Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

Brett Crossley, FanConnect

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

There are a lot of screens at sports and entertainment venues, and when it's possible to buy a 4K TV the size of a bus for a few hundred bucks, team owners and venue operators are having to work harder than ever to compel people to get off their sofas and come to games.

Whether it is college football or pro basketball, there's a big emphasis on maximizing the game-day experience for ticket-buyers, while also optimizing the investment sponsors have made in being at the venue and part of everything going on.

A Charlotte, North Carolina company called FanConnect is very specifically in the business of providing and supporting a platform and services that drive the game-day show, and the information on most or all of the flat screens around a stadium or arena.

FanConnect does in-venue TV programming that enhances live game broadcast feeds with things like real-time stats and sponsor messaging, and it also does IPTV for the suites and loge areas, as well as digital signage around the concourses and at concessions.

That last component is something most or all venues want and need, but the digital signage capabilities also track back to the roots of the company. I had a chat with Brett Crossley, FanConnect's VP of Product.

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TRANSCRIPT

Brett, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what FanConnect does?

Brett Crossley: So what we do is we work with the corporate partnership teams in sports venues, so in college and professional sports and we work with the partnership marketing, the sponsorship team if you think about it that way to put something on the TV screens. I'm talking about our primary product, so our biggest product is FanConnect TV. We make other things, but that's probably the biggest thing we have. It's also our biggest footprint, and what that does is it makes a private TV network for use in the venue that plays on all of the TVs that are in the venue that would've been showing just the live game feed. This feed was being produced for probably the video board in most cases. We turn that into something that fans are gonna want to look at because it's good looking and that fully integrates what the sponsors and what the corporate partners need into that experience.

So that's the main product that we supply, and then I'd say that all the related products are similar, right? They're all designed to operate inside of a large sports venue, inside of a stadium or an arena, and they work with TVs or video technology of some kind inside of that venue.

Do you get any pushback at all from venues saying why wouldn't I just use the broadcast feed that's already coming in that I've already been using on the TVs?

Brett Crossley:  No, I don't think we don't face that pushback, and the main reason is if you think about our primary customer is a corporate partnership team. On the college side, that would be somebody that's a Rights holder, like a Leader field, a Playfly, a JMI, typically that's who that is. On the professional side, it's a group that's titled something like Corporate Partnerships for the Chicago White Sox, and prior to us getting there, they either didn't have any way to include their corporate partners in the TVs or what they had just wasn't working for what they wanted to do.

And so yeah, I don't think we faced any pushback there from people saying why not just use the existing feed? I think the other part of it is too tough, in our opinion, when we are done, it looks a lot better and it provides a better fan experience than before we got there. And I know we're on a podcast so you can't see this, but if people go to our website or if they look us up on LinkedIn. we're FanConnect.TV so that's our domain name. But if they look at what we do, it's designed to mirror a lot of what you would see with a professionally produced broadcast. So imagine somebody's in a truck and they're using tools from Ross and Grass Valley, et cetera, and they're building something to make it look broadcast quality, we're doing something similar. We just do it in software and without having people do it in real-time. 

I assume one of the drivers here for the corporate sponsor people is they're looking for as many ways as possible to give their corporate sponsors some love and avoid any minefields of a TV broadcast, if, let's say, I don't know, Chrysler is the sponsor at a stadium or a sponsor at the venue, they don't want a Ford ad on TV or a Toyota. 

Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what they're trying to do is they want to create something that works for a partner, and I will say, because we probably lead the world in this and I know that sounds like blowing our own horn here, but as far as companies that are really invested in understanding how corporate partnerships work and the needs of the teams that work with them, I think we probably do more of that than anybody. 

I'm not talking about just the pure technology people doing an L bar, creating something that kinda adds to the video. But the other part of what we do is education about the best use of that technology to actually do what it's supposed to do, and so oftentimes prior to us getting there, if they did have something like, think just like an L bar, going back to Cisco Stadium Vision days. If they had something, there wasn't a lot of thought put into it, and in most cases, the experience wasn't great. It really looked like what it was, which is you just shrunk the amount of video space available to show the game and you put an ad wrap around it, and you're showing kinda nothing but a wall of ads, and if you see what our product looks like, if you saw it in the NFL, you're gonna see passing statistics and rushing statistics, and we're gonna interleave in photos from the team's official Twitter feed when those are appropriate, and just pulling in a lot of stats and engaging content and then embedding that with the sponsor assets in a way that looks really natural and not like we just put a wall of ads up there. 

I've certainly heard through the years of very large technology companies like Cisco buying their way into these sorts of venues, and in order to do that, you have to use their technology. Are we past that where the venues realize, yeah, that was great, we got that for free, or very little money, but it didn't actually work for us?

Brett Crossley: Yeah, it's a good question. I'd say that is still something that is evolving. So if you look at the landscape today, certainly you've got teams that have invested in one IPTV system or another, right? So Cisco was one of the first of those. There are plenty of other technologies that do that, and that's something that we make as full IPTV as well. But if you look at the people that do it, I think that in most cases they certainly would show in their marketing something that looks like an L bar and they're all going to say words on their website like make more money from sponsors. But in terms of actually doing that, it's an exercise left to the reader, and so you see teams that have had some of those newer technologies and have had them for years, and we know because we talk to everybody that we work with and people that we don't, you'll see people that have had it for multiple years that have not gotten that to where it does something close to what we do, not even just a basic version of it.

So the content's hard. I think you probably know that as well as anybody, right? In the digital signage industry, content's also hard. But it's especially hard on the side where we play because you have a lot of things that you have to do well to make it look like what we're trying to make it look like. We want the scoreboard embedded in the same way it would be on the broadcast TV feed. We want the live clock that's coming, it's the same thing that's tied to the scoreboard controller that's in the stadium. We want to be able to show out-of-town scores. We want to highlight when something significant has happened in those out-of-town scores that lead to changes. We want to show sort of detailed stats, like in major league baseball, hit and pitch data, and so tying all of those things together and making it work well is not something that's easy, and so I would say that currently the positioning by. Most of the vendors that make something like IPTV is yeah, you can just use our stuff and go build something to your liking. In reality, we certainly work in a number of places where the vendor that is there would much rather that experience be them than be something created by us. 

I'm curious about how deep you have to stitch your way into the operations of the venue and of the sports franchise, whether it's football, baseball, hockey, or whatever the case, you have to work with the scoreboard systems, like the statistical analysis systems, the people are doing things like reading how fast that fastball came in and all that sort of stuff. Is that a lot easier to do now than it was even five years ago? 

Brett Crossley: I would say that parts of it are easier, but there are new technologies that come out and then essentially new APIs that you're having to deal with on the regular. It was much harder for us when we first started. So we started doing this way back in like, 2010, and I can share this now because it's just been so long, and it doesn't matter, but we really bluffed our way into it, and at the beginning, it was like, yeah we want to make something work here, can you work with our scoreboard controller? Yeah, sure. What is that? What brand? 

And it was difficult, right? I think that when you think about the vendors that are in sports venues, a lot of them do not want to play well with others, right? Think about the people that made the scoreboard controller, and the people that made the stats, and I feel like there's another barrier to entry there, which is that the professional sports side, all have pretty tightly codified APIs that distribute all of their data. But if you haven't already got a team that's your customer, you won't get access to that data, and so it's not if you came up with a product idea, you can just build it, and they will come. You have to have something in the door to be invited to use the data. I think for us, it certainly got easier over time because as we saw one of every type of scoreboard controller, we would just chalk that up and write it down. We're like, oh, okay, they've got Dactronics, they have an OES, or whatever the thing was, and then we would figure out how to work with it. You can imagine some APIs represent abstraction for that so that t no matter which one of the controllers we're working with or which stats API, we can kind of create something more unified and easier to manage.

Sports entertainment venues are turning into experiential venues in many ways. Are you now having to also work with almost like show control systems? 

Brett Crossley: So that's interesting. We do, in some cases, work with control systems, but interestingly enough, more of that is done during a live sports game for example, if you think about working with the production crew, they might have a Ross tool that is designed to trigger things on the video board, on the ribbon boards, et cetera and we can make it to work on the TVs that we operate on are one more thing that can be tied into those control systems and so imagine, somebody's just hit the third home run of the game, and so they want to put a special message up, they can send that message, and it'll activate all of the things at once. It's kind of a TV takeover, video board, and ribbon board. So that's where we see that.

On the sort of mixed-use venue side, I think that the requirements in general on the TVs are a little, and when I talk about the TVs, the bulk of the TVs, I'm not breaking it down to the very specific ones that are doing a job that looks much more like digital signage, right? Like concessions, menu boards, and sort of those things. But if you think about it, the bulk of the TVs that would've had the game on in that venue during a concert is probably still showing the concert feed. They might be doing a simple wrap, and the wrap is just giving some day-of-event information instead. So it's a little bit simpler just because nobody has a big vested interest in doing something special for a one-off like a concert. 

You mentioned digital signage. You also have that as part of your kind of product suite, right?

Brett Crossley: Yeah, sure. We originally were a digital signage company, so if you went way back when we started doing what we did originally in college sports and then eventually in professional sports as well, FanConnect was a wholly owned subsidiary of 10 Foot Wave, which was a digital signage company and was split off in 2018 as part of the acquisition of 10 Foot Wave by Spectrio and so our roots were in that space, to begin with anyway. It's natural that as we split off and just focus on sports venues we wanted to be able to handle all of the small screens, you can think about them that way that are inside of a stadium, and so that includes the TVs that are showing the game, TVs that do the equivalent digital signage which is just informational, et cetera, as well as the concession, menu board, those types of things, and then the other kind of interesting one is like what we do at Ohio State, which is we make a tablet that's used in the lodge area. And so it's purpose-built, it does, IPTV, so it does videos so you can watch them out of town game or whatever that you're interested in. But it also has a bunch of functionality used by the kind of premium seat holders at Ohio State. So if they need to call an attendant, if they're trying to figure out the pricing of the mixed drinks or whatever, they can look that up what to do and all of that, look at rosters and team data, et cetera, on that purpose-built tablet. 

So there's one at every seat?

Brett Crossley: There's one at every table, is the way that it works. So if you think about a lodge area, it’s a hybrid, right? So it's assigned seats in grouped sections as opposed to just you're in these five seats, so you've got a shared table for every three people or something like that.

So there'd be a lot of client entertainment happening?

Brett Crossley: Yeah, there's a lot of entertainment, and then those people paid a lot of money for those seats wherever they are. I mean sports venues are expensive, and so just trying to create a premium offering for those people is something that a lot of teams are working on.

Is there a lot of pressure to do more and more from one company in a sports and entertainment venue? 

I talk a lot about the importance of a company being known as the guys who do this kind of work, and I wonder if you were just going into sports and entertainment venues, purely doing the concession digital signage, are you pressured also to be doing IPTV in the suites and elsewhere on the concourses and all that sort of thing? Or are the venues pretty much okay with you doing this piece of it, we'll have these other five companies do these other things? 

Brett Crossley: I think that really like every industry that matures, the buyers in this case, the technology side of the stadium, they would rather have a smaller number of vendors to deal with than a larger number, and so as a practical concern, I think you're right, which is the way we think about it, we need to be able to do all of the things you would want to be able to do on anything that looks like a TV inside of a venue. That's part of what we have to be able to offer because, again, you are correct that people would rather have a single vendor, a single interface, et cetera, to deal with. 

One place where I think that does break down a little differently is the content side because that’s just so complex on its own, and so we certainly have people that are leveraging us for the experience on the screens and all of that, who already have another vendor in as the IPTV solution who may have somebody different for menu boards, et cetera. And the one thing that they truly can't get anywhere else would be something similar to what we do with the content that's created on TV. 

So you might have an IPTV service of some kind, and they're quite good at video networking, but they don't know much about the presentation side of it?

Brett Crossley: To be fair, I'm not going to say that they can't make something that's pretty, I think that you'll see, and I think it's been true of digital signage forever, which people will show you really pretty screens and, use that, whatever's on that screen as a substitute for, here's what you're going to have to do to get that to work. And the example I always give is, you look up at a concession stand or a digital menu board, and you can't really tell what you're looking at, is it just a static image? Is it an image over just an animation background? Or is it truly being rendered dynamically tied back to a point of sale? It's hard to tell. 

So I think that at least on the content side, it becomes something where you would rather have something that works than be given a toolkit, especially when it comes time to actually build anything that's as close to as complex as what we do. You could build it, but you'd be spending a long time. It took us a long time to build what we have, right? And so if you just sat somebody down and you gave them a pile of tools, building that is going to take a lot of effort, and you're gonna have to hire people to do it and it's not like you get to build it once, you have to continue maintaining it and working on it, changing it out and adding to it over time. I think it's just difficult. 

What's the business arrangement that you would have with a typical venue? Where do you start and stop? 

Brett Crossley: Yeah, so our contractual arrangement most of the time is with, like I said, the corporate partnership side, right? If you think about whoever is in charge of making money from corporate partners or sponsors, that's usually who our contractual arrangement is with, and then a side part of that and really it happens in every deal that we're in and every stadium that we're in prior to the deal being signed, they bring in technology and those guys grill us and ask us, how are you gonna work with our system, and how do you do this? And we pull up diagrams because we've seen a lot of that before. And we're like, yeah, this is what we would do to work with you guys. 

Once that's all done, we are working closely with the technical team to just make sure that everything is still operational. But then our business arrangements are with the corporate partnership side and we are paid kind of the way you think about it, just like anybody else, right? We get paid for things we build and put on the screen, and we don't have weird arrangements, I don’t know if you remember those guys like Arena Media Network, et cetera. There were multiple companies that would try to do that. We'll give it to you for free and we will keep some percentage of the inventory. In some cases, it was more like, we'll give it to you for free, we'll pay you to take it, and we'll keep part of the inventory. 

We don't do anything weird like that. We're more of a direct business relationship with whoever is the equivalent of the rights holder and then they are the ones that are bringing the corporate partners. 

Yeah. The whole build it, and they will come to things where we're putting screens in the washrooms and everywhere else, hoping that they could sell media time around it, there's been a legacy of failure there.

Brett Crossley: Yeah, and you still see it, and not to pick on people, right? But the classic one for me was the urinal TV, where you mount these TVs, individual screens up, I like to think that what we do is the opposite of that. What we want to do is to make something that we're a corporate partner, and when they see it on the screen, they are like, wow, that looks great. 

We're active on LinkedIn, and my favorite thing is when somebody that works for the sponsor takes a picture of the TV screen, and they are on it, and it's the game-winner. You've just won the big game, and then their stuff's up, and they take that picture, and they throw that out on their LinkedIn. They like what they see there and the company they're keeping. As I said, if you just look at our product, it really does look good. In addition to kinda all the things that make fans want to be on it and the technology side, and I'm not saying that we wouldn't build something to work in urinals if a team wanted us to build that, but we certainly wouldn't go out of our way to do it without somebody really asking for it.

Yeah. If somebody's in trouble, they become the field maintenance guy for that. Do you do the deployment, hardware sourcing, or anything, or are you strictly on the software and automation? 

Brett Crossley: We work on the hardware side as much as we need to, or as little as we have to.

We're not in the business of making players. We're not like a Brightsign. We try to remain pretty hardware neutral. We have preferences, of course, I think anybody who's been in this industry does. But if you think about the FanConnect TV product itself, it's a hybrid cloud solution, right? So there is a server installed on the premises. A lot of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud. The server is responsible for compositing, pulling everything together, and building out what is going to really be a show and that's how that's going to work. 

The rest of the hardware for FanConnect TV would be the video distribution system, so we work with whatever is there. In many cases, we were replacing, let's say, you had your stadium, you had Channel 10.2 digital, or if you're using IPTV, it's an IP stream, and you've got kind of a symbol for it. We're often just replacing that. That's the first thing that we are doing at most places. Now there are places where we're doing more sophisticated things, where you can imagine, if you're in the suites at American Airline Center, every channel, no matter which channels you are tuned into, would still be wrapped in kind of an L bar wrap so that's an example of something that's different and does require a device behind every TV. But in most cases, pretty straightforward, we're tied into the existing distribution system, pushing that out, and as I said, we try to remain relatively hardware neutral. Our server is, of course, just one U rack-mounted server that's hardened and does what it's supposed to do. But we can work with various kinds of player technologies regarding digital signage, our IPTV solutions, the things we do in suites, et cetera. 

Yeah, I would imagine you're seeing a lot of smart displays in suites now.

Brett Crossley: It's starting to happen. It's expensive to replace everything in a stadium, and you’d think replacing TVs would be something that would be something done more actively than it is. Still, right now, I think what are people wait until there's either a big renovation or they're just going to build another stadium, and so they're waiting on one of those two things to go in and do the big upgrade on the TVs. But yeah, smart TVs, things with a system-on-a-chip capability are certainly starting to move out there, and I’m starting to run into them. And venues would like you to use them if you can, right? They would rather just have a smaller number of things to break and manage. If you can avoid putting a box behind every TV, then that would be better.

Does it make any business difference to you guys in terms of whether you're working with Major League Baseball, which is gonna have 80+ home games a year, versus football that might have six or seven home games? 

I just wonder about some of these massive venues that really don't get used very often. Are they more reticent to invest in technology? 

Brett Crossley: I don't think that's the case. I think that what you'll find is, if you take an NFL stadium or a big college stadium, right? That would get you closer to your six or seven games. The fact that there are so few games means that the games that you have are extremely important and really in their minds, they want to make sure that nothing is going to go wrong. Whoever's in charge of the technology side, just wants to make sure that it's going to work. That's their number one concern. 

The corporate partnership people, again they care the way that I put it, and this is true of really anything in sponsorship, not just us, but if you're a baseball team, if something goes wrong and you don't do the activation for that corporate partner that you were supposed to do, you have a lot of other games to make that up to them and comp them. If something goes wrong at a football game and you mess up what you've committed to a corporate partner, then you're in a different position because that game represented a significant percentage of what you were trying to do for them for the season. 

