope outside of it, marketing and even operational folks that are in the building, or as everybody's talking about retail media networks and how this bigger trade or merchandiser world factors into that conversation as well, depending on the brand.

One of SageNet's other big pillars is cybersecurity. Are you finding that's helpful in the pitch and in the ongoing effort for clients in that you have that pedigree, you have that understanding? It's not, “Yeah, we do have a cyber guy. His name is, let me look it up.” It's part of your DNA. 

IV Dickson: Exactly. It's one of the greatest parts of our extended portfolio. So, about a year ago, I took the role of chief innovation officer, and it's been a journey for me, not only to understand some of the technologies that I didn't understand well but also to understand some of the technologies and wrap my brain around how do customers see that footprint and to your point about cyber security if you look not only at cyber, but you look at how cellular is affecting the market and you also look at the pure infrastructure that's going into one of these restaurants or into one of these retailers, and you start to realize that the POS that used the point of sale that used to be one of the primary network consumers, and by the way, it's still one of the primary from a cyber perspective. 

However, it's a very small footprint compared to all the other aggregate devices that they now have talking on the network, whether that be IOT monitoring devices or whether it be digital signage and digital experience devices, or whether it be guest and or brand WiFi, all of a sudden the cyber level or the management of that connectivity becomes even more important than it was maybe ten years ago. And now you have changes in that market around not only how it's managed, but also around protocols that are being utilized, and you start to look at PCI 4. 0, and all of a sudden the brands are getting that much more intense in their needs, but also smarter in their requirements.

And so when you bring in a media player and a screen, they no longer say, “Hey, we're going to stick this on the network.” They want a deep dive into how that's going to communicate and communicate with what and for what purposes. 

Yeah. I think many more traditional pro IV integration companies and solutions providers lack that perspective and experience.

When you look at something like a restaurant or a retail operation, as you just said, all the different business systems and sensors and everything falling into it, it's just a big chart to be able to try to understand all that. 

IV Dickson: It is, and luckily I have fantastic team members, right?

We've brought in folks with senior-level capabilities from the industry, not only from pure restaurant retail but also from the I.T. on the side. We have fantastic folks in our organization to be able to tackle that because, to your point, one of the differences, and I talked to many of our partners about this in the industry. One of the differences in our business that a lot of people don't recognize from a traditional integrator perspective is when we walk in the door as SageNet, we make two near assumptions. 

If we're talking to a restaurant or even a retailer, we make the assumption that you're geographically dispersed, which means you're probably over at least 5, if not 10, or 50 States. So you're all over the country. But the second assumption we make is that your ownership environment is potentially variable. What that means is it could be a franchise, a dealer, or some qualification of the licensee, and in that scenario, you're then adding a layer of complexity to that individualized brick-and-mortar environment that you're servicing, and that creates major complexity in the process. 

Yeah, cause they might not all use the same business systems for some core operations, right? 

IV Dickson: You got it. Especially when you get into the dealer and licensee world, and that's really where our focus on that, what happens in the “four walls” of that local environment, and then how do we bring that back to a more macro level of IT and AV management? 

One of the things that SageNet did, and I assume, added to its breadth of capabilities and bench strength, was acquiring Convergent back in, I think, 2021. Why was that done, and what does that meant? 

IV Dickson: We did acquire Convergent Media Systems back in 2021 and it’s an interesting conversation about why was it done versus what has it meant. I think actually it's relative to both, and yet there's some separation, right? The interesting thing that a lot of folks don't know is that there was some distant relationship between SageNet and Convergent prior to the acquisition because of the VSAT environment that SageNet acquired from SpaceNet, the better part of 10+ years ago, and so part of our business is VSAT Uplink for connectivity and Convergent back in the day was doing much of their delivery of Corp comm and digital signage and whatnot, TV broadcast type work over VSAT protocols. 

So there was some natural connection there that kind of tied the two organizations together. However, at the really the kind of height of the pandemic, luckily, in some respects, but also prescribed in others, SageNet had grown, and our SageView digital offering had grown to about half of the size that it is today, and we've done that organically, right? We had team members that we had grown a fair amount of operational team members at the time. We had brought on Rob Suffoletta back from the Seneca day to day, and he was there a few years ago. And, so things were starting to churn, and we were about half the size that we are today.

The acquisition at the time of Convergent took that business and positioned it in a place where it was about double, not quite, but about double, and so it was very substantial. The other piece of that puzzle and I'm very proud to say this, is we acquired some really fantastic folks in that acquisition, including some real leaders in the digital industry who have substantially more experience than I do, 30 years in this industry from broadcast to digital signage. So, in that moment, we kind of bolstered our operational environment. 

What subsequently has happened, and it's a good outcome of any acquisition when you can make this happen, we are now a broader force to deal with in the market. So our capabilities are beyond just Installation, monitoring, and management of hardware and software, and now we have capabilities to build solutions, to code against APIs and or pure I.P. We also have creative capabilities to augment what customers may have or what they may want through our experience labs group and so there's the footprint now of the capabilities that we bring to the table is a much more rounded out environment than it was three years ago when we first made that acquisition. 

Now, does that all roll up under SageViw? 

IV Dickson: Yes, that's correct. Yeah, SageView is a SageNet sub-brand, as you would call it, and that is specifically digital experience and digital signage. There's some kind of muddying of the waters between that and our SageIoT environment. 

I remember going back a couple of years, I think I referenced it as kind of a full meal deal offer now that you can take a project right from the idea stage all the way through to ongoing management and do things like you just mentioned, doing the creative work and so on.

IV Dickson: Yes, that's exactly right. And if you look at just digital experience, our capabilities to now engineer and design an outcome and a solution and then bring that to fruition by hardware acquisition as well as configure kit and install. But then all of that, as we still really talk about on a daily basis, it's every conversation that we have. We do a lot of that just for the purpose of day two because still, five years later, we talked about this five years ago, I'm sure, the value of that technology is on day two or day fifty or day five hundred. It's only as somebody in my organization says: day one is only cool for 24 hours, right?

So that's really a big piece of that. But then, as we were talking about earlier, with regards to the portfolio, when you expand that digital experience, that SageView footprint and you start to add SageConnect, whether that be cellular or otherwise, you start to add SageIoT, then all of a sudden the footprint even gets bigger in terms of that, and that's really where we strive, and you look at someone like Noodles & Co, for example, that's a solution that we have been a network provider for many years. Last year, we subsequently rolled out to all of their corporate locations with digital and a network upgrade. but that's where the entire infrastructure of those four walls is key to that conversation.

Are you having companies come to you primarily with the idea that SageNet is capable of handling the degree of scale that we're looking at. We need to be out to 800 stores in the next six months or something like that versus jobs that, let's say, an Electrosonic, those kinds of companies might do that's an airport, it's one location. It's one big wow factor thing that I suppose you guys could do in theory, but that's not really your sweet spot, is it? 

IV Dickson: No, not at all. And actually, to be totally honest with you, we sometimes leave those deals on the table on purpose and when you talk about scale and deployment, that is such a key piece to this environment that people do forget and it's hard to roll out that type of technology not only at scale but fast, and these retailers and restaurants expect fast.

Back in 2021, we were in the midst of a deal that we are still managing today. They had extremely high expectations of rollout, and we were doing nearly 300 installations a day during the month of June 2021, and we did the better part of 10,000 installations in eleven months. 

Was this retail or QSR? 

IV Dickson: Retail, but I mentioned Noodles & Co, that's about 400 locations. We did all of that in the 2023 calendar year for the most part, some 95+ percent.

So you have to have some serious project managers. 

IV Dickson: We do have some serious project managers. That's one of the things I really like is we have those called macro or global project managers. We also have a really amazing field management team, and those folks are dealing with config, the kit, and our national logistics center and getting it out. Then, the onsite technicians make sure that the installation is done correctly. 

Is the competitive landscape evolving? Are you seeing different kinds of companies getting in the competitive mix of opportunities? 

IV Dickson: You know, when you started to ask that question, I thought, boy, howdy, has it changed!

If you look at the vertical markets, some things are identical to what they were before. I would say retail is still pretty similar. The folks who play in retail and who really excel in retail haven't changed a ton. Where we do see a lot of change in the market space from a competitive landscape perspective, QSR is a quick-serve restaurant and fast casual. Not only are there a lot of new names, but they're also not really new to the market. They're new in that space. There's also a lot of different offerings and it's very cloudy. It's extremely cloudy and selecting a provider because we're not there's a, there are a handful of folks that do what we do or similar to what we do.

There's a handful of folks who really are on the manufacturing side and creating great technologies. But they're selling those as holistic solutions, and they might not be, and then you still have the historic landscape of the content management systems, and CMS is out there that everybody goes, well, I don't know what to do with 85 CMSs, right? So that's where the competitive landscape is still the same, and yet you are seeing a lot of volatility in who's in the room. 

Does it get murky because you have all kinds of companies with different sorts of software-driven systems that can bolt on a very rudimentary digital signage application and say, okay, here we've got a digital menus application for you? You don't need to buy a license, a CMS, or something else; just use this. Do you get those questions? 

IV Dickson: You do, and you get some of that bolt-on conversation, and by the way, some of that is probably in our pitch deck as well because there are things that we do that are custom to a customer or customized for a customer around that. However, if you think about my background, I was at Scala Stratacache and back at NanoNation, and we're talking over 20 years, I've watched a lot of that change. I think a lot of people today, there's two factors that kind of drive that. 

One is that many people don't understand the complexity of managing an enterprise-level menu. They think they're template managers; they think simple integrations will do it. When you get down to what might be fifty or a hundred or even two hundred configurations, it's extremely complex to manage all that content and data.

I think the other thing though, that's driving that conversation that the customer really struggles with picking the right solution is today, data integration and usage in menus is higher than it's ever been. The ability to get calories and price and even dynamic images or have dynamic capabilities to resort menus based on configurations. There's more landscape around that type of capability than we've ever had before. That clutters the idea of what my CMS does in its pure interface. What is the UI to take care of versus what am I going to have to go build and manage? And we, to be honest, in many respects, have fantastic CMS partners, and yet we downplay the use of that interface because most customers want that managed, and so they're not going to go and become experts inside of a CMS interface.

Yeah. Years ago, a very large QSR contacted me. They were very irritated with their CMS company because of some business moves that they made. They engaged me as a consultant, and one of the first questions was, what do you think of the software, because, you know, they wanted to consider moving on from it. 

And I said, well, we've never seen it, and I said, pardon me, and they said, well, it's all managed, and I said, well, can you get a log in? And they're like, well, we can ask for one, but we've never logged in or anything, and I thought, whoa, this is like completely managed remotely. I guess it was a glimpse of where a lot of the business was going because you'd want to focus on making coffees or whatever.

IV Dickson: Yeah, it is, absolutely, and also, you have layers of software that are above the CMS now that are as valuable or more valuable, and yet they feed the outcome of the CMS, right? They feed the outcome of the menu, so if you have mobile data, a menu data management system, Adobe Experience Manager, or some other creative digital asset management environment, those are all sitting in a macro environment above that CMS, feeding into it and then getting distributed to those individual locations. 

With SageU, you also introduced something called digital merchandiser two or three months ago, where you're doing some degree of software, like presentation-level software and management software, that might more traditionally be done by a CMS.

Is there a bit of a dance that you have to do with your partners where it doesn't feel like you're starting to eat through their lunch? 

IV Dickson: Yes and no. I think the real key to that conversation is that SageNet builds and deploys solutions in the end. We utilize best-in-breed outcomes from hardware and software providers to do that, and we utilize incredibly talented and skilled folks on the inside of our team who do that as well. Our head of R&D, David Kai, who also oversees our IOT buildout, comes to the table and sees this from a greater solution perspective.

So when you bring him into the room, it's not a CMS discussion. It's an outcome-driven customer and customer outcome-driven environment, and you and I have joked online. We talked a little bit about it in Barcelona. This is actually where I embrace the idea of physigital. I know there's a lot of people who don't like that, right? However, if you really think about the idea of physigital beyond just marketing fodder and you think physical and digital, the consumer who has made the decision to go to a brick-and-mortar location, they've made the decision to go to a C Store, they've made a decision to go to a restaurant, they've made a decision to go to a retailer. They have the expectation of how digital technology is going to affect that, but it's just grown exponentially over the last five to ten years, especially with the pandemic. It created a situation where we did almost everything digitally. So now we're going back to that. 

When you really think in that four-wall environment, and you think about, okay, they made it to my physical location. I now want digital to enhance their experience, then digital works for me, right? It becomes something of value. To that end, then we had to take what the infrastructure was and the solutions were the best-in-breed pieces that we had, and create solutions around that. So you mentioned digital merchandiser, there's a new video out that's about an artificial intelligence shoe kiosk that we showed. 

It's about the integration of all the parts and bringing those to a space where they become seamless for the consumer, but they become wildly valuable for the brand. I joked at NRF because we showed lift and learn, and I've shown lift at learning at NRF before.

Probably in 2004? 

IV Dickson: You got it, right? However, the idea is that I walk into the store, look at something in the mobile app, walk up to the AI kiosk, ask it for a product, it shows me where that product is, I pick it up, and I'm then having a web and physical experience in a very similar manner, or a digital and physical experience.

Those capabilities have become possible because our engineering base in what we monitor and manage was extremely solid. We added the team members, not only through acquisition but also through a refinement of how we engage through experience labs and bringing David Kai into those conversations with software development capabilities and then really listening to our customer's voice is key for this, and so that's a big piece of this puzzle is really listening to what the customer is trying to accomplish, and finding the avenues where digital can help with that, not replace it, not be the only thing, but help with that transaction.

Last question. I'm curious because we've mentioned Barcelona a couple of times. I go for my own reasons. A lot of people go over cause they're selling stuff or whatever. As a chief innovation officer, I suspect you're going over there because there's great wine, but that you're there to kind of see what's emerging, what's different, and it's a different walk than what you're going to do, walking around NRF or InfoComm, that sort of thing? 

IV Dickson: Yeah, very much so. I mean, ISE, for me, is still a location that has more value. Visual technology in one place than anywhere else. I can spend three or four days walking around somewhat by myself or with colleagues, friends, or folks from the industry. But I can consume that and be able to say to myself, what's out there that I'm not using, or how can I use something differently? You know, I use a quote many days, I think it was the MTV founder who said, “Innovation is taking two things that are known and putting them together in a new way.”

I think that's actually the thing that we've somewhat forgotten in this industry is that sometimes we don't have to go build something brand new if we can make something new and interesting out of pieces we already have. And, Barcelona, regardless of location, although Barcelona is a great location, the reality of that conversation is I go to look to see like, what are people doing? What is starting to drive the industry? And to see the year-over-year refinement of transparent OLED, and to see now the influx of transparent, or call them holographic, I don't know that I would call them that, but that's what the Muxwave folks call them that, that environment, but then also now to see what's going on with Kinetic LED and moving pieces and parts while the LED is showing visual capabilities. But then, even going back, I took a video of Epson. They had a massive umbrella, and it was covered in projectors. It was just a reminder that technology is out there and how it gets used.

People often forget that this industry is not entirely new, and yet there are many different ways to do stuff that are actually super exciting. 

Yeah, I always say these trade shows are not about giant leaps; they're incremental advances, and you have to have the knowledge and experience where it's helpful to have that knowledge and experience to recognize, I go, oh, that's interesting, they've done this. It's not like I'm blown away by it, but oh, they've conquered this little challenge, and now it's better.

IV Dickson: Yeah, that's exactly right. 

IV, we could talk for three hours, but I try to keep these to a certain time window, so I'm going to shut this down. It was great chatting.

IV Dickson: Dave, thank you so much for the time, and look forward to seeing you soon out on the road.

Nick Johnson, NowSignage

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company called NowSignage. He'd seen a lot of different options, but these guys he said, had something that was very modern and nimble.

I finally got my act together and scheduled a chat with founder Nick Johnson. Now's roots are in pushing social media messaging to big screens at live events - like concerts and big games. Requests started evolving, both in terms of what could be done with screens and how long they'd be used - which led in part to him concluding the future business was in permanent installations and revenue that was recurring and predictable, versus periodic.

Now markets its product as being affordable and not focused on a particular market segment, like QSR, workplace or whatever. That generalist approach tends to worry me, because buyer decisions tend to get focused on price, as in who costs the least. But in my chat with Johnson, he explains that their market focus is on what he calls multi-screen management - networks with a lot of locations and a lot of screens. Most companies would also say they want that and do that, but as Johnson explains in our chat, that's easy to talk about, but much harder to do well.

I also had to ask about the Frankenstein'd Rolls-Royce that was the eye candy for the NowSignage stand at ISE in Barcelona.

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TRANSCRIPT

Nick, thank you for joining me. I know NowSignage reasonably well. I suspect a lot of other people do as well, but could you maybe just give me a rundown on the background of the company, what it is you do, what's distinct, that sort of thing? 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, sure. Cheers for having me on, Dave.

And, yeah, nice to be here. Yeah, so NowSignage, for those who don't know who we are, is a UK-based business that has been around since 2013. A lot of people thought we launched a market and were in a big whirlwind storm about six years ago, but actually, the tech has been being developed since 2013 now, and then we really honed in on the permanent signage market around seven or eight years ago, really.

In terms of signage, we position ourselves as a multi-screen management platform that allows our users to effectively and efficiently manage large networks of screens. So, we don't really focus on a specific vertical specialism. So, with IE, we're not a specific sector, like a corporate sector outright or anything like that. Our specialism is really around meeting the needs and demands of projects that have multiple screens, often in multiple locations or multiple sites, so those large-volume projects are our specialism. 

Now, I would imagine most software companies would say: we can fully support large enterprise level, big footprint projects across multiple locations and all that, so that doesn't immediately hit me as a distinction, but I'm guessing you're going to tell me that it's easier said than done? 

Nick Johnson: Exactly. So normally, as you say, with CMSs, and we found it ourselves in the early days, we had an eye on those bigger projects, but in reality, as soon as it got above 50 screens, that becomes a challenge for a CMS. It's got a different thought process that needs to go into the CMS from an intuitive nature, but also, your platform needs to be built to kind of balance those enterprise features alongside the simplicity, flexibility, and scalability of the platform. 

So yeah, there are some nuances that, for sure, where if you want to manage those large scale projects, you really need to nail the ability to make it as easy as possible for those end users to target specific screens with specific promotions or specific content and that's quite a powerful and hard to achieve thing within a CMS. It's all about bringing those features to enable that functionality. 

So, if I'm an end user or even a reseller integrator looking at different options out there, what's my sniff test (or smell test) to determine who can genuinely support large-scale networks like that? 

Is it data integration, you know, is it elasticity, at the server level? What are those things? 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, both of those, obviously, come into consideration. The way we position our product is that we ultimately want it to be self managed by the user. So if it can't be easy to be managed by the user, then you've got a problem, and to make it easy to be managed by the user, you do need those features in the platform like very advanced targeted tags or roles and permissions for locking down areas of the platform.

The targeted tags will allow people to target localized stores with localized messages based on the tagging functionality. I'd probably say the most important thing is just giving that flexibility throughout the platform. You can't say that all scheduling has to be done in the scheduling area. You need to be more flexible on that. So in the NowSignage CMS, we enable certain degrees of different types of scheduling to happen, whether it's in the content area, the actual playlist area, the scheduling area, and even at the screen’s level, there are different types of tools that you can use to meet the requirements of the customer. 

So, it's not always one size fits all. You have to go to that customer and say, look, we've got this feature set here that makes it easy to manage large networks. What's your specific requirement here? And we may turn around and go, great. You want to use our targeted tags and our override functionality, or we might say you want to use nested playlists and the ability to set assets to show and remove at set dates and times. So, it's giving that broader flexibility within the CMS to adapt to their needs. 

I'm curious as well about the whole idea of affordability. It's one of the things that comes across on your site pretty quickly that you talk about it being cost effective and affordable. But it's also pretty sophisticated, like a lot of the platforms that say they're affordable, it's because, they do the basics. 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I'm glad you used the word affordable there because I don't like the word cheap. So, for us, it's not a race to the bottom. We're not about being the cheapest. We're about being what you get out of our package, which is the most affordable. It's the most cost-effective. So you get the most amount of performance out of our platform for the cost and ratio. So yeah, it's all about affordability. So, with the platform, we don't charge for add-ons within the platform. 

When you get access to NowSignage, you get access to all our features and functionality, and you even get access to them as we roll out new features and functionality; they become free for all end users to use. So that's why we appeal, as I said at the start there, we don't really have a sector specialism; we focus on the type of customer that we want to work with, and then often those customers we find because we operate, let's say with lots of supermarkets, a supermarket isn't just a retail requirement in the front of the store. A true requirement for a supermarket is actually they want to centralize that CMS and they have a retail requirement. They have a retail media network requirement. They have a digital out-of-home requirement. They have a back office requirement. They have a factory and manufacturing plant requirement. So all of these requirements are completely different, and the NowSignage platform allows those users to pull on different features and functionalities in the platform.

So they may in their manufacturing plant use our Microsoft Power BI integration for showing dispatch information and fleet management, whereas in the retail media network, they might be using our proof of play functionality, which, as you've alluded to, is very much an enterprise feature and it normally very often doubles the cost of a license. We absorb all of those costs, from our servers and so on because we spread that across our whole customer base. So, yeah, it's absolutely the most affordable is how we position ourselves, not the cheapest in the race to the bottom. 

Yeah, I've often said that if you're going to be a generalist, that can be a little deadly because you are just competing on price by and large, but what you're saying is, we go across a number of vertical sectors, but we're not really a generalist because our specialty is large, multi-screen networks.

Nick Johnson: Yeah, and what you will get with those networks as well, because of the types of brands and customers that you're working with for those projects, it's not really about just selling features and competing on cost for those large networks. Now, obviously, they will be price-driven because often they go out to tender, so you do need the ability to really come down on your price, which we have that capability to do so we can be very competitive on price, but equally, what the brands wanna see is they really want to build a partnership with that CMS to get confidence from you that you are advising them on how to structure their account to maximize the usage of your platform, to meet their goals and of what they require from the network.

So if you can communicate and instill that confidence, I think that's really where you find the winning edge to things. 

You also, as a company, say that your hardware is agnostic. I have seen all kinds of companies go down that path, and many of them then almost surrender and come up with their own dedicated player devices. 

I don't think it's because they're making extra hardware margin; it's just that they grow wary of trying to support all these different types of hardware, and the much easier path is to just have their own, which they can control because they know the build and everything else. So, how do you manage being agnostic across so many different platforms?

Nick Johnson: Yeah, so it's all about getting the feature parity across all those different operating systems. There are so many out there. You've got the standard kind of Android, Windows, Linux, all of those. But then you've got the more proprietary ones with the system on chip, where a lot of them are really using an Android base there but you've got Samsung with Tizen, LG with WebOS, BrightSign with their setup there. So, yeah, we've got one centralized code base, and so I probably can't share too much about that and give our full game away, but yeah, we've got one centralized code base set, which delivers feature parity across all those builds.

So when we make a change within the platform, we don't need to make it for seven different builds or ten different builds. We don't have to support lots of builds of the platform, meaning lots of developers. We have one centralized build, and that is built in a way that is then compatible with all operating systems out there. So you may have seen that on our stand at ISE. At ISE, we had three or four BrightSign displays. We had a large video wall that was powered by a Windows player. We had a Sony system on-chip display and a Samsung system on-chip display, and on one setup there via the show Wi-Fi, which is very flaky at times, we managed to achieve perfect screen synchronization across different hardware again, which is quite unusual. 

Not only are we offering parity across the hardware, but actually with features like Screen Sync, we can bring all of that together and actually offer the synchronization to take into account those different processing powers and speeds and so on.

Does that mean if you inherit a network and you're then going to expand on it and it has multiple different operating systems on different devices and so on, you can manage them all off of your application without having something in the middle, like Signage OS or whatever?

Nick Johnson: Absolutely, and I think that's what's so important with the types of customers that we're onboarding is that they will have a network that's out there that's got legacy hardware and screens in there, and they're not in a position where they want a huge outlay of cost to go and transform all that hardware over brand new hardware. So because we can sit on a system on a chip, we can sit on the media players, we also work closely with those partners, as you've mentioned, the Signage OS, if there was a requirement there, then we could sit alongside that. But generally, because we have that feature parity and the hardware-agnostic approach, there's no requirement for that additional layer that needs to be added, so it can reduce all the costs and also mean that the network can be rolled out at relative ease and speed as well. 

Some of the other software applications out there that say they are hardware agnostic, they're able to do that because it's a somewhat truncated application. It's a web player or something. So yes, you can get content, all the different operating systems or whatever, but it's not a pure player. It can't do everything that a native player could do. 

Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, ours is a full application in the way that it's powered. So we are a Chrome OS partner, and we can run through a browser mode or any sort of environment like that where it needs to be embedded into a web page or as a browser player, but yeah, the way our code base packages or fit packages, or everything is its own native application.

A few companies have started talking, well, they've been talking about a few things, but one of them is this idea of headless CMS and the idea that, if I have a tool set that I'm already using within a larger company, that's pushing out to web, mobile, intranet, extranet, whatever it may be, they want to use that tool set to also do digital signage as opposed to logging into a separate application.

Can you do that sort of thing? 

Nick Johnson: So are you referring to embedding us into different environments so that we could be played within an intranet environment? 

Probably more so that the development, the scheduling, a lot of what you would do for a digital sign network, you could do within another application, and the digital signage platform is kind of the plumbing, the infrastructure that moves things around.

It's kind of the way that Samsung with VXT now is positioning itself as you can write your application on top of our platform. 

Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, normally, we operate with a fully open API. So we really want to be the source and the conduit for everything coming into it. So we won't go out there and build some specialist functionality that other platforms already build a lot better than us, like a Microsoft Power BI integration; we wouldn’t try and build something like that or a Quividi integration that we've got if we want to do audience measurement with camera systems and so on, we have an API there. So we can pull all of those great features and functionality together and then be the source to output that. 

Similar to QSR environments, things like with the API, we sit in harmony with their product systems. So, if they want to do dynamic pricing, we will just be another outlay to them. They will look at the output to all the other different avenues for that pricing, and we will just be a different source that they're inputting into. Then, we'll showcase that dynamic pricing data on the screen. So yeah, we've got an open API, and we're kind of pulling all that data resource into NowSignage.

I would imagine the data side of things is super important, the ability to support all that? 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, from two angles, really. In terms of the data capacity on our side, we've just gone through a full year's process of improving and upgrading our infrastructure. So, the infrastructure of a CMS is super important. It is arguably what sets a lot of CMSs apart. You've found in recent years that there are certain CMSs that have risen to the top and that they're probably the ones that have invested in their infrastructure, their scalability as a brand, and their security. So, likewise, we've done the same. 

Our infrastructure is invaluable to the platform. If we have downtime or anything that's going to impact our size of customers, which isn't acceptable, but also the data that we can then pull together and aggregate to then analyze and give back to the customers inside the platform is obviously crucial as well, and that's probably going to be a big focus for us this year.

We already have features like proof of play in the platform that can report on when, where, and how many times an advert is played on the screen, and all of that is live data that comes through. So customers don't need to wait for that data, and we obviously have lots of information about the status of the screens and the uptime status and the ability to kind of set them to go on and off and push our app updates and all of that kind of good stuff. But I think that will be a big push this year to analyze and help our customers understand that data more and more, knowing exactly where their screens are and what's happening with them. 

Your company is young enough in relative terms that I suspect you're not saddled with some of the problems that, or challenges that, really well established companies may have in terms of they have a software application that's, they've been building off of for 15-30 years, in some cases, versus what you've got.

If you started in 2013 and you kind of emerged a few years after that, you've got a platform that's using modern web tools and everything else, and you're a lot more malleable, I suspect. 

Nick Johnson: Exactly, and a lot of the team that I've brought together as well, we're all from completely different sectors, but before that, created and delivered and brought to market a very successful SaaS business there in a completely different sector.

So, as I built this business, I brought on a lot of the expertise from the old CTO, and my investor and my business partner are from that background as well. So right at our core, we understand how SaaS businesses and tech need to work. So we're not from a hardware background. We're not interested in the hardware. We're interested in it. How can this software be the most efficient and scalable piece of software and also the most innovative piece of software? 

So you're right, probably the timing of it and in the sense that digital signage had kind of become to get a bit more established around that point and knew its place, so we don't have all the legacy burden of the hardware and having to build on and revamp our infrastructure with. 

We've managed to build a very clean UI from day one, but also from the experience and background of myself, but also the people that I've built around the team, where we're really focused on SaaS and technology and innovation, that's what we live and breathe every day, really.

And the company kind of grew out of, or at least was inspired by, I believe, it was pushing social media to screens at live events. Is that correct? 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, let's be honest. It was probably me just having a bit of fun in my mid-twenties at that point. So, yeah, the way it all started was I was working for a company that was a web agency at that point, developing websites. And so my part in that business was that we developed a piece of technology that was embedding social feeds into those websites. So, at the time, just before 2013, I separated that as a separate company and thought, wouldn't it be great if we could get some social content onto screens at events. 

This was kind of around the time that the Twitter walls were emerging. So it was right at the early stage of that. So our first ever event was actually at the Olympic stadium, and we were powering the big screens where people were taking Instagram pictures and popping them onto big screens and I couldn't really believe what I'd got into at that point. So, I just enjoyed the ride for a few years. We got shipped around all over the world, doing large events and as we did more of those events, I suppose the platform evolved, which is why the platform is so intuitive and focused just around the software because we kind of started off with that base and then we were doing events where people then wanted to advertise onto the screen.

So we had to bring in some advertising capability to show images and videos, and then before we knew it, we started doing some more permanent setups where we needed to bring in that better structure and management and, then, as I say, probably around, I can't remember the exact date now, but it must've been around seven or eight years ago. Just overnight, it was 90 percent of our revenue at the time, I just decided we needed to focus on permanent signage. That was the model that was going to work. That's the sustainable model and the growth model that we wanted. So we kind of just made the ballsy move at that point that we were ditching all of that income, and we focused permanently on permanent digital signage and because we have the background of the platform already, as I say, people were looking at us going, who are these guys who have come to market and we've just kind of won four AV awards in a row. But, actually, it's because the software was there, and we actually just needed to understand what the channel was and what the industry was and that's what we focused on, and we don't sell directly at all. We only sell directly through our resell reseller channel, whether it's a balance of integrators or distributors, and that's how we now go to market. 

It's funny, I was talking about that with somebody else yesterday about the channel and the opportunities and challenges of doing that and how difficult it can be to sell direct if you also have channel partners.

You're kind of saying that you've got to choose door number one or door number two. You can't go through both. 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I think it's a fine balance, and I'd say certainly in where we come from, it's always through the channel, but I have seen some variances globally that some people say that the channel in Europe, and then in the US that they're selling direct because they get a big contract and the brand wants to work direct.

We've actually just secured a very large project in the US, which is great news for us, but the relationship of that is that we engaged directly and we built trust with the end user and we demonstrated our platform, but now it's come through to a commercial point. We are absolutely funneling that through the channel because that's how you build that trust and that relationship with the channel. So that's now being commercially funnel funneled through one of our channel partners, and then off the back of that. For us, there's no way that we can; we would never do a direct deal because that kind of breaks our whole model of how we're going to market and how we're building trust with our resellers that they're ultimately our partner and our direct customer. 

And are you white-labeled and totally behind the curtain, or would the end user know that this is NowSignage as managed by Brand X?

Nick Johnson: In almost all circumstances, they will know it's NowSignage. What we don't do is we don't do white labels for our resellers. We want them to proudly shout about it being NowSignage. So everybody at the sales point knows that they are purchasing NowSignage. In some instances, once it then goes through the end user, they go, great, we're now using NowSignage, but actually, we want our staff to log into an environment that feels familiar and friendly to them; at that point, we can white label for the end user, but at no point is it hidden and that it's NowSignage. It's NowSignage all the way and then when the end users dive in, we can white label to an end user requirement. 