I don't think we've ever faced any pushback because of the number of games. It's more on the technology side. They just want to make sure that it's rock solid, and we've been doing this long enough, we can point to that, and we can go, we've done so many games, we can't get an accurate count of them. We've tried, but it's thousands upon thousands of live games that we've produced at this point and so I think it's really a trust issue probably more than anything else. 

Is it a challenge for something like an arena that may have an NHL team, an NBA team, a WNBA team, and they all have different sponsors, and they may change from night to night? 

Brett Crossley: So we do support those. If you think about a complex example of that, it would be Capital One Arena in DC, where we were working with the Washington Wizards, The capitals and also Georgetown is in that same venue, and so you've got, NBA, NHL, NCAA, and then concerts, things like that, and the way that we operate the way we operate FanConnect TV is a little different from the rest of the digital signage. So today, we operate that as a managed service for them, and so they tell us what they are trying to do, what they want to do, and then we just help fulfill it and actually make it all work on the screens.

The needs for the different sponsors are really a byproduct of who is running corporate partnership at the venue and for the teams as far as if they need something different. So we do something similar at Acrisure Stadium, right? We work with the Pit Panthers and Pittsburgh Steelers, and there are two totally different corporate partnership teams. In some cases, it is the same team, whatever way they want us to work, we will work with that. 

Tell me about the company. You're privately held?

Brett Crossley: We are privately held. We're not VC-backed. We have investors, and then many of us that are there are also investors, and we were as close to profitable as we want to be, right? And so if we're not profitable at any particular time, it's because we are intentionally spending more money. It's not because we have not yet achieved some measure of success. 

Has all the weirdness of the last three years affected your industry or your business at all? I mean obviously, when nobody was going to games, that was a bit of a challenge, but it’s back.

Brett Crossley: Absolutely. Looking back on it, it was very difficult. I think when Covid hit, a bunch of people we worked with just shrugged to put their hands up and it was not good. One thing that was nice about that was we'd been working on kind of a full ground-up replacement of our core technology, and we went ahead and did that, and now we've seen that through to where we finalized that, right? So it's the third generation of this technology.

And we had the luxury of being able just to take our time, building it from scratch, knowing everything that we'd learned over this time, and so in some ways, I'd say that maybe was a little bit of a blessing, although it didn't seem like it at the time, watching the P&L statements for that time. But yeah, I'd say it was crazy for everybody. 

Yeah, I've heard that story a few times. It's interesting when they say we didn't plan on this, but suddenly we have time to tear up the platform and start over, or do v3.

Brett Crossley: That work had already been started, right? And technology moves forward, right? And then we'd been looking at a number of things that we wanted to be able to do better in a kind of fully integrated way, and so the timing was good. We'd already started working on that effort. It's a lot of work, right? Replatforming is a significant amount of work. 

What it allowed us to do, though, was to take our time and get everything right. There was no rush to try to get something in because the season was getting ready to start. So I'd say we've found some benefit. The one side note, though is things are bigger than they were pre-Covid in terms of what we do in live sports, in terms of attendance, in terms of the interest that we're getting, in terms of the way people view what they want to do inside of a stadium. I'd say that things are better now than they were pre-Covid.

I live in Canada, and I don't live anywhere near Toronto, but the Blue Jays just had their opener, and they did a huge refresh of a lot of the technology in that building, and one of the drivers said they have to up the game day experience. That's what people expect if they're going to be spending $14 on a beer and $80 on a ticket, that sort of thing. 

Brett Crossley: Yeah, that's right, and it's not wrong when people say that sports venues are not competing with other sports venues. They're competing with the big-screen TV that's in your house, right? So putting something in front of the fans that is very impressive is really important, and we fit in well with that. During the off-season, when I say off-season, I'm really thinking of kinda the fall sports off-season, because we are running some games throughout the entire year, but when we had a chance, we went back and did a redesign of sort of the core of FanConnect TV, and we worked with graphic designers that have done work with Fox Sports, FX1, et cetera, to come up with something that was really polished and professional and look broadcast quality, because, that's what people wanna see, right? Especially when we come in, and we're like, we've got something that's better for your TVs, and they're like, okay, prove that, and that's what we ended up with. 

I think one thing that's neat about our design is unlike an ESPN or somebody like that who has to essentially be neutral, right? Our broadcast is definitely themed for the home team, right? If you saw this at the University of Georgia, it is nice, and it's red and black, and it is bulldog television, and if you saw the same thing at the Chicago White Sox, it definitely looks like the White Sox, right? It's not trying to be neutral. 

All right, Brett, thank you very much for spending the time with me.

Brett Crossley: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate it.

Marius van Bergen, COBstr

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

Technology tends to improve as it matures. That's certainly the case with LED displays marketed as being transparent. The first generations looked okay from the front, but the back sides were big metal grid arrays that often looked like hell.

That's improved a lot with newer generations, but the technology now has competition in the form of displays that are embedded in foil or film.

I was intrigued by some online posts recently from a Dutch company called COBstr, which is the sales and marketing front end of a Chinese manufacturer focused on displays that use Chip On Board technology. That's the COB part of the name.

COBstr markets super-skinny displays that use the transparent material as the surface, either adhering to window glass, or laminated the material inside the glass.  The product has a foil layer the peels off and allows the display to be stuck to glass and then if needed, pulled off, rolled up and reused.

I had a good chat with Marius van Bergen, the company's founder about the roots of the product, his Chinese manufacturing partner and the distinctions and benefits of COB versus other LED technologies.

TRANSCRIPT

Marius, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what COBstr is all about?

Marius van Bergen: Hello, Dave. Thank you for having me. COBstr, COB stands for chip-on-board. Now, chip-on-board technology has been around for a long time in the lighting industry. But my business partner is in China and was the first one who has been doing this for LED displays. So she's the one who's filed patents, and she made some mistakes, but she’s a woman that I have a lot of respect for because it's tough in China to make it as a company without help from the state and when you have to fight the big dogs. But she's very impressive regarding technology, which is not my core business.

I'm just a person who studied Chinese and who knows China a little bit. But we hooked up about 10 years ago, and we've been going to the ISE and trying to get a little bit more renowned, and the thing with COBstr is not very easy to do. The big dogs are Absen, Leyard, and LEDman, they're all trying, and we do a lot of R&D for some of the big boys because they don't really master the technology. But it is the only way, that's the way I interpret it anyway, it's the only way forward for the LED industry.

It doesn't matter if you look at it from a sustainability point of view or if you look at it from an economic point of view, there's just no way around it because you skip an entire step in the production process because you don't have packages, which makes it a cheaper technology theoretically, I have to add theoretically, because if you are a big company and you can buy LED packages in bulk, then, of course, you have some price advantages. 

So what's basically happening is with a chip on board, you're able to apply a lot more LED light emitters to a surface without having to do the packaging, and you're skipping an entire step and also speeding up the process. Is that an accurate way of describing it?

Marius van Bergen: Yes, it is, and the package manufacturers, which are also usually very big operations, don't like us very much because if we don't need a package, we don't need their product. The big advantage and that's basically what our R&D has all been about, is that you reduce the number of components and the vulnerabilities within a display.

So is your company kind of the sales front end for a Chinese LED manufacturer, or is it a partnership where you're co-developing something, and it's coming out of the Netherlands? 

Marius van Bergen: Manufacturing is in China, so it's a business partnership where they concentrate on the Chinese markets where I'm a little bit involved as well because that's a different story, maybe I shouldn't get into that, but I basically start with marketing and business development in Europe. That's my main responsibility. 

I got interested in this because I saw something on LinkedIn talking about LED and COB-LED on foil, and I thought, okay, this is interesting. There's a company in Germany, probably a couple of hours from you that has a foil-based product that is lower resolution, super lightweight, and so I saw this and thought, oh, are you reselling that or is this something different? 

Marius van Bergen: We're not reselling that. This is our own product. It's a new product.

We had our first sample back in 2019. I guess that's when COVID broke out, at ISE, we showed it. It was a prototype that we lit, but we didn't display any images on it. But we took advantage of COVID to really bear down on the R&D, and we have now a finished product that's finished and ready for mass production, and so it's hot off the press really because we introduced it at the Signs and LED Display exhibition in Shenzhen last week and we saw a couple of other players who were also getting into this area. I guess there were about five companies also doing LED foil, but from our point of view, a very different level. Because their foil was SMD based, and also no flip chip because they don't have the equipment, and without going into the technical details they have about 2000 nits brightness, and we had 7000 at the exhibition, and we could do much more. But at the exhibition, actually, we are very proud of the product, there were people with a luminescence meter who were measuring the brightness, and they said, oh, 7000 knits. That's pretty nice. 

When you say foil, I've looked on the website, and when I think of foil, I think of shiny metallic material, but is it that or is it more of a film?

Marius van Bergen: Film would be maybe a more accurate word because it's transparent. We can make it non-transparent also. But yeah, it is transparent, and that's one of the markets that we are looking at, obviously, because you can use it as a window display for the retail industry.

How would you apply it to a window, would it be adhered or is it just hanging? 

Marius van Bergen: We are looking at hanging also, but the original idea was adherence. It has a protective foil, and when you take off the foil, it adheres so it sticks to the glass, and we have great viewing angles. It looks pretty damn nice, if I may say so. 

But the problem that we've encountered it now because we sold some to a store in New York, but as it turns out, there are regulations that you're not allowed to stick a foil like that to the window. So I think they have a regulation that it needs to be eight inches from the window. They don't have this regulation in China, and I'm sure it's not like that everywhere, those are some of the challenges you run against when you're working the market. 

Why do they have that regulation? 

Marius van Bergen:  I have no idea, but I'm sure we'll find out. 

So if it is adhered to window glass or partition glass or something like that. I understand is that the transparency is gonna depend on the pixel pitch and the amount of LED in there, but what kind of transparency can you realise?

Marius van Bergen: I have to admit, I don't know how they measure it, but we actually have two products. We have one with LED strips that are still visible and there's the more transparent product and the product without the strips, we claim, again, I don't know how we measure it, but 89% transparency, which is not bad.

Can this work out outdoors, or is it a pure indoor product? 

Marius van Bergen: We sell it as a semi-outdoor or indoor product, but we can make it outdoors as well. It just takes more protective measures. So it's a little bit more expensive if we make it for outdoor applications.

So by semi, you mean it would be in like a sidewalk window or something like that, it’s  protected, but it's intended for outdoor viewing. 

Marius van Bergen: Yes, exactly, or public spaces. 

What are the other benefits to it? Are there weight benefits or when you're pitching this, what are you saying are the key reasons you wanna take a look at this?

Marius van Bergen: As you said yourself, it's very light so instead of carrying these LED cabinets, which weigh a lot, you can just walk around and just hang them in front of a window or have them on a roll and let them hang down. They're very thin. We're between one and one and a half millimeters, so it's extremely thin. It has no frame, which is another big advantage. 

When you have a LED mesh, you have this frame that you have to install in front of a window. So all of that we do not have to do, and another advantage, again, that's what I mentioned before, is the sustainability component because sooner or later, everybody will have to switch to COB at least, that's the way I look at it because it's just too polluting to have this packaging industry go on, and it's a race to the bottom really because it's all about mini LED and micro LED and getting as small as you can, but it's still based on packages, and the package is just not necessary. It's less complicated, but it's not necessary. 

So would you see a day when you would use micro LED as the light emitters, or COB is the way forward? 

Marius van Bergen: We believe very strongly that COB is the way forward, but you can theoretically again because we don't have the purchasing power, but theoretically, you can do micro with a COB technology without a package. It's something called perpendicular stacking, which maybe doesn't mean a lot to people who are not into the technology, but it boils down to you the fact that you are able to go to a very fine pitch with COB, so without a package. So it's definitely possible to get into that area. 

But I don't see micro LED getting very mature within, I don't know, five years or anything. It's just too expensive right now. 

What would you be paying roughly at, whether it's in EU or USD, for a square foot of this material to put in something like a window?

Marius van Bergen: I don't feel comfortable talking about pricing right now. We're talking to prospects, and we're having the discussions, but we will be selling it by a square meter, and it's not a cheap technology, let me put it that way. And the reason is that each LED chip also has its own IC driver so there is a cost attached to reaching that kind of brightness that we have. 

But by having each IC driver like that, each light is addressable so you can control it, fine-tune it, and do whatever you need.

Marius van Bergen: Yes, exactly.

Are there physical limitations or dimensions to how you do this? Are they rolls? Are they are two meters wide or something like that? So if you want something that's fitting a six-meter area, you'd need three rolls side by side?

Marius van Bergen: Yes. We could make them in length that is pretty undefined.

We can make rolls for 20 meters, and we can connect them and go even longer, but the width for now, and that has to do with the equipment we have, is 32 centimeters, if I'm not mistaken. So you put the roll next to each other, and then you can build up a bigger one, and you can just cut it like, like you have LED strips at the at your local DIY store. You can cut the foil actually and make it fit for purpose, which is another really nice property of this LED foil or film if you want because you can make all kinds of shapes with it, and that makes it a very suitable product for creative projects. 

Are you restricted to rectangles as the shapes or squares, or could you do something round?

Marius van Bergen: You can do anything. You think of it, and you can basically do it because it's so flexible. 

So you could conceivably cut a big round disc and put it on window glass, except in New York, and connect it through some sort of like super thin filament wiring or whatever?

Marius van Bergen: Yes. It's not as if there are no limits, obviously, because you shouldn't cut the circuits that are crucial to the system. But basically, yes, you can do a lot of things in all kinds of shapes and forms. 

What are the challenges you face in selling this?

I would imagine a key challenge is that people don’t understand that you can even do this, and also that perhaps what they've seen in terms of transparent film at trade shows, if they're pro AV people, is what companies like LG have, which are LED on film, but pretty coarse, so to speak, pixel pitch that you'd look at and go that's cool, but I'm not sure what I could actually do with that.

Marius van Bergen: Yeah, and LG is one of these companies that, as far as I can understand it, they haven't managed to really market this thing maybe because of price, I don't know. They have a brightness of only 2000 nits, I think, and it's pretty coarse, as you said. We have a P10, a P8, and a P 6.67 now that we are selling in China. We're selling the first samples, I should say. But we can go down to 2.5, and we could probably go down even further but then, where's your transparency? Because that's what we are looking at, and when you're asking me about applications or potential clients, I'll give you an example.

We're talking to a very nice Dutch company, it's called HoloConnect, and they make these holograms, and there are only three companies doing that. There's one in the United States, and there's one in Canada, if I'm not mistaken, and there's one in the Netherlands, and it's a very nice product, and they're thinking, if we use that film maybe we can do more than just show the hologram. You can actually show an NFT with a metaverse world or something like this. It's wherever your imagination takes you. But you can add this digital layer to the hologram to the box, which would be a very nice application.

I've been paying attention to “transparent displays” for years, and when I see the mesh-based LEDs, I've thought those are getting better, they look really good from the front now, but when I go in behind them, they've improved, but they still look like a mesh or a grill and when I've seen most of the transparent LED on film products, they look really nice from the front, and when I look at them from the rear, the non-business end, it's reminiscent of the old printer ribbon cables, that sort of thing, where you see this plastic kind of long, horizontal or vertical stripes.

What does your product look like from the nonilluminated side? 

Marius van Bergen: The very honest answer, I have no idea. I'll explain why, because we've been focusing on introducing this product last week at the fair, that's the reason why I haven't got a sample yet. So we've been producing for the fair and our first distributors. We're building a distributor network is in China because, like I said, the factory's in China, and that's where our focus is for now. 

T=hey promised me that I'd get my first sample this week so they'll send it my way this week and then I'll tell you what it looks like from the back, or I'll put it on the website so that you can see it. But I've seen videos, obviously, and it's not intrusive. It's not disturbing or painful for the eyes. It's very soothing because it's transparent, and the natural sunlight still comes into space. 

Does all the light that is generated go out, or does some of it lead back into the rear view? 

Marius van Bergen: From what I can tell from videos and pictures, it doesn't lead back into the room or the space. 

What do you see as the market for this? 

Marius van Bergen: It's pretty broad. We said retail industry, public spaces, the entertainment exhibition industry. The Christmas market is actually an interesting one because we have Christmas trees now with LED strips for the festivals, but you can do more than that if you have a transparent ribbon, that way you can show your Christmas bars or snowflakes or stuff like this, and the creative projects 

Is this sort of thing that can be used on a temporary basis or if you adhere this to window glass, it's on that window glass and if you're getting it off, you're pulling it off and you're done with the thing, you can't apply it to another sheet of glass?

Marius van Bergen: You can apply again. It's like a sticker but it's not like you take off the sticker and you're done with it. It's reusable. But again, one of the big advantages is it's light and it's very thin, so you can transport it back and forth. You can actually also make fixed installations, of course, and use it like a curtain maybe, or something that you pull up when you don't need it and you let down when you do need it. 

So could this be a rental unit? 

Marius van Bergen: Absolutely. 

When you say you could transport it, could it actually be rolled up or do you put it on some sort of flat pieces of cardboard or whatever on both sides to protect it?

Marius van Bergen: It has a protective foil that you remove when you use the film but it's rolled up. You can't fold it because when you go, you are 90 degrees, then you have a circuit problem. 

So the transport costs of this versus traditional LED cabinets would, in theory, be substantially lower.

Marius van Bergen: Substantially lower, and there's almost no installation once you have your content, and you have your setup, but you don't have all these cabinets to build up, which are heavy, clumsy, and not very practical. And now you just have a roll, you roll it up. 

So the entertainment industry is also something that we think has potential for this product, especially with the brightness that we can achieve. 

When you're talking to potential customers and partners in Europe, what are they interested in? Is it the transparency, the lightness, or the ability to put in windows? 

Marius van Bergen: All of the above. The challenge, I think, is going to be to determine the right price for this product because, as I said, not the cheapest technology. It's COB, it has its own IC driver per LED chip, but y I think, for something like this, which people like to use the word disruptive, but, if you look at it and you have a bit of a vision, you can see this thing going into the consumer market even.

I'm biased, obviously, and price-wise, it wouldn't be something that you can consider at this point, but we have our mass transfer system, so we can go down with prices pretty quickly once it gets traction in the market. 

Are your plans to sell primarily in the EU or are you looking at North America and other markets as well? 

Marius van Bergen: Yes, global. We're looking everywhere.

The main focus right now is China. But Europe, the United States, Canada, you name it. We have a lot of countries that we look at. So we'll see where the market takes us. 

And are you selling direct, or are you developing country-by-country partnerships or reseller partners?

Marius van Bergen: We haven't ruled anything out, and in China, we'll be using distributors—just channel partners. 

You mentioned that there are some other companies that have products as well that don't have the same level of brightness and so on. Do you consider those competitors, or are they going after a different part of the market?

Marius van Bergen: Personally, I don't see them as competitors, but again, I'm biased because I have a very strong belief in the woman who's the brains behind this technology, and that's because I've been with her to ISE for a couple of years, and I know that all big players that everybody knows, they know this very small company, they know there's so much knowledge there but they're a bit afraid of letting us get on the radar. But I think it's going to happen, it's just a way forward. 

As I explained, there's no way around COB. With everything going on in the world, whether you are a climate activist or climate denier sustainability, it's just from an economic point of view. You don't buy a package. You have a cheaper product and a better product at that. So I really believe that we have technology that has a bright future. 

When you talk about the “green signage” aspect of this, are the benefits around energy savings, or is it as much about the manufacturing footprint that you don't have the same amount of material that you're required to produce a display?

Marius van Bergen: It's both as well. It's not only the material, as I said, but we also have a strong R&D background, so it's all about reducing the number of components to get better heat dissipation and use less power. 

The company, the Chinese side of this, are they in Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen or somewhere else?

Marius van Bergen: Dongwang, next to Shenzhen. But the woman who started this at beginning of. 2000, she's from Sichuan. I don't know if you know where that is. But she started with this very small company, almost a sweatshop doing traditional modular displays, the top matrixes, and from there, she evolved and got this idea. She was working for a PCB company in Taiwan, and then she got this idea, what's this SMD all about? And then she started thinking about COB, and it's very interesting how she developed, and then she moved to Beijing, then she moved back to Shenzhen, and now we have a factory in Dongwang. It's not a very big factory. It's very clean. It's very nice, and yeah, we're very confident. 

I assume part of her thinking, along with her interest in COB, is just simply that there are so many LED manufacturers in China, particularly addressing the domestic market, that if you're going to be successful, you somehow or others have to come up with some kind of differentiation, right?

Marius van Bergen: Yes, very true, and again, I think maybe it's not the wise thing to say on the podcast, but I think maybe it's changing a little bit, but very much mission-driven. Like we want to educate the LED industry. Why are people making all these packages when it's not necessary?

And so there is a drive on educating the industry and making it clear that COB is the way forward, and actually, COB is only a name but what we have now, we actually call it COB-IP because it's a chip-on-board integrated package. So it's actually a sealed assembly of a LED ship and an IC driver within one pixel.

All right. If people want to know more about this, where can they find you online? 

Marius van Bergen: Online, you can find us at COBstr.com, but you can ask me, and I'll be glad to share all the information. 

All right. Marius, thank you very much for your time.

Marius van Bergen: Dave, thank you very much for having me, it was a pleasure.

Wes Nicol, Videri

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

If you've spent any time in bars and pubs - not me, but I've been told - there have always been signs of walls promoting beverage brands. They were neon, or backlit plastic, and they were there to perhaps be the last thing someone sees before a server asks, "What'll you have?"

Imagine if you could do that instead with digital displays that were changeable and had the kinds of motion graphics or video that drew eyeballs and influenced decisions.

That's what a New York-based company called Videri offers up. Very quietly, guided by a whale client it can't talk about publicly, Videri has almost 100,000 networked displays operating around the globe - driving brand awareness and delivering a consistent 30% sales lift, month to month, on promoted products. That means an ROI on the investment for the brands who put them in that's measured in months, not years.

The big reasons why it works? It's a turnkey solution based on super-thin, super-light custom-manufactured all-in-one flat panels that a beverage brand's field staffers can install and activate in a matter of minutes. If they can hang a picture on a wall, they can put these in.

I had a great chat with Wes Nicol, who came on as CEO about a year ago and is busily bringing Videri out of a somewhat stealthy period, and making some broader marketplace noise.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Wes, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on what Videri is all about? 

Wes Nicol: Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. I am excited to be on the podcast. I've been a longtime listener, first-time interviewee. But yeah, the history of Videri, it's been around for about ten years, in 2013, we started with digital out-of-home, ruggedized products working with Outfront, which was CBS Outdoor at the time, and then subsequent to that, maybe a few years later, developed a series of thinner indoor displays, Videri Canvas that we built hand in hand actually with one of our large customers And then continue to expand that globally. 

We're typically more of a white-label shop. You don't really hear much about vi I think when we talked before you mentioned, “I have never heard of you guys.” That was probably on purpose. We can talk about that later but we have a complete end-to-end solution: we build hardware, CMS & device management software, and I’m happy to get into the details. 

I had heard vaguely of you in the past, I think one of the jobs that Videri was doing, you mentioned Outfront was on the MTA in New York? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly. So anything that you see on the MTA is our product. 

Oh, okay. Now, do you still do that sort of work, or was the move to these thin canvas displays something of a pivot for the company? 

Wes Nicol: We're still doing that. We are still actively deploying right now at the MTA, and there's gonna be a refresh cycle that we're hoping to participate in. But I think strategically we want to become more of a software company and there's a lot of green space in the indoor product. As you know obviously in the industry, there's a lot of opportunity there. So that's kinda where we're focusing most of our efforts right now.

You have been very quiet. I would say almost stealthy, but in the past year, you started to make some noise in the market, right?

Wes Nicol: Yeah I'm new to the company, so I joined about a year ago…

So you're the noisy guy? 

Wes Nicol: Exactly, and I'm Canadian. So typically we're pretty humble folks, but it's funny. We were at the ISE show. I think we saw you there at your event, at the actual show itself, people are saying, “Hey, we've been trying to find you guys like. We've seen this product somewhere, we just didn't know who made it”, and there's nothing written on the actual display that actually says, Videri on it. You have to kinda pull it off the wall, look at some serial numbers and do some Googling to figure it out.

And that's been great because some of our partners love that. They love the fact they got something really special and unique, and we're going to continue to do that kinda white-label approach. But when you see your list of the top display manufacturers in digital signage, we're nowhere near where I think we should be based on deployments, and that's cause we're not really being captured. 

We're in a lot of cinema projects. We're in many of the top beverage brands obviously we're in QSRs, and there are tons of retailers that you probably wouldn't even realize that it has Videri. 

I have this interesting story that I relate of my experience at DSE, going back to November, and being just like dead tired on my feet and some guy from a company called Videri asked if I could come to their hospitality suite at The Aria, and I didn't wanna go. I was just so tired, but it was right next to the hotel where I was staying, so I figured, okay, I'll go and I met him and we went up the elevator and then walked down a hallway that was, I swear, three miles long to the end unit in this hospitality suite and said hello to some people and they brought me over to the product and it was three skinny monitors on a buffet or whatever you wanna call the thing, and I was thinking to myself, really, I did all this to see some skinny desktop monitors and I thought, please god, get me out of here. But then your guy started to explain to me what was going on and I thought, oh, wait a minute. This is actually interesting and how I've since described it to others is it does a bunch of things, you can explain all that. 

But what I said was, if you think about bars and restaurants that you've been in that had a display on a wall for a beer brand or some other beverage brand and that used to be neon and then it became backlit plastic, printed out plastic. Now it's digital, it's skinny, it's changeable, and it can go up in a matter of minutes and be fully managed on a network and affordable and there's an ROI out of it.

 Is that kind of a fair description of what you're up to?

Wes Nicol: Yeah, absolutely. So that was the kind of the need of this large customer, which shall remain nameless, that worked with us, and the idea was like, you've gotta build something that's gonna fit nicely into a bar, a restaurant that's gonna fit in the environment. There are weird wall situations. It's gotta be something that can fit in. Just like you're hanging a picture effectively, and it's gotta be easy to deploy, being like the sales rep that is working with that bar, the restaurant has to be able to be one that actually installs it. You don't need a third-party installer to come in, roll a truck out and do it. 

Cause that's $150 an hour or something, right? 

Wes Nicol: Exactly. Plus there are all the costs, so these people are already going there. They're dropping off the beverages, they're dropping off merchandise, they're talking to their clients. They have to be able to deploy this in 15 minutes, that was the requirement, and so that spurred a whole bunch of things and thinking about how that is being used in that environment. It's not a tv, right? So part of the importance of this is that we're able to build this cause of what it doesn't have, right? So there's no need for a tuner, no need for speakers, no need for HDMI cables. We have media players embedded inside, a SOC running Android, and they're really thin power cables because we're not actually consuming a ton of power, and we need to be able to store a certain amount of content locally that is connected though it can be modified and centrally managed.

And so the way that works for the restaurant or bar owner is they can have customized cocktail lists, they can do menu boards that will benefit them, but the beverage brand in this case can showcase their products and maybe include that in a cocktail or do some branding exercises and that can all be centralized and managed.

This particular brand which shall remain nameless manages, I think over 40,000 locations globally in 80-something countries now with one person managing content with two interns, and they're managing content globally, and part of that is as part of the installation, obviously, the sales rep is able to just screw it into the wall, there are two screws that you pop it on, plug it in and then they use this app to connect to the WiFi and then connect the network, and effectively they walk away, but they can, with the bar owner in this particular example, customize that content, do some stuff, and so the way we've had to create our CMS platform and device management platform, Is to enable hierarchy of permissions and it maps into this particular customer's CRM system. I think you're using SAP so if that rep is no longer part of the company, they lose their permissions to access those displays. But they can only access these 10 locations and they can work and the bar owner says, Hey, I wanna change this content. I wanna manage this or do something different. That rep can manage that. But the global programs, the programmatic marketing, it's all done centrally from the headquarters, and so by building this product, we were able to then see other benefits, right? 

“Oh wow. It's really thin, it looks beautiful, that's an advantage for events”, and so there's been countless sort of offshoots from building this core product. 

And was it a case of the European beverage brand, I know we're dancing around this because you wanna make sure you're not doing something that's going to upset an apple cart, were they already doing screens in these kinds of environments and thinking this is too challenging, we need something different. Can you help? 

Or were you already working with them and they said, this is a start, but we need to work with you to fine-tune something that really suits our needs?

Wes Nicol: This particular brand has always been very innovative. They've always been pushing the envelope in terms of on-premise marketing. When you're consuming products on the premise, you've got, as you mentioned, like kinda the neon signs, those types of things. That's been kinda standard. They are always the first ones, and so they were testing different digital signage options and they were never really getting what they're looking for, and then they said, we kinda gotta build it ourselves, and luckily through the initial relationship the connection was made and we started building this and testing it and they said, ok, we'll run a pilot, and we'll see what it does. They ran it in a number of locations. Over a period of time, they said, this has to be a one-year ROI or less. That was like the requirements of the pilot. 

They significantly busted through that. It was a lot quicker, and they've seen a 30% increase consistently over four years and tens of thousands of displays consistently driving that because when you're in that location, when you're in that bar, you don't go to a bar thinking, Hey, I want a gin and tonic. Yeah. You're going in there I wanna go for a drink with some friends, right? And oh, what are we gonna have? What do you have here? What's on the menu? Oh, that, okay, great. I'll order that, and so it's kinda that power of influencing people subtly in the background. We're not like a big TV that's showing a sports game, right? We're something that's in there as part of the environment that's. So it was built for that purpose, for that kinda subtle influence of that decision at the point of sale and the deployment, in terms of the requirements of the hardware, they weren't happy with buying TVs.

Like when I came to the company a year ago, I said, hey, TVs are a lot cheaper. We should just make TVs, and they're like, absolutely not. We've built this for a reason, and so that really kinda made me understand the product a lot better.

So when you say 30%, that's a 30% lift on sales of that item in that venue?

Wes Nicol: Yes. Consistently,

Wow, month over month. So that would pay for itself in I don't know, six weeks or something, right?

Wes Nicol: It depends on the product and we've seen in other environments, like in a retail store, get a return on investment in two weeks, it's crazy.

And that's the thing I think about this whole industry. I'm coming from a different industry before, but coming into it, realizing like everyone I talk to about my job here at Videri goes wow, never thought of that. We could totally use that in my industry. And people from all different spaces, and I feel that in this market, there's such a green field opportunity. There's been the traditional stuff, QSR that's been done, but there are so many different areas that I see this potentially going into and when you see these kinds of impacts, like if you're at the point of sale and the customer doesn't really know what to get, think cannabis and others, there's a whole bunch of new industries that you just need a bit of guidance, right? I don't know what I'm coming here to buy, but I want something, and just being able to explain to that customer in a digital way. We have the tools now. We didn't have them before, and yeah, it's really exciting. 

I suspect that the kind of turnkey element of it is also very attractive in that if you want to do something in, let's say a bar, you're gonna have to buy a display, buy a media playout device, or maybe there's SOC on it, but you're gonna have to buy them out. There's a whole bunch of parts involved, and then you've gotta identify software that you're gonna work with. Is it compliant? On and on. So it can become complicated and expensive quickly, and the end users just say, you know what? Maybe later, but not right now.

And they're just selling the dream, so to speak, as opposed to you, because you've got this client and some other clients who can actually say 30% consistent lift month on month, it's like holy shit, where do I sign? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly. Even as you were mentioning, I'm thinking about my TV in my apartment here in New York. I hung it up and I screwed it up a million times, right? And it's heavy, and you're trying to hold it up against the wall. These things are super lightweight. We stripped out everything, right? It's just really down to the bare bones, but it does what you're looking for it to do, and so you're absolutely right. The idea is a very simple consumer-like experience in terms of out of the box, installation. We're talking about a simple iOS app and you've gotta connect to the cloud and then you can manage that through the console, and we're just about to launch a whole new refresh of the platform that is like super user-friendly that will make that possible, and I'm not able to announce a big partner that we're launching other than this beverage brand that's gonna make this a lot more accessible to the average SMB taking advantage of those key features. 

Because you worked pretty closely and continued to work pretty closely with us particular beverage brand, did that restrict who else you could work with?

Wes Nicol: They frowned upon us going with their competitors directly. But not necessarily, no. There's no kinda exclusivity there. But they are pushing to build a product specifically for them and they have got some unique features that they put in that we can’t use with others, but those are software features, so no, we're open, we can work with others. 

Does it become a challenge in the venues themselves where they say we've already got these Videri screens for this beverage brand, we're tapped out, we don't have more wall space, or we don't want competing ones here, this is good enough? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, that's the genius of this idea. It probably wasn't even Videri’s idea to go and do this, but it was this beverage brand’s idea like, hey, this is a bit of a land grab, right? There's only so much real estate in these locations, and if we can own that space it's a win-win for the bar, restaurant, and brand but if we can go and get out there, and they have an aggressive plan to expand then they own that space kind of indefinitely since these things last for a while. 

So that's one of the models we're looking at where the brand is being showcased in a third-party location and the brand owns the display and that's unique and I think it's gonna continue to play out in a few different areas. The other one we're looking at, and we're starting to see some real interest in that, is that the actual retailer owns the display and they have a closed network where they are already getting the brands to spend money on merchandising in the stores. Think about a Telco that's launching a new Samsung Galaxy phone that is 23 or 25 or 57, whatever version it's now, and they wanna buy space in that retail location, they can actually use these displays to, number one, pay for themselves immediately, but also be revenue generating for merchandising in that closed network. I'm not talking about connecting to an exchange or anything, I’m talking about a private closed network and we've seen a lot of it. 

It's just endemic advertising. 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think wireless retailers are like the poster child for that. It is perfect because there are always new products and there are always new plans and features and everything else and the compliance issues of having the right posters up at the right time and all that are massive in that kind of environment, and if you could just all do it digitally, that would be great, but historically retailers tend to be very cheap, would be the impolite term for it, they don't want to spend the money on that infrastructure, they'd rather have the brand come in and do that. 

Are you seeing that shifting? 

Wes Nicol: No. Retailers are under a ton of pressure, you know, 80% of the sales that happen in the US are actually in brick-and-mortar. I didn't realize it was that high, so they're under pressure. But I think the idea is that we have to find a way to displace ourselves. So you've gotta figure out an OPEX model, or maybe it's a three-year term or something like that, and then you charge them monthly, but ok, it's gonna cost you X, but you're gonna make 3X back in a month, let's do a trial for free for three months, see what happens, and they say, wow, like this is actually gonna be generating money from your marketing as opposed to, it's not gonna be a cost set, it's actually gonna be positive. It can show the results immediately. 

So part of the issue for us is like we really need to be able to report that and tell that and really ideally getting access to the point of sale information and say, Hey, like when we've displayed this, we put this out there. We've been running these particular promotions, we've been focusing on X sneaker brand, and that sneaker brand increased dramatically and increased margins at this location by X and Y and really making it affordable and that's the whole thing. I think in terms of the adoption of digital signage. You just have to make it easy to deploy, whether it's a partner that does it or it's in-house, if you're able to make that happen, like this beverage brand, and I think others are able to do it, you still can have a partner come in and it's inexpensive for them as well to kinda just deploy and manage. And so it has to be I think on a monthly basis and it has to drive that business return on investment, very quickly. 

If you pay upfront for the hardware, these displays are expensive cause you're buying the hardware, that's when you're in the year ROI but if you're saying, I'm gonna advertise this over three years and it's monthly, and we know that we're seeing the return quickly, usually in month two or three you’ll find that it's actually paying for itself. 

Yeah. I wrote recently just the other day actually about a company that was starting down the path of AV as a service, the very high-end IT services and everything else related to that, and you're starting to hear about deals that kind of roll in all the costs of a digital sign network into just like a subscription, a monthly fee, to do everything, not just the software, the hardware, the whole nine yards.

Is that something that you are doing now or looking at? 

Wes Nicol: Absolutely, and we have partners that have been doing this for a long time. Here in the US, Velocity Managed Services they're one of our partners.