Yeah, I've always wondered about white labeling. I understand the task and everything, but if you do that as a reseller, there's then an expectation you really know your way around the software, and I suspect that there are a lot of uncomfortable phone calls and meetings. 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, and also, I think you get that frustration as well. We've found fortunately that we've managed to secure some of those resellers who have traditionally sold a white-labeled CMS, and the frustrations that they've actually ended up happening is that they get a demand from an end user to say, we need this feature, and we need it right now.

Now, it's not their code base. They don't own the IP. They don't own the code. They've got no developers. So, at that point, they have to go back to the CMS and say, can you build this? But I think from a CMS's point of view, that kind of, like, well, you're a white-label solution so you now just need to join the queue of things, whereas with us, we have that open dialogue with the end user and with our reseller. So if a request comes in, it funnels straight to us, and we control that kind of destiny of where those features come in, and we're very transparent with that roadmap to react. 

ISE was a couple of months ago. You guys were there when I was walking around. I was expecting to hear a lot more about AI from different software companies. Here's how we're using AI. Here's how we're applying it. Here's the opportunity, and so on. 

But maybe it's just early stages, and I just didn't hear much. I'm curious what you guys are doing with it or you're kind of sitting on the sidelines watching it?

Nick Johnson: No, we're absolutely not sitting on the sidelines watching it, but to have a go at us, we're not shouting about it as much as we probably should be, and what we've found is that we are doing a huge amount of development in the background with AI. So we've already done some integrations into the platform with AI that haven't been released as full features into the platform.

My understanding and the feedback that I'm getting from other CMSs that we talk to and have good relationships with are that AI at the moment; none of the big brands are quite ready to take the first step with it, really. They're all very interested in it, and it's a great opportunity to open a door and start a conversation with them. So we do have AI features built into the platform that can, you can walk up to a screen and tell it what your allergies are, and it can then relay what food is appropriate for you within that store or help you find products within certain aisles or find your preferences. So we're using it as a tool to really open up the door and demonstrate.

But in reality, there's not been a huge amount of adoption from it on our side, and I think that it will come, but I think some of the big brands are just waiting for someone to take the first step to see if it goes well, and then there'll be a lot of people to follow, but we're absolutely in that talking point where we've done a lot of AI development.

Yeah, I think, as you say, a lot of the work isn't really something that is going to be visible to an end-user or to a channel partner. It's work that helps expedite some basic coding and things, right? 

Nick Johnson: Yeah, it's all about bringing in the data and feeding that back to the end user in the cleanest and most efficient manner. So it can become a very powerful tool, where we're seeing it. As I say, a great example would be to walk into a coffee shop and say, “I want something for breakfast, but I've got a nut allergy,” and it can relay all that allergy information and say, this is what we suggest, and if you say, “I don't want anything that has to meat in it,” it will say: here are the vegan options. “Where can I find that?” You can find that on aisle five, it's priced for 99 or whatever it might be. All of that is just pulling live data and using the AI tool to relay that information. 

Just going back to ISE, I can't have this conversation without asking about the Rolls Royce.

Nick Johnson: Yeah. So we had a lot of interest in a lot of questions about why you have got a Rolls Royce there, but I think that's it Dave. But I think for NowSignage and me, we like to get noticed and it's important to get noticed because it's, at times, a crowded marketplace, and I think you've really got to understand that there's a cost of being dull, and a lot of people waste a lot of energy and get drowned out by all this white noise because everyone's saying the same old, same really. So you've got to really consider what is the cost of being dull.

And if you're going to be dull in the events industry, you're going to have an empty stand. You're going to have no pundits on your stand. You're going to be having no conversations. So, it's all about, I think, making people care, making people smile, and surprising them in some way, and if you can hit those three points at any point in any form of marketing, I think you'll get an interest in your sparking debates, really.

So, for people who did not go to ISE, what did you do? 

Nick Johnson: So we bought a 1950s vintage Rolls Royce from a scrap heap, and we did it over three months. My business partner is a fanatic about cars… 

Yes, I met him. 

Nick Johnson: He did it as a bit of a hobby, and before we renovated it, we, to some Rolls Royce lovers, they may not have been happy, but I remind them that it was on a scrap heap, so we did save it in the first place. Wwe chopped it in half, we attached a flatbed truck to it. We then constructed a digital scene on the back to make it look like it was a, like a food van, but actually it was constructed with screens and the digital element created a visual effect to make it look like the screens went up and down and then we drove it 1,300 miles from Manchester in the UK all the way to Barcelona at 50 miles an hour and parked it on the stand. 

So, was it on the back of another truck, or was it a viable rolling vehicle? 

Nick Johnson: So with this setup, and it was over seven meters long unit, so yeah, and because of the age of it, we actually built an electric motor inside it underneath.

So what we did is we transported it on another vehicle that had to drive very slowly, and then when we got it near the venue, we actually drove it in with a remote control by the electric power. So we actually drove because no petrol was allowed in the car, and we remote control it in and reversed it onto the stand and then we had a few gags throughout the show as well, where we got people to sit in and then quickly remove the remote, and they thought that they'd pressed something and made the car move forward. 

Well, that's certainly a lot more eye-grabbing than a bowl full of pens. 

Nick Johnson: I agree. 

So what are you going to do next year? Or you can't tell me? 

Nick Johnson: I am under wraps on that one, but let's just say it's definitely going to be bigger and better. The problem that I think we will have once we do next year is that I'm not too sure how we're going to top it the following year. So, next year is going to be, yeah, pretty impressive.

It is vehicle-related again, but yeah, it's even more impressive. I'm quite looking forward to getting it over there. 

Yeah. Well, the challenge of that is just what you just said. If you one up by yourself every year, then there's an expectation now: what are you gonna do? Is it gonna be a space shuttle or what?

Nick Johnson: Yeah, or just not turn up for any year or so, but I don't think we could do that. 

Nick, thank you. That was terrific. 

Nick Johnson: Excellent. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on, and yeah, I look forward to catching you in Infocomm or wherever I see you next. 

Infocomm and I'll be at the event in Munich in six to seven weeks, something like that, so I’m around.

Nick Johnson: Good stuff. 

All right. Take care. 

Todd Stahl, Clear Motion Glass

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays.

In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes.

So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass?

That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings.

Unlike other products on the market, Clear Motion's LED displays are sandwiched inside sheets of laminated safety glass - so when a building goes up or is being retrofitted, the glass panels that go in are also active, highly-transparent displays.

I had a good chat with Todd Stahl, a glass industry veteran who runs both the established and start-up businesses.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

David: Todd, thank you for joining me. 

Todd Stahl: Hey Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. It's going to be a pleasure to talk about some LED glass with you. 

David: Yeah, tell me about the company. I saw you guys at DSE back in December. You were busy almost the whole time. So I didn't really have the time or the chance to have any kind of a detailed LED conversation, but I know that the company has not been around that long, but it's grown out of a pretty well-established “performance glass company.”

Todd Stahl: Yeah. A little bit about the history there. So, at Clear Motion Glass, we're making the LEDs inside of the glass. I came across the LED glass around June of 2022, so I've had it for just about two years. The parent company is William Penn Performance Glass, and that's another company I started in 2011. We deal with high-end architectural Glass. 

So, a cliffnote version: We go to the top architects in the country, and they're like, “Hey, who are you designing for?” And they'll say to us, “Hey, we want some really cool glass to go in the elevators for the Empire State Building.” So we got into the architectural space with glass, and actually, we'll William Penn, who was just voted one of the top 50 glass producers in North of North America. So something that we're definitely pretty proud of around here. 

Then I came across LED glass around 2022, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen put inside a glass, and I wanted to be a part of it.

David: So when you say you came across it, what do you mean by that? 

Todd Stahl: So, there's another product in glass, another glass product that's been around, I'm going to say right around since 2000. It’s a glass that goes frosted to clear from the turn of a switch, Switchable glass. So there's a company called Smart Film Blinds, and they were an applied film company that would actually take that, what we would call switch glass, but they just took the film and applied it to existing glass, and it was owned by Alan and Tracy Ackerman, and then they had this connection with LED Glass they weren't quite sure what to do with it. They knew it was really cool. And it had a chance to be really something big, but they were more of a film company, and then he and I got introduced, through a need that we had for some smart film, the switchable film, and then eventually we had a partnership for a while.

Then we decided basically that I'll stick with the glass part, what I'm best at, and he'll stick with the film part, which was what they were best with. But that's how I got introduced to it, right around two years ago. 

David: What you're marketing now is Clear Motion Glass. Is that your own product or are you reselling somebody else's manufactured product? 

Todd Stahl: We have partners overseas, such as a company called Filmbase. That's where we get the actual LED grid or LED mesh. We bring that to my facility in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the south-central Pennsylvania area, we're 20 minutes south of Hershey, close to Harrisburg, and then we actually fabricate everything as a finished panel here. So we'll make the glass, we'll get the interlayer components. We have a laminating machine that actually works by pulling a vacuum and heating it up to certain temperatures. After that, it comes out, and we have a clear LED glass display. 

David: So laminated glass is something that's been around forever. So this is just basically sandwiching the mesh in between sheets of laminated glass? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely making a sandwich component. We start with a piece of glass, say that's your component number one. Then, we start with the inner layer materials. 

In a case like this, we use a couple of different techniques, but we use EVA, which is ethyl vinyl acetate. Then we'll actually put the LED mesh grid on top of that, then we put another piece of EVA, then we go with the finished component of the sandwich, another piece of glass, and we stick them in an oven, we run a certain cycle, and about four hours later, we have a laminated piece of glass, exactly how you described. It's a sandwich makeup for sure. 

David: Was there a lot of R&D work involved in it? Because I would imagine if you're putting an LED mesh inside of an oven, then going to a very high temperature and all that, I'm thinking if I didn't know much about this stuff, I'd be wondering, what's all that heat going to do to this thing?

Todd Stahl: Yeah. You know, we have to make sure that it can withstand certain temperatures, obviously, and if you don't heat, and just in general, if you don't get laminated glass hot enough, it doesn't bond, it does not bond correctly. What you have to achieve is cross-linking and cross-linking is basically the interlayer material to the glass itself, and that happens at a temperature of around 110 degrees Celsius, so it's not getting hot enough to cook a Turkey in there, so we're not really dealing with extremes.

I think a lot of people might think when you're actually making glass out of what we call a batch, you know that's where the glass is heated up to 2000 degrees and you're really dealing with some extreme temperatures. It's not quite the same extremes at all when you're dealing with laminated glass. 

David: So tell me what performance glass is, and what high-end performance glass is because I don't know the glass world terribly well. 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, sure. So, so what William Penn performance glass is the performance name kind of all started because our glass looks great and it, but it's an all safety rated glass. So that's kind of the performance part of the glass. So, if you're looking at our glass, say that's used for glass handrails, that's a very specific glass that's chosen to withstand the certain load requirements of a structural application, and typically most of our handrails are tempered, and laminated glass.

So there are two ways on this planet to make a piece of glass safety-rated. You either temper it or you laminate it. We happen to do both of those things in a lot of our projects, and it's kind of funny like obviously safety-rated glass is strong, but the only thing that's really taken into consideration when you're referring to safety glass are you automatically assume it's going to break and what happens when it breaks, right? So with tempered glass, you put a lot of stress on the glass itself through a heating and cooling process, and whenever that glass breaks, it breaks into small panels that would not be able to potentially cause a life-threatening wound, and then you have the exact opposite with laminated where if a rock hits your car, if that's ever happened to you the rock doesn't come through and the pieces of the glass, the shards don't come through, they stay together. So you got those two things to the requirements when you're thinking about what is safety rated glass. 

David: With the Clear Motion product, is it an indoor product only, an outdoor facing product, or what are the use cases? 

Todd Stahl: So what's really cool about our LED glass is that almost wherever you're using architectural glass right now, you can now use our LED displays. So it can be used in exterior applications, a building facade, glass canopies, and railings that may be exterior. All of the components are kind of encapsulated inside that glass, and that glass is making a nice, really safe, cozy home for the LED display inside of it.

David: And it's bright enough that it can be on a glass curtain wall like an auto dealer? 

Todd Stahl: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the really cool applications for it. In fact, you had mentioned at the trade show and boy, were we busy? I think I was just talking about this yesterday. We scanned around 450 people in that short show. Our voices were a little strained by the end of the evening.

So, the brightness of our display at the show, Dave, was only running around 4%, and I thought that was one of the more amazing things about the product because it was still kind of bright at 4%. Later we started bringing that up because a few potential clients wanted to see it at 50-60% brightness. So yeah, you can totally use this as an exterior sign and get whatever brightness you need. I think some of the products are well over 10,000 nits depending on the needs, and I think one actually lasted up to 15,000 nits, so plenty bright for the outside. 

David: Yeah, once you get to 3,500, you're good. 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, exactly.

David: On transparency. I see on your website that it says there is up to 90 percent transparency. 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, so when you get to some of the pixel pitches that are viewed from say, a distance of around a hundred feet, I think the pixel pitch at a 20, I believe that one may allow up to 90 percent of light to come through. It's really cool. I mean, you have this really great display, and then you're just getting all this, and you're not cutting off any spaces so if you have a traditional LED display, you can only view that from one side and I think that's kind of what's really amazing about this product and a lot of times when you're looking at the product, you don't even realize that it's transparent until the image would say it's rotating from one image to the next. And you're like, Oh, wow, that's clear, there are people behind there. So I think, yeah, it's really cool in that application. 

David: From what I saw, because it's this mesh material, with super thin wiring in between each of the LED lights. 

The challenge I've had with a lot of trans or “transparent products” is that they look good from the front side, particularly at a distance, but when you look at the back end of the things, there's a mesh, like a metallic mesh or something like that, a grid system that kind of makes it look like crap.

Todd Stahl: Yeah. With a lot of the applied films that have been out there before, and there's not a whole lot of them, but there are a few, certainly from that backside, it doesn't look at all like the front, and the same thing, with the LED actual metal meshes, again, they look phenomenal from the front, and you get behind, and you're like, man, what am I looking at here?

So with our product, what's really cool about that is you get a little bit of the halo effect, from the image that's playing on it, that you can see from, say, the view side of the glass, and then you get a slight reflection off of that front piece of glass that kind of bounces back through. So you see a little bit of a glow or a halo in the background, but it is not an eyesore, and it looks pretty good. You can see out, and you have a very clear picture of the people that you're looking through or whatever object you would be doing from the back of the product. It looks really good. It's a good look from the backside. 

David: Yeah, there are numerous products out there that now do this kind of foil mesh effect, and you have to adhere it to the inside of a sheet of glass, which is all fine and everything else, but it doesn't look that good from the inside, does it?

Todd Stahl: No, it really doesn't. The concept here, we touched on hockey a little bit, earlier, but you know, we have, you have all these hockey nets in the arena to protect the fans that a puck doesn't hit them, and most of those meshes are black. It's harder for our eyes to kind of pick up the black mesh than it is for white. There are some that have whites, but not many, and the black is blended in a lot easier. I'm a big hockey fan, so I've been to a few arenas, and the white ones are a little harder to, I think it takes away from the image more, and that's why we're using a black LED mesh. 

When we first started, it was white, and it just didn't have as good of a; again, I thought it took away from the product from the backside. 

David: So presumably there are limits in terms of the size of a glass panel that you can do because you've got a laminate in an oven of some kind and that they're only so big.

So if you have, to use the example I mentioned earlier of, an auto dealer's glass curtain wall where the sheet of glass might be pretty darn big. How do you put multiple units together? And what does that look like in terms of cabling and everything? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah. So we're always kind of limited in size by a couple of different things. Sometimes it might be the actual raw product glass that we're using. Some sheets are available to us, bigger and smaller, the width of the laminating materials, and then our oven as well. So basically, in our oven here in Pennsylvania, we can laminate an LED panel roughly about 6x10 feet.

You know, that's a pretty sizable piece of glass, and then what we can do, if you're doing a glass facade it kind of gets into a little bit more of how the glass is installed, but you're basically stacking the panels. there's a control unit. That attaches to each panel of glass, and then those control units are all tied together and then that gives you one cohesive image plane from one panel to the next. 

David: Do you have much of a seam in between them? 

Todd Stahl: So, if you remember, at the trade show, I think we had two panels out there and we had a seam in the middle. So I'll see the seam, you'll see the seam, but when the image is playing, you really don't even notice it's there. A lot of times, depending on the application, a glass facade is a little different, because you're going to have all most likely all four edges of the glass covered, but, we have a lot of applications where the panels are being butt jointed together and it's a nice polished edge there. So, yeah, with the image running and stuff, you really don't even see it unless you get within a couple of feet of it. 

David: So we're talking millimeters, not inches, in terms of a gap. 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. You know, a gap's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three, three-sixteenths of an inch, plus or minus.

David: So not much at all. 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, not much at all. Like I said, it's pretty cool. When that image is going, you're like, it just looks like one big piece of glass. 

David: And there are technical limits, like if, let's say, an airport curtain wall that might be like 80 feet high for the side of a terminal or something like that. Can you do that? 

Todd Stahl: Absolutely. That can all be tied in. You'd have several zones there, and depending on how you're handling the programming from a laptop, and something like that, you just say zone one's the entire thing, and then you might break it down into individual zones if you want different things playing at different times, but yeah, we this is definitely designed to do entire glass facades or, curtain walls.

David: All those little lights generate some heat. How does the heat get out? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we've been working with these products for about two years now, and I always expect when I put my hand on the glass to touch it, that it's going to be nice and warm, but it really isn't. The heat definitely dissipates quickly. There is some energy consumption, and we have charts for that. So once we get into a building design, we can get in there and say, “Hey, this is what you're going to need for your power requirements.” But it has very similar power requirements to current LED displays that have been around for a while.

But yeah, it doesn't really create much heat. You would think it creates more, and I'm telling you, whenever anybody sees it, one of the first things that they almost always do is, “Oh, I expected that to be warm” and they touch it, and it really isn't. 

David: Well, one of the criticisms or let's say what a naysayer might say about this, is, “All right, if I buy this, glass panel with the LED mesh embedded inside of it, what happens if there's a dead pixel? I'm stuck with that forever. It can't be repaired because it's sandwiched in between two sheets of glass.” 

Todd Stahl: You know, it was my biggest concern. We spent a good bit of time. 

I think the lifespan of the LED bulbs we're using is right under 11 years. So we found the biggest problem that we've encountered, and this took us a while before we were going to bring it to market because that's by far the biggest concern; anyone looks at that and goes, it's not the first time I've ever seen a bulb, you know? So there's a couple of things. There's been a lot of research and development to make sure when it comes out of lamination that we've already caused any bulbs to fail before those processes, and we actually have a little bit of a protocol we've developed. So, one of the biggest reasons a light bulb is going to fail is the heat and pressure in that vacuum. It's not so much the heat, but the pressure because there's a little bit of movement in there. So if all those connection points aren't just right, you're going to get a bulb that may come out after you've done all of the work, and then you fire it up, and you know, there's a lot of bulbs, and a diode and only one is bad, it's not good. So we actually have a pre-laminating process we run to actually replicate what is going to go through the stressors of the lamination process. And if we find a bulb or a diode that might not be working, we can replace it after that pre-cycle of lamination. 

Now, on the flip side, let's say it's out there, it's in the field. If we use annealed glass on the front surface, so, annealed is not tempered, but the backlight would be tempered, so you're still dealing with a, fully safety rated tempered and laminated makeup. We actually have a drilling process where we can drill a core out of the glass, and we can actually replace that LED diode. What our experience is that once they come through lamination so far, with all the panels we've been working on we have not had one go out and we've put them in some areas of our glass production facility near our tempering oven, which is a really cool piece of equipment. It has a 600 horsepower blower that when the tempered glass comes through, it cools it to dissipate the heat, but it draws some dust, there's some heat back there. We've had a panel running there for two years in that condition without any issues. But yes, you can actually replace the bulbs if you need to, if one goes out. 

David: So I'm curious when an architect and a general contractor puts a building up, they're thinking in terms of being there for decades, with maybe the exception of football stadiums, which seem to need to be replaced every five years or so.

Is 11 years an acceptable operating lifespan for a sheet of glass for a builder or for a building owner? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah. I mean, our interlayers, they last 20-30 years. The interlayers and the glass products, yeah, they're going to last a very long time. When we've been bringing this product to market I think, the event back to the switch light is one of the first times you're us glass guys are introducing electricity into the mix. And at first that back in 2000, I mean, it was really cool. It had the wow factor, but it didn't quite last as long for me. I didn't really get into the product until recently. But you know, that product will last around 10 years as well, and we don't get a whole lot of callbacks very often with any of our glass products. 

But it seems like most clients are happy with a 10-year usage. That's been pretty good for the Switch Lite product. We talk about a decade out there to the architects and designers now that, that's a number that they all seem to be very happy 

David: Let's say a car dealer goes in, they're fine, they're thinking in terms of the glass that they put in is there for 10 years, and they may switch it out anyways? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, I think you know that everybody wants to be fresh and new. So we found a lot of these high-end retail stores that we've designed with, for instance, a high-end jewelry line, and let's say they have started in California with a new design. They take that design and they move it east to New York City. By the time they get to New York City, whether that's been five to eight years, and they redesign the whole thing over again. So there's a cycle and I think, especially with retail, and a lot of these buildings, they always want to have a new, fresh look, and I think a lot of times they're redesigning in under ten years for a lot of applications. 

David: I'm guessing I could be wrong here, but I'm guessing that there's hyper-competition from China for, what I would say is conventional LED displays and so on; you're probably going to have less competition for what you're doing because of the sheer weight of, even if they can make glass cheaper over in China, shipping glass panels over here would be just ghastly expensive, right?

Todd Stahl: Yeah, definitely. It's pretty heavy to air freight glass, so it's always nice that there's this thing called the ocean between us and China, especially us being we've been a manufacturer forever, and thankfully, it is a little expensive to ship a finished product like that and take some time.

So, yeah, and you know, right now, we're kind of pretty far ahead of the curve in how to actually laminate this properly. Our feeling was when we got involved with this, all right, we got the LED technology. Now we'll just throw it in some glass, and we got a home run and it wasn't quite as easy to just throw it in glass and end up with a finished product, you know?

There are still some areas. We are not the only ones in the world laminating this product, but there are, from what I know, under five; we're the only ones who can do it with thin and large panels. We're the only ones that I know of that are actually doing some of the very specific things to make sure it's going to perform properly in these laminated glass applications. In our process, we are patent protected in our process where I think we're just like in the first phase, I don't know all the legal terminology, but we're going through the patent process for the way we laminate it. 

David: Which will help you over here, won't help you with Chinese products, but again, there's that ocean thing in between.

Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We have a few intellectual properties here and I'm not one to get into too many legal battles, but we would have some type of recourse if someone does come and is trying to laminate in a similar technique the way we do it.

David: I suspect you're kind of looking around the corner as to where this is going and the types of technologies that are emerging. Do you kind of see this as, what you have right now is Gen 1, and over time the light emitters will get smaller, the wiring will be even thinner and so on?

Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly the way I see it going. I mentioned earlier: I really am a glass guy, and this is a glass company by people who absolutely love glass. Now, that's a Will Penn. Clear Motion, we have that same feeling as well, but this is more of a technology company. And what we're talking about today, like you said, generation one. We're going to revisit this in under five years, and it's going to look, I think, a whole lot different. 

David: Who's buying it right now? And are you in the field with this? 

Todd Stahl: So we're working on probably over 50 to 60 current projects right now in the design phase. Almost everyone we're working with has signed NDAs. So we can't necessarily say the clients that we're designing with right now. But one's a high-end fast food restaurant. They want one of these in each restaurant and that's actually for an exterior application. 

David: Are these proposals or purchase orders? 

Todd Stahl: They are proposals right now, so a lot of verbal commitments. We have a project we're working on in the Middle East in the design phase right now, that's 18 months out, the funding has been approved. They're designing it in the UK and then we're working with the audio visual company, I think in Texas. So this is really brand new. 

David: You're in startup mode! 

Todd Stahl: We really are, and this is the third company I've started literally from scratch, and I think it'll be the last one because boy, it is challenging. It takes a lot of energy. There's this great energy when you're starting it, and this is a little extra challenging because this is brand new. No one has ever seen clear LED glass displays like they just did not exist four years ago. 

People might've thought they saw something similar. Like you said, it was a film or a grid that was put behind the glass. But when people are seeing this now, we're creating a new market, we're educating people to that market, and we're educating ourselves. 

David: I'm guessing when people come to a stand at a trade show, you're at, the architects and the people who design physical spaces are the ones who are going, this is more like it.

They haven't really liked the idea of films or foils and all that because of how they look at the back end or they're worried about a film sort of, particularly if it's exposed to UV light and all that, it's going to yellow and on and on… 

Todd Stahl: So what the feedback from the A&D community has been? We did an AIA show in San Francisco last June, and we had one or two clients, say, “Hey Todd, we have the budget for this. We have clients who want this product, and we've been looking for it for years.” Then we start designing the project with them, and that's the thing: once I shake hands with an architect, we might not actually have that project begin production for 24 months to a year.

So, depending if the building's coming out of the ground or if it's just a remodel of an existing one, it's a very long cycle until we actually get orders placed, and you know, something I've been dealing with for 30 years. It's kind of the way the industry is. 

David: Infrastructure projects are never quick, are they? 

Todd Stahl: No, they really aren't, but the A&D world is kind of our background. It's where we've been for a very long time in that space, and we've definitely noticed that companies, individuals in the audio-visual world respond to this entirely differently.

This doesn't have as many questions in their minds. They're more educated because we've been used to dealing with LEDs for a very long period of time. So it's kind of interesting how the two markets work together, like the DSE show where we introduced the product, I would say more to the audio-visual world if I'm using the right terminology there, it was received just as with that much energy, a lot of more understanding right away, not as many technical questions.

David: It's a variation on stuff they've been seen before, but maybe a better variation.

Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely, and the architects, like you were saying, and even in general, I think even though LG makes an applied film. The North American President of, I forgot the gentleman's name, he was in my shop a little over a year ago, and we were working with his film, and then we showed him our LED glass, and he was blown away by it.

David: “There goes my business” 

Todd Stahl: Well, I think he was like, I'm going to make that too. I don't think he was worried about his business, but that applied film that they had been using, again, from a very long viewing distance, the product looks great. It's not yet ready to be viewed in shorter viewing distances, but the fact that it's applied, I do think that there is something like when you're buying a high-end product, you don't want people to be able to come up and pick it off, and I mean that definitely happens with every piece of film, I think I've ever worked with in my life.

The first thing people do is take their fingernails, and they try to scrape the edge of it. It's just something that is instinctual about humans. But I think if you take that film now, I always say, if you put a piece of film on glass, it's just film. Once you laminate that film inside of the glass, you now have a glass product that protects it. 

It does what you were saying. It prevents it from being yellowed over time because the inner layer blocks out almost 100 percent of the UV rays. So I think it's a great home for the LED mesh. 

David: So does William Penn and Clear Motion Glass, do they operate separately, or are you kind of in the same office, the same building, and everything else, it's just different business cards?

Todd Stahl: No, actually, we are in the same overall building complex, but we're not connected physically. So Clear Motion, basically has the equivalent of its own social security number, which down here in the business and for business, the IRS wants us to have EIN numbers for our businesses.

So Clear Motion has an EIN number. Will Penn has an EIN number, obviously, but they definitely operate as two companies but obviously very close connections. 

David: And you are running both? 

Todd Stahl: I am running both right now, and spoiler alert: two's a lot harder to run than one. 

David: Yes, I bet. If people want to find you online, they just go to ClearMotionGlass.com? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, that's it. They can find us there. There are some emails there. They can shoot an email to us and we'd love to talk to anybody if this product's right for them we're really excited about it and definitely creating a lot of energy with it.

David: Are you at a trade show anytime soon? 

Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we're doing Infocomm, I believe. It's the middle of June out in Vegas. Are you going to be there? 

David: Yes. 

Todd Stahl: Awesome, man. We get to meet in person, then. We'll carve out some time for that, Dave. 

David: Absolutely, yeah, and that's a good show for you. There are tons of pro-AV people there.

Todd Stahl: Yeah, I love that. That's a new space for us. So we're a little extra excited cause that's definitely not like a glass trade show is. 

David: All right. Todd, thank you so much for your time. 

Todd Stahl: All right. Yeah. I appreciate it, Dave. It was a pleasure.

 

Neil Chatwood, Omnivex

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach.

That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS software firm Omnivex, which has been around for more than 30 years and has always made data-driven communications central to what it does. More than 20 years ago, the core Omnivex solution included a module called DataPipe. I know, because I was using the thing way back then for a digital ad network I launched ... probably 10 years too early, but that's a story for another time.

While a lot of its competitors have developed and marketed platforms that are pretty and loaded with bling, Omnivex has resolutely stuck to its technology guns with software that's quite involved and very powerful. The net result is Omnivex gets involved in a lot of the more complicated jobs in which real-time data, and the context it provides, shapes what shows up on screens. Airports, for example, are a very active vertical.

I had a long, detailed chat with Neil Chatwood, a transplanted Brit who runs the global transport file for Omnivex. We could have gone on for hours, as he has a lot of insights about data, security, and programming content for large, very involved environments.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Neil, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Omnivex, can you just give a quick rundown on the company? 

Neil Chatwood: Yeah, for sure. So, Omnivex was established back in the dark ages of digital signage, 1991. It’s a privately owned organization, just outside of Toronto, Ontario and Canada.

Oh, come on. It's in Toronto. Like, Toronto goes on forever. 

Neil Chatwood: Yeah, it's right. Pretty much right on the border. Well, it's on the subway line now. They've expanded the subway, so that finally happened. 

Yeah, it's not like you see countryside on the other side of the parking lot though.

Neil Chatwood: Not anymore. In the last 10 years, there's been a Vaughan skyline, as depressing as that may be. But yeah, I've been around a long time in a private family owned organization and it's really grown off the back of our focus on leveraging real time data, integrating with basically any system we could possibly think of.

And that pedigree has kept us in the business for over 30 years now. 

Yeah, I have a history in a network I started more than 20 years ago using Omnivex. So I was familiar with Omnivex products and datapipe and everything. So we were talking before we turned on the recording. I found it amusing that a lot of the software side of the industry has awakened to the idea of data integration and data handling for the last four or five years when it's something you were doing like 25 years ago. 

Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Back in around 2009-2010 when a lot of the industry was yelling Content is King. Right.

Don't say that. 

Neil Chatwood: I know. You see. I do. Yeah, it's a classic. And our ownership at the time, you know, they like to have fun and they took that and changed it into Context as King and we've really kind of run with that since inception.

But I joined the organization in 2010 and data and complexity is where we've always really hung our hat. We're a software vendor but the majority of our revenue comes from licensed sales. But we really do find ourselves in the trenches with our partners and our clients getting in there and providing pseudo consultancy on what data do you have in house? 

Like, how has it been stored? What methods can we use? And figuring out the solution in parallel with all of the stakeholders, even though at the face of it we're just slinging CMS licenses.

So that's our heritage and when I'm when I start talking to someone who's interested in looking at the market or you get a lead or you're talking to someone at a trade show, my advice is always to take a look at a bunch of companies. Take a bunch of companies, look at all these CMSs.

In all the old guard, there's a good handful of companies that I might say some names, Navori, for example, StrataCash, Scala, right. They're all pretty old guard, when we talk about the digital signage industry. 

I encourage people to take a look at all the products that are on the market and once you start to get those demos and you start to go through the sales process, you can really see the DNA of where that company's come from, right? Like, are they focused on a really pleasant UX/UI experience? Are they focused on performing high end post processing within the platform itself and are good at asset generation as opposed to creating it in a third party piece of kit and bringing it in.