Oh yeah. Out of Dayton or Toledo, or something like that?

Wes Nicol: Yeah, and they provide a monthly all-in package. They've been doing a lot of stuff with cinemas and other brands. I don’t know if I can mention the brands. I'm just going to be really careful. But yeah, so that's already provided by them and they can also do a la carte: Do you want to have content management? Do you wanna have content development? We've got all the different services. They even do the installation as part of the monthly, so instead of paying upfront for installation, you can do it over a period of time. I think that's a good model. I think that you can see more and more of that. 

Yeah, because not every end-user client is going to have field reps bringing flats of drinks or whatever into a venue every three days or whatever it may be. With other ones, you're going to have to have some sort of an install crew, even if the labor costs are relatively low because it's quick.

Wes Nicol: Absolutely, and many companies don't want to deal with that, right? They just say just give me a turnkey solution. I want a partner to manage this for me, I'll pay for it, and that's completely reasonable because the business case justifies it.

You guys provided the screens at my mixer in Barcelona and we had multiple screens with content cascading over multiple screens, shifting back and forth. So there were many matrixes of rectangles and squares and so on. You could do interesting stuff like that. But what we've been talking about mostly till now has been with what sounds like single displays that would go up and replace a backlit display or backlit printed signs that might have been there in the past. Are you doing much in the way of these multiple displays?

Wes Nicol: Yeah, that's a whole other space, right? And this product is fantastic because of it, the name Videri means ‘to be seen’ and it's an interesting play on words in terms of, like, how do you want to be seen? How do you want your brand to be seen if you're at an event, if you're launching a new product, how do you want that to be seen?

You want an elegant, beautiful display, but you also would love to see an array of displays that's unique and different, right? You can do a wall, an LED wall, that's one thing but if you want a unique layout that's like Eye Catching, we built this orchestration software that really enables you to do that automatically. So you can pinch and zoom the entire video, and if you're able to see the screen behind me right now, and I know we're just on audio, but I have videos running across a number of displays in the back wall of my office that just automatically happens.

So when you're looking at events, activations, and others, unfortunately, a lot of our stuff we can't really share. We have some hidden places that I can share with certain customers, but yeah, so it could be like, you're launching a new car, or you're doing a new whiskey brand or trade shows. That's a huge opportunity for us. People didn't realize this existed, and since we've come out in the last few months here, we're getting tons of inbound requests, and we're going to an event in Kentucky that's a booth-building event. So Booth builders are looking at this product, saying, this is super light, I can hang this anywhere. I don't need special reinforcement. It's very thin, and then I can do these mosaics, and we have a lot of examples of doing an entire huge stand of 50-60 displays, all orchestrated content and it's kind of a unique way, and we've done some studies on that, and it really draws your attention because firstly it's unique, but we purposely put gaps in between the displays by the way, that's what we've learned as a best practice, at least an inch or two in between. So then your mind is drawn to it like you're trying to fill in the gaps and it just draws your attention more. So that's been kind of like one of the key best practices in terms of how we arrange these displays. 

It's interesting because the mantra in digital signage for 25 years has been to try to get to seamless and not have gaps or bezzles or anything else, but you're saying that visually it works the other way. 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, just to be unique, and to catch the eye. Like we're an LED wall, and the LED walls are fantastic, right? They're really cool for certain things, but we have a unique product that lets you stand out, do something different and draw people's attention because you can do things that you couldn't otherwise do. 

Are you constrained by the creativity of that? If a creative person is listening to this, are they starting to think, okay, what does this file look like? What am I doing that's different? Do I have to design something very custom? Or is it just a file, and it'll run on here?

Wes Nicol: It all comes down to actually how you mount the displays. You've got three ways to do it. It has to be a square, portrait, or landscape, right? And you can't have some weird triangle thing going on with displays because it looks kind of weird. 

But yeah, in our creative studio platform, it shows like certain content will render well in that aspect ratio, and so if we work with you on an event and you're saying, okay, we've got this wall that we're going to be working with, we can say, okay, we can do a couple of portraits, we can do landscape, we can do whatever, and then the content has to match up to that. But generally, all the major formats of video, and then you can go back to still images, to video. We can schedule all and manage all the different slots.

So if it's an interesting-looking matrix,, if you step back and look at it, you're thinking in terms of it being a 16:9 rectangle as the overall canvas, even though it might not fill all of it or a square, or whatever.

Wes Nicol: Exactly. 

Okay. So you've mentioned partners a few times. Are you mostly selling through partners, or do you sell direct, or a little bit of both?

Wes Nicol: This is kind of a miss, I think, over the company over the years is we haven't really set this up properly, and we're fixing that. But we have a lot of direct customers, and then we have a very small handful of resellers, a couple in the US and one in Israel. Having gone to this ISE show in Barcelona, realizing people want the product in Poland, they want the product in Spain, they want the product in the Middle East. So we set up a partner program that we just launched two or three weeks ago. We're getting resellers and distributors that will give us the products in the country throughout EMEA. That's like a big push right now. So the product can be sourced there. 

In the past, you'd have to get a shipment from New York and it would take forever to reach Saudi Arabia. Now we're gonna have a local presence with local distributors. So we're definitely actively signing up a ton of resellers and partners. There's been a ton of demand at the show, I think I mentioned that people were just like, wow. where have you guys been? I've seen this. I'm from South Africa, I've been trying to find this product for years and no one would tell me where they got it. So that's all that's changing now, and we're really actively recruiting partners. 

You guys did the reference design, I assume working with your big client or clients, is the manufacturing done in China or somewhere in Asia? 

Wes Nicol: That's correct, done in China. We do all the design work. Our New York office is the sales and marketing, and finance. But we have all of our engineering is done in Canada, based in Montreal. So we have hardware and software engineering up there. So we design, we got mechanical engineering, we deal with radio stuff, and like a whole bunch of designing everything from the display. We're actually building some other unique things I'll talk about maybe a future podcast that is taking advantage of some of the skill sets up in Canada. But yeah, all that stuff gets designed, and we work for the entire process. We're launching a whole series of products right now, and it's QAd in Canada and then it goes back to the manufacturers in China. 

Would that just be an evolution of what you already have or distinct? 

Wes Nicol: It's an evolution with some interesting new twists to it. 

Like what?

Wes Nicol: We can talk about it when you invite me back to get back on this show. 

Now, what about a large retailer that's already working with Brand X CMS software company. Can you integrate with them, or do they have to be like parallel activities that don't cross one another? 

Wes Nicol: We're completely open. We just had a big meeting about that. We're working with some other partners around integrating their CMS platforms. We've got killer device management. So I think our role, when we're working with other partners, we want to be able to manage the provisioning and, making sure the device has the right software, we're able to get a lot of really good insights in terms of CPU performance, memory, WiFi signal, temperature, all that stuff. We would continue to play that role, but we definitely integrate with any other CMS platform. 

When you were at the show, we were sitting across from Appspace, and we went, hey, can we run your Android APK on this? And within 15 minutes, we had Appspace running on our displays at the booth in Barcelona. There are some gotchas to this. We have to do a little bit of modification, but it's actually quite easy for us to start running some other CMS platforms.

Does that cannibalize your revenue? 

Wes Nicol: I don't know if you have my history, but I was at Blackberry, and we were talking about the fact that do we just stay focused on the hardware or do we open up our platform? And you remember Blackberry Messenger, and then they kept that unique to Blackberry because they thought that would help sell hardware, and you saw where that went. 

So I understand that we need to work with other partners. We have to be an open platform. We were talking about a potential partner of ours that's got I think a million displays that they're managing, we're not going to rip out existing deployments, right? We want to play nicely. Maybe they want our display. I see our device management platform being something that could be really valuable, and we'll take a small piece for that, and I think that's reasonable. 

You mentioned that you're in 40,000 locations with this particular client. What's the overall footprint if you can tell me?

Wes Nicol: With all our install base? We're around the six-figure number, but I can't say exactly. 

Okay. So north of a hundred thousand?

Wes Nicol: In that kind of range, yeah.

Wow. That's a pretty big footprint for a company that very few people have heard of.

Wes Nicol: Yeah, I know. I have to get that fixed. 

It's working. 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, it is. But I think there's just so much more potential and we need to make people aware of this.

The structure of the company. Are you privately held or public? 

Wes Nicol: We're privately owned, primarily by a family office here in New York.

Oh, wow, and you're able to just grow organically? 

Wes Nicol: Yeah, for now, yeah. I mean there could be some potential acquisitions later on. But yeah, without going into too much detail, we completely revamped our whole software platform and refreshed our hardware platform, and invested in marketing. So there's a lot of stuff going on right now that we're just focused on kind of coming back out into the market. Once that plays out, then there could be some other things we can focus on. For now, we've got our hands very full. 

I appreciate you taking half an hour for me.

Wes Nicol: Thank you. It's great chatting with you and nice meeting you there in Barcelona, and excited to hopefully get back on here sometime. I need some more excuses to talk to you again. 

Absolutely. Thanks again, Wes.

Brad Koerner, Koerner Design

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

Brad Koerner is a Harvard-trained architect who has spent decades looking at how technology affects and defines built environments. He has a specific interest in technologies like lighting and digital displays.

An American based now in beautiful Amsterdam, Koerner works with both end-users and technology companies. By his own admission, he's obsessed by the question of how digital and interactive technologies are starting to disrupt centuries-old thinking about architectural design.

We met recently at Integrated Systems Europe, where he did a well-received talk on his ideas and observations. He later sent me the presentation deck, and it was pretty clear I needed to get him on this podcast.

In our chat, we get into a whole bunch of things - but focus quite a bit on the terms immersive and experiential ... what they mean and how they get applied.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Brad, thank you for joining me from Amsterdam. Can you give me a background on what you do and what Koerner Design is all about?

Brad Koerner: Yeah, thanks, Dave, for having me. It's really an honor. So Koerner Design is my own design firm, and I focus on the future of the built environment, iSPAN, architectural lighting, digital signage, and circular economy product design.

What would be a typical engagement? If there is such a thing as typical. 

Brad Koerner: A typical engagement for me is working with lighting design companies to create sustainable products. I've been engaged with a few digital signage and marketing firms looking at trends in digital media. I'm also working with DC Power folks, thinking about sort of infrastructure-level improvements that help lighting and digital signage.

So a company would come to you saying, we are thinking about doing this, but we don't have our heads wrapped around how it would all come together? 

Brad Koerner: Yeah I speak a lot. I talk about the future of the built environment through a variety of different channels, and a lot of people find inspiration in the pieces that I do. For example, I just spoke at Integrated Systems Europe on immersive digital environments, and an earlier presentation I gave was called “Every surface is a screen, now what?” 

The year before that I presented at Integrated Systems Europe, also on DC Power Systems. These videos go out there and they get people really inspired. They start to see these industries in new ways. They look at their problems with a fresh mind, and they really want to engage them in an innovation process, right? A proper design-driven innovation process. So I help them do a future envisioning session: what are the trends, what are the options, what do they have? Then we turn that into a sort of proper wishlist of product concepts or new business concepts, and then we drive it into the roadmap where it's scoped and prioritized, and they focus on that. 

I also then take it all the way out and help 'em with product marketing and marketing communications for those new launches.

So they would come to you because you're not selling them anything other than your insight and expertise as opposed to trying to angle them toward how they're gonna use a fine-pitch LED wall? 

Brad Koerner: Correct. I'm agnostic when it comes to all the technologies and equipment. 

You talk in your presentations a lot about immersive digital experiences and I'm very curious about how you define immersive because I just wrote the other day about a company that described a billboard along a roadway as immersive, and I thought, boy, that's really stretching to call that immersive, but maybe I'm wrong.

Brad Koerner: I think it's helpful for your audience to understand by background. I'm an architect. I have two degrees in architecture, and when I was young, I always wanted to be a Disney Imagineer as a kid, and that's what drove me into architecture, and then as a side interest, I took up theater lighting and stage set design.

So I really think of immersive digital experiences from that sort of the architectural point of view where you are in physical places, you are surrounded by six surfaces and in today's world, all of those can become digital, they can become luminous, they can become a portal to the internet or to the digital world in some form or another. I've said this because I cross over between architectural lighting and digital signage a lot in my work. 

Every pixel is a light source and every light source is a pixel in these modern building projects. And a lot of people still don't quite understand that concept yet. An immersive digital experience is becoming how you design an architectural space, and I think particularly a lot of architects and interior designers are really trailing behind the technology. They look at signage as a thing that's applied after the fact almost like a typical signage project, non-digital signage. They don't yet understand how to take everything they've been taught about architecture placemaking, creating thresholds, creating progression, creating a sense of space or wonder, efficiency or economy for working environments, or branded retail experience. They don't know how to take what they're so good at and apply digital to it and mix digital into that and use digital to create something really engaging placemaking. That's what I mean by immersive digital experiences. 

You say they don't know how, but is it the case that they do want to?

Brad Koerner: Some for sure, some absolutely not. I saw Michael Schneider from Gensler speak at the Integrated Systems Europe show a few years ago, and Gensler has a whole group now that's called the Digital Experience Design Group, and this is exactly what they're focused on.

Gensler hired the Head of Imagineering at Disney.

Brad Koerner: Bob Weiss, right? So they get it. For every Gensler, that's out there, There are a lot of architects that think of digital experience design as well, “Don't put a TV on my wall that's gonna show a Coke ad”, right? And they don't get it right. They still think of architecture as concrete and steel and glass and like Le Corbusier's famous quote, “It's the magnificent play of forms bathed in light”, and I've inverted that many times and I've spoken and I said you know what happens when the forms themselves emit light and they become digital, how are you gonna design that? How do you design the element of time? 

And with the element of time, you get this sort of very active storytelling capacity within architectural placemaking. So it's no longer enough for you to design a wall and it just sits there forever. You have to think about how that wall will change over time, right? These sorts of cycles of time, whether it's days, weeks, seasons, hours, minutes, or whatever that is, that wall can change dynamically. So why will you change it? How will you use that for placemaking and creating engaging experiences? I don't think most traditionally educated architects and interior designers can really get their heads around that yet. Even lighting designers have this sort of classic preset scene notion when it comes to controls. They're struggling with getting their heads around digital media and that live data stream, live media, and sort of interactivity. 

But you seem to be suggesting that this is a matter of time as opposed to maybe it'll happen because I keep writing and talking about how that time is coming fairly quickly when architects and people who design physical spaces are thinking about LED and projection and other technologies as design materials, as design considerations. 

Brad Koerner: Yeah. I think it's inevitable. The best science fiction has shown this for decades now. It's shown this amazing potential world we can live in, both the positive and the dystopian use of it like Children of Men. I just spoke in Integrated Systems Europe and I started my presentation by saying, “The future is now!” You look at Blade Runner, you look at Minority Report, you look at Star Trek, and all of those things that everybody still thinks of as like out there decades away in the future, now in fact, is decades behind us, right? And people haven't admitted to where we are, right?

The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed and digital signage is definitely a world where that is super true, right? You go to the trade shows and a few years ago Sony had an 8k native-resolution digital wall that was eight meters wide and four meters tall, and it was hyperrealistic. That technology exists, but then you go to clients out there and you know they can't afford at any budget, anything, or they simply won't choose to do that, and I think it's inevitable. These architects that are afraid of it, I think what happens is somebody will put a digital sign in their space whether they like it or not for other reasons, and the worst-case scenario is it does become an ad, right? And that's not what they want in their space. So they better get their head around it and integrate it actively into their design concepts and really look at the poetics of it. How can they use simple things like beautiful motion graphics and beautiful textures?

Just like an interior designer would make a material sample board, a swatch board, they need to think of the digital media like that. What is the sort of swatches of digital media that they're presenting to their clients when they're designing these grand lobbies or offices or retailers or whatever?

I wonder though, with Gensler, they are an extremely well-established company with huge clients and everything else, and they work with Fortune 100s, fortune 500s, giant airports, and everything else. But there's a whole bunch of designers that are working with like a regional insurance company or something like that, and they're just saying, we get what you're saying, but our customers aren't gonna spend that money. They want a defined ROI. They don't want something that's just artistic and ethereal and vague in terms of what this does.

Brad Koerner: I think you're talking about a couple of things, right? So first off, there's just cheap, right? You'll always have customers that can never be cheap enough, right? But you have to segment the market, right? There are always customers at the high end of the range that wants the newest, the coolest, the hottest things at the beginning of the cycle. I joke that it's the sort of corporate lobby art budget crowd that always seems to have the money to do those sorts of fanciful things.

But the technology keeps plummeting in price, right? A lot of this technology was indeed available even 20 years ago, but it was at such a price point no one could afford it unless you're like U2 going on a concert tour with a LED screen with the width of a football field. They could afford it but no one else. 

Or Comcast and their lobby because they were a cable company before streaming! 

Brad Koerner: Yeah, the Comcast lobby, right? What is that already 15 years ago, right?  It's like I said, the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. So the price points just keep coming down until they become more and more common.

Could you have imagined even a decade ago that every little restaurant and coffee shop, and donut shop would have digital menu boards? It's amazing how fast that swept through the market, and right now we have these sorts of virtual production spaces, right? I think it was, what, just three years ago, the Mandalorian showed sort of the first instance of that, and there was that movie First Man Before, I think was the first that used an LED screen in camera on film. Now it's everywhere, right? Every studio around the world is installing these virtual production facilities within a year. 

The accelerating rate of technological innovation is a term that’s thrown around, and I don't think people understand what accelerating rate means. AI image generation six months ago exploded onto the scene, and now everyone is using it every designer is thinking about how it's gonna disrupt them, and every content producer is thinking about how they can suddenly reduce the cost of their content generation using this sort of AI image generation, or increase their margin.

That was just six months ago, so I think with the technology becoming so cheap, it's low cost to visualize the concepts. It's such a low cost to design, commission, and program them. The hardware is continually plummeting in costs, so you to open up new opportunities, right? The menu boards in little mom-and-pop restaurants. There will always be the high end of the market going down into the middle end of the market, and they will use these, right? And they will have very smart design teams that come up with real ROI stories for why these things work, and it becomes fanciful and sci-fi today or yesterday, tomorrow just becomes normal and accepted. People don't even think about it anymore. The bottom end of the market will always be cheap. There'll always be people who can never save enough money or be stingy enough. That's in every market, right? Lighting, construction, you name it. It's always like that.  

You're suggesting in your presentation that the digital and physical worlds are fusing in that with physical spaces being portals to a virtual world. I'm curious about what you mean by that, and maybe you can give me a couple of examples of how that's actually playing out.

Brad Koerner: Let me go back to when I was in school. I have a Master's in Architecture from Harvard, and when I was there, I did a thesis titled ‘Active Object Surfaces and Zones’ I looked at using physical interactive controls for retail displays and lighting, and this was in 1999. So I was a bit ahead of the scene on that one. 

But in the early 200s, I believed that physical spaces would become the best interface to the internet which is, I know, a wild concept for many now. But you have to remember back then we were still using 20-inch Sony Trinitron screens were like the hot technology, and people were still using three-and-a-half-inch floppy discs and dial-up modems but the internet showed so much promise and there were a lot of designers doing really amazing websites and that was very spatial, right? And even just the notion of hypertext itself is very spatial. 

So I kept imagining that physical spaces and using your body as the control and creating progression and threshold and a lot of the sort of architectural principles that you see in the internet experience could be combined. But then, in 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone, and little black mirrors hijacked our internet experience, right?

Now though, I think people are over that, and we're saturated with personal devices and little black mirrors everywhere, the retailers are finally waking up to say, Hey, we need that digital in our physical experience, and so are the hospitality providers and healthcare providers. And they're starting to think, wait for a second, now we can tie all this digital data o tour spaces, right? And we can take all these great media that we have on our little black mirrors, and we can put it into our physical spaces. We can create these great experiences, and we can complete this cycle of gathering data from the real world, using it to drive great media content creation, live and interactivity and use it to drive behavior back in the real world, right? And it completes that virtuous cycle, and that's what I mean when I say architecture becomes a portal to the virtual world. A portal you can go back and forth between, right? The digital might come from into the space, and the spatial actions might drive digital data, right?

Can you give me some examples of where you've seen this applied and you think it really works because I've walked into some spaces that retail spaces and other spaces that are called immersive and experiential and thought to myself, being an old fart, cranky and everything that that's nice, but I don't see the point of this and I sometimes struggle with how they're gonna see a return out of this? 

Brad Koerner: Yeah, I haven't seen many. Long story short: I think you just have this great divide where you have, for example, a lot of startups doing smart buildings, right? And they're deploying all these sensors, and they're gathering up all this data, but then they don't return that data back to the spaces. The data does very little to act on the physical space. Then you have all this great media content that's out there and you'll throw up media content on these screens, and it's not tied to anything that's happening in the space, right?

So it has no recognition of if somebody's even looking at it or not, much more if that person is gazing at it or wanting to engage it. There's been a lot of crazy stuff. There's indoor GPS positioning using lighting systems and apps. That was a flop. People have tried to tie app experiences into the real world. Not a lot of that has any real success story. You see a lot of these sorts of art-driven installations where I call it the be in Me and My Shadow problem. You can put a stereo vision camera system in space and track people exactly, but then, all they do is show the person's presence on some huge digital wall, and it's like me in my shadow, and there's no other point to it, so you have to think about why you need interaction in a space, right? I say for lighting and digital media, you can deliver the right light or the right content at the right place at the right time. You can use it to create really memorable human experiences, or you can use it to drive action, right? And those are areas that are not well explored yet, right? You don't have a lot of good designers out there connecting all of those systems together to create genuinely good experiences. 

I actually worked with a startup called Digi Valet that makes a hotel room control system for luxury hotel rooms. So they make an app that sits on an iPad, but the other half of their system is this black box that interfaces with every physical control system in a modern hotel room like the thermostat, the blinds, the lighting, the media, everything that's Bluetooth, the Bluetooth controlled faucet on the bathtub, the Bluetooth coffee maker, the Bluetooth perfume/scent sprayer, and all that stuff.

And it was great because they asked me to help them. This had a lot of customers, these hotel chains wanted to develop a brand of digital media and lighting experiences as part of this iPad app, right? And it was a fascinating way to think about it. So you're in this hotel room, and you click, I want to watch a movie. It immediately says on your iPad, okay, can we set the cinema lighting? Yes. Can we lower the blinds? Yes. Would you like us to order you champagne and popcorn? Yes. 

It totally changes the way you think of the room, right? You don't have lighting control pads and blinds, and you don't have to find the remote control for the TV. It's all about having this really smart butler that just knows what to do when you want to watch a movie. 

So if you're a frequent flier or whatever, you travel between different Marriotts, and you use your loyalty card, and it just sets it up in your room. So you don't even do anything; that's your configuration. 

Brad Koerner: That's the next level, right? That's future beyond that when you can add in the CRM systems on top of that so it remembers your preferences. Then the next level beyond that is there's almost this genie-like ability where they begin to understand your desires so well that they can start  to add magic to your experience that you are not even expecting or the hotel can't do it at scale, right? I just think that's fascinating, like how could you take those principles of experience design and apply them into high-end retail or high-end healthcare, or even just a commercial office environment, right? It's a beautiful UX/UI experience in a space. We desperately need to see more intelligence and creativity around using digital in physical spaces. 

Yeah, I wanted to ask about the discipline that needs to be enforced at the start of these things. When I've done consulting in my dark past, I would try to ensure the first question out of my mouth that I would throw at the customer or a client was: why are you doing this? What do you want to see out of it? And so on. 

Is that the sort of thing that needs to be addressed super early so that it's not just, “We've seen these big video walls and other lobbies, we want one too.” 

Brad Koerner: Usually, the first question I ask is, what's your budget? But that doesn't work too well.

Can you afford me? 

Brad Koerner: It's both of those, right? It's what's your budget and why? I think that, first off, many of these companies have a lot more budgets if they want. They just don't want to at first, they don't understand what is possible, they don't understand what it would cost, and they don't understand the ROI on that investment. So it's a real uphill battle, and that tail is as old as time, that's an architect preaching an upgraded finish on the oak panels, or that's a lighting designer preaching adding dimming into the system. It's always like that in these construction projects, and you are right, about the why, you can have all this technology in the world, right? Anything you can dream, you can do, right? So technology is not the limiting factor. It's imagination, right? Imagination is the limiting factor and thinking is almost like a movie director or the early stages of any media content where you have to think in storyboards, right? You have to think in moments of time. You have to think about their journey, what's the user journey, and what's the user experience, right?

If you've seen any of these big design firms, they map user journeys, right? Throughout the omnichannel retail experience, they create these huge flow charts that take up a whole wall. You have to think about that in physical places now. So if you're walking into the shopping mall, do you put signage at the door's threshold? Classically, in retail design, you don't put anything really important at the threshold of the door because you need a sort of decompression zone where people charge into a space. Then they slow down, and then they look around, right? 

There's just a lot of classic common sense design stuff that is not being employed in digital signage, particularly in any interactivity, right? You need these new combinations of skill sets that just don't exist yet. You almost need to take a game designer with a world-class architect and make them work together and see what happens, right? You need to take a Hollywood storyboard artist and combine them with a technologist and make them work together and see what happens., and that's what's missing right now from all of this, and I think you have companies like Moment Factory and Gensler and some out there are on that bleeding edge that they are trying to do that. Here in Amsterdam, there's Purple Storytelling, and there are lots of little groups that see the future that they struggle with, right?

I think they struggle to see, and get the clients to understand the potential. I think things like Unreal Engine and live rendering and that sort of starting with a game engine, which is so powerful with live rendering, is going to make visualizing these scenarios so much faster, so much more profound, instead of starting with a classic architectural sketch, and then you went to an architectural photorealistic rendering, but it didn't move. Now architects are using things like Unreal Engine to make these animations, particularly in the luxury real estate marketing firm. Have you ever seen what some of these high-end luxury real estate developments are doing for their marketing? It's unreal. It's Hollywood-grade special effects from just 10 years ago, and they're using it just to sell condos. 

You start to take the power of that, and you add it into very specific segments. So, retailers, have their very specific sort of customer flows, customer journeys, and ROI expectations, and hospitality operators have their very specific desires, healthcare facilities, have very different customer journeys. With Unreal Engine, you can now tie together these professions. It's the first time in my career that I've seen this flow complete, that you can use architectural models in BIM in Unreal Engine, and you can show these scenarios. You can animate them, you can set up the interactivity, right? Cuz it's a game engine at heart, and then you can use that for commissioning these systems. I think that will be the next step in all of this. 

But are people like architects and those who design physical spaces, are they conditioned and trained and understanding about the ROI needs of their clients? Is that something they've always had to address, or is this new because of this more mysterious ROI that you would see out of an immersive space? 

Brad Koerner: It's a great question. I don't think they are. I have two degrees in architecture. I was never trained to think of a business scenario. Again, it's combining different skill sets, right? It's almost like you need to combine an architect with an MBA and think about why, what's the point? It's a real challenge, right? Obviously, if you're a high-end real estate developer and you're doing luxury condos, you know that if you add marble to the lobby, you're going to get a certain ROI. You might not have it calculated, but you understand your customers, and you understand it's going to help with sales. You understand that it's worth it, right? You can't just put chipboard and cheap carpet in, you have gotta do the upgraded finishes, but you also know where not to spend the money, and you know where it’s not going to get return value to you.

And there's an intuitive aspect to that you can never just set up in a spreadsheet, and $5,223.32 will be your ROI in 32 days. You'll never get that precise, and that's why you need a creative mind and a business mind, and they need to come together to figure these things out, but it will happen, right? If you create a great experience for a hospitality provider, right? They'll know it. They'll know it from the customer feedback, reviews, and qualitative comments on that, right? And eventually, that drives revenue for them. But those sort of attribution problems for ROI is vexing in every industry.

Marketing goes through this all the time, but it will happen more and more in physical placemaking with these systems, and I think it's a skill. Again, people have to get good at this. It doesn't exist now, and it's tricky because it combines several skill sets that have never worked together in the past and you have to fuse them to sort these things. 

Yeah, I listened to a panel at Digital Signage Experience, and I believe it was somebody from Moment Factory who was saying that in terms of a return, they're now starting to hear from the HR departments of companies who are saying that having an experiential aspect to their lobby and their overall space is incredibly important in terms of recruitment and retainment of employees these days that particularly in technology jobs where you may have several choices as to who you're going to work for, what that space looks like and how you feel in it matters.

Brad Koerner: Yeah. It's like in the commercial office section, right? I forget the exact numbers, but it's $3 a square foot, $30 a square foot, and $300 a square foot, right? Three bucks are your cost of energy, and 300 is your cost of salary, right? So should you focus on saving a few pennies of energy, or should you focus on saving hundreds of dollars of efficiency for your employees and salaries? That's just the concept that has to be employed everywhere. There's this sort of scale of effect that is critical to ROI. Understanding that is often siloed, right? You get a salesperson running in with some smart building system. They're talking about saving energy because we'll turn all the lights off more. And they don't understand that will create a lousy experience for the workers, right? And it will really damage the effectiveness of the workers and retention and all that, right? Same thing with digital signage, anything, right? If you put a big LED wall into a commercial office, will you just put a waterfall on it? Is that going to help make your employees happy? Maybe, maybe it's as dumb as that. But could you do something more sophisticated with it? Could you recognize employee accomplishments live? Could you show employee performance live depending on what your business or industry is, do you give people a pat on the back instantaneously? There are so many scenarios that could be developed around these technologies when, again, when the surfaces you're surrounded by become digital. You need to think about what they do, how they react to you, and how people react to those surfaces.? What is that cycle of action-reaction? 

It sounds like you're saying there's more to this stuff than eye candy.

Brad Koerner: Eye candy's great. I'm not going to argue against eye candy. There's a lot in this world that is just for eye candy's sake, and that makes a big difference, right? This is a classic design. This is architecture, this is interior design, this is a brand design, and retail design. Some of it is just eye candy, and people know how to justify that, right? That’s a tale as old as time, right? It's making a statement. It's making a brand, culture, making, and experience. Why does Starbucks charge $8 for a coffee when they spend 50 cents on it?

Because they've invested heavily in how their stores look, they feel and smell and sound, and there's just a lot of eye candy there, right? They consciously built all that so that they could charge that price premium. So yeah, it will just be eye candy for some of the digital stuff. I joke about the waterfalls, but can you beat the waterfall? In terms of your media content, it's mesmerizing, right? It's biomimetic, it makes you feel comfortable. I think humans have these deep-seated connections to natural effects. Maybe you just put a glorious force scene on your huge LED wall, and somehow the best thing you can show, right? I don't know. It could be as dumb as that. You have to test it. 

I think the other thing people have to get savvy on is that you don't just build it and walk away. You have to build and operate it, and these teams that are developing these concepts will have to work with the operators, whoever it is to tweak it, right? To look at, we're going to make a whole bunch of assumptions, right? There are cycles of time, there's media content, there's interactivity, there are all these new things that people have to figure out. They can simulate it upfront. Nowadays, they can go into the virtual world during the construction project and get it mostly right or pretty close. But then, who will fine-tune that in the field over time or refresh it over time? Most people don't even think of the media budget. How many people forget about, oh wait, you mean we need a media budget for all these screens we've built? They can't even do that, and it's a long way before you're going to have clients actively spending the money to tweak this stuff and make sure it's optimal over time. 

All right. Great conversation. I think we could have gone on for three hours, but gotta cut it off at some point. If people want to find out more about your company or perhaps bring you out to speak to their company or a conference, where do they find you online? 

Brad Koerner: They can find me on LinkedIn just Brad Koerner or KoernerDesign.com. 

All right. Thank you very much for spending some time with me.

Brad Koerner: Great. Thanks, Dave.

Ney Corsino, Nanolumens

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

Nanolumens was an early player in the LED display space - known mainly in its first few years for innovative  display products that were super-light, thin and flexible ... at a time when just about everything else on the market was heavy, thick and solid.

The Atlanta-based company was still pretty much known for that kind of product when Ney Corsino was hired on as CEO, at the start of 2020. Experienced as a business transformation and turnaround guy, Corsino has evolved Nanolumens from a company with an interesting niche product to one that has a full range of display options - from conventional video wall set-ups and all-in-ones to transparent mesh displays and the thin, flexible units that first gained attention.

Nanolumens has also got more focused on some key vertical markets - arguably the biggest ones being airports and public spaces. Several new air terminals that have been built or renovated in the last couple of years have featured Nanolumens product in its signature public art, messaging and experiential installations.

Corsino and I chatted about how he has also put in the hours with his team to clarify how it goes to market, and how it specifically works with integrators and solutions providers.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ney, thank you for joining me. You joined the company from Barco, so you would've already been well-versed in LED displays. What attracted you to Nanolumens? 

Ney Corsino: Thanks for having me. Yes, I came from Barco before Barco, and before that, I was at Phillips, Philips Electronics, a European company, and Barco, also a European company, and now at Nanolumens, a US-based company. But to be honest with you, at Barco we paid little attention to LEDs. We have a deep engineering base in projection there and we venture with click share. 

LEDs have been up and down at Barco and at Nanolumens, all we do is LED, so we are pretty much focused here. 

Because you knew the business, was there something in particular that attracted you to Nanolumens? Because they're relatively small and US-focused as opposed to a big global entity like Barco. What was your perspective on all that? Why join them?  

Ney Corsino: I think for good or bad, I developed my career in improving businesses, transforming and improving turnaround, and I felt that the impact I could continue to do would be more valuable in companies like Nanolumens. So I think it was a good encounter between a company that needed this kind of action and someone that had experience in doing this at a corporate level in many different business units. So now I could come, and exercise all I have learned all by myself and I'm very glad I did that.  

When I first got to know Nanolumens, let's say 10 years ago, their calling card, so to speak, was these flexible, almost rug-like displays with removable modules, they called them nixels at the time, and I think they still do. 

It was very unique on the market at that point, and those were the early days anyways for LED displays. I wouldn't say they're not still unique, but I don't get the sense that's the kind of the main growth driver for Nanolumens these days. 

Ney Corsino: The company has run for about 17 years. It has been one of the pioneers in the LED display market, has been involved in many innovations, and has almost a hundred IPs, but most notably, like you just said, it is the invention of the flex module, which is still called nixel where you can basically do smooth curve wall. So we hold IPs on that. But since then, it has evolved quite a bit especially in the last three years, we continue to do of course very well on the curve. But we have re-engineered and extended the portfolio for cabinet-based modular units, also mesh, all in one. So we now have a very extensive portfolio.

Now if you ask about the sales, it's almost half of it. It is still customized, which includes the curved modules, and the other half is more on the standard flat solution.

Why do you think it's played out that way? 

Ney Corsino: I believe that the brand commands that customization aspect, the DNA of creativity, wow effect, doing things that are let's say complex and difficult, but we engineer to make it possible. So I think that's the inheritance of the brand and continues to be. What we have tried to do, part of my arrival here is to continue that, but create us not a next segment that gives the possibility of of scaling up the business, and that's why, as I mentioned before, re-engineer the flat segment all in one mesh outdoor if it is more on the architecture. It's the one step in the direction of extending the portfolio to scale the business and find a consistent regular growth path for the business. 

So if you stayed primarily with these lightweight flex products as your main product line, that would restrict you to being a niche manufacturer as opposed to broadening it and becoming a general manufacturer that would give you scale?

Ney Corsino: Exactly. It is very architectural, customized, and therefore you could call it niche. It's a good portion of the market. We do very well there, but if we have bigger ambitions and big plans, then we need to play in other fields as well. 

In paying attention to projects that come on stream, and knowing that in many cases the customer doesn't allow the manufacturer to say who it is that's providing some of the technology, I still get a sense that Nanolumens is doing a lot of airports in particular, and I'm curious why that's played out like that. 

Why are you guys winning so much of the business in airports? Apart from that, I'm sure you're gonna say because we have great products, but, there have to be other reasons.