Our DNA has always been on the data side our position is that if you're going to make good images and assets that you're going to bring into the CMS, trying to ask a creative to use a tool, that's not something they're already comfortable with, you know you're kind of paddling upstream on that.

So we've always taken the position of let people use the software that they're already comfortable with. Let's not introduce a knowledge gap, bring it in. And that leads us to, well, if we're not going to focus on the asset side, let's focus on the data side. So yeah, that's where we've come from.

And it's where goals are set for in the future as well. 

Well, when you have literally hundreds of software options out there these days and I would suspect most of them in some way say, yes, we do data handling, we have data integration, we have APIs or whatever it may be. How does an end user discern what's real versus just you the bare essentials?

Neil Chatwood: That's a good question. When the user is going through that sales process and they're doing their comparisons, they have to show you it works right? Like, we're in an industry that is extremely visual, very creative. And you and I have been to a lot of trade shows and a lot of the DSEs in our time and if you're walking around there on setup day, I've seen plenty of CMS vendors running their showreel on windows media player, right. Before the crowds arrive and it's like, well if your stuff's that good, why are you using that? Like, why are you doing it that way? So if I was a buyer or if I was a third party consultant trying to guide someone through this, I'd be like the first couple of calls you're going to have with them. You're going to get the dog and pony show, right. They're going to show you all the sexy stuff, right?

Oh yeah, all works great. Do you want to bring this plug in? Get your IT team involved, right? The people who know where your data lives and what format it's in, how accessible it is. And get them to sit down with the sales engineers of these CMS companies and get them to POC and get your data into their product, right?

Most CMSs at this point, they're cloud hosting their software as a service, right? If they're sitting there and they're saying this is really easy. We can just go bing bong bop and it comes in, alright then show me. Just don't accept it at face value if you really want to dig into this stuff. I don't know any software vendor out there that isn't going to entertain the idea of a proof of concept or at least won't say, yeah, sure like any salesperson just wants to get the sale. Right. 

So, if you've got this accessible data, right. Let's say it's up on Azure, right. It's some kind of blob storage or if it's accessible through an API. Can you just give me the keys? Like, let me in and I'll show you it in real time and then we'll bring it in.

Once they can prove that to you, then it's not about data accessibility anymore. It's then you need to start looking into the assurances that they're going to be ethical and they're going to have the same levels of governance and control over that data that is being ingested into their system. That's where a lot of our focus is now.

And you've really kind of touched on that with APIs. Back in the nineties, when we were asked to integrate with all these different data sources. We were lucky if there was documentation, it was probably RS232, serial cables..

David:That's a term I haven't heard in a long time.

Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Using Telnet to get in. So like, a lot of the solution building was just kind of banging your head against the wall just to even access the data and make it legible to processing that data into information and then getting that information down onto the screen.

That is less of a concern now because we're at the point where any data provider, they've probably got a fully or semi documented API or they've got an SDK, a software development kit where for the most part, if we're looking to POC a data integration. It probably takes us two to four hours, right?

But based on how well documented it is, if the data structure is easy to work with and more often than not, the biggest part that takes the most time is liaising with the third party organization to let us in, right? 

Because the client will say, Oh yeah.we use such and such for this and we're using this product for our bus timetables, our bus scheduling. Can you guys hit that? So it's like, well, there's a good chance we've already hit it because we've got clients there already but if we haven't, then we need to start up an engagement and start talking to that third party organization.

This is the sticking point, right? Because when we start talking to that third party organization that controls that data, that the client is already paying for and leveraging it in house. Depending on the attitude and market position of that third party, they might not want to let us in, right? Like there's a bunch of organizations out there that sell digital signage as a value add, right?

So, a good example of that would be, the historic vendors for flight information display systems, right? Screens in airports showing arrivals and departures. They sold data and the screen element was like, Oh, by the way, you probably want to show this on a screen, right?

So we'll just sell you that too. It's a value add, it's not a true CMS. It's a point solution. So when we're engaging with that third party vendor, I'm often at the head end of this for transportation, I'm like, Hey, we're working on this project with a mutual client, they want us to get into your data. Is there any way you can provide a sandbox or some test keys so we can just prove this out? Depending on where they're at, they might not want to let us in. So, the sticking point becomes, then I have to go back to the client and say to the client, I don't wanna cause any friction here, but we can't get in without credentials and they're not giving us any.

So can you please get involved? And those are the conversations where things start getting political. We're not looking to roll logs under our course friction anywhere. But as far as I'm concerned, your client's already paying for the data, right? Like if you know if you want to bolt on some charges for hey now you're using it for digital signage, so we want to charge you an extra 5k a year.

That's on you. But as far as I'm concerned, an existing client is paying for the data, they want to use it this way. You're standing in the way of progress here. So, how do we deal with that? I spend so much time dealing with that now.

And a reaction to that about five years ago, I started a scum works team internally. Here in order to proactively build data partnerships so that when a client says a key phrase, Everbridge is a good example, right.

For mass emergency notification. So when a client says Everbridge, we don't have to go through an uncertain process of reaching out to someone we don't know, not knowing what their position is. It's like, we've actually already got this working somewhere else.

We can get in here. I can show you an example of it already working or if you can give us access, we can actually prove it with your data. So that, yeah, that's the business.

I just wanted to ask, 

I've seen companies that talk in terms of what I call functionality apps so that they developed a data handshake with, as you said, Everbridge and then they sort of market that as an application, this is something that we can activate for you.

Is that how you look at it? Or is that kind of a different angle? 

Neil Chatwood: We look at it that way, conceptually because it's modularity, right? So, in our product, we're going to use a mechanism to reach out to that, that could be through some custom scripting or it could be within a product in our stable that has a full UI, in order to access that data.

Like a good example would be, back in the day we had a via link for a via phone system. Right. So, that functionality that some organizations call them widgets, right. Where it's like, Hey, I just want to slot in this functionality. It's a couple of clicks.

I put in my username, put in my password and away we go. We operate that in the backend of the system. But at this point, don't have a full kind of walkthrough where it's like, Hey, put in your Twitter username and password and away you go. Ours is a little bit more behind the curtain.

We do it that way because we have user personalities. We actually used to use the Simpsons characters too, like, are we dealing with a bar? Are we dealing with Maggie? Like, who are we dealing with here? So those user profiles. It's like, you should be doing this, right?

And if when we're looking at building out a data integration, that should really be set and forget it. There really is no reason to go in there on a regular basis and be changing that information or that query or the way we're massaging the data. So that is an administrative function, right?

That is something that's behind the scenes. By virtue of that, we're probably dealing with someone who's a bit more technical, as a bit of an IT background. So, we have a relatively open system, right? So, whereas when we're dealing with widgets and a simplified user experience. Click this button, put username in, click this button, put your password and click this, or it comes on screen and now you can kind of like trim that down like that.

That's what I've seen some CMSs do and I think that's a really light low friction way to get that data in there. We take the approach of like we're a toolkit. We're going to assume that our users and our clients and our channel are matching our products and our toolkit to the right levels of user.

So, in the backend, it's like, here's a fully open interface that you can do whatever the heck you want with, we can give you some foundational building blocks or modules to enable and empower that user to take it where they want to take it. And that speaks to kind of one of our other positions in the industry where anyone who's been around kind of knows that Omnivex deals with relatively complex situations because we've got that wide open back end that frankly is quite and is a bit scary, right?

To a user that just wants to change a welcome board or change some numbers that are on a restaurant board. So that's really not our target market, right? Our target market is predominantly enterprise level. They've got an in-house IT team or they've got a good system integrator involved where we can really get into the weeds on what data you have.

Data has a cost, right? Well organizations are paying to cultivate it, gather it, store it in house. How do we make that data actionable by adding incremental value to it? That's what we're looking for. So when we go into a situation, we want to find those people, those stakeholders within the end client and within our channel to get into those deeper discussions on like, I know you want to point an arrow to the right but if we look at what data you've got in house, like, let's say, modern elevator system or a modern escalator system where we're able to tie into the back end of, Hey, on a Monday, this elevator serves floors 8 through 12. 

But, on weekends or on bank holidays, that elevator is completely shut off. Then, I probably don't want that arrow to go right, when that elevator is offline. I want it to point straight ahead like a zero degrees rotation, right? Instead of 90 degrees rotation. So if we don't have an awareness of what data the client has and the client doesn't have the kind of persona or has the team in house that knows, how their systems work and how their architecture and what data they have, then they might not be the best fit for the kind of challenges we're looking to tackle.

You're doing a lot more than changing a price or a soup of the day. 

Neil Chatwood: Yeah, that's the table stakes, right? I mean honestly, it's a bad word in our industry, but If you really want it to go down, PowerPoint is able to do that now.

Like you can integrate PowerPoint with Excel. So I know, ever since I've been in the industry, you’re always kind of one step away from someone saying, well, why wouldn't I just use PowerPoint for that? It's like, well, you're missing a whole bunch of functionality on top of it. But fundamentally, any CMS worth its salt has two core elements that it needs to play with. It needs to play with data and it needs to bring in assets and basically import those two elements into a layout, right? So by that definition, can PowerPoint do it? Yeah, If we really boil it down but there's so much value on top of any of these systems.

But getting to that data, exploring the data with the clients is where our ROI comes in and that's a scary term for a lot of people in this industry too. I honestly think digital signage was really looking for ROI metrics for what feels like 20 years, we were really struggling.

We only really started to get metrics around that in certain fields. Right. So it's really easy to establish ROI when we've got a camera pointed to the audience, we're looking at expressions and demographics and we're triggering it and we're detecting when eyeballs are looking this way.

So ROI on that is really easy. You want me to give you ROI on a wayfinding arrow changing from zero degrees to 90 degrees. That's going to be a bit more obfuscated but maybe you're going to see that down the road when you have an independent audit on your facility and your KPIs go shifted five points because your space is a lot more usable now.

So, adding incremental value on that data is really what we're looking to do and you mentioned menu boards. Menu boards are a real quick win. It's very transparent, the value of that is very clear but when we start to talk around, passengers flow around an airport or like nudge theory, convincing people to move one way instead of another way because that benefits the operations of the environment.

That is a little bit more tricky to prove ROI on but the humans walking around that space are going to have less friction and less stress while they're in there. But it really all comes down to weaponizing the data like how do we get the most out of it? How do we turn data into information? 

I could ask a bunch of questions but we probably talked for about three hours. I'm curious about a big job that you were directly involved in and Omnivex was obviously directly involved in at Minneapolis airport which is considered one of the better airports on the planet now.

What's all involved there? Because there's a lot of data handling and a lot more going on than just saying that the flight to Seattle is at gate 47. 

Neil Chatwood: Yeah, there is a lot going on at MSP and just to give them a quick shout out, MSP just won the best airport in North America for the third year running. I think that came out a couple of days back and I think they've won it like seven times out of the last eight years. So, they've got a dedicated team in house that takes care of this stuff.

And I really want to focus on not Omnivex for a second here because the airport deserves to be called out here and so do us. We've got a system integrator in there called radiant technology as well out of Columbus, Ohio. And the success there has really started with the vision of their CIO, Eduardo Valencia.

He was directly inspired by sports stadiums, right? And he was personally quite frustrated when he went to a sports stadium. How come the puck goes in the net, the whole stadium changes color and everything goes whiz bang and all of a sudden I'm being advertised, Coca Cola and like why do my screens in my airport suck?

But I'm able to see this when I go to a hockey game. So there's got it. So he used certain mechanisms to figure out what's going on in the industry and who's able to power these full experiences within a facility and thankfully led him to us.

So it really started with that frustration and they took a strategic view at the airport where you'll hear Eduardo talk about it. The entire airport should just be treated as a single pane of glass and I should be able to control any screen in the airport any way that I want which is a great ambition and a lot of facilities, it's not just airports. A lot of facilities have a similar ambition and it's very easy to start with that dream but it's not going to happen unless you align resources in house. So, MSP have their own decision making panel for digital signage. 

They've got a group in house that is responsible for pushing this forward. Nothing good, nothing worthwhile, nothing award winning happens by accident. Like, they've taken a real pragmatic approach to this. So, they took a look at their screen estate. They took a look at the use cases.

They took a look at that data and they engaged that system integrator as I mentioned, Radiant to like all right, how do we make good on all this stuff? So, it started from the top which kept teams engaged. It kept them focused and that's why this is a success. So, a part of that with a foundational piece of technology in there.

But we're really just a toolkit and it speaks to what I mentioned before about, Hey, our backend might be a little bit scary but you can do whatever the heck you want. That's the power of a toolkit. So, to go back to what you mentioned about that widget and that usability you can have a really like turbo linear workflow but that really hamstrings capabilities, right?

So when you're making a product, you've got to decide which way you want to go? 

Do I want to go a mile wide? And an inch deep or do I want to go real deep where the scary stuff lives? That's where we typically are. Where were the, you know, where were the angler fish?

So, that was MSPs approach and that example I mentioned was about what the elevators are doing, what the escalators are doing. What's happening operationally right now within my airport. So that's where you start. Like what's happening right now. Okay. So what's happening now?

Well, Delta airlines have these check-in counters open. So well, I know my building, I know where the check-in counters are. So the screens that are directly parallel at the curbside to those check-in counters, then let the people pulling up in their cars know, Hey, if you want to go Delta, there's a big Delta logo and it says open underneath it.

Okay. Particularly airports that are dynamically assigning check in counters for smaller airlines, right? 

Neil Chatwood: For sure. Yeah. Multi-use, environment. So, when we're, yeah. So there's always going to be situations where like, Oh yeah, that terminal that's United terminal, right?

So like, there's no real variance there, but there's a whole bunch of smaller airlines and they call it common use. So, yeah. So, you know, we've got systems where, you know, let's say, you know, a smaller airline, you know, logs in like, you know, one example could be Flair. I don't, it's not around anymore.

Right. But flair could log in. Okay. Well, they've only got two flights a day but they need to take over the ticket counter, they need to take over this gate temporarily. So when they log into the common use platform which is what's on those screens in front of those agents. When they log into that common use platform by virtue of them logging in, I know who they are, right?

And I know that they work for Flare. So now it makes sense to change the screens that are physically behind that desk. Put up the default content for Flare right now because until this agent makes some decisions around, this screen is going to be the backdrop. This screen is going to be a priority checking or whatever.

Maybe we just want to highlight that this is Flare's house now and then as they go through their login procedure the screens can be set up any way that they like and what we can do is we can provide dashboards and linear use case tools that makes it easy for that user. That's where things should be easy where someone's interacting with digital signage as this is not their job. Like their job is to make sure that they're processing passengers and getting them to where they need to be. There might be really high turnover. They have no interest or time to be trained on how to use a content management product.

So it's like, look at that requirement. So what do I need to do? I probably need to present the screens that are behind them, I need to present to them the assets that are available to them and I need them to highlight which flight that they care about right now, that could all be manual.

So, their experience is like, okay, I'm Neil, I've logged in, I'm at Flare, bang, screens change. Okay, I've got four screens behind me, what do you want on each one of these screens? I want to do image one, image three and image five. Instantly goes up on the screens behind them. All right, I'm done. So that's where it's really important to reduce that friction and make it easy.

Not necessarily when we're setting up the data flow because again, I'm only really going to be setting up that data flow once and then maybe changing it when upstream data sources change. That experience for that airline agent, that is multiple times a day. That's where we need it to be frictionless, not on the data integration side.

I think it's interesting with airports and other large footprint facilities like mass transport hubs, stadiums, multi use areas where there's a stadium, restaurants, residential, commercial on and on and on and airports in particular, I kind of see two threads to how experience works.

I see these gorgeous, very ambitious, very expensive, digital art installations and giant LED walls in newly built airports and they talk about the experience of that and how people are going to feel good about flying and so on. But I see this whole other side and it is much more what you're talking about. A great experience in an airport is not being panicked, not being lost, not being delayed, not knowing where things are, all that sort of stuff.

To me, that's a far more important experience, is that kind of how you see it and how some of your clients see it? 

Neil Chatwood: There's a few hats I could wear on this. The first hat I'll wear is someone who wants to sell as many licenses as possible. I would rather they have a thousand flat panel screens, right.

But that's not where the industry's going. Right. And the big reason for that is, we as an industry, we've watched the price of DV LEDs really just go through the floor to the point where there's real comparisons where it's like, is this a parity with like a 55 inch flat panel now

For me to get a DVD, like a modular DVLED the same price. So that's a huge part of it. It's like the cost has finally come down to a point where it's reasonable at scale but a lot of it is also just straight up hype, right? Like airports, like anyone else have to sell and compete with other airports.

And this is something that you don't really think about until you get into it but when you've got two airports that are within an hour's drive of each other. They're not only competing for passengers, they're competing for the airlines. 

Yeah. 

Neil Chatwood: Right? So it's like, If I'm courting with the idea of trying to bring a major airline two that are right next to each other but a good comparison would be like SFO in Oakland, right?

So it's like, okay well, if I'm in Oakland, how do I convince people not to go over the bridge to SFO? I'd probably need the carriers that carry the most passengers. 

San Jose?

Neil Chatwood: Oh yeah. Good example. Yeah. So a lot of these big sexy installations are coming from, you've got to keep up with the Joneses.

But also the price of DVLEDs is reasonable now. So there is that part of the market where it's all about the LinkedIn posts and the marketing and the wow factor. Yeah, you're exactly right. So there'll be like a handful of those within an airport, right? Like a good example would be, Nashville.

We worked on a project with Nashville airport and the content that provided for that was, Gentle Home out of Montreal, where they all are. So, they provided that in an awesome job but that is just one. It's essentially two screens in probably in a state of, I think about 800 or so, 

Something like that.

Neil Chatwood: So, the big glitzy installations are now basically a requirement for any new build or any renovation for any airport. There's a couple of projects that I'm aware of that are really interesting. But in terms of decision making, like when I come back down to the fundamental goal of signage in general, not just digital, is to convey information quickly and clearly guide decision making in an environment.

Is this generative AI artwork doing that? No, it's not going to help me get some flight on time but it might bring down my blood pressure a little bit, that's what these art installations are, right? 

Like they're looking for an opportunity for facilities to express themselves, reinforce their branding, market the local area but also sell advertising which is a huge driving factor on some of these big installations too. So, there's very much like, let's call them the anchors, right? Like they're the anchor installations now where there's millions and millions of dollars being spent and then it's why I've always kind of enjoyed your outlook and your material Dave is like, the boring stuff and that's what I'm into as well and when I'm walking around the world. That's the stuff that I'm like, Oh, that is cool as hell. One of the best bits of boring signage at MSP is that good design is invisible, right? So, there is an underground walkway. It's not a walkway.

It's more like a hallway but it's very much a liminal space and you're going under there. I'm trying to imagine putting my hand up. It's probably about 10 feet tall. So it's like, well, there's not much opportunity for overhead signage cause we can only really add probably about eight inches to this, like overhead.

So, that team works with a display vendor and they put in, I think it's roughly around it's about a hundred or so feet wide. I know I'm probably over, I get it. It's probably about 80 feet wide. But 80 feet wide by about seven inches high. 

So number one, okay, well, we're still compliant with safety and we've got this screen in this hallway now.

What's great about it is it's pure wayfinding. All it does is just show people where they need to go. But upstream of this, like this very boring sign is I would estimate two and a half thousand data points. Yeah. In order to get the arrow point in the right way showing, Oh, you're looking for this airline or you're looking for a route with accessibility or you're looking for the TSA. When you add together the time to get to the queue, plus the queue time, which way should you go?

What condition are the elevators in? What condition are the escalators in? Where as an airport, do I want to drive people right now, based on what's going on in my space? All that intelligence is above that sign, logically. But as a passenger, I look at it and I'm like, Oh yeah, I'm going with Air Canada today.

Bump, I'm done. But the solution is so complex behind it but ultimately, it just means, Hey, this logo appears on screen and this arrow is at 220 degrees and that boils down to that. And I think that use case is beautiful like simplicity in design, it gets rid of the friction. It gets people where they need to be.

That's what we're in this business for. 

But the bottom line on that is it looks simple to the end user, to the observer, but there's a lot going on behind the curtains to make that work seamless. 

Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Again, good design is invisible, right? Like you would have no idea the complexity that goes on with that screen.

Like I said, we could talk for a very long time but we're already running longer than I usually do. So I got to wind this down, Neil, this has been great. 

Neil Chatwood: Thanks, Dave. Omnivex has been around for a long time. I've been around a long time. You've been around a long time. I'm surprised we've not get to this earlier but thanks so much. I really respect Sixteen Nine and what you've done for the industry. And I encourage you to keep at it. We need a rational voice in this craziness. 

All right. Well, thanks. Thanks again. 

Neil Chatwood: All right. Thanks a lot, Dave. Take care.

Joe Occhipinti, ANC

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed.

Screens are sync'd, and content is carefully timed and triggered based on data and all kinds of variables.

While most integrators and solutions providers are focused on executing on ideas and needs, the New York company ANC has for years being delivering services and software for what it calls branded entertainment.

The work started with collegiate and professional sports, but more recently the company has branched into areas like retail and mass transportation - including the multi-venue, many screens experience that stretches between the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan and underground to the World Trade Center complex.

I had a great chat with Joe Occhipinti, ANC's Chief Operating Officer.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

David: Hey Joe, thank you for joining me. I've chatted with ANC in the past with Mark Stross but that's going back like six years or something like that. I'm curious, first of all, what your company does and maybe we could get into a little bit about the background of basically buying the company back from prior owners that started as a family company and now it's going back as a family-driven company, right?

Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great. 

Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great. 

It was a good five or six year run we had with them. And I was with the ANC for a lot of those years. I started back in 2012. So I saw the end of Jerry's initial ownership and then into the Learfield, and then I kind of parted ways with ANC in early 2022 and found my way into a company called C10 with Jerry's son, Jerry Cifarelli Jr. and shortly into 2022, Learfield reached out to us and was interested about looking into a potential acquisition and I think Learfield's business has changed a lot, right?

Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great. 

They were in multimedia rights and they've kind of shifted into a data-driven company with all their fans and engagement and I don't think it was core to them any longer and obviously with Jerry's father, having started the business, it was very near and dear to our hearts. We felt that ANC had all the right foundation but due to its success over 25 years, we can kind of take it back and change a few things, get the parts back together, streamline things, and get after it once again to bring the band back together.

And that all happened in early 2023. We couldn't be happier to kind of be driving the boat again. 

David: So, anybody if you meet at a cocktail party or a neighborhood party or whatever, says, what do you do? And more to the point, what does your company do? What do you tell them? Because it's quite involved.

Joe Occhipinti: The loaded question. Hopefully they have like two drinks like one in each hand or something. But basically, the ANC consists of four business lines, we like to call it. So, the kind of the moneymaker, the thing that gets the most press is LED Technology installations and that could be the things that catch everyone's attention is obviously the large format LED displays but we're really a technology integrator, throughout the entire venue.

So we have installed IPTV, we've installed TVs, we've installed full control rooms, things of that nature. And those are the apps which have a large format. I keep going back to that but the main video center hungs and arenas, center field boards and baseball. We have a 280 foot display at Westfield world trade center.

Some of those marquee kinds of displays that you guys have heard and seen. Then we also have a services department or venue solutions we like to call it. After which all the pretty lights go up, we have to then maintain it and make sure it works for the life of that display or until the next renovation happens.

So we actually have a fleet of operators out in the field who are going on pregame off days and making sure that modules are fixed and things are corrected. The proper content's loaded into the software and they're ready for the game presentation or for the next event or for the next change in scheduled content that's going to happen in an out of home venue.

So we do a ton of that as well and then we also have our ad agency business. So that goes back to when Jerry started the whole business of TV visible signage, where we are acquiring inventory from teams that we work with or we go out and purchase it and then we also represent brands.

So we'll place a discount tire behind home plate at a specific market that they would like to see or a number of different advertisers that we've been working with for years that really want to have that TV visible signage in sports our ad agency is mostly on the sports side we do some and out of home but obviously those are kind of owned by the properties and things like that so it's a little bit different and then what ties it all together is our software business. So It's called LiveSync now. It started as FasciaSoft, VisionSoft, VSoft and now it's LiveSync and it's all in the name. We specialize in syncing all your displays throughout the venue. So, somewhere like Westfield World Trade and Fulton Center, they're kind of one venue to put together.

I think they have upwards of 75 or 80 displays between LCDs and LEDs and we have a constant stream of scheduled content. That's looping every 10 or 20 seconds 24*7 and you can sit there and watch in one area 5 to 10 displays all changing at the same exact time, frame to frame, everything running pixel to pixel.

But the beautiful thing about live sync is what it does is we're wide open, open API, open source. If you want to play ball with everybody else that might be in the control room and we want to be able to trigger whatever else you might want to trigger with that piece of content.

So if you wanted to run a home run graphic at Fenway park and you want to get your LED lights for a night game to flicker, you know when the guys around the bases. ANC Live Sync can trigger that software and it can all run synced and simultaneously. So, we really like to say that we can be the quarterback of the venue like somewhere like Wells Fargo Center. We trigger an IPTV program to have a goal animation run in the suites over whatever TV broadcast is being shown. 

So, we've really come a long way in that regard. The software has come. Leaps and bounds, probably even from six years ago when you talk to Mark and we're really proud of the software that he's developed with his team.

David: And this is your own software. It's not something you sell, right? It's software that you use when you're working with various customer venues. 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. A lot of times our software is installed when we are doing the full install. Right. We don't really sell it out of cart. We have started to look into that, right?

Like we think the software is at a point where it can do that and can be that. We did a deployment this year at I think it's PPG paints arena at Pittsburgh Penguins where another LED manufacturer got the LED job but they came to us for the software. So that was just a software standalone installation where we went in there into the control room and installed the servers and had it integrate with everything else they had there and it runs their live game presentation now.

David: Right and when you're talking about being known for LED or being known for LED display control and so on but you're not a manufacturer or reseller of somebody else's product, right? 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we're not a manufacturer at all. So we do have competitors in this space, right? You know, big name, LED installers but they're all manufacturers.

So, even though we were competitors, we're kind of not, you know what I mean? Like you can see a world where we can come together with some of these and enhance their business. Right. We feel that we can do a good job on the installation side and on the service side. But we really talk to the clients and figure out what they need from the LED signage perspective and we go out and find the best possible product to deliver that. 

And then we'd like to use our four business lines to create a cohesive partnership with that client. So, once we're in a venue and they want to add a display here and there. It's very easy to add it into our existing licensing software or to add it to our services.

Right? So, we like to use or give the partner back ad dollars by finding somebody to buy advertisements on their home plate or elsewhere in the venue. So, we really can use our different lines to be a full service partner for all of our clients. 

David: It's interesting. Years ago, I remember talking to somebody about shopping malls and how shopping malls, particularly in Asia, were no longer just seen as warehouses or Harmonized venues for retail.

They were experiential places that were programmed and that had like programming calendars and special events and everything else related to it and it kind of sounds like what you're doing and what you can deliver is you're really programming a venue or in the case of down by the World Trade Center, multiple venues so that content cascades across them things happen and so on, but it's all kind of cohesive as opposed to maybe more traditional digital signage and just display work where there's something driving this, there's something else driving that maybe they once in a while sync up but they're not really working together. 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I agree. I think these are all becoming everyone's fighting to get the people to their venue, right? I mean they want to drive sales or drive concessions or whatever it might be. And the malls are becoming more of let's go spend a few hours at the mall.

I mean let's not just go pick up something I need, right? It's like, let's do this with the kids or see this special event or whatever it might be. And being able to create an atmosphere that's inviting and appealing to people's eyes kind of goes hand in hand with that.

And then obviously you can promote the upcoming events and whatnot too. Right. So there's just more and more digital installations happening and the interesting thing that we're seeing in the business and it's happening in sports as well. 

I mentioned Jerry Cifarelli Sr started with rotational signs like static banners behind home plate and on ribbons and that grew into LED behind home plate and then LEDs on Ravenstein, these massive center hongs. But now these at home venues and these sport venues are now expanding, right? You have these big conglomerates businesses that are doing stuff outside beyond just the stadium, right?

Trying to get people there before the games and to the restaurants and to the bars and you're seeing digital marquee that you would typically see on the highway, kind of up on the back of a stadium or down the street at the bar that they just built, that's owned by the same kind of marketing company that owns the business or has similar interests.

So, if they are kind of meshing a lot and they're all trying to fight for those eyeballs and fight for those people to bring the dollars and revenue in their way. 

David: Yeah, it kind of seems like the worlds are converging, when I was reviewing your company website and seeing how deep a background you have in sports, both college and pro. And expanding into retail and in public spaces like mass transport and so on and thinking at first that well these are very different worlds but when you really think about it they're very similar worlds in a lot of ways these days because like airports are shopping malls and sports venues are no longer just the arena, 

It's the multi purpose sort of event area with retail and residential and hotel and everything else and it's all being driven by the same developer or developer group. So they are harmonizing all this stuff. 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, that's exactly right. And we're here to help. Whatever those entities are to create a cohesive appeal to the entire look. And then what's happening too is a lot of our venues are old, right?

Our malls are a little older, our stadiums are getting older. So you're going to see more of these stadiums, new builds will happen but you're going to see a lot of renovations where there's going to be seating upgrades and there's going to be changes to potential sight lines and things of that nature and make egress and easier and more exits whatever it might be.

But the technology is really what's going to put the renovations over the edge and it used to be that once you walked through that little tunnel and saw the baseball diamond, the first LED you saw that day was then. Now it's like when you're a couple of miles away on the highway, you see a billboard that's on the stadium.

So right away, you're triggering people's eyeballs before they even get to the park. Then you're tailgating and you're seeing advertisements run in your face and then you scan your ticket and you see an LED when you go through the lobby and the concessions and things like that, those can be obviously monetizable and you can have advertisements there.

And the same things happening in malls and in transit hubs and in other places where they're trying to grab your attention before you even think about heading into that wherever you're at, wherever you're going. 

David: Do you have to sell this whole notion into these kinds of venues or do they just inherently get it now because they've seen it in action elsewhere and it's no longer just this sort of exotic concept?

Joe Occhipinti: They definitely have seen it and they want to do it. I think where we come in is kind of helping them bring that to life. So we actually have like an architectural designer that will go and meet with teams and say, Hey, we have this area of our club or of our mall or transit hub that we'd really love to be able to monetize and put some LED signage here but we don't really know how to do it.

So that's where we come in, I would say we consult them but we're really just trying to provide another service to an existing partner or potential partner to say, Hey, we'll take some pictures, we'll create a virtual world and we'll throw some LEDs on there and you guys can kind of see and understand what it might look like.

And how do we angle it right to catch the attention of people coming up the stairs so that whatever it might be. So you can maximize the eyeballs and the dollars that you would get from that, right? Or the feel or the presentation that you want there. So we're doing that constantly.

We have done that at a lot of our marquee venues where we start with one install and the next thing you know is there's three or four or five installs over the next five or six years where they're adding a screen here or there because they realize it's a high traffic area or during walkthroughs or tours. It's a good place to promote their upcoming events or whatever it might be, you know what I mean?

So we kind of do that a lot for our places just to allow them to continue to add to the technology and to provide a better presentation to their constituents that are at the venue. 

David: Is it just the highly visible stuff? In the case of, let's say, a sports and events center, are you also driving the menu boards, menu displays in concession and the ticket windows and things like that?

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we've done some of that. As I mentioned, Wells Fargo is like our, I don't want to say crown jewel but it's been a really great partner for us for I believe over a decade. And we literally do everything there from, they have a sports book lounge on their top level to where they were ingesting staff feeds and scores and betting lines, their main video screen is kind of kinetic.