Ney Corsino: Yeah, that's a very good question and probably not easy to answer. The product definitely makes an important play there. But I would say, Dave, that the airport is one of the most complex and demanding environments. You have the airport itself, you have the airlines, and you have the advertising agencies or companies. There are a lot of things going on in an airport. You have very tight schedules where you can work and when you can’t. We have security aspects to it. 

I think over the years the company just got to understand how all these cards are played, and then more importantly, we learn and we learn to adapt and not fight the system, but work with the system, right? Whatever the constraints are, wherever the demands are, we translate that into a workable plan that involves product, involves people, involves a process, and there we go. 

How much of it does Nanolumens take on versus channel partners and integration partners? 

Ney Corsino: I think about the past of the company and then I have seen not only Nanolumens, but also in my past, there is confusion within the company as far as the go-to-market is concerned, and that's not a good thing. It was no different here. Nanolumens from its past behavior has confused the market in terms of whether it is going directly, is it going through the channel partner. So one of the things that I've done since my arrival is basically to clarify that and commit to a go-to-market plan, and it is my strong belief and that's where the company is settled now. We go to market through channel partners. So that's our approach. So there is no more to it.

So you don't do direct sales? 

Ney Corsino: No, we do have some house accounts, legacy ones but less than a handful, and whenever we have a company that wants to do direct business, we sit with them and we explain all the risks associated with taking a technology company that is focused on creating things and trying to make it a turnkey company that will be distracted with many other things. And through that dialogue, we always introduce channel partners that work with us very well, and I think, I think 99% of the time we end up in a good alignment that we will play through the channel to the end user, and everybody will be satisfied. 

One of the things that have come up in LED manufacturers for marketing is because a lot of the “channels” didn't really have a lot of background and experience in deploying LED displays, they didn't know how to specify it, they didn't really know how to sell it or anything else. So a lot of the manufacturers came up with these all-in-one finished displays with fixed sizes and they would come in a kit and everything's there and you just open it up and deploy, and it's a 186-inch big ass TV that sort of thing.

I'm suspecting that the channel partners you're working with are beyond that because they're doing mega walls and airports and so on. 

Ney Corsino: We do also have these big-ass TVs as you call them. It's part of the working out distribution model for the company. Our channel partners work with them from a very early stage where we train their designers, we train their salespeople of course if they are open and welcoming to it, and most of the time they are. So we actually work together to make them more comfortable with the technology and entertain the prospect of their business, but ultimately that will come back to us and we will engineer the solution as a final project anyways for them. 

So it sounds like this is more about getting the right channel partners as opposed to getting lots of channel partners.

Ney Corsino: Oh, definitely I mean there are thousands of them out there. We work very well with many, but I think there is a right balance and we try to be very cautious of it. 

The marketplace seems to be inexorably moving towards increasingly fine-pitch displays. Are you seeing that or are you still experiencing some customers who understand that the dynamics of the environment we're in 4 millimeters is fine or even 6 millimeters? 

Ney Corsino: I would say that the answer is: Yes. For the most part, every two-three years, the volume goes into the next narrow pitch size, right? It used to be the 2.5, and then it went to the, let's say 1.5, and to the 1.2. So it feels like it moves, 3-3+ years, and that is not changing. 

However, I think that's very interesting for the LED marketing industry. LED is going in places where nobody would have a screen before. That's number one. So it is growing into something new areas, new applications. The Second is also replacing some of the projection technology, and the third is also replacing some of the old LCD solutions. So it's a market that keeps growing, and I say that because, with that kind of penetration in so many applications, you end up with a need of almost any pitch size, any fine pitch, meaning, the 4mm might be very good for certain applications and the 6mm from some others if it is outdoor or indoor. 

I will give you an example. In airports, there are a lot of 2.5 millimeters going, and they say, why is that? Why don't they go finer? It's because terminals and lobbies are usually very big in airports, so the screens are far from the person and therefore you don't need a super fine pitch, a 2.5 does an excellent job. 

Is there a kind of a sweet spot, like I was hearing in the last couple of years that seems like the market has settled a lot on, as you were just saying, 2mm to 2.5mm works for most applications if you're getting away from really close end things in retail or museums.

Ney Corsino: Yeah. That is right, and I think there is a second trend toward volume on the 1.2mm, especially in applications where people don't want to have a tile LCD solution. They want to have a more smooth, seamless, and large screen. So therefore you also see in that particular part of the segment where people are closer to the screen, the market’s moving very fast for the 1.2mm.

I was walking around Integrated Systems Europe about a month ago, and looking at displays that were R&D products at that point, or R&D efforts but I saw 0.4 millimeters and I didn't see it personally, but I saw the PR after a Chinese manufacturer saying they had 0.39. So just a hair thinner even and I wonder, are they just marketing, trade shows, eye candy kinds of things? Is there really a demand for the LED to be that tight in pitch? 

Ney Corsino: Technology-wise, there is a pursuit for that, that's correct. I think one of the reasons is that you need that kind of super-duper fine pitch to reproduce what LCDs or OLEDs are doing nowadays in the market. Now for the consumer-based screens, you will need to go that low. So technology tips, pushing the boundaries, pursuing that route, no. When you look at the business side of it, the business is run in 0.9mm to above pitch size. Even when you say 0.7mm, many companies are now displaying 0.7mm, is it doable? Yes. Is it expensive? Yes. Are there volumes? No. There will be very, very selected products or screens being made on a 0.7mm at this point. 

So I just try to give you a relative situation between a technology that pursues eventually to be in a consumer kind of demand but still is in a professional kind of market. 

We've seen in the last few years the emergence of mini LED and then micro LED. Is most of what Nanolumens is doing still for, to simplify the description, conventional SMD or four-in-one LED? 

Ney Corsino: Yeah, so we do conventional. Nowadays also moving to COB and therefore going to mini LED. That's where we play. I think the term micro LED is a little bit overused in applications that are not micro LED. I'm trying to be polite, but there is a big marketing push on the use of micro LED at this point. 

Do you see your company going to that? If some of the mass transfer challenges and production challenges get overcome, because I keep hearing that when those get figured out, that's really gonna greatly reduce the cost of micro LED and make it something that you could use for something other than just super premium applications.

Ney Corsino: Yeah. At that point, it is almost like a process industry. If you don't control the yield it cannot be cost-effective. So they will have to operate at a very high yield. I think the company will go with the market. As part of the transformation from the early days of Nanolumens, we are now very market-centric and we will respond to the market demands in the short, mid, and long-term.

So when you say you're market centric, you mean you're focused on certain verticals like airports? 

Ney Corsino: Exactly, yeah. We try to translate unique aspects of those segments into the portfolio, and into the design that we will provide.

Does that kind of apply to going after larger public spaces, that sort of thing? 

Ney Corsino: Yes. So let me also give you a little bit of insight into the business. The largest portion of the revenue mix was on the airport and also in theme parks, so large projects that come every other year. But since then we are now having a very evenly distributed mix where we operate in airports for sure, theme entertainment for sure. But now we also do lots of business with corporate, large venues, but also, especially their lobby and briefing centers. Higher-ed has been investing nicely, Sportsbook, and last but not least, the golf segment. I think those segments are all growing for us, and that gives us a more evenly spread mix in the top line.

Why are all these different segments now investing in LED versus 2-3 years ago? Is this just a function of price and awareness? 

Ney Corsino: I think so. I think the product became more affordable. The product became better, therefore it can be applied in different ways, on different surfaces, and I think the previous solutions they had has already depreciated, and LED becomes the next technology that’s future-proof that provides a more immersive experience.

And I think not to overplay the word immersively, but there's an enormous trend in an immersive experience, and when can you achieve that? And I think LED from a screen technology is very capable of doing that. 

Yeah I've certainly seen this emergence, particularly of these experiential venues where they're using projection, and I love what some of them do. I've got a good friend who has one in Montreal, but I just wonder if that's a technology that's gonna be taken over by LED with time, because you've got more flexibility, it doesn't have to be a darkened room and you're not confronted by some of the environmental issues.

Ney Corsino: True. I think my belief is that no, the technologies will coexist. One technology opens up a new application like those new kinds of museums u or experiential centers that you mentioned. Eventually, some of them will move to LED when they find it is appropriate to have an application to do so. Projection will still stay there. So I think they will coexist, but they will find a new balance in terms of sharing the market. 

One thing I believe your company has expanded into in terms of broadening the product line, is some of the mesh LED products that are both for indoor and outdoor use. Are you seeing a lot of activity there?

Ney Corsino: Yeah, we started that more than a year ago. We installed the big landscape here in Atlanta, the TKE building. I think that got a lot of media exposure. It's a large surface up high in the building. 

It's an elevator test facility, right?

Ney Corsino: That's a test and showroom facility. So there's a lot of elevators going up and down. The building has a glass facade so people could go into the elevator and yet see the stadium down there and see the city, and they didn't want to block that view so we engineered a match solution where you go through the elevator and you still see through and enjoy the same view. However, if you are on the road, in the stadium and you look back at the building, you have this beautiful branding screen there, and that was designed about two to three years ago. It was delivered about a year plus ago, and since then we have seen the pipeline increase.

People became aware of it and the possibilities of it, especially the architects and consultants are very interested to see what the new possibilities are, and we've been engaging more and more in those conversations, and with that, the pipeline keeps growing. 

I assume that one of the reasons there's a lot of interest in that is because it's pretty lightweight, and as you say, it doesn't block light coming in, in the way that a solid kind of cabinet-based system would do. Is that a big attraction?

Ney Corsino: Yeah

You mentioned earlier working with the channel and with integrators. Are you also trying to circulate and drive awareness amongst the design and architectural communities because I kind of see LEDs becoming a building material. 

Ney Corsino: Yeah, we have a separate group within the company here that deals exclusively with the AUC group and we have lots of certified material for training. We do lots of hands-on learning, and we find out that, although we are a very known and improved and growing brand, there are still a lot of people that need to know us better. So that's definitely one aspect of importance for us and we enjoy it because it's not a sale conversation. It's more of a solution conversation in many cases. 

You're based in Atlanta, you do your design, all the specifications, and everything in Atlanta and like everybody else, you get some of the manufacturing done overseas. You're competing with a hell of a lot of companies that have sales offices here and maybe some degree of support, but most of what they do is on the other side of the Pacific. Is that a kind of a key marketing plank that you are based in the US and somewhat designed and assembled in the US versus the others? 

Ney Corsino: A hundred percent. We are very proud of it, and let me quote a customer the other day. The customer, it's a new engagement channel partner and he asked, “When we deal with your company, we actually don't need to use Google Translator. Is that right?” I replied, “No, we don't need Google translator. We are here. We have the full skills here. We are very easy to do business with. We respond very quickly, and we are very adaptive.” At the end of the day, if you put everything into Excel or into the papers it is more cost-effective to have it this way. 

And are you finding just generally that the people you're working with, they are familiar or they've had enough experience in the marketplace to understand that you can have a Chinese manufacturer that has a sales office over here, but support everything else is overseas and that becomes problematic?

Ney Corsino: True, and Chinese manufacturers knock on my door every single, and they offer me, and of course, they offer many other people out there. So then the question is, what's the value proposition? What's the uniqueness? 

So we are very tied with our supply chain. We have made improvements in the last two years. They are paying off nicely, and our channel partners working with us have appreciated all the value that we have been bringing to the table, and once we go through that experience, a hundred percent of the time, it's becoming repeatable and the repeatability of it gives me the comfort that we are adding value to their business, and we can do that in a profitable way for the industry, including ourselves. 

Where are you at as a company in terms of headcount and are you public or private?

Ney Corsino: We're a privately owned company. Therefore we don't share business metrics. 

But do you have 50 employees, 100 employees, or 5k employees? 

Ney Corsino: Around a hundred. 

Okay, and is most of that in Atlanta? 

Ney Corsino: I would say 70 to 80% in Atlanta, and the remaining part spread.

For your manufacturing, do you have people over in China or wherever you get some of your product made or components made? 

Ney Corsino: Yeah, so we work with a contract manufacturer but we have R&D and a supply base in China. 

If people wanna know more about your company, where would they find you online?

Ney Corsino: Nnanolumens.com. We have refreshed the website and brought a lot of tools into it, making the experience a lot more user-friendly and that's where we'll find us. 

Great. All right, thank you for spending some time with me. 

Ney Corsino: It was my pleasure. Dave.

Gavin Smith, Voxon

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

When I was at the big ISE pro AV trade show a few weeks ago, I yet  again saw several products that were billed as holograms, even though they didn't even loosely fit the technical definition.

I am always paying attention to news and social media posts that use that terminology, and once in a while, I come across something that actually does start to align with the true definition of holograms and holography. Like Voxon, which operates out of Adelaide, Australia.

Started years ago as a beer drinking and tinkering maker project in a garage, Voxon now has a physical product for sale that generates a visual with depth that viewers can walk around and see from different angles.

That product is mainly being bought by universities and R&D teams at companies to play with and learn, but the long game for Voxon is to produce or be the engine for other products that really do live up to the mainstream, Hollywood-driven notion of holograms.

I had a great chat with co-founder and CEO Gavin Smith.

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TRANSCRIPT

Gavin, thank you very much for joining me. I know you're up in Scotland, but you are based in Adelaide, Australia, correct?

Gavin Smith: Yes, that's right. I'm originally from Scotland. I grew up here, spent the first part of my life in the north of Scotland in Elgin, and then I went to university in Paisley, Glasgow and then eventually, after working for 10 years in the banking sector, I immigrated to Australia and I've lived in Adelaide for the last 14 years. 

That's quite a climate shift! 

Gavin Smith: Yes, it is a climate shift. I was speaking to my wife the day before, and it was about 40 degrees there, just now they're having a heat wave, whereas up in Elgin here, it's about 1 degree at the moment.

Yeah. I'm thinking, why are you there in February? But on the other hand, why would you wanna be in Adelaide if it's 40 Celsius? 

Gavin Smith: I quite like the cold. I prefer to be in this temperature right now than 40 degrees, that's for sure. 

Oh, I just spent 45 minutes with my snow machine clearing 25 centimeters of snow off my driveway, so I wouldn't mind being in Adelaide today.  

Gavin Smith: Thankfully I can have the best of both worlds. I'm heading back there in about a week and a half time. 

I was intrigued by your company. I saw a couple of LinkedIn posts with embedded videos and thought that's interesting and I wanted to speak more. So can you tell me what Voxon does? 

Gavin Smith: Yes, sure. So Voxon is a company that started in about 2012-2013, and it came out of two joint research projects. One was me and my friend Will, based in Adelaide, we had a Thursday Night Lab Session, as we called it, where we went to the shed and we drank a few beers and we tried to invent things. It was a bit weird, science-esque.

So this wasn't exactly a lab? 

Gavin Smith: It was a shed. Let's face it, with a beer fridge and there was a lot of machinery, which was in various stages of repair. We used to get hard rubbish off the right side of the road in Adelaide and take it apart and see what we could make. 

It was just amateur invention hour. But it was at the start of that project, we built fairly rudimentary machines, CNC machines and we took apart laser scanners and were just inquisitive about how they work from a mechanical point of view. But that then turned into more of a, let's see how far we can push ourselves and learn new stuff, and we've been inspired by sci-fi, Star Wars, all those sorts of things. So we said, let's try and make the sort of 3D display that we'd seen in the movies and those science fiction movies always had the same type of display, and that wasn't a screen, that wasn't a headset. It was always some sort of floating image that you could walk around and you could look out from any direction and the common name for that in popular media was a holographic display. That's what people called it. So that's what we set out to build, and we very quickly figured out that this type of display had to be something to do with projecting images or dots onto some sort of surface that moved and that's because in order to render these little dots that make up the image, inside a space that had physical dimensions, you couldn't make the lights just appear on air. We figured you, you might be able to do some sort of gas or some sort of lasers and things like that. But the way we approached it was starting off by just shaking business cards back and forwards and shining lasers on them, and then that made a line because of persistence of vision. 

I always think that Neanderthal man invented the volumetric display because they probably waved burning embers around on the sticks at nighttime and drew those patterns in the air and those patterns really only existed because of the persistence of vision and the extrusion of light through a volume of space, and so that's what we decided to do, and we realized if you could draw a line, then if you could control the laser and turn it off and on again, you could draw a dot. And so we did that by cutting the laser beam with a rotating CD that was stuck on a high-speed drill with some sticky tape on it. We chopped the laser into little bits, and by controlling the speed of the laser, we ended up having a single dot, which we referred to as a voxel, that's what we Googled that a dot in space is referred to as a voxel and then we extrapolated from there and say if we're building these images out of little pixels of light or voxels, we need more and more of these dots, and when you do the math you quickly realize that you need millions of dots of light or volume to make an image, and that's difficult. And really that started us down the road of experimenting with video projectors, with lasers with all sorts of things and more and more advanced moving surfaces, and eventually, we made a small helical display using a vacuum-formed helix that we basically made in Will's wife's kitchen when she was out, in the oven, and yeah, we created a very small image of an elephant. You might call it a hologram at the time. That's what we called it at the time, but it was a volumetric swept surface image. The terminology I'll go into a bit more detail, but at the time it was just a hologram to us, and we thought this was amazing and we'd never seen it before. So we put a video of it on YouTube and some guys in America who were unbeknown to us doing the same project got in contact with us and push came to shove, we decided to join forces and form Voxon, and that was back in 2013. 

So when you created this little elephant, was that like a big ‘aha’ moment? Like, “Oh my God, we figured this out”?

Gavin Smith: Yes, very much so. We believed at the time, we were the first people to do this. In fact, we weren't. But it was the first time we'd seen this type of image, and it was literally spine tingly amazing, to see a truly three-dimensional object that you could look down from, above, from the sides, from any angle, and it filled a space the same way as you or I fill a space in the physical world, you could measure its length that's spread, that's height and even its volume in gallons or liters. It had a tangible existence in the physical world and not on a screen as other 3D images tend to do.

At this point, was this a stationary object? 