It comes down at one size and opens another and we just have to hit one button in our software which allows it to do that and then their IPTV system. I think it's upwards of 700 LCD or TV displays that they have across the venue and we don't have our own IPTV software but we built a bridge between us and their IPTV providers so that when they do score a goal or there is a win, we can send graphics out there.

Or if something they want to promote to their suites or to certain areas of the business of the venue, I should say, we can do that. Or even emergent emergency messaging or something like that. We have the ability to go full blast on every display that we touch that's in there.

And then even still, they're even adding more, we have billboards out on 95 there in Philly. They added some more displays on their outside, where if you go to a flyers game tomorrow, you'll see us up there kind of installing it. So, like I said, they're trying to get you from when you're a few miles away to get you thinking, you know, I'm excited for this game and I'm excited to participate in this event but also what goes out on there, you alluded to that.

I kind of said the betting lines and things like that. But one of our venues we have in the city, we have two JP Morgan Chase banks and you think that's kind of like a sleepy thing like who's going there to see the LED. But what Chase does for their customers is while you're sitting there, you might see If there are any subway delays, we work with the MTA to ensure that you'll see any traffic it might be if you're heading to Queens and say, it'll say take the tunnel not the bridge or whatever it is. Right.

And whether we'll pop up. So yeah, we're not creating this data but we're ingesting it from different feeds and from different sources and we're making it pretty, we're creating the graphical ways that it might show up and kind of add to the person's experience being at whatever venue they're at. 

David: Right. Now if I talk to virtually any CMS software company out there these days  and I asked them about data integration, they'll say, of course, yeah we do all kinds of  data handling.

We've got APIs and this and that where we're all over that stuff but I get the impression that there are very much different kind of tiers of this that you can have kind of basic data integration that yes, you could query, let's say some transit data if it's publicly available as an XML feed or something. From what you're telling me, this is quite a bit more exotic than that.

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I believe it is. I mean, I think what we can do is if the weather variable says it's going to be cloudy, we create a graphical thing that shows what you would think would be cloudy and that shows up there, right? Or if when it's time for the weather to come through and it's sunny, the background will say 65 and it'll be sunny but if it's 65 and rainy, the background will have rain on it.

So we're even going to that level where what the trigger is we're not just spitting out what the variable is but we're trying to create a cohesive content experience too, that kind of shows what's happening and then it allows us to trigger different items in our software too that if we can automatically change when the variable goes from top one to bottom one, it automatically changes the advertisements that would run in that happening.

So it even comes with efficiencies on our end of what we're able to and how we're able to gain presentation and things of that nature. But yeah, I mean these are little subtle things that the customer or the fan really appreciates and it's just great for us that we have an in-house design team.

We recreate these things, we're then our statistical engineers and our developers are then creating ways for it all to work together. So yeah, you do have your base level where we just want to see the scores on a ticker which we're happy to do but if they want to get more involved and do some more graphical things to enhance the experience, we're obviously able to do that as well.

David: When it comes to things like game day experiences for big sports venues and multi purpose venues like that, do these organizations have their own teams that handle all that and they just kind of work with you or are you actually doing the game day experience for these companies?

Joe Occhipinti: It's different at every venue. We're happy to be part of the team. However they would like us to be. It goes anywhere from a place like the game bridge field house, right? They just hosted the all star game and we live sync touches every LED display that's permanently installed there.

And our operators heavily involved in production meetings need to understand what the run of the show is to load the content prior to the game. He's been there so long. I'm sure maybe he will make some say, Hey, maybe try this or that. I don't know but he's been there for a while.

He's great at what he does and they fully trust us to carry out the run of shows that they have created but what might be in that run of show or graphics that the in-house design team also creates. So that's kind of part of the services department that I mentioned before, we also have graphic designers in house that if they want a special intro or some graphical element for a camera like a kiss cam or something. These keys and things that you see that help with game press, we kind of create those things for them.

And our guys are downloading it, testing it, making sure that it works for the game when it inevitably runs in the game. So it is varying levels somewhere passive, right? We're like, Hey, we're here, let us know what you need us to do. Let us know what content needs to be run.

And then in others where we're heavily involved where we're talking to them twice a week on content and churning out thousands of hours of graphical design and in their production meetings and we're upgrading their stat layers every season and creating a new look that might go with their season tickets or whatever it might be.

Right. So they would kind of like to have that whole cohesive kind of brand. Brand look that they go for. So it does vary per client just based on your level with them and what they want to get out of the relationship. 

David: Your company background is much more in sports but as we mentioned earlier, you kind of branched into retail and mass transport and other kinds of things like that.

How does the business break down now? Is it still predominantly sports or are you seeing quite a bit of traction in these newer areas? 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. I mean, obviously the legacy business, it used to be ANC sports and we dropped the sports when we started to foray into other things, the at home kind of markets.

I would say we do more volume and on the support side but there's obviously a lot of growth and a lot of greenfield on the place we call it places are out of the home side. And we've been lucky enough to do some impressive installations where the clients have trusted us to perform those, even though we had a lack of experience in it.

I've mentioned Fulton and Westfield, that was our first foray into it and was a hit and it looks great and still looks great, seven eight nine years later. We did a really good install down in South street seaport which we believe is really impressive.

We did some stuff at Moynihan train hall. So we've been lucky to have some big marquee type installations. We are trying to build our relationships with a lot of the out of home players without naming any names. Like we were trying to build those relationships and just kind of see what the partnerships look like there and be an installer and integrator for them as well, just like we've been able to do in the sports. 

So, I think the numbers will probably say that we're still more of a sports type business. But I don't think it's that far off from being even one day and I think we are going to put some resources behind it and we're going to do some stuff with the software that will help us change. We are in the process  of changing our user interface to be a little bit easier to use.

We're doing some cloud type and quick play type stuff at NBC Universal right now, where they can walk around with their phones when they're doing tours and they can just change what's being displayed on the screens from their phone. So we are putting some resources behind it because we believe in it that we could help a lot of different partners achieve their goals there.

David: I would imagine the typical media companies, even very large ones, would be pretty happy if somebody handled these more involved installations like Times Square or an entertainment district where there's a lot of screens because they're primarily in the business of selling media time and display faces and so on.

I don't know that they really want to get all that dirty in terms of running these kinds of networks, particularly when they start to get quite complicated. 

Joe Occhipinti: Literally and figuratively dirty like we're also installing the displays. It's a heavy construction type thing too.

Right. So we're installing the display, we're doing the steel work and then we're plugging everything in and running the show as well. So yeah, I think we have a lot to offer. And obviously, we need to make some enhancements and it's almost like the out of home stuff isn't easier.

It's different from in-game live presentations. And like you said, the legacy business was built that way. So when we got into the out of home market, it worked for out of home but we had some of these features like scheduling and overtakes and some of these things but they weren't maybe as robust as they are today cause we started doing more in it. 

So, we've really focused in and debugged them and made them stronger and better so that we can run an out of home type market but it's almost too robust for the simple kind of one display on the side of a building like I'm talking about where we specialize is game presentation where you see five or six or seven different screens. They all have to be synced to kind of make the game presentation feel cohesive or in certain venues like Westfield, where you see many screens at once, you don't want it to be choppy and look off but we're maybe a little bit too robust when it comes to a single display, right? And because we're too robust, our features, maybe a little bit heavy in terms of costs.

So we're going to try to address some of those things and really create something that would get all the features that we have but can also be used in an easier type setting as well and not be so cost effective and then like I said, we want to start getting our cloud infrastructure stronger and things like that, so that people can go by and change it with a phone.

Right now we have people on staff that are scheduling these places for us in our lives.

They're voting in and scheduling all these things. It would be easy if you work for Westfield World Trade and you're trying to court a client. You don't have to coordinate with ANC and the scheduler to, Hey, between 11 and 12, I want to show Sixteen Nine podcasts on all displays. 

You could just walk around and you could press a button on your phone and right when you're showing up and you can just launch it.

Right. So we're trying to do things like that. 

David: The Fulton Center thing is interesting in how it crosses into a world trade in the Oculus retail area and so on. What did you learn out of that in terms of putting together a visual network that was going to run across multiple venues that aren't necessarily visible to one another.

They're connected by tunnels or concourses but they're different things in certain respects and also, instead of a game where people are sitting for 40 minutes, almost all of them are constantly on the move. 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. So obviously they placed the screens in places where they felt there was going to be higher traffic, right?

Like an entrance to a subway tunnel or you come out of the path from Jersey and you're trying to get up into street level Manhattan and you walk that past, what amounts to almost four or five hundred feet of screens and it was definitely a little difficult to envision what they were trying to do but as it started to come together, it made a lot of sense to us and they kind of made it a little easier on us than had they treated the different areas of the facility to want to run different things, right?

They want the whole facility to run everything all at the same time. So we're able to create the software, create batches that have all the displays and throw all the content in there and then schedule them appropriately rather than this side underneath by the path station needs to run this at this time and then over by tower two, we want to run that. And then in Fulton, we want to run this other thing. 

They are two separate venues so we have two different schedules going at each one because they're different trains that run at each station, right? So in Fulton, you have four or five. And in Westfield, you have the AC and the two-three or whatever it is.

So you have to decipher what goes where but the way they wanted to run it allowed things to be a little bit easier on the back end but we had to deal with network infrastructure and everything else like that which was new to us in this type of a venue. But they're really there to obviously be advertisements.

Also, they need to make the place feel beautiful. Have you ever been down there? It's like all marble, it's a really beautiful facility. So they had to fit and they wanted to be in your face cause they were driving advertisements. They want to be appealing but they still need it to be beautiful and look good as well.

So there was a lot of pressure on us too. The 24/7 nature of it is a little different than sports where you have a game and if something goes wrong, you generally have till the next day or two days later to fix it. That doesn't happen outside of home. Things gotta be working 23 and a half hours a day with not a lot of downtime and not a lot of issues happening because advertisers are walking through it and potential advertisers and the customers.

So it was a lot of pressure on us. We literally have people walking the facilities downtown, New York, for 18 hours a day reporting issues and fixing issues. We don't want to have any downtime on these displays because the stakes are that high. 

David: Yeah, really.

How many people do you have working in the company? Roughly? 

Joe Occhipinti: We have about just under a hundred full timers and depending on the seasonality of it, we have around 200 part timers that work for us all across the country. 

David: And of the full timers are most of them kind of in the greater New York area.

Joe Occhipinti: There's probably like 30 percent in this area, just cause like I said, we have a lot downtown and kind of work at our headquarters in Westchester but we're pretty spread out. We have upwards of almost a hundred venues across the country where we have something. 

So, in those markets, like in LA or Washington DC or Baltimore, where we have a lot of different things going on. We have full timers that are in those markets actually running a stable of part timers as well. 

David: Yeah, because they need to be there. They can't just say, well I can get there next Thursday or something.

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, they gotta be there at a moment's notice most of the time. . 

David: Alright. This is great. If people wanna know more about ANC, they just go to ANC.com. 

Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. ANC.com. 

David: Nice and simple. 

Joe Occhipinti: We do some stuff on social media but LinkedIn is really probably the one that makes the most sense if you want to check out some of our posts and what we've been up to lately.

But we just did a full rebrand. We changed our logo. We kind of changed our colors after we bought the company back. I think the website looks great. So yeah, ANC.com will take you straight there and you guys can learn everything there is to know about us. 

David: Powered by C10, I see.

Joe Occhipinti: Powered by C10. C10's still around. Obviously, Jerry Cifrelli Jr. founded that company and that was the vehicle from which we acquired ANC but obviously with the legacy he had with his father and the name brand that ANC had, we decided we wanted to keep it. And just give it a refresh and push it forward.

David: All right. Joe, Thank you very much for your time. 

Joe Occhipinti: Thank you, Dave. This has been great. I appreciate it.

Rowan Brunger, Amino

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players.

They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment.

So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage?

That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic.

I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about? 

Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on.

So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices. 

David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV.

 

Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management.

So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players.

David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market. 

Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world.

There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a lot of the endpoints for Triple Play, Vitech and some of the IPTV streaming guys. So we've got loads of boxes out there in circulation and they're coming up for renewal or people wanting to upgrade to 4k, et cetera. 

So that gives us a natural pull off. Okay, let's look at this market in isolation rather than just bolting onto our existing business. And then there's actually looking at the experience that we've gained in the pay TV world which has become a very competitive environment to be in.

We can take a lot of that experience and truly add some value within the pro AV space with the gravitas of products and devices that we've managed previously and importantly, bringing over our video expertise onto the media player, rather than just looking at signage. We've done well where we integrate the two and we're finding a lot of customers are wanting both of them to run side by side on one device.

So we can pull the huge expertise we have in enterprise video and actually put it on the same device next to, for instance, the CMS platform, 

David: The markets and the use cases are, in some respects, very similar in terms of both needing very high quality of service.

Like the stuff can't go down, right?

Rowan Brunger: Sure. Yeah. We look at that from a number of different angles in terms of the physical player itself is truly enterprise grade, steel case designed to work in all environments 24 seven and some would argue we've even over engineered it. I mean, we've literally got boxes that have been running 24 seven in the field for 10 or 12 years solid and they're still displaying every single hour of the day. 

But then there's the actual total robustness of the system and that's the inevitably when something does go wrong and things obviously do go wrong, the ability to fix that very quickly and also the ability to make sure the ongoing security and updates of that device are easy to get onto it, is as important as it running really.

David: Yeah, I would say any number of CMS software companies in the industry have only in the last few years sort of realized the importance of remote device management, whereas it would have been inherent in what you do right from the start, right? 

Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it's absolutely an upfront thought in where we've come from.

And inevitably like a lot of things, you only realize how much you need something when you don't have it and when there's a problem. So certainly a lot of the signage projects that were involved with it, it's not their first signage project at all. They're learning from the deployments they've already made and what the pinch points were and what the really painful bits about it.

And I think we're in a world now where people are taking their signage a lot more seriously with a big emphasis and cost push to get people back to the high street. For instance, when we're looking at retail, it's not just a tick box, we have a signage system in place. It's got to be absolutely robust.

You've got to be able to rely on it and certainly, in times where people are paying to have their content advertised within the stores or the settings, they want to know it's actually been on the screen. 

David: So you're competing in a few ways with different kinds of companies. You've got the consumer/prosumer android set top boxes that have come over from Shenzhen or whatever. You've got special purpose media play out boxes like a bright sign box and then you've got companies like SPINX who have their own box and other companies that have their own boxes and then you have PCs.

So how do you kind of position yourself? 

Rowan Brunger: It's a really good question. So, if I cover the first section early on, I'll probably include system on chip in that as well. So we've got a system on chip users, people have realized that there's value in having a player but maybe not as necessarily selected.

One that hits all their objectives, I'm sure we say and then we've got the likes of the guys that do really high end boxes with multiple outputs. We've liked to keep this really simple, we have two products in our portfolio, for instance, we have a POE model and we have a Wifi model.

So we keep it really simple. It's at a price point where we're stretching the people from the cheap consumer devices and the system on chip operators but add enough value to make that extra investment to move towards an enterprise grade player but we're underneath a lot of our true competitors that you know do fit for purpose signage players because we don't try and do everything. So I'll give you an example of that.

We like to partner with specialists in areas that aren't familiar to us. So if somebody needs a four output player, we've got a partnership with the likes of Matrox to give you that. So those guys specialize in multiple output play, cards and players, we feed into it. But what that gives the customer is one platform for pretty much whatever they want to do.

So our device management and the reliability is right up there with the top end competitors. But we've got a really simplistic view and what our customers like is no matter what they're displaying or what they're using the player for, it's the same player that does it all. So we've got one customer that has probably six use cases for our player within their stores.

So a large rollout of about 650-700 stores in the UK and they're doing multiple things with it but they know it's a H 200 player,  that is just programmed in different ways for those different use cases and they really liked that from a maintenance point of view. So we've kept things really simple.

We are definitely a step up and a professional grade player to challenge the lower end operators in the market and in terms of the higher end guys, I think we're hitting a price point. They can't, so we can get mass adoption from our product and we've got the right partnerships in place to cover all use cases with the guys that lead the industry in those areas.

David: So for the age 200 player. If I'm buying, like 10 of them, what roughly in U. S. dollars would be the cost? 

Rowan Brunger: So well, I'm doing a conversion in my head. 

David: Well, give me, EU or sterling. 

Rowan Brunger: Yeah, so we've got a package to trade within Europe that's about 240 pounds.

Okay. What are we at? Just over 300 and that's a full two year package of enhanced support, premium device management software on the player itself. The player itself is around 200 on its own with various different options. So it hits a price point if you want to power four screens; for instance, in a video wall, it actually becomes price.

It prices itself well enough that you could actually put a player on each of those screens, run it as a video wall, or run them individually and have that flexibility. So you're not just doing one or the other, yet you're still coming in at probably less than a quad head player that would powerful screens, 

David: Yeah, and it's interesting. By standardizing on just one box for a whole bunch of different use cases, you could keep a spares pool without having to think, okay, I need two spares of these and two spares of those, and so on. You just have five on the shelf that you can pull off if you need to.

Rowan Brunger: Exactly that. I mean the scenario I just gave you before, they're even looking at running just some simple audio or some simple HTML pages, just because they like the simplicity that everything is powered by exactly the same thing. 

David: You mentioned that you've had stuff in the field for 10 years. Do you have a rated operating life? 

Rowan Brunger: Well, the chipset has changed, which has sort of adapted that slightly, and then you've obviously got the provisions of using flash memory but the products that we have in the field have normally been programmed to do one thing, from the offset. So, quite often, decoding video streams, so they haven't really been updated, and that's why they've been running for 10 or 12 years plus. They’re designed and warranted to run for, you know, the standard sort of five or six years, but they've become so robust that people have just left them in cause they're working. 

We've got an airport with 2000 of the units in, and it's only because they want to change to full grade that they even thought about upgrading them. They've been running in excess of 10 years in that airport.

David: So with the build for these units, if I have 500 of them and I decide, okay, I'm expanding, I'm an airport, I'm expanding a new terminal. I need 500 more. Is it going to be a different box at this point, or would that even matter?

Rowan Brunger: The H200 has been around for about two years now, it really depends on when those proxies were deployed but the older boxes that we have in the sort of thousands out there, aren't supported anymore because they're well over 10 years old, but we've got a very easy upgrade path to swap those boxes out for the new range of products. And in doing that, they're all on the same platform for managing them then as well.

David: I asked this because one of the complaints, among probably quite a few complaints with buying little Android boxes from Shenzhen or elsewhere is that if you order a hundred of them and then you order another hundred that second batch of one hundred might have different operating systems or different versions of the operating system, different electronics inside and everything else. So every time they show up, you're starting from scratch.

Rowan Brunger: Absolutely. Welcome to buying consumer products. But we manage our chipsets and our components very strictly, and you can imagine the volumes we make them in because there's a lot of crossover from the set-top box side of the business but more importantly, we operate Android AOSP. So, we actually control and write the firmware for the product ourselves. So, in terms of updating the products, we're putting our own firmware on there. We're not relying on Google or Android updates for anything; in fact, much the opposite, because we want to be in control of it.

So for instance, when you boot one of our boxes up, there's no app store. There's no standard Google browser on there, it's exactly what we choose to put on there, which makes it very fit for purpose because it's not running a million things in the background. We give it some very clear parameters and control exactly what middleware or APK that we put on there that's monitored centrally and all the versions and updates are controlled centrally as well. So you know exactly what's on there and you’re the master of your own destiny. 

David: Are you having to worry about security, well, I guess everybody worries about security, but because, as you just described, does that kind of greatly reduce the risks?

Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it does, and again, this is something we've pulled over from our knowledge of the Pay TV market. So working with Android, we adhere to some pretty strict guidelines from Google in terms of security patches and timely updates, et cetera, and we actually think that's really very relevant in the pro AV market as well. So we've actually pulled over the standards that we adhere to on the Pay TV market, within the digital signage space.

So as a result of that, we do at least four firmware updates a year that contain all the relevant security patches because there's nothing else on there in terms of an app store, et cetera, we’re cleared in very highly secure environments. So we do a lot of work with the government. We've got a really interesting project going on, within a prison. So somebody's made their own middleware that they're using on the box and actually running entertainment within prison cells using the H200, which you can imagine is a super secure environment. So because we're in complete control of it, we can make it as secure as we like.

And we're seeing that more and more prevalent with even retail rollouts now, with things like 802.1X authentication on networks, which I've never heard asked for but have been asked quite a lot for recently. So we quite got an agile development team. We're able to add functions like that and drop them in the latest firmware, and get them out of the boxes very quickly. 

David: So because you're shipping a lot of units, do you get some sense of what the marketplace demand is? 

For the longest time, people were saying, yes, it would be nice if we went to 4k, but nobody actually needs it yet, and for signage applications, it's probably never needed. Certainly, 8k, which is being marketed, is something that is probably years away if it ever comes. What is the marketplace actually using?

Rowan Brunger: We are being asked for 4k a lot more. You're right in the signage space; it’s less applicable, although a lot of the CMS providers don't even output in 4k, which, obviously, is a stumbling block. But for those that do, we're just testing a build for 4k content at the moment, and we've got out with some beta testers, and that's going very well. Obviously, 4k video is pretty much a must when people are looking at video, and that's very much our expertise, how we can stream that and what protocols we use to stream it and transport streams and encryption, is all around 4k and in particular, low latency is something that we specialize in quite a lot. So that takes us down certain vertical markets such as sporting and gaming where latency is an absolute deal breaker. 

So we're seeing for our players and going back to your question about market trends, I'd say 50% of our opportunities are video-led, and the other 50% are signage-led, but with an element of video, a lot of them are with an element of video as well. So I think our expertise in video is really setting us apart here, and that, down the 4k route. POE has been requested more and more so that's why it's standard on our H200s.

David: For retail more than anything I would imagine?

Rowan Brunger: Actually, no, and I thought it would be, but what we're seeing is the requests for Wi-Fi is actually coming through retail more than anywhere else because when people are doing a retrofit of a store or they want to have quite an agile space within the store and be creative with where they're putting the screens, there's not normally a network point there.

So we're actually finding some of our big retail rollouts are actually going down the Wi-Fi route, which I didn't expect, to be honest, but we've done a separate Wi-Fi unit for that marketplace because leading back to the security, a lot of our government and military deployments require us not to even have the ability to have Wi-Fi in the box altogether, which is why we didn't just add Wi-Fi to the existing H200. We've actually done it as two separate products. But yeah, interestingly, we've just launched our, or we're just in the process of launching our Wi-Fi unit, and the inquiries that are coming in are predominantly retail, and also the leisure industry as well as people want to put more screens and things in bars and pubs that typically have terrible infrastructure. Wi-Fi seems to be the easiest route to go with that as well. 

David: You mentioned streaming, I'm a little curious about that because most of the set-top boxes that are on the market have onboard storage and digital signage most typically is forward and stored and played off of a hard drive locally. 

Are your boxes doing that, or is it all streaming?

Rowan Brunger: No, it's all streaming. We can digest the number of transport streams such as multicast, unicast, low latency dash, and low latency HLS because that's what our bread and butter are on the set-top box side of the world.

So we're finding a lot of people for instance, within the betting industry where low latency is an absolute must, we're working with specific middleware vendors that provide the streams on an OTT basis, and we decode them locally on the box with various different levels of encryption and it's enabling people to reduce the amount of head end hardware that they've got. Even down to sort of office builds, government buildings where there's an element of wanting just some basic news channels alongside the signage, the ability to switch between the two. So typically, you'd have a big head end, consumer set-top box with aerial on the roof, bringing those streams down, we're able to bring them in completely OTT.

So we remove the need for all of that hardware, and just, bring it on an OTT basis straight to the box, which is game-changing for somebody that's, maybe, got a larger state and they have to rent aerial space on the roof of all their stores, have a big server unit within there, consuming a lot of power, needing managing, and obviously bringing those streams down locally, we literally just pop the addresses into the box, into a JSON file and we pull them down through our player that's on board within the software stack.

David: Are there worries at all about the quality of service and reliability of service for connectivity? Because God knows that used to be an issue, but maybe it's gone away. 

Rowan Brunger: It's becoming less of an issue because with different encryptions and transport streams, they require a lot less bandwidth. It still needs assessing, obviously, when you're looking at a sign. But you can tweak the bitrate frames between the different encryption levels to get to a happy medium of a quality that you want alongside a bandwidth that you're willing to play with. So, it's becoming less of an issue. We can still obviously decode on-prem feeds as well when it's absolutely paramount that the feeds have got to be on-premises but the bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue now. 

David: You mentioned enterprise TV at the front end of our chat. How do you define that? 

Rowan Brunger: So it's really whether it's TV-led, and what I mean by enterprise TV is, anything that's not residential, and not, hospitality so retail, office environments, sports stadium, things like that. That's where we'd class as enterprise TV. So it's the enterprise-grade of the box, but it's primarily streaming IPTV rather than just signage. 

David: Do you sell direct or do you kind of go through a channel or, through software partners?

Rowan Brunger: So we sell purely through a channel. We sell through distributors around the globe, trade only, through the channel directly to our system integrators, and onto the end users. So yeah, we're a channel-focused business, and that's something that we've recently sort of redesigned because that model is very different from what Amino is used to in the Pay TV market where they may deal directly with operators.

We've decided that within this marketplace, a channel-only focus is the best way to go. It ensures our partner's protection on pricing and margin, et cetera, and also gives us scalability that we've got partners out there promoting the product for us.

David: When you started Looking at the digital signage market, was it a little baffling when you realized how many software companies there are?

Rowan Brunger: Yes, there does seem to be an ever ending amount of CMS partners to play with. We've worked with a couple that we've got a history with and onboarded those guys. We've now got an accreditation process. So when we do onboard a partner, we truly onboard them as a partnership rather than just saying, okay, we've tested that version of the APK, and that works fine. Let's call it accredited. 

We actually onboard them and make a commitment that CMS will work ongoing with Amino and we go into a partnership with the CMS so we get beta releases of each other's software so we can truly test it in advance, which is why it takes a little bit of time to onboard, although we have quite an impressive list of CMS vendors on the list to go through accreditation, so it is definitely a nice route to market. We want to play with as many people as we can. At the same time, not overloading ourselves. 

I think what's helping us there is the fact that a lot of CMSs seem to develop their APK before the platforms, so we do tend to be able to onboard people fairly quickly. And if there is any integration work that needs doing, it's fairly straightforward, and we've seen it before on somebody else's application. So yeah, onboarding and partnering are absolutely key for us over the next 12 months. We don't want what CMS somebody uses to be a barrier to sell, and it's not just a CMS, we work very closely with a number of streaming middleware companies as well that are specific in certain vertical markets as well. 

David: So you're at a stand at some trade show and a CMS, digital signage CMS software company walks up and says, “Hi, I'm aware of you guys, and would like to be involved.” What's that thing you tell them when they say, “What do we need or how do we need to be set up in order for this to work?” 

Rowan Brunger: Initially, we would ask for a version of their application and log in to their system, and we deliberately ask for no more than that because we want to test it as a virgin user if you like. So we put it through a first round of testing, which is:

Does this go onto the box? Does it behave as if I would expect it to behave as a user? And that's our first round of testing. Normally, if that goes okay, we put it forward towards a full Q.A. test with our Hong Kong development team, which is a 400-point Q.A. test, which literally tests every element of the software and the integration, and at that point, we give a report back to the CMS provider to say, “Yes, it's all gone smoothly” or “It works, but can we suggest we do this and this integration together to make it a better experience?” And then, we go into the commercials of the partnership and make sure that we're sharing best practices with each other in terms of updates and things.

We also have a lot of APIs that are available through our remote management software that we're finding a lot more of the CMS partners want to integrate into their CMS platform to give the end users, that one pane of glass, whether they're managing content or the device that they can do it in one place. So we have completely open APIs for the CMS partners to be able to do that and put a lot of the functionality that we have in our device management, actually in their front-end system that the customer is using every day for the content. 

David: Does your platform support IP streaming or multicast or that sort of thing? Is there a foundational thing they have to have? 

Rowan Brunger: No, not at all. We are dealing with some partners to put our video play technology within their CMS but it's not these guys' expertise. So, actually, the value to them of working with Amino is you can run their CMS software and switch seamlessly into an IPTV solution alongside their CMS. So, all of a sudden, they can speak to their customers about IPTV streaming solutions alongside pretty much any CMS rather than having to have a specialized solution incorporated into their roadmap. 

How many times have we provided screens to somebody and you get the call, maybe two, two weeks later, two years later, “Can we put some TV streams through this for us?” For us, that's just a service we can turn on without having to ship any hardware. So it gives a lot of flexibility to these existing CMS deployments. 

David: You mentioned the Hong Kong software team, is that where the company is based? 

Rowan Brunger: No, we're based in Cambridge in the UK. So we are a UK-based company and have been for our existence. We have a couple of support teams. One is in Portugal, level one support is in Portugal, and we have a level two support team in Hong Kong. So we've got to follow the sun kind of coverage on support. 

David: And manufacturing is done in China like everybody else?

Rowan Brunger: Some manufacturing is done in China. There's a whole host of countries that we're manufacturing in. We've got stuff coming out of Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong. It depends on the product or the chipset, but yeah, a fairly well-diverse manufacturing plant. We're not stationed all in one place.

David: What's the next AV trade show that you guys will have a stand at or a presence at? 

Rowan Brunger: So Infocomm is coming up. We've got a presence there, and we've just done ISE, as you know, and then we've got some presence at NAB as well because we do see some crossover from some of the broadcasting shows that are looking at enterprise video or signage. So our trade show calendar is still split between Pay TV, but with a much larger emphasis than we have done on the AV world. 

David: If people want to know more about Amino, where do they find you online?

Rowan Brunger: Sure, just go to Amino.tv. 

David: Clever! All right, Rowan, thank you very much for your time.

Rowan Brunger: Thank you, David. Pleasure as always.

Sebastien Boulanger, DVOX

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

There are lots of reasons why digital signage and digital out of home ad networks don't have audio - the biggest reason being that the majority of people (especially staff who are in that environment all day) don't want to hear messages over and over.

Many speakers have been stabbed with forks or seen their audio cables snipped by workers who could not take it day after day.

But there also cases in which audio would be welcomed, and very useful.

There are different technologies out there that can enhance and complement the messaging on screens, and headset devices that can be borrowed or rented, so that audio can be added to things like museums and attractions or live sports events. The challenge is that the technology used might be old and limited, or the set-up requires maintaining, cleaning, charging and keeping track of a lot of hardware.

A Montreal company called DVOX is taking a different approach - making audio streams from live events and from screens available over local area networks and WiFi, so that anyone with a smartphone and headphones of some kind can launch a simple web app and start listening.

The primary markets, I think, are with big sporting events and conferences, but it's also the sort of thing that has applications for digital signage and digital out of home. I spoke with DVOX president Sebastien Boulanger.

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TRANSCRIPT

Sebastien, thank you for joining me. I know very little about DVOX. Could you give me a rundown of what the company is? 

Sebastien Boulanger: DVOX is a fast-growing startup at the moment that is offering a new generation technology for live audio streaming purposes in several domains. 

How does it work?

Sebastien Boulanger: Easy enough. DVOX is taking and acquiring any analog audio source, that might be coming from a live microphone, sound desk, broadcasting trailer, audio extractor devices, or whatever you please. We're acquiring analog audio input and then converting it to digital to stream it directly over the local area network, meaning that guests or visitors have to be connected to the right WiFi to be granted access to the audio stream.

We're doing so that the stream goes out through a webpage, so the end user doesn't have to install any mobile apps or whatever. It's only a web browser page, basically. 

So the idea is you're seeing stuff on a screen at whatever venue you're in, whether it's a sports bar or a sports stadium or some other place, you can basically hear the audio without, the having to crank the speakers to 11 for, that to happen?

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Let me give you a couple of examples here that might be helpful here. Let's say you are in a sports bar, as you were just mentioning, and you have plenty of screens in front of you. So, which of those screens will be on the speaker boxes? So basically you can have ambiance, music, whatever for all the other guests, but if you feel like you want to hear a football match, you simply have to have the audio of that screen. 

So with DVOX what you can do is have all the different audio feeds running inside of the system And then by being connected to the right WiFi, you will be able to choose which audio feed you want to hear, so basically, through a regular webpage,, as simple as browsing, you have access to all of the audio feed that the venue is offering in live, in real-time. You only need a QR code to get onto the event page, and if you're on the right WiFi, there you go; you have all the feeds. 

You're using a smartphone and a web app to get this, as opposed to asking people to download our special app and go through a bunch of hoops? 

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct.

And that's why we're having a lot of pull these days in the sports industries, in the congress center industries as well, educational because any audio source can be streamed through WiFi. We're just back from Detroit, where we're showcasing our technology to a league, which is called the UFL, and in the meantime, we present it to the NFL Lions and the Active Forward Field, and basically, what these guys are offering is having a 60,000 seats venue with powerful WiFi coverage. So now, with DVOX, they can have any exclusive content because it's not a broadcast. It's a local stream. It's a huge difference here. So basically, they can have any audio feed, and give it to all of the attendee's, ticket owners that are inside of the building to have exclusive content.

So, while your eyes are looking at a football game, you can have an audio description, you can have a quarterback microphone, you can have a bench microphone, you can have anything you please, basically. 

As long as the organizer decides to make that available, you can capture it through your devices and then use it.

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Mainly what we're doing is installing physically the device, the DVOX hardware piece of equipment next to the broadcasting trailer, let's call it in the loading dock, if you please, because all the audio feeds run through that truck, basically broadcasting trailer. But before getting those streams to the sound desk and on air, we can have those same feeds and put them back in the venue for the guests that are attending. 

If we rollback a little bit of discussion to the digital signage here, just to give you another example, it might be helpful to understand with another example. Let's say you are in an airport. So you are here two hours, three hours prior to your flight. You already have your headphones. There's already WiFi in the airport, and there's, I don't know, in between 600-2000 screens all over the airport. All of those screens are on mute. But why? Because it would be a mess to try to have sound coming out of those. That's for sure. 

So now, you have plenty of apps that could be available, and some of them are really neat. I'm not arguing these, but you might be a tourist with a foreign SIM card, not having a data plan or whatever. With DVOX, basically, you log into the WiFi, simply browse to the airport webpage that is offering sound, and if all of those are video feed or backed by an audio feed that the airport wants to give you, then all of a sudden you have access to the audio feed for all the screens without the need to install anything, no latency, and then, basically, you choose whatever you want to hear without reading the subtitles all the time. 

I travel a lot. I go through a lot of airports, and the quality of the WiFi varies pretty widely, from airport to airport, sometimes it's amazing, and sometimes it's dreadful. What kind of impact does introducing these audio streams to an airport that maybe already has as much demand as it can handle, what's that going to do?

Sebastien Boulanger: That's actually a really good question, and here's one thing I would like to explain in detail here, if I may. WiFi is one thing, internet access is another one. So, in your example here, when you're saying the WiFi is weak, is it the WiFi strength, the coverage, or the internet access? Because sometimes, the issue is not necessarily the strongness of the signal, meaning you have good reception over the WiFi antennas that are installed all over the airports. There are so few nets, but yeah, you're right, sometimes the administrator just locks to a certain speed, the up and down traffic to avoid having a bottleneck to the networks for somebody with, I don't know, streaming live or whatever. 

The thing is, with DVOX, when you are on to the WiFi, you simply download, if I could say, the visual of the event page. So, simply by browsing, you're accessing a webpage. Same thing as when you are asking for google.com, and you have the search bar popping in. So basically you only have a visual that's coming in. But as soon as you click on play, all the audio feeds are kept local. Your cell phone has a direct path to the hardware, which is inside the building. So to answer your question, having slow internet is not even a problem as long as you have WiFi coverage, and even with only one bar of signal, that says we're enough because we're only carrying audio around on purpose.

So here, in that scenario, we are using 48 kilobits per second per user per listener. 48 kilobits is nothing. Those antennas are built to manage one gigabyte of data transfer. Everything stays local. So there is no round-time trip latency with the cloud or internet, whatever. So we have less than 0.04 seconds delay. So on the WiFi, it's really light. 

Unlike if you're trying to send video around, which should be very heavy on a network if there was a lot of demand, audio is nothing. 

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, absolutely. Plus I'd like to add that since we know that we are only audio for obvious reasons, all the web browsers are behaving the same way. And for any network, might it be public or private or whatever WiFi infrastructure, we are considered as voice over IP. So, therefore, there's already pre-configured, quality of servicing because, of course, people sometimes are having Messenger calls or FaceTime or whatever. So the audio goes smoothly through any network, and all the web browsers, such as Safari, Chrome, Edge, whatever browser you might be using are behaving the same way because they think it's a web radio. 

So you can kill your screen put your cell phone in your pocket and keep listening for hours without dragging down your battery. If we were to have video content or subtitles or video bumper or whatever, we would be having issues with being polyvalent with all the web browsers they are not behaving the same way. 

So this concept and need has been around for a while now. The idea that I wish I could hear what was on that screen, but they've kept the sound down for whatever reason, or I wish I could hear this or that. 

There have been other attempts in the past to do this sort of thing. I remember there was a little company called, Hear My Lips which is a god-awful name, but maybe that was part of the problem. But there's been a few things out there. Technology advances this stuff, obviously. But I've also seen things like golf tournaments or other events where people have this weird little thing clipped onto one of their ears. That's a remote speaker, it's a hardware device that you have to have in order for you to hear specialized commentary or something.

You're saying we can remove that equipment because you have a receiver in your pocket anyway, your smartphone and earbuds, and you're good to go. 

Sebastien Boulanger: That is correct. And, I would like to compliment or answer that question with a brief history of DVOX. So being myself, a technical director in the show business industry for a while, at first I was asked to have instant translation over a large crowd, let's say 2000+ guests at a corporate event back in 2015 and back then in 2015, there was still a lot of Blackberry in the market and it was a business conference.

So even the business people attending did not necessarily own their own cell phones. Remember the very beginning of the Apple smartphones, sometimes they were business phones, so they wouldn't even be allowed to install. Plus the speakers, the keynote speakers, or themselves refracting the fact that their content might be going into the cloud. They didn't want that because they just created or written a speech for this particular event without allowing us to have any content going to the cloud. 

That said back then, I only had infrared technology, which is great, but it's an old-generation technology where you need to have dedicated receivers, landing counters, managing IP, installing radiators, and so on. So then what's left, you have FM technology, which is behaving the same way, basically with a dedicated receiver. And you know as well as I do that all the FM frequencies are saturated, downtown, and it was a mass basically. So now by looking for a solution, I end up with apps that were out of the question.

So back in 2015, they said, okay, there's nothing that is doing a simple thing, which is acquiring audio streaming live through a webpage. So then I asked around, and I decided to build it. So if I rolled back to your previous question, sorry for the long answer, you're absolutely right. Any cell phone and/or an MP3 player, which is WiFi capable, iPad or anything that has a web browser that can be on the WiFi is, in fact, an actual receiver with DVOX. 

So that you may use your preferred headphones or your preferred Bluetooth devices that you already have configured with your cell phone and there you go, you have a new receiver. It's really convenient. You don't have to bother with having a dedicated piece of equipment. There's no cumbersome stuff to install either. 

I was in the UK a few months ago on a working holiday and went to a couple of museums or places where you would pay to get in and walk around, and you could give them five pounds, and they would give you a headset device of some kind that streamed, and I thought they were great, but there's a whole routine to cleaning them, making sure that they get them back. I'm sure there's maybe not shrinkage because people aren't really stealing them as much as just forgetting they have them, and they walk out and see them when they're on the subway, and they decide, you know what, I'm not going all the way back with it, so they toss them. So it's expensive, and there's a lot of management involved. 

You're saying with this, even in a museum setting, you could just use this instead of this hardware suite. 

Sebastien Boulanger: Absolutely, and then you don't have to manage all the batteries that are going to be dying and people dropping their receivers. All your points were really valid ones. And, yeah, your cell phone is the only thing you need. 

I might add, just to a certain extent, how many cell phones, old cell phones, do you have in your, I don't know, Gunther tray or how many devices do you still have at home from the past?

Four or five.

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, there you go. So even without a SIM card, they're still accessing the WiFi, right? So even these old cell phone phones are actually working as a receiver for you. So in a museum environment, I know they do have a lot of schools coming in and younger visitors and stuff like that. So they might be willing to use it. In that sense, this is not an issue at all. Anything that is web-capable is an actual receiver. They may provide, or they can provide themselves, any MP3 player that’s WiFi capable, and all of a sudden, you have a visitor that can use their cell phone, and that's it.

For an airport, for a museum, for a big sports stadium, those kinds of things, they're going to have IT teams, they're going to have telecommunications closets, IT closets, they've got all the stuff together, and the experience and qualifications to put something like this together. 

If it's a sports bar or some sort of small to medium business environment like that, is this over their heads? Is this something that would be great, but they won't even know where to start? 

Sebastien Boulanger: Oh, no, it's so easy. Even when we went to the Australian Open at the beginning of the year in January to become a medium, it took 20 minutes. The hardest problem was to have the right feed out of the sound desk, basically over 20 minutes, we're up and running.

Let's put it that way, whenever you have audio content somewhere, you have the audio side that you can have access to, and you have a WiFi net, DVOX fits right in between. So, on a boot cycle, we're up in about two minutes, and we're already in your WiFi because we connected the network and then we plug in the analog audio feed. The only thing left is to match the volume, and that's it. It's really easy to understand and integrate. 

These are basically rack-mounted appliances, like 2U appliances, you just slide into a rack, and off you go? 

Sebastien Boulanger: Absolutely. You need a 2U rack space, and it's super convenient for any rack because they are standard AV kind of dimensions. So this is not a huge rack and this is not a refrigerator that you have to deal with in your AV room. 

Yeah, so it would fit in most businesses, and it's not a big footprint, too. 

Is it the sort of thing that a business owner could install, or are you doing this through resellers and integrators who would put this in for folks and manage it?

Sebastien Boulanger: That's a kind of a two-way answer here. If I were to send you a device right now over FedEx or whatever you receive, I'm pretty sure that within, I don't know, 15 minutes, you'll be up and running.

As long as I have a hammer.

Sebastien Boulanger: I'm sure you won't need it. You just need an Ethernet cable, not a hammer, and I'm positioning my company as an AV manufacturer here because we're aiming for several markets, and several fields of usage, meaning digital signage, sports, hospitality, transportation, whatever, and whatever, plus we're having several territories.

Now, we are distributed in the Australian market and New Zealand. We are as well in the US and Canada, and soon enough, we'll be in the UK. We're just leading the discussion right now. So, I will not personally be able to answer the call for all of these territories, right? So, I'm relying on a seller to help me be the first layer of servicing and/or be the integrator. 

And the complexity is not on the DVOX side. Let me give you an example of the airport once again. Whenever you're in the airport, you have announcements, a lot of announcements. You sometimes have ambient music, or, in a sports bar, you have a little happy hour music or whatever. But whenever there's an announcement, it's just taking over because they want to have everyone hear it per terminals, whatever. So these guys already have audio DSPs, amplifiers, speaker boxes, and stuff like that. So basically, by having all the audio DSPs, those AV integrators would reprogram the DSP just to have an audio mix that goes through DVOX that will still keep the announcement on top whenever there's an announcement, right? Priority. But in that sentence here, this is a bit more complex, so yes, an integrator would do it, but for any sports bar, you take any audio source out, maybe an HDMI audio extractor, and put them in a DVOX and that's it, you have nothing else to do, So if you want to have a dedicated mix with priorities over some feeds and blah, blah, blah, that's a little more complex. I'm relying on resellers and integrators, but if you are going your own way with analog in from an auxiliary one out of your preferred sound desk or HDMI extractor or microphone, you're good to go.

Does the footprint of a facility, like something like an airport, which is vast, does that present any kind of a problem in terms of latency, on the local area network, or it doesn't matter whether you're 10 feet or a thousand feet away?

Sebastien Boulanger: No, absolutely. An airport is a good example here. They can't generate delay on the IT side meter. All of the terminals are interlinked through fiber optics cable. So there's no IT delay, if I can put it that way, and, I'm going to use again this Australian Open example here where we're connected to the Melbourne Olympic Park. These guys had more than 400 antennas, and that was still leaving the site of the Australian Open, and along the bicycle path or whatever, you go out of the site, and you have another section, which has a huge hill, grass slope where people are sitting and looking at an enormous big screen. So, for all of those that are not ticket owners, they could be going there. So the WiFi was offered to that section too, and we were snap-syncing the screen. So the delay of the IT is not an issue. Of course, if you are running with copper wire over 27 switches, you will be infringing on the delay. But, we are not experiencing IT delay, if I can put it that way, on our installation, and we can be as wide as the coverage is. 

It strikes me as there's always a challenge with, something unfamiliar to get people to, first of all, be aware, and second, do whatever is needed to get it going. Do you face that at all in terms of putting this in place, like at the Australian Open?

How does the Australian Open make their ticket holders and fans aware that this is there and get them to use it?

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, totally. First, they must communicate that this is a DVOX device. This means you should bring your own device and headphones. So what they did in this particular event was to have one or two emails sent prior to the event to the ticket owners mentioning, to bring their headphones or their devices, but on-site, there was a lot of advertisement as well. “We're using DVOX. You can connect to your cell phone!” So that's for the part about bringing your own device. Now, what we did at several events, actually, not only at the Australian Open, is have a small JPEG, a picture, that is telling people, step one, connect to the WiFi with the name of the wife, connect to whatever WiFi, right? Step two, scan this QR and done. So, any guests in the room simply have to take a cell phone, connect to the WiFi, and scan the QR and that's loading the page. That's it. W

e also have prints, large banners, vinyls, and stuff like stickers, posters, whatever that are applied almost everywhere on site. So people can have this QR for them. Web, event, page, anywhere, so that's pretty easy to communicate with the guests. 

Could you have tiers of service? So let's say you can get a basic thing of the in-game play-by-play, but if you want to hear the audio from the quarterback's helmet or whatever it is, you can get that too, but you're going to pay an extra five bucks or something?

Sebastien Boulanger: Paying a little bit, five bucks more, that's totally up to the broadcaster itself because with DVOX, you just give me the audio feed you want to stream. So in your example here, okay, we went to the Crypto.com Arena on the Fox sport request to have a showcase or technology for a boxing match, back in September, and you were sitting in the audience; it was a private one, right? It was with the Fox team and ADI and whatever so we were roughly 30 people trying the solution. So, for that test, what they gave us was the blue corner, red corner, the referee mic, and the commentators. So when you are listening to the commentators, these guys who are commenting on the match are next to the ring, so you can look at their lips and you are directly sitting next to them. You can hear it super clearly, and you don't have any delay. So the lips to your ear are instant, plus whenever these guys were, and that was a heavyweight championship. I'm so happy not to be a boxer or a fighter. These guys are, I'm saying politely, monsters.

They're big, and they're anyway. So I was in the audience, and when I grabbed the referee microphone that was falling from the ceiling microphone, you could hear it. The glove hitting the face, the glove smashing the skin of the opponent, and, it, hurts, basically, so you are in the audience, and for the first time, you're experiencing the hit; you can't be closer without getting hit, basically. And the red corner and blue corner were really quiet. These guys are fighting, but as soon as you hear the ring, ding, the dong, and then whenever they jump back to their corner, their coaches are giving them strategy, and you can all hear it. That's really engaging. You can select the red corner, and you can hear, “Okay, just try to block a little more, and he's punching you all the time in the same place.” And you have all this relevant information that is changing the game completely, so basically, it's super easy to get any of your feed out from the broadcaster. 

It's interesting. I keep coming back to airports, and honestly, the TV screens that are on there show news every half an hour or whatever, I'm very happy if I can't hear that, but what I would love to be able to hear, particularly at many airports that have god awful audio systems is I'd like to hear the gate announcements because it sounds bad. I can't figure out what they're saying because they're using cheap old speakers or God knows what, but if I could just hear that now they're boarding zone two, I'd be happy as a clam.

Sebastien Boulanger: Of course, and not to forget about all those noise canceling headphones that work really great. So you can be in your small cocoon of yourself, and hear everything in the announcement clearly without bothering about a baby crying or so on. 

In the digital signage world, we're also leading a discussion with, I'm not going to mention it per se, big players that are offering, exterior places like Square that are surrounded by LED screens. It is not Times Square, but just picture Times Square in your mind so you will see what I'm talking about. So basically, when you are walking in this environment, you have plenty of LED screens, but the only thing you hear is cars passing by, or tires squeaking, or whatever noise might be happening. So all of those. Publicity or visuals are only video for the moment. And, then again, you're walking by, you might be waiting for a bus or whatever, will you take time to install an app? You already have 80 of those on your cell phone. To have the sound of a billboard could be as easy and it is as easy as getting a QR code and then you have it directed. So that's really cool. It's a good way to wait for the bus basically. 

Yeah, although I really can't see myself walking through a big public plaza and deciding I want to hear these ads as well, but that's just me. I'm a cranky old fart. 

Sebastien Boulanger: No, but you're right. This is not necessarily for publicity audio,, but some places like the one we're talking about right now are also running interviews.

Last question, because this just flew by, what am I, as an end user, buying? Am I buying hardware, or am I buying hardware and then subscribing to a service as well?

Sebastien Boulanger: Basically, what we are selling at the moment is the hardware solution because we need to acquire the audio and stream it to your network. So, the input card which is DVOX hardware, has to stand inside of your building. On the other hand, we have a yearly licensing, which is really good, though super affordable, because we're not dealing with up and down traffic. So the only reason why we're having a yearly licensing is for you to be able to customize your visuals. You can totally modify the webpage, the event webpage, as we call it. You can put your logo, your color, your name, your picture face, or whatever you decide. So you can customize the visual.

You can also customize when it's going to be up and when it's going to disappear when the event is over or whatever, plus one thing that is really important. You can extract the KPIs. Basically, at the end of a certain period of time, you decide you jump into your event, and you can interrogate this system to have relevant tasks. But they're all anonymous, not an app. So we don't know anything about you; we just know about your cell phone. Meaning, how many people were listening to which feed, or how long, and which was the most popular, or what time of the day was the most popular. We can have all these graphs. So, to answer your question, yes, you have a first expense for the hardware. Then, after, there's a super low price licensing; it's a yearly base flat fee, and you can customize as you wish for your unit.

And on the back end, you're getting insights on what actually interests people. So, in a bar where you're showing premier league games on eight different screens, you can start to understand, okay, this is actually a Liverpool bar. We didn't know that. But now we do. 

Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, and these days, we have enormous LED screens, LED walls, whatever, and we have a lot of pictures inside of it, so we can have several feet inside of the same screen. Well, give me one audio feed per picture in picture, and all of a sudden, we'll be having a totally different experience, and at the end of the day, you can have a look and interrogate the system to see, okay, this one was really popular. So we were paying for the rights to have baseball, but no one listened to it. But there were a lot of people tuned on to the soccer game. So next week, what about taking the PIP out for the baseball game and putting a bigger PIP for the soccer game?

So that's only an example, but the KPIs are really relevant. You know exactly how your system is behaving with your guests. 

All right. That was terrific and very interesting. Thank you so much for spending a little time with me. 

Sebastien Boulanger: Cool. It was a real pleasure, and if you ever have any more questions or whatever, we have our corporate website, dvox.com

Jeff Gunderman, DOOH Academy

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I'm not really joking when I write about needing to find my decoder ring if I am going to write something about an announcement from a digital out of home ad tech company. There are exceptions, of course, but more often than not, I read this stuff and I just go cross-eyed.

So I was pleased to learn of a new education-focused initiative called DOOH Academy, which exists to raise the level of understanding of how things work for operators, end-users and the people who make ad-buying and planning decisions. I was also pleased to learn - though I pretty much knew - that I'm not the only one confused as hell by how technology like programmatic is marketed.

The Academy is the smiling, weeks-old baby of ad industry veteran Jeff Gunderman, who saw a need to get quality, vendor-neutral educational material out there that helps people get up a steep and slippery learning curve. He has an interesting model - in that the academy is subsidized by companies in this business who also understand everyone benefits from better awareness and deeper knowledge.

We had a really good chat about the roots of the online academy, how it works, and also how the industry has responded.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jeff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DOOH Academy is all about? 

Jeff Gunderman: Yes, the DOOH Academy is the Digital Out of Home Academy, and it is an education initiative I started that is designed to help people understand all of the advances going on in digital and programmatic media for the out-of-home media industry. 

I had been a media operator for about 15 years running a company called Eye Corp Media, which was an Australian-based media company, we did both static and digital signage around the country and places like shopping malls, bars, restaurants, and cinema lobbies, and when I sold that business, I essentially was talking with a number of individuals in the industry and recognized that there was a real gap in education and understanding around digital and place-based media, and at the same time, when I sold my company, I started to have some requests from media companies and ad tech firms for consulting work and that clarified for me, really the gap that existed in our industry as we are moving to more of a digital and programmatic world, people are very confused, and so after talking with a number of people in the industry, I felt that we really needed a single point of education to help people understand digital place-based media.

I get asked quite a bit if I'm doing any consulting, I don't really do much these days, but when I get asked specifically about doing consulting around digital out-of-home networks, I just say, I really can't help you because I don't fully understand what's going on, I don't understand the nomenclature, everybody seems to market themselves a little bit differently, even if they're doing the same damn thing.

It's just overwhelmingly complicated to me, so I do one of these things with my hands up beside me going, I don't even want to touch that. 

Jeff Gunderman: You know what? It's much simpler than it seems, but because it's such a massive change from the way we used to plan media with spreadsheets we used to sell a location, or a billboard on the side of a street corner, 

You used to sell location and audience.

Jeff Gunderman: Location and audience, and now, really what we're selling is I'll use the term audience again, but audience and impressions. So it used to be more boards and ad loops and you'd sell a flip on a board, and nowadays people, especially advertisers, and marketers are really looking to maximize their reach of a very particular audience and the beautiful part about it is that data companies have come in and enabled out-of-home media operators to sell their media based on the audience that's in front of that media, they've enabled the ability to understand the measurement of the audience that actually goes by their boards, and so with all this data and measurement that has come into the space, out-of-home media operators can now, especially digital ones, can now sell their media the same way that social, mobile, online media is sold today, and by the programmatic partners that have come in, have enabled the transactional component of that to happen the same way that digital, social, mobile is being transacted today.

S we really are in an amazing position as an industry now to gain a share of the marketing spend. But to do that, we've got to better understand programmatic, especially digital out of home and all the data that sits behind it, and that's what the DOOH Academy is really designed to do to elevate the knowledge level of both media operators and agencies or buyers of place-based, digital and programmatic media.

Now, if it's increasingly similar to the way that you plan and buy online and the way you plan and buy mobile, why then are media planners confused by digital out-of-home if it's the same sort of process and everything else? Are they using different naming conventions and things?  

Jeff Gunderman: There are a few reasons behind that. The first one is that, especially in the United States, a lot of the people buying this media are out-of-home media specialists. Out-of-home media used to be so complicated to buy, and in some cases, it's still not as smooth as you would like, but it used to be so complicated to buy because there were so many different media operators and so many different options that putting together a plan was a massive undertaking. 

Now with digital and especially with the programmatic infrastructure that's out there, you can actually go into a tool and a planning tool or a demand-side platform and you can actually program in the audience you want to reach, the locations you want to be in, all kinds of criteria, and it will connect and pull down the inventory that's available that meets those demand criteria and with the push of a button, essentially you can book a campaign across many different media operators, many different locations, many different boards, and many different media types. And it's so much simpler than it used to be, and it's so much more accurate in your ability to reach an audience. So what we're finding is that out-of-home media, which used to be mainly for branding, can be much more part of the full funnel of audience conversion. 

Which gives access to more, better budget, right? Before, it was just gross impressions, like I know that a hundred thousand cars go down this highway every week, and therefore we can estimate that many people are going to see it. Now you can get into much richer data that will tell you, you know, give you a much better sense of how many people actually did look as opposed to that gross number.

Jeff Gunderman: That's exactly right. So not only you're tapping into bigger budgets because now, all of a sudden, those digital budgets were designed for activities other than branding, such as store visits, web traffic, or driving conversions. All of that is now trackable within the digital out-of-home space and so we're seeing people who may be used to spending with social, mobile, and online, take a much more serious look at digital out-of-home, not only for that reason, but also because digital out-of-home has such a lower density for fraud and it's a safer place to advertise, and now you can measure it, which is really driving an opportunity for space.

I have a theory, and you can tell me it's stupid or spot on. God knows I have no pride of ownership of it. But I get a ton of press releases every week from different digital out-of-home ad tech companies, and they'll say, we've just done this, or we've partnered with these people, and so on, and I will try to read the things and decode what on earth they're going on about, and I've sent notes back to him saying, I've read this five times, I still don't know what the hell this is about, and you're saying it's a lot simpler than maybe I think it is, or the world thinks it is. But my theory is that the marketers are having to change their descriptions, their naming, and everything else about their product versus the other ones just to make it sound distinct.

Jeff Gunderman: There are nuances within digital and place-based, specifically within programmatic that are really the catalyst for why the DOOH Academy is in such high demand right now, and it's because if you look at my model, I am funded primarily through sponsorship of companies, unbiased, and nobody can have any kind of exclusivity and when they talk in an educational format that has to be generic and not self-promoting. But what I've found is these competing ad tech agencies, trade associations, media operators, and companies have all come together to support foundational learning that enables people to get to a level of understanding of how the entire ecosystem works together.

And then what it has allowed is the same, let's say ad tech companies that are sponsoring, to not have to focus on getting people up to a basic level of education, but then they can focus on really educating on the nuances of their specific platform and the benefits that they drive. And so I think that email communication that you're getting or the other communications you're getting are today confusing. If you went through a digital out-of-home academy course, you learned the full infrastructure of how everything works together from A to Z. Now, all of a sudden, it's going to make sense what that specific company's particular value proposition is and many of these ad tech companies have very specific value propositions that make sense, but they make sense in the context of greater knowledge of what's going on across the industry, and that's where we're really designed to do is to bring the entire industry up to a specific level of education and knowledge base.

Is this aimed primarily at newbies to the industry or is it something that everybody could benefit from?

Jeff Gunderman: It's interesting you say that. We're now working on advanced courses, but the first course we released is called Digital and Programmatic Fundamentals.

It is fantastic for an entry-level person who knows nothing about it because we use vocabulary and acronyms, and we really worked you through the basics of digital and programmatic media in the out-of-focus space. But then it's also very good for people with, I'll say, intermediate knowledge that want to just get to the next level because it's pretty in-depth. It's a five-hour streaming video course with 12 different, we call modules, but we could refer to that as a chapter, and it has 20 different video segments with 12 different industry experts, so it's a very thorough course, but it also starts out very basic so it doesn't leave someone behind.

Let's go down to the wood on this. How does it work? You go to the website, and you basically register to become a student?

Jeff Gunderman: Exactly. So you go to doohacademy.com, and that is the portal for everything. It's the portal for our learning classes. It's the portal for our thought leadership. It's the portal for company spotlights and other content, and it will continue to build. So all of the content, with the exception of the learning courses, is free. You can go in and see company spotlights on very specific companies. They were just launched recently so you'll see more and more of those start to be released.

You can see thought leadership that will continue to release on a fairly regular basis to get ideas of, you know, hot topics that are happening in the industry and people's perspectives, and then there's also the certification courses, and you would go into the course section, and you can register. There's a small fee for the certification courses, and usually, a discount that's out there in the industry can reduce that fee further because all of the courses are underwritten from a cost perspective by the sponsors, and you go on, and you register, and then it is all built on a university grade LMS or learning management system or platform, and so, and it's all streaming videos. So you can start and stop as your schedule permits.

So some students will come in, and they'll take the whole course in a weekend, and others will come in, and they'll be on a coffee break, they'll take one video segment at a time, and those are somewhere between 8 and 20 minutes in length, and then they'll turn it off, and they'll come back another day when they have a chance around their next coffee break, and will take the next segment. So, it's fairly easy to navigate at your own pace. 

And from what I saw, it's a kind of a combination of interviews/discussions with a second person or, in the case of, I went through the acronym one, or at least kind of quickly bombed my way through it. It was you talking, but also, you had a deck that you were referencing and talking to. So are those the two formats that you're using? 

Jeff Gunderman: They are. The real design of the course. I don't call myself the experts, so to speak, I call myself the host because, you know, I have a level of knowledge about all of it, but I really host most of them, mostly through interviews with very specific industry experts.

And then on the basic things, I'll teach myself vocabulary and acronyms and a couple of other areas, you'll see me instructing, but for the most part, the design of it is to bring in the foremost experts in a specific topic. So when we talk about an SSP or the sell-side platform, we work with two different ad tech companies and their specific head of supply, we interview on that topic. And so you're hearing really from experts in the industry that are about as knowledgeable as it can be. 

But they're not setting the curriculum. They're not saying, okay, this is what I want to talk about for the next 25 minutes with you?

Jeff Gunderman: No. They certainly can give me some feedback that they don't like a question or what have you. But, all the questions are formulated by me. 

Let's take a step back on this, actually. I think this is important. We have an advisor team and an expert team, and the advisor team helps me guide the actual curriculum. And the experts are experts from multiple competing companies. So I make absolutely sure that I'm not swayed by a certain way of thinking or doing things, and I'm ignoring maybe another option. So we try to be as neutral as possible and bring it, this is fully an educational course.

I'll use measurement as an example. So on the measurement side, we have one company, Geopath, that has a measurement methodology, and their measurement methodology is different from Place Exchange, the PerView product that Place Exchange has, and so I was very confident or very certain to make sure that I used interviews with someone for each of those companies so that we weren't, giving a single way of doing things, and in fact, we also brought in, because it's North America, from a measurement perspective, also Combe Canada, who has yet a third methodology for measurement. In the first course, I think it's probably important to point out that measurement is one of those tricky pieces that, as we expand into new markets and new areas of the world, measurement is sometimes defined by the capabilities within that market to measure an audience. So it would be very hard to have a worldwide single measurement methodology because it's, you know, what you can do in the United States is potentially a little different than what you can do in other regions.

So if I'm going to be interviewed as an expert in one of these modules, do I need to be a financial supporter of the Academy, or would you pull in somebody who is absolutely the best person to talk about this?

Jeff Gunderman: No, we would pull in the people who is the best people to talk to about this. We've done that on a couple of occasions, and those individuals have decided to sponsor. But if we feel that a topic needs to get covered, regardless of whether you pay money for sponsorship, we want to cover that topic, and we will cover that topic.

Now, there are two sides to the platform. There's the educational piece, which starts with Digital and programmatic fundamentals as a course, and later this year, you'll see advanced courses come out on the sell side and the buy side. So you'll see more and more content and more courses come out. But on the other side are actual spotlights on very specific companies, and those are sponsored companies, and it is thought leadership with very specific people. Many of them sponsor, but not all are open sponsors, so we have an unbiased education piece. Then, we actually have another area where we show how real people and real companies are applying that education or that knowledge in the real world.

So if I'm an ad tech company, being a sponsor, a supporter of this initiative also gives me the opportunity and the outlet, so to speak, of, kind of a central repository of good content about, you know, the industry that I'm active in, and if I want to produce thought leadership pieces, this is a great home for it, as opposed to maybe just my corporate blog that nobody's going to read?