Gavin Smith: Yes, at this point the elephant was stationary and the way I'd created the elephant was we'd figured out, in order to make this elephant, we first needed to have the swept surface moving. So that was the helical screen, which was spinning at about 900 RPM on a very small electric motor and then we had a video projector that we'd managed to get going at about 1,200 frames per second, and in order to create the images, which were cross sections, helical cross sections of an elephant, that was all done offline. So the way I approached that was, we used software called 3D Studio Max, which is a design software, and in that, I modeled a helix and an elephant, and I then intersected the helix with the elephant in the software, rotated the helix digitally, and then I rendered out the resultant cross-section, the boolean operation of one on the other, and this is like taking a drill and drilling a hole into the ground and looking at just a helical core sample.

So really it was like a CT scan of this elephant, but just slice at a time, and then I rendered those images to a file. I wrote some software to convert it to a new video format that we had to invent to compress all that data into this high-speed image stream, and then projected that onto the helix. Now, of course, the timing of the images and the rotation of the helix were not in sync, and so much like an old CRT screen where the vertical shift is not dialed in, the elephant would drift out the top of the display and come back in the bottom, and at that point, we knew that this was all about a combination of mathematics, optics, precision, and timing. And to make it interactive, we'd have to write a real-time computer program capable of generating these images in real-time, and that was the next part of the puzzle.

This was a work working prototype basically. 

Gavin Smith: This was a working prototype, yeah. 

How big was it? 

Gavin Smith: The helix was very small. It was about five centimeters in diameter, about an inch and a half in diameter, and about an inch tall. But because the projector that we used was a Pico projector at the time, and it was about half the size of a pack of cards. This tiny little thing that we got off the internet from Texas Instruments, and you could focus it at about one centimeter away. So all those little pixels were infinitesimally small, so it was a very high-resolution display and very small, and we realized to get these number of frames per second, we'd have to take advantage of one of the most incredible pieces of engineering ever conceived, in my opinion, and that is the DLP chip from Texas Instruments invented by Larry Hornbeck who passed away several years ago, sadly, and that is an array of mirrors that is grown on a chip using photolithography, the same process as you create microchips, and that array of mirrors contains upwards of a million mirrors arranged in a two-dimensional array, and they can tilt on and off physically about 30,000 times a second.

And that's called a MEMS, a microelectromechanical display or in optical terms, a spatial light modulator. So it's something that turns the light on and off at ultra-high speed, and those on-off cycles are what give us our Z-resolution on the display. So that's the slices that make up the display.

Wow. So where are you at now with the company now that you've formed it and you've grown it, what's happened since that very first prototype elephant?

Gavin Smith: Following that we realized that my programming skills were finite. I'd spent 10 years as a COBOL programmer in banking, and I wasn't up to the task of writing what was needed, which was a low-level graphics engine. This didn't need a mainframe, no, and we couldn't afford a mainframe, even if we wanted one.

So we looked up on the internet to see who we could find in terms of programming to join the company, and there were two programmers who stood out. They were referred to as the top two programmers in the world and were John Carmack of Oculus, and then there was Ken Silverman who wrote the graphics engine for Duke Nukem back in the late 90s, so we contacted Ken. John wasn't available so we contacted Ken and demoed to him at Brown University in Rhode Island where he was working subsequently as basically a computer programmer teacher with his dad, who was the Dean of Engineering there, and Ken really liked what we were doing and his understanding of mathematics and foxholes and 3D rendering really made him think this was something he wanted to be involved in. So he joined our company as a founder and chief computer scientist, and he has led the development of the core rendering engine, which we call the Voxon Photonic engine and that's really our core IP, it's the ability to tick any 3D graphics from a third party source, from Unity, from a C program or something else, and turn it into a high speed projected image, which can be processed in such a way as to de-wrap them when they're projected, so they're the right size. We use dithering in real time to make color possible, which is similar to newsprint, CMY newsprint in the newspaper, and this all basically allows us to project images onto any type of moving surface now and do it in real-time and make applications that are much bigger and extensible so we can plug it into other programs or have people write their own programs for our displays.

So you've emerged from being an R&D effort in the shed to a real company to having working prototypes and now you're an operating company with the product. 

Gavin Smith: I like to say we've emerged, but I'd very much say we're still crossing the chasm, so to speak, in terms of the technology landscape.

After that initial prototype, we spent many years batting our heads together, trying to work as a team in America, and eventually, Will and I decided to raise some money in Australia and set up the company there. We raised about a million and a half Australian dollars. It was about a million US dollars back in 2017, and that was enough to employ some extra engineers and business development, and an experienced COO and start working on our first product, which was the VX1. Now, the VX1 was a different type of display. We decided not to do the helix back then, and we decided to make a different type of display, and that was a reciprocating display and so we invented a way of moving a screen up and down very efficiently using resonance. It’s the same I guess mechanical thing that all objects have, and that is at a certain frequency, they start vibrating if there's a driving vibration force. So the Tacoma Bridge falling down when the wind blew at the right speed was an example of when resonances destroyed something. But an opera singer, breaking a glass at the right pitch is another example of something that vibrates due to a striving force, and so we found out if we built a screen, which was mounted on springs that were of a very particular weight, and the springs were a very particular constant of Young's modulus, we could vibrate that subsystem and the screen would vibrate up and down very efficiently and very fast, fast enough that you couldn't see the screen. So that's what the VX1 became, and onto the back of that screen, we project images and those images from a swept volume, and the VX1 had a volume of about 18x18x8 cm, I think it's about 7 inches square by about 3 inches tall, and we have a single projector mounted inside of that and a computer and a ton of electronics keeps it all in sync, and we built a software API for it and a library of programs that come built into it. So it's off the shelf, you turn it on and it works.

And so we built that back in 2017 and over the last five years, it's evolved into something which is very reliable and now, you can't tell them apart when they're manufactured at the start, each one might look different with hot glue and duct tape and all the rest of it. But now we have a complete digital workflow. We outsource most of the manufacture of the parts and we do final assembly software, QC, and packaging up and then ship them out to companies we've sold probably about 120 VX1s globally since 2017, and those have gone out to companies all around the world, like Sony, MIT, Harvard, CMU, Unity, BA Systems, Verizon, Erickson, a lot of companies and they've bought them and they're generally going into explorative use cases. 

Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like they're going into labs as opposed to stores. 

Gavin Smith: Yeah, they're not going into stores. The VX1 is really an evaluation system. It's not prime time ready for running all day long, and the reason for that is it has a vibration component to it, and also the refresh rate of the VX1 is actually variable within the volume. It's hard to explain, but the apparent volume refresh rate is 30 hertz in the middle and 15 hertz at the poles and so it has a little bit of flicker. But in a dark environment, it's really spellbinding and it's actually used in museums. There's some in Germany and a science museum there. It's been used in an art exhibition  in Paris, where the art was created by David Levine and MIT Media Lab and it's frequently used in universities and it pops up in all sorts of trade shows, and it's always a talking point and it always gathers a crowd around it, and what we like to say with the volumetric display from a marketing point of view, or really a description of what it is, it's really about creating a digital campfire. That's the kind of user experience. 

It's gathering people around something intimately in a way that they can still have eye contact and maintain a conversation, and each person has their own perspective and view of the 3D data. 

The scale you're describing is still quite small and that seems to be What I've experienced with, when I've seen demonstrations at the SID trade show of light field displays. They're all like the size of a soda bottle at most. 

Is that a function of just the technology, you can't just make these things big?

Gavin Smith: You can make them bigger, and we have since that point. The biggest display that we've made so far was one that we just delivered to BA Systems in Frimley near London, and fo that one, we've gone back to the helical display for that particular one, and it's. 46 centimeters in diameter and 8 centimeters deep. So that's about nine times the volume of the VX1. So that's a much bigger display. 

Now you can, with a swept volume, you can go as big as you'd like within the realms of physics, and what I mean by that is with a rotating display, you can make the display as big as something that can rotate at a speed that's fast enough to make the medium kind of disappear. So if you think about propellers and fans, for example, I've seen pedestal fans that are a meter in diameter running faster than we run our display, and with rotating displays, it's easier to do because you have conservation of momentum and you have inertia which drives the display around, and yet you can rotate the volume as well, have it enclosed so that you're not generating airflow as a fan does. 

So for example, if you have a propeller-shaped blade encased in a cylindrical enclosure, and that enclosure is spinning, then you don't get the air resistance you get with a fan and the display that we made for BA Systems is ultimately silent and flicker-free because we're running at exactly 30 hertz throughout the volume, which means you don't get flicker, but reciprocating displays, ones that go up and down, scaling them is more of a challenge because you're having to push the air out the way up and down, and as the size of the screen moving up and down gets bigger, if you're projecting from behind, for example, you also have to start considering things like the flexing of the substrate that you're projecting onto. For a front projection display where you project down from the top, we can go bigger because you can make a very lightweight, thicker screen out of exotic materials and those are materials that are very light but very stiff. Things like air gels and foamed metals, and very lightweight honeycomb structure so that way you can go bigger but we may need to move into the realms of using reduced atmospheric displays, partial vacuums, and things like that to reduce the resistance or using materials that are air permeable, such as meshes that move up and down very quickly. And we have done experiments with those and found that we can go a lot bigger. 

However, with the current projection systems that we're using, you then have to increase the brightness because the brightness of the image is also stretched out through a volume. If you imagine a home cinema projector projecting 3k or 4k lumens, you have to consider that each of the images that it's projecting is pretty much evenly lit in terms of all the pixels that you're projecting. Whereas what we are doing is we are projecting these thousands of images, we're only illuminating the cross-section of every object. So we're maybe only using 1% of the available brightness of the projector at any one time, unless you project a solid slice all the way across, which is really you're building up this construct, which is how I explain it to people as it's very similar to 3D printing. If you look at how a 3D printer works, we are doing exactly the same thing, except we are printing using light instead of PLA and we're printing thousands and thousands of times faster. 

In digital signage, the thing that always gets people nervous is moving parts, and that directly affects reliability and longevity. How do you address that?

Gavin Smith: So the VX1 is a good example of moving parts in a display that isn't yet ready for long-running and when I say long-running, we do have it in exhibitions, but we have recently engineered it in such a way that the parts that may break or will break are the four springs that drive the machine, and those have been engineered to resonate at particular frequency. Now after several hundred million extensions of those springs, they can fatigue and they will fatigue break and that's something that we're working on, and that might be a month or three weeks of running 24/7, and so we've made those springs user replaceable. You can change them in two or three minutes for a fresh set. So it's almost like the mechanical profile of something like an Inkjet printer where you have to change the cartridge every so often.

And we find with mechanical stuff, people accept mechanical things in their lives as long as the maintenance/utility ratio is at a level they can accept like bicycles, cars, and things like that. You maintain them as long as their utility outweighs the inconvenience of the repair. Now for projection equipment and things like that in digital signage, there are a lot of two-dimensional technologies that are ultra-reliable on those things, big LED panels, 2D video projectors and just lighting. You can turn them on and leave them and you should be okay.

So in our rotating displays and we have another rotating display that we're working on, which we can't discuss just now cuz it's still under NDA, is part of the reason we're going down that rabbit hole or going down that design sort of path because we can make rotating displays, which are very reliable, they're effectively like a record player. You turn it on and it spins around and you could leave it and come back in three weeks and it would still be spinning around, and also a rotating display if properly manufactured within tolerances won't cause the vibration, and the vibration is really the thing that can cause the issues because vibration can lead to fatigue and failure in electrical components, electronic components, small cracks in circuits, and things like that.

So from our point of view, we're going towards rotating mechanics because that ultimately allows us to make things which are reliable enough to be used in a wide range of industries including digital signage, advertising, medical imaging and gaming, and many more.

In my world, there are all kinds of companies who are saying that they have holographic products of some kind or another. As somebody who's doing something that sounds very much like a hologram or close to what we thought of when we all saw Star Wars, what do you think of those things? 

Gavin Smith: I don't like to be a troll, first of all on LinkedIn, and so I try to shy away from saying, look, that's rubbish. But what I try to do is politely point out how things work when it's not clear from someone's post how something might work or where it's misleading. Now if you look at the term hologram, it comes from the Greek, hólos and grammḗ, which means the whole message, and in a way, I tend to think of an actual hologram, which is created using lasers, laser interference patterns, and light beams and things like that they don't represent the whole message. Because if you take your credit card out, which is one of the few places you will see a hologram you'll notice that you can't look down on the hologram from above, you can't turn the card over and look at it from the back. They are a limited view of something, and so the term hologram has become, as you say, in popular fiction, and popular media, it's really a catchall for anything that is sci-fi 3D related, right? And it’s misused, everyone calls it a hologram, and our staff sometimes call it a hologram. I like to say it's not a hologram because it has a lot more features than a hologram.

Holograms have some really interesting properties, one of which is that you can cut a hologram into 10 little pieces and it turns into 10 individual little holograms, and that's a really interesting thing. But holograms from a 3D point of view don't exist in signage anywhere. They simply don't. The terminology used to describe things that you see in signage and popular media is completely misused, and I like to go through them and categorize them into different things. And those are, first of all, volumetric displays of which we're the only company in the world that's making a commercial volumetric display. There's one other company Aerial Burton, who are based in Japan that makes a volumetric display, but it's a very high-tech scientific prototype that uses lasers to explode the air and has very low resolution. And then you've got autostereoscopic 3D displays, and they broadly fit into the categories of lenticular displays which are as you probably know LCD panels, which have got a plastic lens array on them that allows you to see a left and a right image, and those left and right images can give you a stereoscopic view. I would call them stereoscopic displays because they're not 3d. You can't look at them from any direction and they don't physically occupy three-dimensional euclidean space, which is what the real world is, and those types of displays come in different formats. So you get some with just horizontal parallax, which means you can move your head left and right and see a number of distinct views. You've got some that you can move up and down as well, and also get a little bit of vertical parallax as well, and there's probably five or six companies doing those sorts of displays. You've got Looking Glass, Lightfield Labs, Acer, and Sodium, so that area can grow. The physical size of those displays can get bigger, but the bigger they get, the harder it is to move further away because you're pupil distance means it's harder to get a 3D view, and also with any display like that, the 3D image that you see because it's the result of you seeing two independent images with your left and right eye, that 3D image can never leave the bounds or the window of the display, and that's something in advertising, which is very misused a lot, they show a 2D monitor with the image leaping out beyond the border of the monitor, and that just can't happen. That breaks the laws of physics, and so that's the kind of three auto stereoscopic 3D landscapes, and it's hard to say that autostereoscopic, 3D display because people zone out and they go, is it a hologram? And no it's not. 

The other types of 3D that are popular just now are obviously, glasses-based display, AR, VR, mixed-reality, and we don't really, we don't really mind about that or care about that because it's something you have to put something on your head, and that's our different thing really. So those offer you an immersive experience where you go down a rabbit hole and you're in another world and that's not what we are about.

And then you've got the fake 3D displays, which are not 3D stereoscopically but appear that way, and that's where I get slightly annoyed by those displays, but I understand there are people making types of signage I guess you would say, that is perfectly suitable for a scenario and those are things like Pepper’s ghost which is when you reflect a 2D image off a big piece of glass or plexiglass, and that's the pepper, the famous one, the Tupac hologram at Coachella. I met the guy and spoke to him. He's a really lovely guy and I had a good chat about that, and he knows full well that it's an illusion, but it's the illusion that Disneyland has been using for many years, and it's a perfectly good illusion for a seated studio audience because they see someone on stage and they're doing it now with the, I think the ABBA Show in London is a similar type of setup. 

They call them holograms, but it's a 2D picture that's far enough away that you can be made to believe that it's three-dimensional and it might exist at different levels like a diorama. You could have a stack of images, on fly screens or whatever, that appear to be layered, but ultimately they are 2D, and then the one that's come out recently, which causes probably the most amount of confusion for people are the anamorphic projections on large billboards, and everyone's seen these displays on LinkedIn and YouTube, and they tend to appear on large curved billboards in parts of China where the rental of the billboards is sufficiently cheap as you can put these big images up there, film them from one particular spot in 2d, and then put that on LinkedIn and have people comment on it and say, wow, that's an amazing hologram. Even though a) they haven't seen this in real life and b) it's not a hologram and it's not even three-dimensional. It's a perspective-based 2D trick, and so one of our challenges is expectation management, and that is people see large-scale fake 2D images, and fake 3D images and then they conclude that it must be possible and they want to buy one, and then when they see yours they go, oh, it's much smaller than I imagined, and you feel like saying, it's real. It's actually based on science, and you could walk around it.

And that's the challenge we're at just now. Trying to move away from this feeling that you have to have the biggest display in the world for it to be valid, and a lot of the business for us and a lot of the inquiries we get are from the likes of the Middle East, where they want to build very big, very impressive, very bright, very colorful displays and they say, we want a hologram that will fit in a football stadium and fly around in the sky, and you have to say well, that's great, but that's also impossible using anything that's even imaginable today, let alone physically achievable, and so yeah, we are very much a case of trying to be as honest as we can with the limitations, but also with the opportunities because regardless of the fact that our technology is relatively small compared to large screen billboards, we have got the ability to create sci-fi-inspired interactive displays that you can put in personal spaces, in museums, in galleries, in shopping centers, and they really do look like something up close under scrutiny that you might see in a Marvel movie, and that's the kind of relationship we're trying to find with other companies as well.

There are other types of the display as well. You probably talked to Daniel about some of his displays, which are levitating grains of dust and things like that, and the challenge I have with them is yes, you can make a 3D image, but you have to look at how long it takes to make that 3D image and they're really more akin to painting with light. It's long-exposure photography. You have to manipulate something and move it around over a long period of time to bring it, to build a single image, and scaling those types of displays is impossible. It’s the same with laser-based displays, whenever you're moving a single dot around, you run out of resolution extraordinarily fast because it's a linear thing, and even with Aerial Burton exploding the air with a laser they can only do about 1000 or 2000 dots every second, and that breaks down to being able to draw maybe a very simple two-dimensional shape whereas to draw a detailed image, an elephant or anything like that, that we've displayed in the past, it requires upwards of 30 or 40 million dots a second to do that with each image, each volume contains millions of dots. 