Jeff Gunderman: Exactly, and I like to think of it as a centralized area where the industry can come for content, thought leadership, company spotlights, all of this content that is not specific to an individual organization, that gives a really well-rounded view of what's happening in the latest news and education around digital and programmatic for the out of home space.

You said, in passing, that it's going quite well, that there's a lot of demand for it. What was your initial reaction when you went to some of these organizations, and how do you kind of quantify that things are hopping? 

Jeff Gunderman: A few answers to that question.

The first one would be the fact that we have multiple competing companies across ad tech, agency associations, trade associations, and media operators. This tells you that it is supported by the industry, and I gauge success, not by ultimately who sponsors it, but really by the reaction of the people that are taking the course.

So we've been live for just six weeks now. We've already had over 200 individuals register for the course. We've had almost 40 complete the course, and a large chunk of those 40 have provided feedback to us, their reaction to the course, and we've had nothing but very positive feedback from the industry, which alone helps. We've solicited a lot of the people that have gone through the course, just to make sure that if there's any, you know, your first few weeks, it's obviously the time when you test the integrity of the course and the platform that you're on and things like that.

There have been a couple of little things that we've been able to fix. There was somebody who pointed out an audio issue with one of the videos that we were able to fix immediately. You know, one person pointed out a typo that we had. But now that all that is corrected, we're starting to get group registrations. So we're seeing companies come to us and say, we want to register our entire team, and so we actually have a new product now where you can register your team in what we call a group training, and we will register them all at one time for you and send invites out that they can log in with so they'll be auto-registered into the tool. They just have to set a password, and then we can send to the organization a report every week or two that shows the progress of each of their team members against completing the course, and we're finding that's been popular. We have two agencies and three media companies so far that have signed up their teams, and we're seeing increased interest in that.

I've heard a number of times over the last several years from companies who've said, I appreciate what you do with Sixteen:Nine, You should know that when we onboard new employees, we tell them where the cafeteria is and all the nuts and bolts and we also tell them you need to be reading Sixteen:Nine every day. You need to subscribe to this and so on so you can get up to speed on the industry. 

Do you see the time when this will just be kind of part of the normal routine of you've joined this ad tech company, there's your desk, there's this and that, and, here's your login for the DOOH Academy?

Jeff Gunderman: I mean, I could only hope to have the amount of content that you do after seven years. I can imagine that the archives that you have are probably invaluable for anyone entering the industry. 

But yeah, I'm fairly humble about that. I saw a need, and I created a platform, it took me a little longer to release the first course than I thought it would, but I'm rewarded by the fact that the industry seems to be responding very positively to it, and it would be fantastic to think that this would be part of someone's onboarding. Certainly, the goal of this is to fill a gap that exists in education, and as long as we produce the right content, I think the people will follow, and that's proving to be true so far in our first six weeks of being live with the course.

Have you had the, “Oh, thank God, somebody's done this” responses?

Jeff Gunderman: Quite a few actually, and I've had others that have said, I can't believe you did this because I know what an undertaking it is, certainly a little bit bigger of an undertaking than I had anticipated in the beginning, but, I think as you probably know from Sxiteen:Nine, once you've started to create enough content, it gets much easier.

We're working on an advanced course right now for the sell side, and we're also working on, which we'll produce after that, an advanced course on the buy side, but. We are getting smarter at producing some of that content earlier on, and it's now much easier to pull it all together.

It's interesting one of the modules that I didn't see in there that I think would be very helpful. I don't know where you position it, but is one on business fundamentals and viability. Because every week I still get phone calls or emails or press releases from companies who are putting screens over urinals and washrooms or in corporate aviation lounge, just all these, build it and they will come ideas that I just know from doing this for 25 years ain't going to work or a really tough go and it would be so beneficial if somebody could save themselves half a million dollars or whatever and take this course and go, you know what? Maybe that's not such a great idea. 

Jeff Gunderman: I think it's a great idea for the course. I'm not sure I'm gonna tackle that one, but I get what you mean. 

You log in, and it just says, “Don't!” 

Jeff Gunderman: It'd be great to have like a little calculator of sorts where you enter these values, and it spits out a good business case or a bad business case.

But I think you touch on a topic that topic, I don't know that education specifically is going to be able to tackle it, but you touched on a topic that's interesting, and that is that too many new media companies are saying, I'm going to deploy a bunch of new screens and the business will come. I do think you have to understand the statistics in the industry, where the demand is coming from an advertising perspective, and where you fit into that demand.

I'll use a couple of resources. DPAA, for instance, has an immense amount of information, and, in fact, one of their recent reports said that there were 1. 25 million digital screens connected, from an advertising perspective, just in the United States, and most of those there's certainly a chunk that are billboards, but most of those, the 1.25 million is specifically place-based media screens that are sitting inside of that. Whether it's a gas station or a convenience store or a cinema lobby or what have you if you then go to the agencies and you talk about the demand for advertising, there are venue types that in their mind are a must or like to buy and there are venue types that are not even on their radar screen, and I think one of the challenges that new media companies face is that they don't take the time to do the research on where the demand is coming from. 

I’ll use one other example: the Out Of Home Advertising Association does a great job every year of producing a document that breaks down the industry. So I think we're in the United States, for instance, we're about $8.4 billion spent in out-of-home out of that, about a third is driven from digital out-of-home, whereas two-thirds is still driven from the static or printed side of the space. So you've got about $2.67 billion dollars, give or take that is, and then out of that, you have about 15 percent or about 450 million today that is driven programmatically, and one of the things we see is these smaller or upstart companies come out with digital screens, they think they're going to connect to programmatic, and then, they don't really have to sell a whole lot and that all this money is going to come, and they don't realize that in their business plan, they're saying I'm part of an 8. 4 billion industry, but the reality is there's only 450 million right now transacted programmatically.

And so they're trying, and they're few screens, a hundred or a thousand screens that they've deployed to compete with 1.25 million screens, all connected, all competing for $450 million, and so when you start doing the numbers, it doesn't always add up quite as aggressively as probably their business plan does.

Yeah. And, of that $450 million spent, for most of those media operators who are getting that money, it represents 15- 20% of their inventory at most. Is that pretty accurate?

Jeff Gunderman: Well, programmatic is at most 15 percent of your total sales. You've got to have direct sales, and even half of the programmatic is not open exchange. It's coming in through private marketplace deals that someone has to physically set up with the agency or the trade desk. So, it is arguably closer to about 92-95% percent of your sales of any successful, healthy companies arw coming in through direct sales.

So anybody who sets up a screen network and just thinks I'm going to put these up and I'll do it all through programmatic, I won't even need salespeople, and I'll just watch the money flow in, God bless you!

Jeff Gunderman: It's not a good business model, no. 

This has been great. We could chat forever, but I try to cap my time on these things. If people want to know more about your academy, where do they find you? 

Jeff Gunderman: I appreciate that. It's as simple as going to www.doohacademy.com and if you want to take a course, the code DOOH20 will take 20% off the cost of the course. There's a ton of free content there and a growing amount of free content there as well.

Wow. I think this is my first discount code on this podcast. All right, Jeff, that was terrific. Thank you!

Jeff Gunderman: I appreciate the time.

Thibaut Duverneix, Gentilhomme

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When Terminal C was opened at Orlando's sprawling main airport, I was intrigued from a distance by the experiential digital features integrated into the new space.

They got my attention because they were genuinely interesting, but also because they were put together by a company completely unfamiliar to me - Gentilhomme, from Montreal.

In the time since that project went live, and won numerous awards, Gentilhomme (which is French for Gentleman) has also delivered experiential work for Nashville's airport. And the team is in the middle of a job for Houston's airport, and another airport on the US east coast that's NDA'd for now.

I've been trying to organize a podcast chat with founder Thibaut Duverneix for a while now, and we finally got it together recently.

We spoke about signature projects, and the ideation and design process. But we also get into the background of the company, which has roots in things like rock band tours, and has some direct ties to a couple of very well-known Montreal companies that are also all about experience - Cirque du Soleil and Moment Factory.

NOTE - This interview was recorded before ISE, where the company picked up an armload of trophies at the global Digital Signage Awards.

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TRANSCRIPT

Thibaut, thank you for joining me. You describe Gentilhomme as an Earth-based multimedia studio. What does that encompass? Because you guys are into a whole bunch of things. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Hey David, It's a really good question. The idea is that the studio was built around my own practice as an artist and as a multimedia director at first, and I come from fine arts and computer science, so I like to do all things that are very different and, it's been very hard to describe what the studio does because the studio was built using that philosophy, and most of the time people would ask you, don't you want to specialize in anything, like video content and I was like, no, I don't, we like to do a lot of different things and they go from interactive sculpture or inflatables to building placemaking for airports and content for rock shows. 

So I guess the best description was, around that, we want to create experiences, and the medium doesn't really matter. 

So when people come into the office, they never quite know what they're coming into, right? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Pretty much, but luckily, the casting at the studio is very broad, and everybody's like a Swiss Army knife. 

How and why did it get started?

Thibaut Duverneix: This is my second studio. I had another one before, and we were doing a lot of the first experiential work on the web in Flash at the time. 

I had forgotten about Flash, for a good reason. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, exactly. But I was also doing music videos and rock shows, and eventually, I wanted to focus more on directing and doing things in real life with people. So I went my own way, and I built Gentilhomme more like my holding company in a way for what I was doing, and one-day Cirque du Soleil called me, and they had this show in France they wanted to do it for a theme park, which was a multimedia show while heavily relying on multimedia and I thought I was just going to direct it. but then they were like, no, we have five weeks, and we need turnkey. Can you also just make it happen? So I built a pop-up studio to do that, and then they said, Hey, do you want to do our next big top tour? And I said, yeah, and then I had a choice of do I keep doing my director work or do I build a studio with the people that I want, and do it the way I want it because it's never a one-man show, you need a team to do that, and that's what I did because I wanted to capitalize on my knowledge. 

And Cirque is in Montreal as you are. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. We're all children of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal. 

Yeah. I was going to ask about that later, but we might as well get into it. What is it about Montreal, because, in my world, in multimedia digital signage world, there's Jean Théon, there's the big guy, Moment Factory, and there's also Arsenal Media and so on, and there's a real creative community in that city and it's particularly strong when it comes to the digital signage place-based work. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. I always say it comes from Cirque, I don't know if I'm right. I think it's one reason Cirque du Soleil was the first to push the boundaries of what can be done, and it created a lot of side studios, people that actually build highly complicated stages and animatronics and stage equipment, but also people like Moment Factory, who started doing parties for Guilherme Liberté and stuff, and then, they turned out to be who they are now, but, I believe like Cirque was a big part of it and also all of the tech, there was like, a big tech ball, it started with the web and engineering, and now it's a lot of AI, and tax credits help with that a lot too, and there was a big VFX industry also. VFX is part of it.

There are a lot of gaming companies in Montreal, right? 

Thibaut Duverneix: VFX and gaming, yeah. Ubisoft is here, and all of the big VFX shops are here, too. 

So at one point, for a while there, you were working with a Moment Factory. How long were you there? 

Thibaut Duverneix: I was never there. I was always freelancing and part of the family. My first project with them was when I was the Interactive Multimedia Director for the Nine Inch Nails show when I was 28. I think that was the first time we started collaborating together., and I helped them with a lot of projects. 

So when did you start Gentilhomme? 

Thibaut Duverneix: 2014. 

And where are you now with it? Is it still a freelance collaborative, or is it like a full company with offices and full-time staff and all that stuff? 

Thibaut Duverneix: It's a full-on operation now. We are about 25 people full-time, and we expand depending on the projects. So obviously, when we do airports and things like this, we could be 80 on the project, but I like to keep it small and do only a few projects at a time. Everybody is very senior here. So that was my idea of the studio being small with highly competent people and doing only a few projects at a time.

Yeah, it was, I went to Moment Factory’s offices about, I'm thinking six years now, pre-COVID and I met with the folks there, and one really interesting comment that they made was they were so busy that they couldn't even deal with all the inbound opportunities that they had. So they were quite happy to pass along work for jobs that they either just didn't have the bandwidth to do, or weren't really in their wheelhouse or whatever.

I'm curious if your company collaborates at all with your former contractor at Moment Factory. 

Thibaut Duverneix: It's been a while, but we're always happy to collaborate. Montreal is a very small community. 

Let's talk about some of the work that you do. We could talk about music videos and Cirque du Soleil and all those sorts of things, but given this is a digital signage podcast, we should probably talk about that.

The projects that come to mind for me that I'm most familiar with would be Orlando Airport and then Nashville Airport. Can you describe both of them or describe one of them? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. It was a game-changer for us. We entered the pandemic, we were finishing a stadium tour for Fall Out Boy, Weezer, and Green Day, and obviously, that got shelved in March, at the same time we won the RSP for the Orlando Airport Terminal C which was very big for us. For anybody, it would have been big, but especially for us, and yeah, we went full-on with it. We created more than five hours of content that's across all styles of content, there is a lot of live-action content, a lot of computer-generated content, and a lot of interactive content. 

So, we designed and created all of the multimedia content across those three giant media features. I think ultimately they only built two, but there is one that's called the Movement Vault, which is a double-sided circular media feature. Each panel is about 4k inside of it, and outside, it's 4millimeters so I think they are about two gauges, and so outside it’s only video, and we wanted to create that sense of place and oasis, something very calm and the trompe of a wall that would transform into a garden to invite you to get inside of it, and inside of it, we created a full 360 degree, interactive scenery in Unreal, that's using AI body tracking, so basically the people would use their movements to interact with the scenes, and we also created a lot of underwater 360 degrees, live-action footage of manatees and landmarks, from central Florida.

On the second media feature, it's three giant flat LED screens that look like windows in the corridor, and here the idea was to create something that looks like a window with a lot of live action. So we created those trompe l'oeil effects where you really feel like you're looking through a window, and again, we wanted to showcase more the unknown of Orlando than the known. So we didn't really focus much on amusement parks and entertainment, and we really focused on nature and things that people don't necessarily expect from Central Florida. 

Was there a brief of any kind or, like, how did you arrive at what was done there?

Thibaut Duverneix: Oh yeah, for sure. So they had a multimedia architect, Marcella Sardi, and she was in charge of the vision, and the RFP came after. So she designed the media features, and she had a vision for what the content should be. As an architect, basically, the brief was the known and the unknown of Orlando, right? And so we went with that, and we collaborated with her very closely, and it turned out pretty good, I think. 

It's challenging working in airports, is it not? 

I'm assuming the lead times involved, but also some of the nuts and bolts stuff like getting access into post-security areas and so on.

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, it is, but it depends on how organized you are and how good of a relationship you have with the stakeholders. For Orlando, we did this through the pandemic. So that was already a challenge, and we went pretty far with it because we actually had our own servers hooked up to the airport's whole system.

So we could work only using laptops and small workstations over our own WiFi. So we could work directly on the media feature in real-time. So getting all of that access was pretty intense because you need to get into the firewalls, the server rooms, and the badging. But it's all about organization and relationships and getting clearance. But yeah, it's a challenge, and you follow construction. So that's the hardest part because we work very fast and construction doesn't work fast so you have to align. 

It sounds like the work that you and your team do is obviously driven by creative thinking and execution, but you couldn't just be multimedia producers. You need quite a bit of technical acumen, right? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, engineering is a big part of it because we do a lot of interactivity and so we have C++ programmers and now we work a lot in Unreal, but still we build our own pipelines and plug-ins. 

You've had to do that because you're inventing experiences. When you go into these things and this is not functionality you can just buy off the shelf from existing software? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Well, sometimes you do, but like we have our own tracking solution. For that reason specifically, not that we didn't want to buy it to build it. It just didn't really exist at the level we wanted it. So when it doesn't exist, you have to build it, but yeah, we're not necessarily a tech company, but we do develop tech out of necessity. 

One of your, I don't want to call them competitors, but fellow companies that are doing that kind of work. Flopper actually came up with their own media servers because they had to design this stuff. Have you found the same thing where there's a technology that you've developed, or you could think, well, maybe we could remarket this?

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, it's always been a discussion. We talk about this a lot actually with Alex and they went into the Real Motion thing very early in the game, and now it's like they can't really go back, they're already pushing this, but we are not into the product business. We're a creative company.

Basically, we have two products, if you want to call them that. We have a show in Montreal for interactive installation, and we have a tracking system, but we are trying not to sell that as a product. We would license this for projects and we would give it to friends or other artists that need it because It's boring to build that, but we don't want to be in that business because it's a very different business.

Yeah. You're going to very different kinds of trade shows and things, if you're going at all. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. 

Can you talk a little bit about the Nashville airport? Because that's also very experiential, but quite a bit different from what you did at Orlando. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. So the Nashville airport, they actually built that huge screen, on top of security, TSA, and they didn't really know what to do with it. Once they built it, they knew they were going to use it for signage and for feeds and stuff and advertising, but then they were wondering, should we do something experiential? And they reached out, and we started thinking about what we could do, and we actually did this very quickly because they were very far in the process and they never really thought about the strategy about content. So I think we did that in 11 months, probably from strategy to delivery, and so we have them doing all of the strategies about placemaking and identity and what would make something compelling for Nashville. 

But also, you don't want to create a bottleneck because it's TSA. So we wanted to create some form of engagement and identity but not break the flow of TSA. 

So you didn't want people stopping and watching for 10 minutes. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. Also, we had to incorporate all of the signage stuff, such as the feeds, the widgets, and also the advertising. So we designed grids, systems, and branding guidelines. So they would have everything that they need to do all of that, right?

So it's not like you just do a full takeover, and then they have the other stuff we wanted to make it. It's integrated as an ecosystem, so we also had them design their media system because they didn't really have something strong in place. So we worked with the engineers to recommend some solutions for them.

It's interesting. I've heard this story many times through the years, and it's still a little bit surprising that you have organizations that will make a very ambitious and expensive capital investment in a big video wall, and they're well along the way with it, and then they start thinking, okay, what are we going to put on this thing?

Thibaut Duverneix: It depends, right? Now we're working with the Houston airport, and they bought it pretty early in the process. I think people are getting better at it because they see what other people are doing, and they're like, we should not wait until the last minute because these things take time, and people get educated about it. So that's good, but yeah, for sure, sometimes they go on with the program because the program follows construction. 

They just go step by step. They know they need a video wall. They work with the architects, they work with the engineers, they build it, they design it. It's state of the art, it's beautiful. It's Nanolumens, two millimeters, whatnot, but then yeah, they would think about the content strategy at the end.

Because you've now done a couple of airports and you're working in Houston, have you found that the simple fact that you've done these leads to other opportunities to do other airports?

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely, and also, we want to do those because I think we got pretty good at it because we understand the problems on the technical side, but also on the user experience side. So it's something very interesting for us, and we really like to be immersed in different cultures, and that's what I love about Apple because that's the first thing you know when you enter a city, and that's the last memory you get, and if we get a chance to create something unique for every airport, I think it's very interesting, and you get to work with local people and to understand their community and who they are and what the city is about and I think it's very exciting.

I assume airports are also a good kind of client to have just simply because they have billion-dollar budgets for terminal expansions, and they can work your component into those kinds of budgets in a way that maybe a retailer or a commercial property owner who also putting up a big video wall, they might look at the process and the overall cost of doing what you guys do and turn white, like, there's not that many end-user clients who can do what Nashville and what Orlando did, right? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, it's also very different because the problem is volume because, if you're doing airports, you need to create a lot of content, enough content so it doesn't feel repetitive because people stay there a lot, and there's a lot of dwelling time and we like to do high-end content. We don't want to do shit content. So the challenge is how to maintain production value across the board because the budget might seem big, but it's not because you have to do so much at such a high resolution because the screens are becoming crazy like you get 1.8 millimeters across the whole corridor so it's like a lot of pixels to push. 

So the challenge is maintaining quality and quantity, whereas when you do retail, you might spend the same amount of money for a couple of minutes, right? So it's just a very different approach. 

What's the process, and as you said, the approach, when you get engaged in a big project like this? Where do you start, or what are the first questions you're asking besides, “Do you have the budget for this?” 

Thibaut Duverneix: Well, usually, they do have a budget most of the time, and you retrofit it within their budget. But not always, no, we're trying to find the identity, what are you about, and what do you want to communicate? Then, we can start building a strategy around placemaking and identity.

So that's the main focus, and that's something you do very closely with the clients, and they, usually, they have never done this before, or maybe they've done it, but on the marketing side, so it starts from marketing most of the time, and we try to understand better the mission and build from that.

I've seen some of the airport projects when there's PR issued about it, there's talk about how this is highly experiential and gives people the sense of joy that they're flying and so on. It all gets very ethereal at times, and I wonder how you define experiential, what it means, and what you're trying to deliver in these kinds of environments in terms of a feeling.

Thibaut Duverneix: It really depends on where the media feature would be because, again, if you are TSA, you want to make sure that you get things flowing through, and you want to try to create this sense of place and identity, but not go too far on entertainment and engagement but if you are post-security waiting for your flight, then you're trying to get a lot of engagement, especially if it's around retail. So you get people excited and feel good about waiting for their flight, and if you do that, they are more likely to go into the retail store. So, to me, that's the KPI.

It's like if we can calm people and make them feel good about being there because it's very hostile, the environment, and if you do that, you help the airports greatly. 

Yeah, I've certainly heard a number of times people talking about the dynamic of gate huggers and people who get through security and then they go immediately to their gate, and they don't want to leave the gate because they irrationally think if I leave, the plane's going to board and leave without me.

And that doesn't happen, and the airports want them to go shopping if they've got 75 minutes, go get something to eat, or go experience the Moment Vault if they're in Orlando. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly, and that's our own KPI for the Moment Vault, I want people to miss their flight. That's what I wanted. I wanted people to forget what time it was. I don't know if it happened yet. I should check. 

You want to be careful about that, they'll sue people about anything in the United States. 

Thibaut Duverneix: No, but the idea was we wanted to create good engagement so people forget about time and have fun with it. But we were very careful about how we designed it. Even with the engagements, we made sure that all of the interactive stuff wasn't always playing. So you don't have that problem, actually, of missing the flight.

Do you have a sense at all of what works and what doesn't in terms of creativity on a big screen? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah. When speed scales, colors, and blinking stuff, like it's to me, when you design for spaces, it's the opposite of doing a rock show, actually, it's the complete opposite job. So you want to make sure that everything that you create feels architectural, at least we do.

So we work very closely with the architects and we want to make sure that all of the lighting that is physical would match what's virtual. So we don't want to think about those screens as screens. We want to think about it as a part of the architecture. So whatever we create, we're trying to be very careful about that, which makes it the opposite of doing a movie. So, you're most likely, if you're shooting live action, your camera is not going to move. You want to make sure that your perspective feels accurate in terms of scales; you want to do things slowly enough so it's not distracting. So yeah, we're trying to really focus on those techniques to make it compelling within the space.

Yeah, that's interesting. I wouldn't have thought in those terms, but I guess if you're coming off of doing all the backdrops and everything for Fall Out Boy, and there are all kinds of things happening behind the band, you can't do that in an airport or an office tower lobby. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Well, no, that would be crazy because that's the thing when you do a rock show. You would use your surfaces as lights most of it is a canvas for set extension, but it's also a light. So you can play with it in that way. But when you're in space for a permanent installation, you need to think like an architect. So it's very different. 

Yeah, I've written a lot about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it can now be an architectural design decision, like this can be the full bulkhead of an airport area over the TSA screening area, that sort of thing and I'm curious if you watch how that's evolving and you're intrigued by things like LED embedded in glass and so on. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Oh, yeah. We went to all those trade shows, and we came to work a lot with those elements on the past projects and on the future projects, and that product is evolving so quickly. And that's how they think. They think about any LED as part of the architecture, and I think their product is becoming very stunning, it doesn't look like a picture anymore. It really feels cinematic, and it's not aggressive. The light is very diffused, and it feels really soft and nice. 

I know you reference how you're now working on some aspects of the airport in Houston. Are there other jobs that you're working on that you can talk about? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, there is another one on the East Coast, but I can't talk about it yet.

Another airport? 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah. 

Interesting. So the same kind of idea as the other ones.

Thibaut Duverneix: This one is a bit different, but they're all different. But yeah, high-end content, placemaking, but different types of media features. 

All right. If people want to know more about your company, how do they find you? 

Thibaut Duverneix: I've not been very good at that.

You've managed somehow anyway. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah. We are trying, but we're small and not really good at marketing. Hopefully, we will get more known, and we want to get more engaged. So yeah, our website is a good place to start, and we are doing more and more Trade shows and events, and we're going to be present in Spain also next week, and we're trying to be at all of the events and make sure that people start to know us more. 

Right, and they can find you at Getilhomme.com. I will put the link in the blog post so people who can't spell Getilhomme for the life of them will be able to find it that way. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Thank you. I appreciate it.

I appreciate your time. That was terrific. Congratulations on the work you've done to date. It's turned a lot of heads. 

Thibaut Duverneix: Thank you so much. That's what we want to do. 

All right. Take care. 

Thibaut Duverneix: You too. Bye bye.

 

Chris Johns, PassageWay

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The UK startup PassageWay operates with the interesting mission of using technology that nudges people to make well-informed and more sustainable decisions about how they get from A to B.

That's done by thinking through and developing the presentation layer for Real-Time Passenger Information content that's then run on digital signs, most notably for the bus systems around the city of London.

PassageWay's business model is - in simple terms - taking the rich, real-time data available for routes and stops and making it presentable and digestible for transport authorities, like Transport For London, which pays the start-up to do so.

The logical notion is that the more that good, real-time information is made available to people, the more the transport services will be used. While London Underground stations are well-equipped with information and the services are pretty predictable, there's not as much available to the millions who use less-predictable surface transport services like the iconic double-decker red buses.

I had a good chat about all this recently with PassageWay co-founder Chris Johns.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what PassageWay is all about? 

Chris Johns: Thanks so much for inviting us to your podcast today. PassageWay is all about generating demand for public transport by leveraging real-time information. We do this by putting it onto digital signs that are displayed on host-supplied screens and typically these screens only require a modern browser to display the digital sign. 

You made a point of saying the host supplied. There's been a history through the years of companies who've done things like put in the infrastructure, the screens, and so on and then run content on them with the idea that content would be Interrupted so to speak by advertising. You're not going down that path. 

Chris Johns: No, we're not. Typically those sorts of plays are similar to JC Decaux or Clear Channel who have long had this relationship with transport authorities whereby they will fund the deployment of bus shelters in return for an ad revenue share. We supply transport for London with digital signs that are displayed at bus shelters but also within their other infrastructure like bus stations. But really we're more citywide about putting digital signs into places such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, offices, and such in order to generate demand from the sort of non-traditional locations and encouraging the people within those locations to consider public transport.

So this doesn't sound like a traditional business, you said, this is about generating demand to use public transport services and so on versus, more traditionally, this is about making money somehow or other. 

Chris Johns: Yeah. I think that's the difference, a lot of those traditional plays actually put the real-time information secondary to their primary objective which is to earn revenue from the display of ads.

And to my mind, that means a poor customer experience and the poor customer experience means reduced demand. If you think about traditional bus shelters, they are actually incredibly complex for many people trying to navigate the public transport information.

If you're coming to London, for example, trying to find out which is the right bus? Is it going to go to your preferred stop? How long is it going to take? Is there any disruption information? If you don't have it, it will make you want to go and choose a different mode of transport.

So, you probably take a taxi or you may end up using your own car, for example. Actually what we're trying to do is to show people that public transport is really easy to use. It's really accessible. It can get you from A to B pretty fast. And if you're aware of the onward travel information from the stop you're trying to get to, then actually, you can make the whole journey much easier and less stressful, for many people.

So this almost seems like a community initiative but there is a business model behind this, right? 

Chris Johns: Yeah, there is. The business model is pretty straightforward, to be honest. We are paid by the transport authority or their contract partners and our job is to provide these digital signs and the digital signs generate demand. So in a different way of thinking, you might consider the real time information as being the best form of advertising for public transport.

Certainly better than a static advert, in my opinion, anyway. 

Your company's efforts are to aggregate the data, make sure it's handled accurately and always up to date, and so on. Why would transport for London not do that themselves? 

Chris Johns: Yeah, they do. Transport for London is the world's largest integrated transport network and they have the global leading data strategy.

And they're famed the world over for their open API strategy. That means we can access their data and we pretty much have unfettered use of that data. And so do many other developers as well and we can Be sure that the data we've got is true and accurate. What we do is that we take that information and we plot it around a particular location and we bring it together with a legible London-style wayfinding map, where we plot the access points onto it and then we bring it all together into a sort of nice looking digital sign that's easy to understand and act upon. 

So we're not generating data or we're not modifying data, all we're doing is bringing data together into an easy-to-understand format. 

So you're doing the presentation layer that in theory, transport for London could do themselves but you're good at it.

it's not what they want to focus on. So they're happy to work with you to do that part of it. 

Chris Johns: That's right. Yeah. We are a supplier to TFL and they use lots of other different tech suppliers whether it's to build their award winning TFL go app or to build bus shelters whatever it may be. They have lots of different suppliers bringing their individual skill sets into play and that's basically what we do.

But I think that one of the things that we do bring to the party because we're a tech startup is innovation and the ability to pivot quickly and come up with sort of entrepreneurial new ideas that we can bring into play and throw them out to TFL and say, listen, what do you think about this?

And so we can move quite quickly. 

Did you have to go to them to sell into this or is your company kind of a result of being in discussions with them and starting the company because this opportunity existed?

Chris Johns: It's a mix between the two actually. So TFL actually issued a tender some time ago that we want to produce the platform and we've taken it on from there and given it a life of its own and extended the service beyond London as well. So working with other transport authorities and other partners outside of London. 

So this is audio, so it makes it a little difficult to visualize things. But can you give me some sense of how this manifests itself within the transport system? And then in public and private buildings. 

Chris Johns: Okay. I'll give you a couple of examples. For example, in every bus station across London, there are digital totems. And those digital totems are a bit like an airport or a train station where you've got a central totem and it shows all the services where they're going and whereabouts within the bus station they're leaving from and if there's any disruptions.

So we look after all of those for London. Another example would be smart bus shelters, whereby you could have a large format digital screen with detailed route maps for each of the services that are running via that bus shelter with real time information on all those routes plotted not on a fixed JPEG of a route but actually plotted live onto a legible London style map.

With onward time estimation to reach all the onward stops, onward travel information such as the tube status, any disruption notifications and more so that people can quite easily contextualize their journey and see if it's going to be running smoothly all the way through. Another example, could be at a bus stop itself.

So across London, there are about 18,000 bus stops and only about 2000 bus shelters. So only about 2000 of these locations have any real time information. So what we can do for those ones is put in QR codes and customers can scan the QR codes and open up a real time digital sign on their personal device with no registration, no login, no heavy download.

It's just a purely web based solution that shows all the upcoming departures for that particular stop with detailed route information, onward stop information et cetera and then links to download the official apps. So it's like an interstitial page where it's easy for everyone to access. Hopefully you're going to convert more people into downloading the official apps.

Now the official app is the TFL official app or yours? 

Chris Johns: No, we don't do apps. I'm afraid.

One of the points about what we're doing is about trying to make everything as open and as accessible as possible. So there is no registration, there's no login, there's no download. All you need Is a modern web browser and you can access the information. We don't ask anything from the customers.

We don't track them. We don't do anything really about that. 

Yeah. That's one of the problems when you go to an unfamiliar city and you decide I'm going to use their transport system. You go to the app store to find the app for the mass transport system in that city. And there's five or six of them and you don't know which one is official or which one's riddled with ads or not updated or God knows what.

Chris Johns: Yeah. In London, I can't really speak for other cities because our primary focus is London, that's our area of expertise. But there are hundreds of thousands of people who are digitally excluded. People who don't have smartphones at all and then there is a whole another segment that are extremely low digital users and I think in London, there's about 2 million of those, according to a Lloyd's report.

You've got about 2.5 million people that are not going to be using smartphones or not downloading apps and you've got to provide real time information to those people because those are also a core audience for the transport authority because they tend to be looking at the demographic. They match perfectly the sort of TFL bus user type.

But at the moment they're somewhat excluded from the service or the latest developments of promoting those services. 

Is the focus more as a result on road transport, buses and so on, as opposed to the London underground? Because the underground has maps. It's got covered areas and everything else. It's easier to convey information. 

Chris Johns: That's right. Like train stations and tubes, they're fairly straightforward. You go onto the platform, you take a train going one way or the other way or if you go to a train station, it's all linear.

But if you're taking buses or you want to go get a bicycle, they're within the built environment itself. And they could be going pretty much any direction. And you really need to know where the best location is for you to find your particular service and then how long you're going to wait and if there's any problems with that particular service.

Also the other thing is that the tube services are linear again. They're always getting the district line, for example and are always going to go to those particular routes, one way or the other. They might stop slightly earlier but generally, they're always going to follow that same path.

And if you wait one minute, then the next one's coming along for two or three minutes. So what we do is that we just show on the tube status. We show if there's any problems on any particular line. And then we say all of the lines are running fine, which is the sort of TFL standard approach to displaying the statements 

Yeah. This year I've spent a couple of weeks in London, doing interviews and then I was there semi holidaying as well and I was struck by the amount of real time information that you could get on. I was taking the Elizabeth line more than anything else and it was terrific in terms of telling me, I definitely don't want to go on the Circle line right now.

Chris Johns: Yes. the Northern line. 

The really old ones.

Chris Johns: Yeah, some of them are better than others, to be honest. Also you've got to pick the right one. It's freezing in London at the moment and some of them have heating and some of them don't. Like in the summer, some of them have air con and some of them don't as well. We don't flag that as much. I couldn't tell you offhand which ones are which.

Toko on here is stifling. 

Chris Johns: Yeah. It could be useful information to many people.  

What you're doing is a little reminiscent of a US company called TransitScreen. 

Chris Johns: Yeah, I know. I've heard of TransitScreen.

Yeah. They would sell a service into a building and they would also layer in things like the availability of Rideshare, Dockless bikes. I'm not sure what their status is right now but probably scooters as well. Do you do any of that?

Chris Johns: Not at the moment. It is something that we are quite interested in.

But we are dependent on the data sources that are available to us. And obviously we are primarily funded by TFL as well. Our modus operandi is to really promote TFL services. When we've looked at it before there are Lime and Forest e-bikes for example, across London.

But they don't actually have an open API that we can access. The other thing I think separates us from the transit screen service, I think they've rebranded actually now. But I think they don't tend to have maps or contextual maps on their screens. They tend to be very linear in terms of saying information is available on this particular site type of service at this particular place.

And that it's 500 meters where you have to go and work out which direction it is, whereas in London, we've got what's called the legible London wayfinding scheme. So across London, you find all these Totems which are just flat totems, they're not real time information.

But they've got localized maps with all the local highlights on it. So, there's a sort of native way of expecting maps and how they should appear to people as they're moving through the built environment that we've tried to replicate.

Ultimately, what we'd like to do is to take over those totems and convert them from being static information locations to being real time digital totems with wayfinding public transport information and other information as well. 

I suspect the barriers, there are steady advances in e-paper.

As that gets better versus using LCD or things like that require a lot of energy to be visible in daylight. 

Chris Johns: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head there or bleakly by saying, really the issue is cost and technology. There are hundreds of legible London totems around London.

Not all of them have power nearby and the cost to convert each and every one of them would be very substantial but if we can bring in as technology advances and things become cheaper, solar power and other sort of lower energy burn options come into play then that's where we're hoping that there's an opportunity.

So, I think I saw you guys have your offices or technical location and the Battersea area. If the Battersea power station which is now a kind of a multi use mall and other things, wanted to put your content on a large screen in their main access areas, would they need to do what's involved?

Chris Johns: It's really quite straightforward. They just need to install a screen of any particular size, it can be small or super large. We put a 75 inch screen into an office complex, Paternoster Square, just a week or so ago. But you can go for pretty much any size screen.

The larger ones tend to be ethernet connected rather than Wi Fi connected. As long as that screen has browser capability then we can deploy a digital sign onto it. And it will be suitable for displaying both small scale and large scale. So you could have it within a stadium. If you've been to the power station, they've got the huge sort of warehouse-y style engine rooms there which are now full of shops but you could put one at the end of one of those engine rooms and it would look fantastic. 

Yeah. I was there three-four months ago. It's a great reworking of that building. Outside they could really use wayfinding but that's somebody else's problem. 

Chris Johns: Yeah. Also there's boats there as well. So Uber has taken over the boats in London. So, unfortunately they no longer provide data onto the TFL data feed.

And so we're trying to work with them to get data from them. But at the moment, they're not included within the TFL API feed.

I'm understanding this correctly, there's a URL per geo-specific site. 

Chris Johns: That's right. 

And if it was a digital sign in a building that was also showing, if we're using the Battersea Power Station as an example, also showing sales promotions for some of the retail tenants, could your information be scheduled in or does it need to be on there full time?

Chris Johns: No, it doesn't need to be full-time. Obviously, we're very aware that digital screens need to pay for themselves and often that's through advertising. Our content can be part of a playlist and run for 15-20 seconds every 40 seconds or whatever the host decides is best.

So, we're working on another project at the moment which is actually something very similar to that, whereby the content will rotate with other content about walking routes, heritage and other information that takes to a particular place. Because obviously, public transport information is not the only thing that's of interest to people as they're moving through the built environment.

But it's one of the time sensitive things that is important to them. 

Because it's web based information, is it responsive?

Chris Johns: Yeah, We do smartphone friendly signs as well but usually they're going to be QR code based. So, someone will scan a QR code and then it will open up a smartphone or other personal device friendly version.

Some of the other signs that we've designed particularly for larger format digital signage screens.

So what I've seen examples of was a portrait mode screen but you could do a landscape screen, no problem. 

Chris Johns: Oh yeah. We've got loads of them. It's roughly 50-50 at the moment in terms of deployment between landscape and portrait.

I don't really have a preference. I think they look good. I think the one we put in last week into Paternoster Square was a portrait and I think it looks really quite nice in portrait style. 

And have you done the design and everything to mirror or parrot the transport for London colors and so on?

Chris Johns: We've built it to meet the TFL brand guidelines. So that was very important. Obviously, because we're paid by TFL and the map is styled to look as close as possible to the legible London guidelines but without copying it. We use a service called Mapbox to do that which allows us to play with the layers and the design of the layers on the maps very efficiently.

And we actually did a project for Melbourne as well, Transport for Victoria in Australia where we came up with a similar whole range of concepts for Melbourne and again using their sort of legible Melbourne guidelines or Transport for Victoria guidelines with their branding and their mapping as well.

So is there a consulting wing to what you do as well? 

Chris Johns: Basically we can provide just consulting but really what we're hoping to do is to build long term relationships with transport authorities where we can deploy the platform, make the signs available across their estate and out to their community.

And if that option is available to us then we'll do the consulting bundled into a longer term agreement with them. 

But it's not fundamental to your offer? 

Chris Johns: No. No, not at all. 

My next question is, are you working outside of London? So you're in Australia.

Are you elsewhere as well?

Chris Johns: So, we're one of the winners of a global innovation tender for Transport for Victoria and we developed a whole range of concepts for them. Unfortunately, their data wasn't quite a state as yet to enable the concepts to be deployed. So that one very much watches this space.

We've also had discussions with others, both, in Europe and also in North America as well. We're quite keen on working internationally. I think on the international side, we're much better when we work with a bigger technology partner. So, usually with transport authority tenders, they put them out there and there's big organizations which pitch for them. We're typically too small to pitch for them but we can go in with those larger organizations and bring that element of innovation and entrepreneurialism and some design to give them an extra edge in their tender over and above everyone else.

So you might be going with an IBM or somebody like that? 

Chris Johns: Yeah. The big one in America is VIX Technology and they're a nice bunch of guys. But we've also partnered previously with Trapeze which is in the UK. And also, there's a one in the UK who we work with very well called True Form Engineering as well.

We've done stuff with them both in London and outside of London as well. 

You mentioned at the start that you're working with the London authority which has a world reputation for its data API and everything else. And you also mentioned that Melbourne isn't quite at the same level. Is that a big challenge when you look at other jurisdictions?

Chris Johns: Yeah, totally. Basically, the world is changing and it's changing very rapidly. The data is becoming less of a problem. But one of the problems that remains is the cost of data which means that actually using our service may be prohibitive to smaller towns or organizations outside of London.

With the CFL API, we have free Access to that but if it was outside of London, for example, in Bristol, then we would have to partner with a third party data provider. And there are a small number of those that can provide that service. But it's not free and their costs are extensive.

And then we have to layer our costs on top of that and it may be that for that transport authority which they look at that and say, we can't do that sort of cost at the moment. Indeed somewhere Bristol actually used to have their own API and then took it offline.

Because they said, we can't justify the cost of maintaining this open API strategy which to my mind is insane because surely the biggest way of generating demand for public transport authority is telling people what services there are there. And you can only do that if you've got real time information.

So if you suddenly say to all the developers and even your own services, we're not going to have an API anymore. It just means that you're going to have a natural impact on demand. 

I don't know if this is a simple answer or way too involved to even get into but I'm curious if I'm a transport authority, let's say in Kansas city, Missouri, Winnipeg, Manitoba, or Munich, Germany.

Do you need the shape and structure of data to make this workable? 

Chris Johns: It’s what we call a JSON API and then documentation around it and we'll take it from there. So, most of the APIs follow a common standard these days and we can work with any of them, really.

We've not done any multi-language so digital sign designs as yet. So we do need to consider the elements of user experience for trying to work in something like Japanese, for example, would be challenging for us at the moment because we'd have to consider how they interpret information which is different to how we might interpret information in the UK.

But somewhere like Missouri and Munich would be fairly straightforward for us. 

Okay. So if people want to know more about your organization, where do they find you? 

Chris Johns: So the best thing to do is to look at our website, which is at passage-way.com, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm quite chatty on LinkedIn, and I post a fair amount, and also the company is on LinkedIn as well.

That's how I found you. 

Chris Johns: Yeah, and the more the merrier, really. 

All right. Chris, thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Chris Johns: Thank you. Have a great day.

 

Eric Henry, Carousel Digital Signage

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system.

I had a really good chat, one that flew by, with Eric Henry, the president of Carousel, which is the digital signage side of a larger Minneapolis company called Tightrope Media Systems. The Tightrope side of the business focuses on broadcast.

In our chat, Eric and I get into the opportunities and challenges of working with K-12 schools, what typically goes in, and the types of content that help create a sense of community. He has some interesting thoughts about taking marketer's approach to messaging in schools, and getting beyond the predictable.

We also touch towards the end on the higher ed market, which has some core similarities in terms of need, but is also quite different.

Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts.

TRANSCRIPT

Eric, thank you for joining me. Happy New Year.

Eric Henry: Happy New Year. 

I've done a podcast in the past with your colleague, JJ, but it's been a few years. For those who don't know much about Carousel, can you give me the background? I know that you grew out of tightrope media systems. Some people will know that, but others won't. You've been around since 1997, maybe not you personally but the company. 

Eric Henry: Yeah, correct. Personally, I haven't been at the company since 97, but I've certainly been around since 1997. But yeah, Carousel started out as Tightrope Media Systems, actually still a division of Tightrope Media Systems. 

So there are two divisions of the company, Carousel, which is the digital signage group and then Cablecast, which is actually our community television broadcast, part of the company and so I actually run the Carousel business.

We did start in 97. 1996-97, It's debatable in terms of paperwork and those types of things, but after a long time, it actually came out of the education space. So, our first customer was Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota for Carousel some 26 years ago, and we've been in that space for quite a long time. Obviously signage lends to many other vertical markets, so we are certainly in other verticals but our founder story is rooted in the education space 

And going way back to the late nineties, what was a school district looking for at that point? And is it pretty much what they're looking for today?

Eric Henry: Quite a bit different today. So back in the late nineties, there were certainly much more tube televisions and we could update lunch menus and those types of things and that was really very early days of putting content on screens that wasn't broadcast. 

So that was really the early days where schools were looking for a solution that wasn't really hard because there were only a couple of things that could actually put content on screens but they were fairly prohibitive because a lot of them were designed for much more retail, graphic intensive folks and not necessarily teachers.

Right. Yeah. I remember back to the mid to late nineties, there were early-stage quasi digital out of home companies that were in the business of going to school districts and schools in general and saying, Hey, we'll put a TV in the classrooms of your school and you can run school messaging on there.

But by the way, there's going to be advertising there too, to pay for the technology. That's a model that didn't work. 

Eric Henry: No, it did not. And I think we've really been trying to find our way as an industry, for quite a long time. If you look at the early days, I remember being at a trade show and there were two higher eds from the same state.

And I asked them why they wanted to do a digital signage project and the answer was basically because the other one was going to do it. So, that's not a very compelling reason, nor is that really a sustainable industry. If we don't really understand what the value is that we're going to bring, why are we doing this thing?

And I think that has really been a long journey for us and we've been searching and wrestling with that question. We did a signage project because it was cool and because nobody else was doing it or because we wanted to put something on these new flat panel displays we wanted to buy but it's very different now in terms of what's important and what schools are thinking about when they're putting content on screens.

And what a K-12 environment does versus what a higher ed environment does can be very different, correct? 

Eric Henry: They can be the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the same. How you reach that goal may look a bit different, right? In a K-12 versus a higher ed. I would say one of the major things, so the thing that is the same, what we see and this is true for any organization, our corporate customers as well in the retail space. This idea that people feel connected to their community, like the heart of us, is what we can do to give an organization tools to keep their people connected.

Ironically, we're suggesting more use of technology but using technology to actually bring people together in a relationship face to face. So the more that people are aware of what's happening within their school and things they can participate in. So extracurricular clubs or the sports scores from last night from the football team or the auditions for the play coming up. Those types of things or recognizing people within their community is really creating more sense of community through visual communication is really at the core of what K-12s do and higher eds do.

Now it varies a little bit. Higher ed, for example, the big challenge is getting students on campus and getting students registered for classes and those types of things. So the campus visits weekends and promotes what that university has to offer. So it is a bit more of a marketing tool for prospective students and those types of things, when you're trying to attract them to campus.

And then the signage becomes a tool that says, Hey, you're in the residence hall, just so you know, seven o'clock on Thursday, this math club is meeting or you can go into the writing lab and get a review of your paper. So, that is how across education it is creating community and creating awareness of all the services and things that we're providing to help you be successful.

So, let's talk first about K-12. What does that environment or what does the build typically look like for a school within a larger school district? And I guess I'm also asking, do you sell to a school district or is it school by school?

Eric Henry: We certainly have had both approaches. So in the K-12 space, what is interesting is it really depends on the district.

And now there are districts that have standardized on the Google ecosystem. There are school districts that have standardized on the Apple ecosystem and there are school districts that actually split between Google ecosystem and primary grades and Apple for higher secondary schools. So, in terms of environments that we see, we see typically a Google or an Apple environment or a mixed environment between those two, sometimes Microsoft. 

So does that matter to you? 

Eric Henry: It matters a little bit in terms of how we're thinking about a deployment, not a ton to us directly at the Carousel.

We obviously have to be mindful of customers' choices, right? So, there are certainly relationships that we have that are more ingrained or stronger or support devices that we have. We do have opinions around what devices we feel work best but if you've already made device choices, as Carousel, we need to work to support those devices. So with that said…

In a Chrome OS environment. 

Eric Henry: Yes. But the qualifier on that environment, is it to the same level of support and performance as the Apple ecosystem or the BrightSign ecosystem? No. They run on Chrome but we don't invest top tier resources in terms of making sure that's the prime environment.

And honestly, because we don't have a lot of customers running on Chrome. That's what it comes down to for us. So as far as a K-12, what we see most often is common area signage and so not necessarily in the classroom. So when you ask a school, Hey, are you doing digital signage?

They would say, yes, we have five devices in common areas. So in each of the main hallways or however they break out their building. Sometimes they've had it at a district but many times it started at one school because there was a champion within a school. Sometimes we have a district that has three or four different solutions.

Some every once in a while, we have district-wide initiatives and we prefer that because whether you're going with us or a competitor, we think it makes more sense to think about your communication strategy more holistically. So it's a little bit challenging if you have three or four different solutions.

And I would say we see more individual schools choosing than we see full districts choosing. We've seen mostly common areas and sometimes, Hey, can we do something in the lunchroom? And what we've really tried to encourage schools to be thinking about is how can we get into the classroom? beyond the common areas because the reality is when I observed my kids in school they're cruising through the hallway as quickly as they can to get to class. So, there wasn't a lot of dwell time in common areas unless you're at lunch. So how can we get into the classroom in a way that's affordable? 

And that's been a big challenge over the years with the devices that we have and especially the mix. As I mentioned, there's Google and there's Apple. There's also Lots of other devices that we see in the classroom. We have Immersive, we have Screenbeam, all these other multi-purpose devices that we see in classrooms, we've really tried to think about how we can lean in and support that.

And I've wondered about the other devices like Immersive and Screenbeam and Zoom rooms and so on. There seems to be a marketing effort for the schools to have this in their classrooms because you can not only use it for collaboration and teaching and so on but in downtimes, it can be used as digital signage messaging, a kind of screensaver-ish mode.

But I've wondered, does that actually happen? 

Eric Henry: No. The short answer is no. The reality is it's cost-prohibitive. So if we wanna get into a little bit of where we're going as a Carousel. When you look at school districts, a K-12 or a higher ed, they have to be very mindful of their budgets and how we as digital signage manufacturers, CMS providers have priced our products historically.

You have a dedicated media player and we price per media player. So anytime we go to a classroom environment, you start talking about a 100 or 200 or 500 per school, which pretty quickly gets the school district out of the budget. So this is where as Carousel, we've backed it up.

And so talking about what is a K-12 or a higher ed trying to accomplish. I did have an opportunity to go and meet with a bunch of higher ed leaders and really hear from them what their struggle is and what they're trying to do and overwhelmingly the theme was, Hey, kids don't read emails, kids aren't engaged.

They don't really know what's going on. How can we reach these kids? That's the question they had for us and how can you be part of helping us with that? And the interesting thing is there's already like 15 ways we can communicate with people, right? We have Slack teams, all the different higher ed little solutions for back and forth communications with students like Patio and all these other ones and we have digital signage and we have Moodle and Blackboard and all these others learning management systems. 

So thinking about all of those things, I backed up and none of those higher ed leaders were saying, boy, the thing that I really need is digital signage. It's going to solve all of my problems and so that was very clear to us. So when we started asking the question, what does my overall communication strategy look like as a higher ed leader?

What do I think about my communications as campaigns? Like retailers think about marketing campaigns. Here's all the places I'm going to place this campaign. Here's when I'm going to place it. Here's who needs to see it. Here's the call to action. When we start thinking about communication for a higher ed or a K-12 in that way, we understand that signage is one part of that much bigger communication.

And it moved us to this idea of let's think more about the audience that we're communicating with than the number of devices they're necessarily on. So, as far as where we're going in the future, we're going to a K-12 or in a higher ed and saying, you need to communicate within your classrooms to all of your students.

And you identify your student body as one audience. You should have an audience feed for students and if you need to communicate with parents, that should be a different audience that you're thinking about and even switching the value proposition of carousel and how we price based on that concept of saying, how many audiences, unique messages do you need to create to meet with your people?

And don't worry so much about whether that's a 1000 people or 5,000 people thinking about what audience you have because the interesting thing about signage and the way that it's always been is the more successful you as an organization are, the more expensive it is for you, right? And when we want to switch that, we want to say, look, we want the Carousel to be really helpful in actually accomplishing the thing that you're trying to do, right? 

You want students on campus, you want them to feel connected, you want them to be successful. So the more people that know what's going on and the more people that see that information, the more successful you're going to be.

And I don't want you worrying about what that costs you. I want you to go, okay. I know that I want to target my freshmen, my sophomores, my juniors and my seniors with unique messages. So Carousel, we need four feeds. Cool. How many people are actually consuming that feed? Hopefully a bunch, because you'll feel like you got a lot of value out of those feeds.

And so that's how we're looking at solving that classroom problem and it sets us up for some other things that we're thinking about going beyond the screens on walls. It's still necessary. I think seeing that message and a dedicated screen on a wall is absolutely important.

Seeing it in the classroom is important. Seeing it on other devices and web pages and screensavers is also really important. So we're trying to think much more holistically about how we are thinking about our communication campaign and all the places that should show up

So, if capital budgets and operating budgets are an issue, as they certainly would be in most school districts and the schools aren't really multipurpose these other devices like the Immersive and so on for digital signage, how do you make all this happen? 

Eric Henry: Well many times. We rarely see a net new from zero signage project, right?

They're making a big capital outlay for screens and for devices and so oftentimes it is, how can we take the investment you've already made? and enhance it and leverage it for new purposes. So for us, very often, we are going into a school district or we're coming alongside an LG or a Screenbeam or BrightSign or whoever that already have these deployments and saying, how can we make this deployment better? Because you're already using this device for something else. So, that's where we as Carousel come in and say, this is how we're going to price this thing. Sometimes these multipurpose devices are just playing a URL.

And so if the classroom signage communication is simple. It's very easy to do if it's a little lighter weight and as Carousel, it's more about providing the thought leadership and helping them strategize what they're trying to do in their organization and think about the inventory of all the devices that you have and what are the things which we can support, what an additional investment might you need to have as well to make this happen in a big way.

Then by the way, we have to make sure that it's simple enough for you to administer so that you're not hiring staff because nobody has the ability to hire staff just to manage signage networks. So that's how we think about it. Okay, 

So you got to educate the educators.

One thing that I've seen come out in press releases here and there, I'm thinking in particular of Rise Vision that focuses a lot on K-12 is the use of students to do the content creation and actually in some cases, manage the screen networks within schools.

And when you start thinking in terms of a marketer and taking a marketer's approach to communication which makes perfect sense to me, that's not necessarily a mindset or a skill set that a 16 year old kid who knows their way around motion graphics has much experience in.

Eric Henry: Yeah, I think I love that direction because it's not just for the content creator kids, it's also for the tech kids who can manage the network. And so for us, we're working on some things that will come out later this year to really encourage, close to my heart is, diversity in tech.

One of the challenges with diversity in tech is that we don't have a diverse population of people to even hire to come to our company and so what I would love to do is move into the middle school, high school age of kids and encourage them to experience tech, event management of devices and configuration and those types of things.

On the back end, especially in areas that are much more diverse than we are here in Minnesota and so we're looking at things that we can do as a carousel to incite much more of that activity. I applaud what Rise Vision is doing because I think it's the same heart that we have, which is how we can get these kids engaged and getting their hands on things and thinking about things early.

Now, are they always going to know what to do and how to get it right? Not necessarily and so we have all the tools within the Carousel to do that in a pretty safe way where there's content approval workflows, there people don't get to post things directly to the signage network and so you'd have a teacher or an administrator checking their work and making sure they're not doing crazy stuff but I think that's absolutely important, like hands-on learning is valuable and getting kids a taste of, am I interested in communications? Do I want to create the video that goes on the signage? That's pretty cool. So, I absolutely love that direction. 

Yeah. Giving logins to a group of 16 year old boys terrifies me. 

Eric Henry: Yeah. You definitely have to make sure that your system is locked down and that your users are set up correctly, for sure.

So when you're taking this marketing centric approach and getting material up in common areas and ideally in the classroom as well. What are those messages that really seem to work well? Beyond the obvious things like, congratulations to the team for winning the local football championship or its hamburger Friday.

. 

Eric Henry: Yeah, those are certainly the core things. I would say that student wellness has been a pretty significant area of focus. 

What do you mean by that? 

Eric Henry: What I mean by that is, around student wellness in the U. S. there's some discussion around social emotional learning is another term that they would use.

So, student wellness being, are you experiencing anxiety? Here's how to prepare for tests here. Hey, the emergency drill is coming up in two weeks. Preparing students, especially, coming back from the pandemic and kids not being in that routine. Trying to help with all of the things that students are wrestling with, Hey, here are the support services we have as a school available to you as a student, here's how to prepare for a test.

A lot of those. So when we talk about student wellness, their mental and their physical health, like really thinking about those types of things providing content. We actually interviewed some different teachers and administrators and found that they were spending a pretty significant amount of time trying to go and find that content online to put on their signage networks.

And so we actually hired some people to help develop that content professionals in that space to provide to schools, whether they were a Carousel customer or not. Just say, Hey, if this is helpful to you, here's anti bullying campaigns, here are things around deep breathing or other things and this is not my area of expertise but just giving you a flavor of the types of things that what we're hearing from schools are a lot of kids were anxious, a lot of kids were struggling, a lot of kids were acting out when they came back from the pandemic.

So how can we be helpful in even the messaging that they're seeing on screens? And so a lot of soft messaging I would say around, what do we want to recognize as a community?

A lot of recognition stuff around, in primary grades especially. At our schools, they call them the wow awards. What are you exhibiting the values of the school? And we're going to celebrate Caleb, the first grader who showed kindness, those types of things. Reinforcing what we want our community to be about.

And does an individual school have to have a champion, they have to assign whether it's a teacher or somebody in the front office staff or whoever who's going to manage this thing? 

Eric Henry: Typically that works best. And this is true in education, in corporate, in retail, in healthcare, in every vertical, when we start talking about a signage network, the first assumption is we're going to have one person do all of this stuff, right?

Or two people and it's going to be highly centralized and that reasonably quickly becomes not sustainable. So back to the Genesis of Carousel and understanding who we were building the product for in the late nineties has always been part of, we have to make sure of the complex as this becomes and at enterprise scale that individual people can still manage their little world.

So fundamental to Carousel is how can we keep the user experience simple? If I'm a district and if I log in, I can't see other schools because I already don't know where I'm supposed to go.

Architecting your signage system in a way that I log in and I only see the two or three things that are relevant to me is very important.

You may have a champion at a school but you may have really targeted things like, Here's the PTA groups log in, here community educations log in for after school and they can only do certain things in certain zones and here's the administration from the principal's office and they're responsible for school wide messaging.

So we encourage the school or the district to really, let's start with your initial scope and think about who's going to own it and where are you going to get the content from? And then let's go from there but understand that all the tools exist for you to really break it down. So even as we were talking about students earlier, this is how you would use the carousel in a safe way for students.

And sometimes the safe way has to be for teachers too. Not because they're trying to do something malicious but because they might not know how to use a signage network. So for us, always the goal is how can we make this as simple and dynamic as possible? Some schools, the Carousel is the collector of all of the other information systems.

Here's an RSS feed of the sports scores. Here's what we're getting for the lunch menus from another system and just consuming stuff from other places and putting it together in a way that is useful and is highlighting the most important things that's really valuable because now I don't have somebody constantly trying to feel like they have to maintain yet another system 

In the same way that in the business world for workplace communications and so on, the last four or five years have seen an explosion in the ability to use API's to tap into real time data and general data from business systems.

Does that work within school districts? Are there data sources available to you? And are they useful? 

Eric Henry: Certainly. The thing that's a little bit challenging in the education space is probably the most valuable information system to tap into is the student information system. At the same time, you have to be very careful about that.

It's like in healthcare, like patient information. There are pretty natural things that you would connect to in a school. The things that are interesting I think are more on the content creation side, let's take Google Slides or Canva or those types of tools that schools are already using. I think those are probably more pertinent in the education space, certainly than they are in the commercial space.

They are fairly common, Hey, let's go grab the sports scores or grab a thing off our website or those types of integrations that are pretty lightweight but more than anything is probably like, can I grab my Google slides content that I made as a teacher and put it over here? So that's a little bit different. Corporate is much more, give me Power BI dashboards and hard data and those types of things. 

The difficulty in schools is there's not like a Power BI and everybody uses it type thing in education and so we have to be a little more flexible in terms of, Hey, can you get it in RSS and consume it? It's hard to build APIs for everything that's out there. 

Time is flying here but I wanted to quickly cover off as well the distinction between K-12 and higher ed because K-12 the students have to go and they go in their neighborhood or in their general area. But with higher ed, a lot of what's going on is about recruitment, right? Whether it's for athletes or non-athletes students.

Eric Henry: Certainly. So in the higher ed space, I think one of our customers that uses Carousel pretty significantly is the University of Minnesota right here in our backyard and they have the 3M innovation lab and they're highlighting all of the innovation and the things that they're doing throughout the world.

They're highlighting things like green buildings that are carbon neutral and all the stats of the building. So you'll see much more in higher ed space, I would say, much more around thought leadership and why you should come to this university, how well you're going to be supported here in certain areas.

And the beautiful thing about signage is it's flexible, so you can schedule everything. So, the higher ed will schedule things that if you have a campus visit weekend or you know that you're having incoming students, prospective students coming to campus, you can really target your messaging to all of that type of stuff.

Think about the possibilities of why we're an awesome university and all the resources available to you. Then when you get to regular campus life as people are coming back from break now, for example, now we can start talking about and here's all the things that we're doing right now.

Hey, remember students, this is the thing that's going on Thursday night. So you see things in residence halls that are reinforcing things that are happening on campus because students usually remember the thing that's right in front of them because they have so many things going on. So, that's what it looks like in higher ed versus… 

I think the wellness thing would be even more important or maybe not more important but as important as K-12 in higher ed because you've got particular first year students who maybe moved away from home and this is the first time on their own and they may be extroverts who are just right in there for party central but there'd be all kinds of young students who are a little a bit terrified and very lonely.

Eric Henry: Certainly. And it's interesting because the services available in a higher ed are a little bit different than in K-12, right? So the messaging around wellness and availability of those services looks a little different in higher ed but you're certainly right on point.

Again, reminding the students that there is actually a wellness center. There actually are places to go to work out. There are places to go to get counseling services within higher levels that you can sign up for. The university my kids attend, that's actually a free service on campus for them and they didn't know about it until they saw it. They were reminded of it and they didn't read the newsletter that the university sends out but they saw it seven times on the signage and then they actually went. So that's the idea.

It worked. All things are possible. Eric, thank you very much. That was great. We could have easily chatted for another 90 minutes, but try to cap these things at about half an hour and it's been terrific. 

Eric Henry: Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity. It was great chatting with you.

Meghan Athavale, LUMO Interactive

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.

Jason Lu And Grace Kuo, Cecoceco

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

I have written and blabbered away about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it is becoming a design consideration for architects and the people who create the look and feel of built spaces. But that thinking always assumed that clever creative could make the black surface of a big video wall, loaded with the right content, take on the look of its surroundings.

Now a spin-out from a company with deep roots in LED display tech has gone the next step, by coming up with LED display tiles that look like wall finishes. Imagine a building lobby wall that, in its off state, looks like stone or tile or decorative wood, but lights up - with animations or messaging that appears out of that decorative surface.

That's the pitch for a new company called CECOCECO, which is a subsidiary of Chinese LED giant Unilumin. The company was founded by Jason Lu, who years earlier founded ROE, which is widely considered top of the heap for rental LED displays used by touring acts.

Lu was getting bored with that business and wanted to innovate again. So with his wife Grace Kuo, they've come up with and are now marketing something called ArtMorph. We get into a good discussion here about the origins of the product, how it works, and who is interested.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jason and Grace, thank you for joining me. First of all, can you tell me what Cecoceco is all about? 

Jason Lu: I'm very happy to share the story about Cecoceco with you. I think, 16 years ago, I founded a company named ROE, and this company develops and manufactures LED displays, so we have 16 years of experience in that industry. To be honest, after 16 years, I got a little bit bored with that traditional business, and I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what kind of product I could develop. So, one day, I found out that the traditional LED is always a black cabinet.

It's difficult to put it in an indoor environment. So I hope we can do something new and put a traditional cabinet with some new masks together to 100 percent match.

Grace Kuo: So the story is, one day, Jason came into a hotel and he suddenly said, “Oh, that LED looks so ugly. Why do these beautiful hotels have this ugly black LED? It's not really part of this hotel. You can really tell this is not a part of the hotel.” So he thought, why can't we build these kinds of things that have the lighting or video source but you won't see that ugly? You can take it as part of these decorations. You can make it as part of these buildings, which is how the idea came out. He thinks, oh, I should create some innovation, stuff which can make this environment look more material and beautiful and not only for the hotels, but also for restaurants, and also for libraries, every place should have those kinds of stuff, instead of the ugly black LED for atmosphere.

So, for context, just so people understand, ROE is very highly regarded as the best rental temporary LED displays on the market, and your company was acquired by Unilumin, correct? 

Grace Kuo: Yes. 

Were you still with the company until recently?

Grace Kuo: Jason's still with the company because you know the story is like he said two years earlier, when he felt bored with this traditional business, he felt oh I should stop it. I should get out of this business and continue my passion for innovation so he left for two years, but at the end of last year, he came back and continued his leadership at ROE and then he also brought back the Cecoceco  team to ROE Visual. So, right now, Cecoceco is a subsidiary company of ROE Visual as well. 

So ultimately you're owned by Unilumin? 

Grace Kuo: Yes. 

So we'll make the assumption then that the underlying LED infrastructure technology is Unilumin? 

Grace Kuo: We are very independent. We develop everything and do everything by ourselves, even the manufacturing, so they're basically only financially part of the group, but, besides that, everything is independent. 

So as I'm looking at this on your website, it appears to be relatively low-res LEDs with a veneer front to them, and the veneer can be stone, it could be fabric, it could be wood, or it could be something else, correct?

And how do you push the light through the veneer? Is it microscopically thin? 

Grace Kuo: So this is a good question. This is a key technology we have on these products, but Jason, can I give you more explanations, about how we make lighting come through those kinds of materials?

Jason Lu: Oh, yes. We tried a lot of different materials but finally we found out very special 3D printing technologies so e use these technologies to print the different masks. But it looks very real. When you touch it, you will feel this is real wood but it's still printing technologies.

Oh, okay. if I see a stone wall where there's light coming through, and I'm thinking to myself, how did they cut the granite or whatever that thin, they didn't? It's 3D printed to look like stone?

Grace Kuo: Yeah, there are two different ways we are doing this. One way is as Jason explained to you, but we also, actually, find out it's really, goldstone, the real stone, that can work with our products which also can have very high lighting or display transparencies. 

Oh, so you can do it with real stone? 

Grace Kuo: Yeah, we can do it with real stone. 

Jason Lu: But the basic version is a print version. 

Grace Kuo: Yeah, so we have two versions. One is, the printing version, in which you can choose everything you want, you can choose wooden, you can choose stone or you can choose a different kind of texture, but we also have the real materials that can work with our products. So we're working with one of the companies in the US, which is making a very special stone. They have very high lighting transparencies, which can work with our products very well. 

Jason Lu: But we start from the printing direction first because this is an easy way. But if some customer needs customizing, we will choose some real material, but I think we start from the basic printing idea. 

So you have a number of different faces or veneers or whatever that you already have available. But if you had an existing building and a lobby that was wood lined, you could color and tone match whatever the look of that would to create a custom veneer, right?

Grace Kuo: Yes, that’s possible to customize. 

Interesting. So, how bright is it? 

Jason Lu: It's 700 nits, which is more than bright enough for what you're trying to do, right? 

Grace Kuo: Yeah, I think so. We also discussed this with a lot of scientists and designers, and they felt 700 nits, for those kinds of motion products is more than enough. 

Yeah, I have seen some instances of low-res LED walls where they put a diffusion fabric layer in front of it to create something visually interesting without going to the full expense and everything associated with a full video wall to fill a whole lobby. This created the experience without all that cost and all the maintenance and everything. Is that kind of what you're going for? 

Grace Kuo: No, actually we are approaching different way to achieve this goal because, yes, you can see there are several projects that already happened, with different materials on top of the traditional screen, but there are a lot of works on a project site, so you always get two layers, separately and you need to have a lot of completed works on the project side. 

So it's gonna cause a lot of unpredictable problems and also cost a lot in labor, so our goal is to integrate these two ideas together and make one a finished product when the customer gets it, they get finished products and just make the quick install. They don't have actual onset costs. 

Okay, and there's a whole mounting system that you apply to the wall, fairly shallow by the looks of it, and it looks like the tiles themselves are less than an inch, and each of the tiles is ten by ten, I think, right? 

Grace Kuo: Each tile is 500 millimeters by 500 millimeters. 

So these things go together like a traditional LED video wall and you can stack them, tile them, and so on? 

Grace Kuo: Yeah, so you can build them as big as you want. 

And there's no physical dimensional limit?

Grace Kuo: There is no physical dimension limit so it's just units you can combine together. 

Jason Lu: And we also did some optic design to try and reduce the gap between the two modules.

To reduce the gap between the modules? 

Grace Kuo: With those kind of upper masks, visually, you've got some optical visible lines. So we also use some technologies to reduce these optical visible lines to make people feel this is really one picture, there are no optical lines, between units.

Right, because you want to make it disappear and just feel like the wall, the furnishings of the building. what typically is going to show on these... Is it immersive, it's ambient, you're not really doing messaging or anything, correct? 

Grace Kuo: What do you mean by messaging? 

You wouldn't run text. You wouldn't run a logo or something like that, probably?

Grace Kuo: It's possible, because the resolution is more than enough to play the characters or any content. 

So you could read something, or would it be more of a large logo or something? 

Grace Kuo: No, you can read some things. 

If you were describing the pixel pitch, what would it be?

Grace Kuo: Objective.

Grace Kuo: Because we are not selling this as an LED display, we are selling this whole concept as a totally new experience that we are bringing to this market, so it's based on the display technologies, but it's not a display, it's totally a mode product, emotional products, bring the different lighting or visual experience, to the people so that's why we're not selling on the resolution. 

So the people who you'd be accustomed to selling to and partnering with at ROE are the very different people for this product because I suspect you're dealing with architects and designers of internal spaces. 

Grace Kuo: You are correct. So it's currently totally different customers from what we have right now. So that's why we said that Cecoceco was independent from the design to the sales. 

So when you go to these architects and interior designers, are they tilting their head to the side trying to figure out what you're talking about, or do they get it?

Grace Kuo: Most designers or architects, when they hear these stories, they get it, so they know what we want to bring to this market. They know they see some things actually they've been looking for a long time because they are also really boring. With the LED screens, there are only high resolutions, but nothing new. So they feel there is something that can really be a game changer. 

What you've done here is the advancement of the idea that was in the Comcast Tower in Philadelphia some 15 years ago where you had, I think was P6 pixel pitch LED, with the content picking up the look of the side wood walls in the lobby but then stuff would appear on it. But as you were saying at the start, if it was off, it was black. 

And in order for it to always look like the rest of the lobby, it always had to be on versus what you're describing where it could be off, and it's going to look like the rest of the lobby. 

Grace Kuo: So it's just part of the decoration. So that is where the idea comes from, you need to have fun things be part of these decorations, be part of this environment, because we don't want to bring some high technologies and destroy the history in castles or even history is a restaurant, right? But we still want to bring these modes, bring these emotions to the people living there or sitting there.

We wanted that when the people came to step into this space, they didn't feel, “Oh, there is some, some lighting or a display surrounding them.” But they felt, when they are lighting up, they say, “Oh, I'm in a beautiful, lighting environment.” 

So, do you consider this more an architectural lighting application than a digital display app application? 

Grace Kuo: So this is a combination because we have a full 16-17 years of knowledge about the lighting and lighting source or display source. We keep some balance between the lighting and displays and make sure, even with a display, they still can get the true lighting source out. So that's why we do not use our traditional three RGB colors. We use multiple color combinations. 

So it's not just white light? 

Grace Kuo: No, not just white light. It's four colors, but it is not a traditional full RGB color. We draw multiple colors together to get more mature and to lighten up.

Jason Lu: So we use four-color LED. So that means the light quality is very high. So, the CII is very high.

Interesting. So when you said that architects and designers have been looking for this for some time and unable to find anything, why were they looking for this? 

Grace Kuo: I think because they want to offer something new to the end user, right? And I think they also have the same feelings as us just because the people like the video and the lighting, right? So that's why we can see LED displays everywhere right now, but to be honest, in some places, it's not the right place to put out the display. How many people are really reading the message from the display when they get in the galleries, they are going to galleries, they are enjoying the content, they enjoy the atmosphere. They're not really reading the message from the LED, right? 

So if you can offer that kind of architecture stuff that can also bring this lighting or display experience, it's a bonus for the market.

On the creative side, you're selling to architects and interior designers who are used to specifying finishes, like this wall is going to be mahogany or granite or whatever. They don't typically have to worry about creative files motion graphics, and so on. How do you deal with that? 

Grace Kuo: So we have our own developed controllers, which you can design any content you want to play out.

So you would design the content within your software? 

Grace Kuo: Yeah, we actually have some content galleries already set up, controllers, which you can choose directly, but you also can create your own, content with shaders, and play the different content. 

Is it a particular skill set to produce creative for this, or if you know your way around motion graphics, you'll be fine?

Grace Kuo: You probably need a little bit of technical background, but it's not that difficult. 

But if you work in After Effects or something like that, you'd be able to figure this out. 

Grace Kuo: Yes.

What about the cost versus conventional LEDs? So if I wanted to put something in a lobby and I was thinking about, let's say, a 1.9-millimeter pixel pitch Unilumin LED wall or something versus the Cecoceco, is it similar cost, a lot less, or more? 

Grace Kuo: Oh, compared with the 1.9 millimeters, of course, it's going to be lower than that resolution, so our target MSRP price is around $4,500 per square meter, which is quite acceptable after we talk with the market, especially for the buildings. At the very beginning of the design, they already can design these products be part of the creation materials. Basically, they can see me on some of the creation materials from the beginning.

So that's when this is probably the easiest to sell into a building, right? When they're putting the building up, and it's just another number in a whole bunch of numbers versus coming at them cold and on a finished building and saying, “It's going to be X to put this in too.” 

Grace Kuo: Yeah, so you can do it before they have to finish these buildings, but you also can do this after that, but if you make a better plan at the beginning, which means you can also see the materials, right? For the majority of the walls, you don't need marble anymore. You just put our ArtMorph instead of the regular marble. 

Is it changeable? Let's say there's a building that starts off with your product that has a wood-like veneer on it and they do a renovation quicker than they'd expected and want to go to stone or something. Could they retrofit it?

Grace Kuo: Yes, this is a key point. This is another benefit of ArtMorph. The surface is actually changeable, especially, for houses, like hospitality, they would like to show different content, and different feelings, to their guests in different holiday seasons. So the textures are actually changeable, and it's very easy to change. 

Is it the module that changed, or can you actually change the veneer? 

Grace Kuo: So you can actually just change the top part. 

So when did you get started, and when did you start selling? 

Grace Kuo: So we are ready to sell. Actually, we already started to sell but officially, I think we're going to start selling Q1 next year, 2024. 

And are you showing up at trade shows with it? 

Grace Kuo: Yes. We're going to bring this to the ISE in Barcelona in 2024. 

I'll be there. 

Grace Kuo: Oh, good. looking forward to seeing you there.

So, are you going to have your own stand, or will you be associated with ROE and Unilumin?

Grace Kuo: Cecoceco is going to share a stand with ROE, but they're going to have their very independent, separate area. 

And are you installed anywhere yet and can you say where it’s at? 

Grace Kuo: We are, but we can not yet say. 

But you're actually selling and installing?

Grace Kuo: Yes. 

Where are you seeing the most interest? Is it North America, Dubai, or China? 

Grace Kuo: I think North America, of course, is a very important market for us because there are a lot of interior designers and some architecture, and Dubai, we haven't done too much because we want to focus on a strong market and expand to other territories. So we are going to start from North America and the UK. We feel these two markets have a lot of talented designers. 

I would have thought you'd start in China. 

Grace Kuo: China wants to get this kind of influence from overseas. 

So where is the company based?

Grace Kuo: The company is based in Shenzhen, China. 

Do you have offices in North America?

Grace Kuo: We have an office in North America, which is in Chatsworth, Los Angeles. 

Suburban LA. Perfect. All right, this was great. I'm looking forward to seeing this in Barcelona. 

Grace Kuo: I'm looking forward to seeing you in Barcelona.

All right. I appreciate your time with us. Thank you.

Grace Kuo: Thank you, Dave. 

Thank you, Jason. 

Jason Lu: Thank you, Dave. I'm so sorry, I cannot explain my idea to you directly, but Grace is a very good partner of mine.

Grace Kuo: We are partners, yes. but Jason can give you more product introductions in Barcelona.

That would be perfect. I suspect there's going to be a lot of people very interested in this. 

Grace Kuo: I think so, yeah. 

David Thomas, BudSense

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

When cannabis started being legalized in US states like Colorado, and more recently across Canada, it struck me that it was a very interesting new vertical for digital signage companies to chase - because it was a greenfields industry that had retail environments offering up products wholly unfamiliar to a lot of the people walking in the door.

It's grown pretty clear, though, that while there may indeed be big long-term opportunity, cannabis retailing is also a very complicated industry - with rules and regulations changing by jurisdiction, a whole bunch of vendors and SKUs, and widely variable supply chains.

While there might be a common perception that getting the OK to sell cannabis is a license to print money, a lot of operators are struggling financially, and both retailers and the tech ecosystem underpinning cannabis are coming in and dropping out all the time.

A Canadian company called BudSense has a particularly interesting story to tell. The company, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, started out as a retailer, but found its way into technology to fill the gaps in what they needed to effectively manage stores and communicate to customers.

Now, software is the main business, and BudSense has a SaaS software product that is all about managing menus and other screens around dispensaries, and is very specifically tuned to cannabis retailing - as opposed to general digital signage software that could also drive cannabis store menus.

Canada has been the main focus to date, but co-founder David Thomas says BudSense has business in the US, and plans to grow that.

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TRANSCRIPT

David, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a little bit about BudSense?

David Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Dave. BudSense is a menu merchandising company in the cannabis industry. It solves the problem for our retailers of menu management.

And are you focused just on menus or are you doing in-store promotion, all kinds of other things within these dispensaries? 

David Thomas: Yeah, we do some in-store promotion tool sets as well, pretty much anything that involves merchandising is the solution that we want to solve. 

Your company's in Saskatchewan, right?

David Thomas: Yes, we're based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, where we got our start in dispensary operation. 

So when you say dispensary operations, you mean you're actually running a dispensary? 

David Thomas: We were, and we still are. I partnered with my brother, John, around legalization in Canada. We started by running four stores in Saskatchewan. We've since sold those stores and moved on to other retail footprints but that's when we started developing the software that is now BudSense. 

What set you down that path? Because being a retailer is very different from being a software company?

David Thomas: Absolutely. So I have a background in engineering. My brother has a background in pharmacy. We actually started our business partnership before cannabis in real estate and we have an entrepreneurial spirit. We were always looking for opportunities and when cannabis was announced for legalization, we saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we wanted to participate so that was the catalyst that pushed us into the cannabis space. We went into retail because of our real estate and pharmacy background.

I have a lot of experience running teams and building systems. So we just put our skill set to use in a brand new industry. 

So did you write your own software to run your store and that's what got you down the path or was it the absence of good software to do what you needed? 

David Thomas: It was both. We solved whatever problem was directly in front of us. So it wasn't like we wanted to solve digital menus. It was more of a necessity and then we had the skillset to do it in that way. So when we started, we had four stores to run and that's very atypical from a normal business where you start with one and then progress if you're successful.

So from day one, I knew that we needed a system to manage merchandising from a central location. So we could know what was happening in the stores and there were some solutions on the market but they were pretty flimsy at that point and we just felt more comfortable building our own.

So, that's where we started down the path of digital menus.

At what point did you decide that you'd rather be a tech company than a retailer? 

I think the perception when cannabis was legalized in Canada was if you managed to get permits, particularly in those provinces where they allowed for private operators, it was a license to print money.

David Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. The markets are very interesting with cannabis. I've watched them develop in our region, in the U.S., and other places and that's certainly the perception from the outside looking in and that happens a lot in an early market, whereas some of the permits are protected and ours were in the early days.

We actually sold what turned out to be the peak of the market which was an excellent catalyst for our next chapters. So now a lot of the markets in Canada are oversaturated. I've heard numbers thrown around something like 70% of dispensaries in Canada are unprofitable and that has to do with market saturation, but it also has to do with operations being a little bit bloated and not really having the efficiency needed. 

BudSense is focused on driving some extra revenue but also tries to make sure your costs are under control and you're running an efficient operation.

I've also heard a number of times that the big challenge of a lot of the people who get into launching dispensaries is they know they're cannabis, but they don't really know retailing. 

David Thomas: You've hit on something really interesting because even if they do know retail, which is very rare, cannabis is different. So you have this situation where no one has the perfect skillset so it's going to take innovation and learning regardless of what your background is because it's new and it has new problems. 

So what happens is, regardless of your background, you go into it, you start trying things and if you're not mindful then your first go at it isn't going to be perfect. You're going to need to change your strategy. That's where people get into trouble with switching costs, with building systems that aren't necessarily malleable enough to change. So there's a ton of different backgrounds. Some people are more experienced with the product. Some people are more experienced with retail. Some people are more experienced with purchasing. It's really interesting because you essentially have to lean on your strengths while understanding your weaknesses and kind of build the business that way. There are a lot of different paths to success in cannabis and we see that with our different customers of BudSense where there's not one way to do this but it is challenging regardless of what your background is. 

One of the big challenges that I've perceived is how things are licensed and regulated changes by jurisdiction. So for instance, In Saskatchewan, where your company is based, it sounds like it's privatized. Where I live in Nova Scotia, it's run by the Provincial Liquor Corporation. So it's very much regulated and I can go in and buy a bottle of wine around the corner and buy whatever you buy there, I don't terribly know but it's all incorporated and much more heavily regulated perhaps than in a private situation and I guess it's the same in the states where it can change state by state. 

David Thomas: Yeah, you've hit on another one where it's interesting because your operation depends on the municipality (based on zoning) and the region you're in because one of the most important parts of it is your location and how protected it is from other competition, and then your purchasing is different based on your region. But one thing that we excelled at is it's very simple. We read the rules, and we read the regulations, and we understood them. And a lot of other times people would go in based on what they're doing in the U.S. or what they're doing in another market. 

The problem with that, like a concrete example, was when we opened our stores in Saskatchewan, we didn't have a security guard at the front door because the regulations didn't say you had to, we were treating our customers as customers and a lot of people looked at what the U.S. was doing and they saw these security guards at the front door and they didn't necessarily understand the purpose of the security. The security guards were there because it's not legal federally. So it's purely a cash business and the insurance is extremely expensive. So when you have a cash business, your store is filled with cash, and it's a target for crime. So for those reasons and the illegality of it at a federal level, that's why the security guard is there. But when you read the regulations, there's no reason for one.

So it's little things like that where if you're not focused on the details of the regulations and respect the regulations, it's really hard to create a dynamic business without understanding them. 

So if I'm a cannabis dispensary and I've just opened up, or I'm about to open up, and I determine I need digital menu displays and I would like some promotional displays as well, could I just use any old digital signage CMS software to run the store or would I be just buying into a whole bunch of work that I don't need to? 

David Thomas: It depends how large your organization is and it depends how highly you value your menus. If it goes back to our conversation earlier, what is your skill set what do you value and how are you going to create value in your business?

If you're willing to enter all of your product information daily and keep it up to date on your menu, which some people do, there is a viable reason to do that if you want expanded information that says something BudSense doesn't offer. If you want a clean, tight operation, that runs your menus a little bit more efficiently and automated, that's where BudSense really starts to shine. BudSense manages scale really well. So you may be able to have an owner-operated store that uses a chalkboard that understands every product that's coming in, but when you get 5-30 stores under a banner that falls apart really fast. It again depends, but like we offer some powerful menu solutions that go beyond that kind of out-of-the-box, digital signage stuff that you're referring to.

And from what I understand, there's a whole sort of technology ecosystem focused around the cannabis dispensary business, including point of sale systems, information systems, inventory management systems, all that stuff that maybe you would never find in an apparel store or hardware store or something like that, but it's tuned to cannabis. Is that accurate? 

David Thomas: It's very accurate and I'm fascinated by it because I think it's partly to do with our time in modern technology, where if hardware stores were legalized today or if hardware stores were invented today, I believe they would have a stronger tech ecosystem. I believe that we're using tech in cannabis more so than in other verticals at the start of their run because it's available to us and it's helpful.

That said, the nature of cannabis and the instability of the supply chain leads really well to these niche products. You mentioned point of sale, and for example, there's a seed-to-sale regulation needed where you're monitoring individual products from the time that they're grown to packaged, delivered to the store, accepted at the store, to sell to the customer, meaning seed to sale and that regulation is over and above most just out of the box point of sale systems, so that's why. 

And that, again is down to the region. So these point-of-sale companies have to change their technology to support region-by-region regulations based on that seat to sell tracking and other things.

Wow. So it gets very complicated. 

David Thomas: It does. It is certainly a unique set of challenges, and it's a really early stage too. So a lot of these challenges and underdeveloped technology fall on the lap of operators, and it's challenging. 

As a tech provider in this ecosystem, is it challenging to get to scale because you've got all of these operators and as you said, 70 percent of them maybe aren't profitable, so they come in, they come out, they're cash constrained, and everything else? 

David Thomas: It is challenging.. That being said, this is my first software-as-a-service company that I've built so I'd imagine that it's always challenging, but I do think it's particularly challenging in cannabis. 

That said, I think it requires the right approach for this industry, and it's back to what I was saying, where just understanding the rules and, as you said, understanding the conditions that these operators are trying to run their business in is really important. For those reasons, we spend all of our capital on the product. A lot of our competitors spend more on sales than we do. And the reason why we spend on products is because exactly what you're saying, there's a lot of problems to solve and if people are going to go to business, I don't really value early market share that much.

That being said, it lowers the revenue that we can create out of the bat, but I feel like focusing on the product and focusing on trying to help our customers create success, drive revenue, and clean up their costs. I feel like that's a winning formula long term. It's just a little bit rocky at the start.

And where are we in that sort of evolution of the industry? Did legalization happen 10-plus years ago in Colorado?

David Thomas: Yeah, 10 years ago, Colorado. Five years ago, Canada. The Colorado legalization, like the legacy in the US, is interesting because they've been in an eye on an island.

So, tools such as BudSense haven't really hit them. They made do with what they had, and it created interesting market conditions. It's all in the US, also I don't think they've seen the growth and consumption expected and that's because without federal legalization they really won't see that three decade increase of consumption that we're expecting and when you go nationally legalized like Canada would see. But yeah, where are we from a tech standpoint overall? I think we're really early. I don't think it's been proven that a point-of-sale system can have international dominance.

It still seems to be region by region. I don't really think many people have realized how taxing regulation is on technology. For that reason, BudSense is what I call decoupled from the transaction, and this is counter to most traditional tech thinking where you want to get as close to the transaction as possible because that's where the money is but in cannabis, that's also where the regulation is.

So, by decoupling from that, we can spray it a little thinner and build solutions that are easier to scale across the entire industry. So industry as a whole, I think we have a long way to go. BudSense is making pretty significant strides in building powerful tools that take some of these retailers out of the dark ages, of the challenging period of cannabis retail.

And some of the surf riders have come in and out of the space as well or you contacted me because one of them was basically backing out of the digital signage. 

David Thomas: Yeah, I've seen a lot of significant decisions of pulling out, coming back in, investing, divesting. It's tough for me to speculate, but yes, our main competitor in the US has dropped out of digital signage in the cannabis industry. 

And you're speculating again, but I'm curious: why would they do that? It strikes me as if you get into something with them, then you've got recurring revenue.

David Thomas: Yeah, my best assumption is, first of all, Enlightened was purchased by a company called Weedmaps, which I believe is the largest Cannabis company in the world. So they had a larger parent company, and when a larger parent company is involved, and you're dealing with a subsection of that company, who knows what could have possibly happened?

But what I see time and time again is even a dominant player like Weedmaps, likely doesn't understand the whole scope of the cannabis industry. They get their part really well, but they don't necessarily understand the retail part or the cultivation part and the individual challenges that come with it. So when they think of digital signage, they're probably thinking of it as simpler than what BudSense has, and when you bring a simple solution to a really complicated environment, it's really tough to maintain and scale. So there's a chance that they're making the right decision for them, whereas that recurring revenue that they might have on their balance sheet, maybe it's not sustainable. And again, I don't know, but those are some assumptions that I could make to the decision. 

Of those retail stores, dispensaries, whatever you want to call them in Canada and the US, are most using digital screens in some way or are some of them still analog? 

David Thomas: It goes in trends. Canada has a higher digital percentage than the US. A lot of stores don't use menus at all because they just completely simplify the problem and use their Budtenders to communicate directly with the consumer. 

But that gets challenging in terms of volume and staffing, right?

David Thomas: So many things, because then now you have personal bias too and your consumer, they don't necessarily want to get all their information from the Budtender. Some people love it. Some people don't like it. 

I think one of the missing pieces in that ideology is that the menu isn't just for the consumer. It's also for the Budtender so that they can use the menu to discuss purchasing options together. With cannabis, there's a lot of information to process, and I think that some operators, they're around it all day, every day, and they lose sight of what it's like for a consumer to come into the store and just absorb and consume all of this information.

And what menus really do is help structure those conversations, regardless of how you see the customer journey happening, I think you're missing out if you don't have a well-thought-out merchandising plan. That said, if you're dealing with something that's inefficient and doesn't really work that well and it requires more headache than it's worth, there's a great argument to not do it at all. 

If you're not able to do it well, don't do it at all. That is a methodology that I subscribe to for other parts of the business. So why not menu management? 

Yeah, that's a long-running story in digital signage.

A lot of venue operators, whether they're retailers or QSR or whatever, invest in the technology. They invest in the original content load, and then it just becomes an orphaned bunch of screens that never get updated. 

David Thomas: Yeah, I see that all the time, and then it's just in the background, right?

We see that in our sales cycle too, where our potential customers are using another solution, it might just be collecting dust in the background but when they see our software, they're more like, oh, this exists. This is out there to help me manage my menus and make it a little bit more meaningful. So it's fascinating. There is a difference in ways that operators manage menus, whether you're talking about ‘No menus at all’ or poorly managed menus or something more along the lines of BudSense. 

Yeah. I was excited by the prospect of digital signage in cannabis retailing because you would have a whole wash of consumers who would be walking into these stores for the first time, completely unfamiliar with the product, and maybe a little bit uncomfortable because they don't get it. They don't know what they're buying. They don't want to be sold stuff that's overpriced or whatever. 

I saw digital signage as a way to help educate, drive awareness, and streamline operations. But I hear a variety of stories, including from you about how well that works. 

David Thomas: Yes, it's fascinating, right?

I think back to legalization and what consumers' expectations were of the store and what we had. They came into our store on day one, and we had 8 products for them to buy, like edibles weren't legal, we didn't have pre-rolls because they weren't legal and it was just in a lot of ways disappointing.

And when you look at it up close, it feels like a struggle. But when you resume the way out, I see a 30-year improvement cycle where we're getting better at this, and we're starting to pull consumption away from alcohol and towards cannabis, and I think that a lot of operators are a little bit too close to it where they don't see these new customers coming in because it might only be 2% of their customer base that is new, but that 2% over time is massive and it's exactly what you were saying where there's a feeling that our customers know how we do things, we know where to find the products that they want to buy and maybe they even already know what they want to buy before they come into the store. Yes, that's all true but there is this subsection of the consumer base that is intimidated the first time that they come into the store.

There are a lot of Canadians who still haven't been into a cannabis store, or maybe they went once, and they had a negative experience. So, exactly to your point is this customer journey. We really do have to try and make it as welcoming as possible. 

And I've seen everything from cannabis stores that look like Apple stores, they're sleek, they're beautiful and I've seen other ones that look like Korean variety stores in suburban Toronto or something, you just run down and shabby and everything. 

David Thomas: Yeah, it's interesting. That was the common thread of, “We want to be the Apple store of cannabis,” and I think we've softened that stance a little bit. A lot of those companies who had that concept in mind, they're quite frankly, they're bankrupt now or on their way out, and what happens is when you have a 30 percent margin packaged good product, you gotta be careful where you spend your money. 

So, I think it's about making our customers comfortable, and the other thing is how much space do you need? I think, as a rule, even our early stores were too big and they were still half the size of some of these other ones. If you make your store small enough, you can make it as nice or as rough around the edges as you were saying, as you want. But it's really about where you're spending that money and how you want to design your customer experience from there.

So tell me about the company, what's your installed base? 

David Thomas: So we have approximately 10% of the Canadian market right now. We started out focused, so we're in over 500 locations in the US and Canada. We're very focused on maximizing our current customers' use of the product; that's how we approach our development. And as we go, we build from word of mouth and inbound leads. As I said, we don't have a ton of sales efforts. 

One of our early successes was based on my retail experience, understanding from first-hand experience what a retailer needs and building a product to suit that. But eventually, that kind of ran out, and I'm still involved in the space from a retail perspective, but what we started to realize was there are different perspectives of this, and there are different ways of doing it, and we look at every new customer as an opportunity to see a new perspective of how menu management can work in this space, and we try to build our product around those different stories. So each of our retailers might not realize it, but they have a voice in the development roadmap of our product, and that's how we see growth because if we can save our customers’ time and then once we save them time, we can start maximizing margins, and once we maximize margins, we can start boosting their revenue. We can really take some of these companies who are struggling and make their business better, and that's what we're focused on rather than store count because we're in the infancy of the industry. So, I see it as almost a waste of resources to chase early market share. I would much rather build a strong product. 

Is it easier to work in Canada than the US because it is nationally legal? 

David Thomas: I guess it really depends on what your goal is. It's easier to do some things with cannabis in Canada. For instance, we built a database of 35,000 SKUs in Canada to help our retailers with data entry.

That's not possible in the US. There are no barcodes from state to state, just because of the federal legality of it. That said, if you're going to do a more simple solution, the US could be easier. The reason why we focus our development on Canada is because it's a little bit more robust in terms of a national regulation standard. So we can build out our product in a way that kind of wraps around a nationally legalized structure, and then what we do is we take parts of that, and we distribute it in the US. So our Canada market is like an R&D farm, and then we pull out parts of our product and wrap it around a particular use case in the US, but if we focus on the US, it's so fragmented that it's tougher to build that cohesive system. It's better to build the cohesive system and then only use 30% of it rather than build 30% of it and not know what that 70% is supposed to look like if that makes sense. 

The company is privately held? 

David Thomas:  Yes.

And how many people do you have? 

David Thomas:  We have 12 people right now.

And just dispersed, or do you actually have a bunch of people in Regina?

David Thomas:  We have a head office. It's a pretty cool program. It's called the Conexus Cultivator, and it's a tech incubator. So we have about half of our team there, and then the rest is distributed throughout Canada and remote work.

You're in Victoria, BC, which is a lot nicer this time of year than Regina. 

David Thomas: It is, yeah. I spent many winters in Regina. I do feel grateful to be here now in the winter. 

Yeah, I'm a Western Canada boy, so I had to get the hell out of that one. I don't like minus 30 Celsius. 

David Thomas: I feel like I've spent enough time in it. 

You've paid your dues. 

David Thomas: Yes. 

All right. This has been great. Very insightful. 

David Thomas: Thanks a lot, Dave. I appreciate you having me on.