Where do you see this going in, let's say, five years from now? And are you at that point selling products or are you licensing the technology to larger display manufacturers? Or something else?

Gavin Smith: So at the moment what we're doing is we're looking for projects that we can scale and one of the first projects that we're working on just now and the technology can be applied to a range of different industries. As you can imagine, any new display technology. You could use it for CT scans, you could use it for advertising, for point of sale, for a whole lot of different things. But you have to choose those projects early on when the technology is immature, and that is low-hanging fruit if you want to use that term, and so our low-hanging freight at the moment, we believe is in the entertainment industry, digital out-of-home entertainment to be specific, which is the likes of video gaming and entertainment venues, and so 2018, we were in the Tokyo Game Show with one of our machines, and we were situated next to Taito at the company that made Space Invaders, and their board came across their senior members and they played with our technology and they really liked it. And so we entered into a conversation with them and over several years, we have built a Space invaders arcade machine called Next Dimension, and that's using our rotating volumetric display with three projectors each running at 4,000 frames per second and a large rotating volume, and we've written a new Space Invaders arcade game and Taito has granted us the license to bring that to market. In order to do that, we're now doing commercial testing and technical testing which involves taking the technology into venues, play testing it and getting feedback from the venues on the suitability of the game and the profitability of it as a product. So with that game, our plan is to follow in the footsteps of the previous Space Invader game, which was called Frenzy made by Roth Rolls. It sold 3000 or 4000 units globally. So if you could do that, it would be a profitable first venture in terms of bringing technology to market, and at the moment, we're looking to raise some capital. We need to raise $2-3 million USD to do the design from the manufacturer for that and build the first batch of machines which would be rolled out globally. 

Now, that's really seen for us as a launch of technology using the IP of Space Invaders as a carrier, a launch vehicle for the technology, but once launched and once our technology is widely known and understood, what we then plan to do is build our own revenue generating model and technology platform that can be deployed to venues around the world who can use this as a kind of an entertainment device where you can run different IP on it from different vendors and do a sort of profit share with the venue owners. So a cinema, Chucke CheeseB, Dave & Busters, those types of venues, as well as bowling alleys, VR arcades, and all those types of entertainment venues that currently is starting to grow in strength, largely because people are now looking for entertainment experiences, not necessarily just staying at home. 

COVID obviously threw a curve ball our way as well. When our Space Invaders machine was sent to Japan for testing, COVID had just happened so it went into internal testing within Taito, and then Square Enix who owns Taito, their parent company decreed that Taito would no longer manufacture arcade machines but would license their IP only so that kind of threw a spanner in the works and they've come back to us and said, we'd love the game, but we want you to bring it to market, not us. So that's one thing we're working on just now. There's a video of Space Invaders: Next Dimension on YouTube that you can look at, and it's a really fun experience because it's a four-player game. We've added the volumetric nature. You can fly up and down during sub-games. You can bump your next-door neighbor with your spaceship and get a power-up. It really is for us a way of saying, look, this is a new way, it's a new palette of which to make new gaming experiences and the future is really up to the imaginations of people writing software. 

All right. That was super interesting. I learned a lot there and some of it is, as often the case, I understood as well.

Gavin Smith: That's great. I'm glad you understand. It is a hard thing to wrap your head around, especially for us trying to demonstrate the nature of the technology in 2D YouTube videos and LinkedIn videos, and you really have to see it with your own eyes to understand it, and that's why this week I was over for a meeting with BA Systems, but I took the opportunity to spend several days in London at a film Studio in SoHo, in London, the owners very gratefully let me have a demonstration group there, and I spent two days last week demonstrating the product to ten or so companies come in and see the technology, and it's only then when they really start to get their creative juices flowing and that's where POCs projects kick-off. 

So that's what we're looking for just now, are companies that have imaginative people and they have a need for creating some new interactive media that can be symbiotic with their existing VR and AR metaverse type stuff. But really something that's designed for people up close and personal, intimate experiences. 

If people want to get in touch, where do they find you online? 

Gavin Smith: So we have a website, which is just www.voxon.co. Voxon Photonics is our Australian company name, and you can find us on LinkedIn.

Actually, my own personal LinkedIn is generally where I post most stuff. That's Gavin Smith on LinkedIn, you can look me up there around, and then we have the Voxon Photonics LinkedIn page and we're on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube as well. We have a lot of videos on YouTube. That's a good place to start. But if you wanna get in touch, contact us via Voxon.co. Drop us an email and we'll be happy to have a meeting and a video call. 

All right, Gavin, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

Gavin Smith: My pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.

Brandon Harp, Electrosonic

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

When I see an ambitious new visual display project lit up at a new or reno'd airport, office tower or attraction, I just about assume that if it's in the US, the company that put it in is probably Electrosonic.

The company is, technically, an AV systems integrator, and there are lots of them out there, of all sizes. But where corporate meeting spaces, control rooms and reception areas are the day-to-day work for most of those companies, the bread and butter work for Electrosonic is in locations where experience is the primary consideration and mindset.

The company - which has offices in the US, Europe and Asia - has a ton of experience and expertise in delivering AV and IT jobs that involve more than getting infrastructure in place. They work a lot with creative design and technology shops who are fantastic at the big ideas and compelling visuals, but want and need to hand off the install to a seasoned team.

I had a great chat about Electrosonic with Brandon Harp, a senior business development manager working out of the company's New York offices.

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TRANSCRIPT

Brandon, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on Electrosonic and what it does that's different from a lot of the AV integrators who are out there? 

Brandon Harp: Sure. Thanks, David. I appreciate you having me on the podcast. I've been a longtime admirer of your content and so forth, so I've been following you for many years, so I really appreciate the opportunity.

So Electrosonic is a technology professional services firm. We design, build and support innovative technology solutions that create unforgettable experiences where people live, work, and play for many years. You probably know of us from the museum and the theme park world but we've expanded over the years and have really started to focus solely on immersive and experiential environments, and so for us, we're a bit of a specialized firm. We do consider ourselves still a boutique-style AV systems integrator, but the kinds of projects that we work on are global level and span a multitude of different industries, including corporate and retail and attractions and a multitude of others.

You said you expanded into this from museums and those kinds of attractions. Was that a conscious decision or is that just where the business was going? 

Brandon Harp: Right after Covid, we made a decision to go back to our roots, which were always these complex sort of custom environments that we had been working in for many years, which our clients best knew us for. We've done away with just the kind of typical hang-and-bang conference room projects. We still do a portion of those if there is an element to a more project that fits better into our scope. But we've really done a good job, I think, as a company of being able to identify where our strengths are and where we can really add value for our customers. And that is really in that experiential and immersive sort of environment working with video walls, various different interactives, projection mapping, and things of that nature. 

Is it a situation where you don't really want to do the meat, potatoes, boardroom, collaboration displays, all that sort of stuff because there's no money in it or minimal money in it, or is it just not terribly interesting?

Brandon Harp: I think it's a combination of all those things, Dave, I think with the standard corporate conference rooms, it's really become a race to the bottom, and we just as a company have recognized where our strengths are on delivering these projects and really our delivery model best lends itself to more of these custom really high-end engineering projects where we need a certain level of technical ability that not all integrators have, and so those are the kinds of projects that we're setting our sights on, and that's the ones that we continue to get hired for because of our ability to not only project manage, but engineer and design. 

Something you might not know about us is that we actually have a full design consulting firm within our larger company, and we look at things through, I would say, a much more creative lens. So it's less about just engineering a system, and it's more about looking at it through a creative lens and saying, all right, what's the user experience? What is the story that you're trying to tell? How does that all get fused with the architecture? And then really thinking about at the end of the day, what is the human connection and what are they gonna feel as the system gets implemented and they go on to use it.

Yeah, you've found this niche and pretty lucrative niche in that a lot of the AV/IT systems guys can be very good at the technical side of putting something in. But they've probably not spent a lot of time with video walls or projection mapping or inversive environments, and you just start talking about that and they're looking at you like, could you say that again?

Brandon Harp: Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to our roots, working on dark rides and so forth in theme parks. If you can imagine some of the complexities of being able to projection map in an environment like that, we've been able to essentially replicate that and bring that same methodology, that same sort of design consulting and engineering into corporate spaces, briefing centers, visitor centers, lobby attractions, things like that where you've got this sort of experiential element that we're best known for, and then we help you think through it creatively and our creative technologists and knowledge experts can really help the clients think more about, okay, what is that user experience? What do you want them to feel? As opposed to just looking at boxes and squares on walls and trying to price technology. 

So our approach has been a bit different, but it seems to be very effective with our clientele, and they like the fact that we're not afraid to take the technology away from them in order to really think through that content experience, to think through what is it not only short term but also the longer term for their environment. 

It's interesting because so many places are now being defined as attractions. So 20 years ago, an attraction was a theme park or a museum but now, as you alluded, a corporate lobby is an attraction.

Brandon Harp: That's right. We've seen a big uptick in that right around the time of Covid, so 2020 and onward. What we're also seeing is that there are quite a few real estate developers now who are trying to take on these attractions. I think one that you're probably familiar with, that everyone has either been to or is aware of now, is SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, where SL Green was the real estate developer behind an attraction like that, which is an observation deck that spans multiple floors and is multi-sensory. 

So working with real estate developers like that who have a good understanding of real estate and square footage, how do we apply that to an attraction-based environment and help them be able to have the very best system to create that guest experience, and that's what we've been doing and that's why we've continued to get hired for these large scale projects that seem to have those sorts of elements.

For that one in New York, what was driving SL Green? 

Brandon Harp: What was really driving SL Green was the vision that their CEO, Mark Holliday had to have this observation deck that sits high above the clouds in New York, and as part of a major building that went up just next door to Grand Central Station, which is One Vanderbilt and so 90 stories up in the air, you've got this multi-sensory experience where people can not only come and see and enjoy the views of New York but also be immersed in these various different rooms and environments that really lend itself to something for everyone. 

You don't necessarily have to be a tourist to enjoy it. You can also be a local or someone just passing through. But it really lends itself to something for everyone, and now we're starting to see more and more of these major supertalls that are going up, that are changing the New York skyline, having an element of an immersive experience in it, whether it's an observation deck or a lobby experience, an elevator experience, things of that nature.

And where did they see the money out of that? If it's an observatory high up, I assume they're charging for that. 

Brandon Harp: They are. It's a paid attraction. So that uptick in paid attractions inside of corporate, what were typically fully corporate buildings is now something that we're seeing more and more of.

Yes, you may have, all the other floors in the building are corporate tenants, just like One Vanderbilt. But it also has this attraction there that spans four floors. So you're starting to see this mix of not only corporate, but attraction-based entertainment, and think about it, in New York City, it's not a theme park like a Disney World or a Universal, where you've got lots and lots of acres to play with. We're talking about going vertically here for these attractions that go up in New York City. So we're starting to see a real uptick in that and really being able to apply all of that methodology that we've developed over the years in how to deliver those projects successfully for the theme park business to these corporate institutions.

I'm assuming it's a bit of a delicate dance for these property developers if they do that sort of thing because if you turn your building into a tourist attraction, you're at the risk of a lot of crowds and people wandering around, and the regular tenants are fighting their way to get to the elevators and things.

Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think to combat that, what they've done is for example, One Vanderbilt, they have all the tenants have their own lobby, so they're actually utilizing their own elevators and so forth. So their day is not interrupted at all by anything in terms of crowds or anyone trying to get into One Vanderbilt. For the observation deck in SUMMIT, it's got its own separate entrance and it's actually very well thought through. I think what impressed me most about SL Green was their ability to adapt to the ever-changing kind of design and environment, and they really did a good job of listening to all of the consultants that they brought in.

Again, they're real estate developers, and so to take on a major attraction inside one of the largest buildings in Manhattan is something that was a bit foreign to them. But they really brought in great consultants to help them think through every aspect of this, which is why it runs so effectively and efficiently now.

You mentioned that you have a design consultancy. What is all that about? 

Brandon Harp: So our design consultancy practice is based out of Las Vegas. We do have design consultants now that are remote as well. So we have a few here on the East coast and in Denver and a couple of other strategic places around the US and overseas in Europe.

But for us, it's very much about AV consulting. What you may not know about us is that we also do security surveillance, access control, as well as information communication technology, which is your structured cabling as well as acoustics. So oftentimes we find ourselves in these conversations very early on with architects and owners and people who are designing these experiences, and so they want us to be a part of their team to help steer the technology decisions, and so we're finding that we're being hired more and more early on in these projects because we look at things through that creative lens. We consider ourselves creative technologists, very true to our trade and very client-focused throughout, and being involved very early to help steer and guide the solution through master planning is very important to the outcome of these projects, and so now what we're seeing is an uptick in design-build as well, because we're working very closely with the owner and the owner reps at an early stage to really flush out the design and the intent, and then if we're able to come in and do the AV build, which we're finding is happening more and more, there seems to be a real desire to have one hand to shake at the end of the day when it comes for all design-build and all the way through to support, which is what we offer.

Do you find that the end users, whether they're property developers or just building owners or major tenants or whatever, that they are smarter or more sophisticated about what they wanna do than maybe they were 5-10 years ago? 

Brandon Harp: That's a great question. I think it's still a mixed bag. Honestly, I think there's oftentimes when clients come to us with blue sky ideas, or maybe they have some sort of concept renderings that they had hired a firm to put together for them and then they ask us, "How do we execute this?” and “What do we need to be able to be successful?” And I think that's where our design consulting practice comes in. We help them really think about not only the technology but more importantly, what's the outcome, how the user feels and what are they gonna experience here that's gonna make them want to continue to come back and continue to talk about this.

So getting in early like that has really been very effective for us, and then the build portion of it as well, which we've always been very known for. Having a good understanding of the project from day one has really made it very effective for us.

How important is scale? We've seen all kinds of press releases about a LED video wall that's 60 feet wide or 100 feet wide, whatever the dimensions are. But I'm wondering if you're starting to see a more sophisticated approach where you are not just thinking about the scale, but how it fits, how is this gonna work within the environment? All those sorts of things. 

Brandon Harp: Yeah, I think some of the clientele has thought that through or they've gathered information from other projects. Some do have maybe a bit of a more sophisticated approach, or they have someone who's a technology advisor who's been helping them think through things. I think where we come in is really to be able to help them take that to fruition, right? And take it to the next step. So I do think it's still a bit of a mixed bag. 

In terms of the scale itself, it depends on the project. I think we do a number of projects that are gonna have multiple locations over and over again, and we create this blueprint for those, but we also do a lot of these one-off projects, as you can imagine, especially when it comes to museums and theme parks and briefing centers and things of that nature where it's one of a kind experience and we really have to be able to deliver on what the client's looking for. 

Yeah, and that's a bit of a challenge I would imagine. One-off projects are awesome when they come along, but it becomes a bit of a roller coaster ride as opposed to the predictable recurring services you might be providing. 

Brandon Harp: It is very much and we find with these one-off projects that because of the size and the scale of them, typically they take anywhere from a year onwards to be able to complete. So you can imagine that requires a great deal of patience and skill and making sure that we have updated schedules just strong project management, and strong design engineering early on to make sure that we have the very best system in place. But, also the supply chain is another thing, right? And so not to go too far of a rabbit hole on that. But if your projects are typically a year to a year and a half in length, often what we're finding now is that the client wants to know right out of the gates, are there any stumbling blocks in terms of supply chain challenges? And then we have to order this material, and equipment very early on in the process in order to combat that or we have to find something else that we can use in order to deliver the system on time and within budget. So it's a bit of, as you said, a rollercoaster is a great way to describe it.

You said a year and a half. With some airports and let's say hospital campuses, that's probably more like a 4-5 year planning cycle, right? 

Brandon Harp: Certainly, yeah. I think the year to a year and a half seems to be average, but yes, to your point, we often find ourselves involved in airport projects and so forth where the delivery date is 2026 or 2028 even now. And again, I think it has to do with being able to get in early with the right people, make sure that we're providing them with what they need to be successful, and then staying  in touch and in tune with what's going on through the life cycle of the project and the management of it. Project management in AV has always been a hot point, right? 

And so for us, it's very much about the project managers being able to see through a project of that length properly and show it the adequate attention that it needs to be successful. 

I'm also guessing that because you're sometimes looking that far out for an airport or something like that, you really need to stay on top of emerging technology and think about, okay, I'm not thinking about what I'm going to put in right now with what's available right now, I'm thinking about what's going to be out there three years from now, which might be micro LED or something else that isn't really commercially available right now. 

Brandon Harp: That's very true and that's a great point. It's certainly something that we take into consideration on all of these projects.

I think you have to look at the manufacturers and the longevity of their companies. Are they gonna be around for many years to come? And what does the product roadmap look like? And I think that's why we have our key partners that we work with who are very good at understanding what's coming, what's future, making sure that they stay top of mind with all of our designers and our engineers to ensure that at the end of the day when the system is installed, that it is the most recent and up to date technology, and it's not something that's going to be phased out or end of life that just simply isn't feasible when it comes to spares or replacements, anything like that.

So Thinking that through, especially on these longer projects is really important and that's what makes us effective. 

I've been intrigued when I've seen big design agencies like Gensler or content-driven technology shops like Moment Factory where they've worked with you guys a lot because I get the sense they know what they're good at, they know how far they can take a big idea, but at some point, they have to hand it off to somebody who's good at the execution. 

Brandon Harp: That's exactly right. We have developed, I think, the kind of the secret sauce for being able to work with companies like Gensler and Moment Factory, because you're right, at the end of the day, they're the big thinkers, right? They're the creatives who ultimately generate the user experience that is on those LED video walls, or on the digital signage or the interactive, or the inside of the projection mapping, and so forth. 

For us, we have to play that supporting role and not every project is exactly the same, but we do understand what their strengths and capabilities are And then we play a very supporting role in that, and we've now made it so that it's a well-oiled machine and as partners, we're very agile and limber enough to be able to say, we need to pivot a little bit, or we need to look at this a little bit differently than the last one. And again, not Two projects are all the same, and so I think it's our ability to work with them and adapt to ever-changing circumstances and projects and environments that allow us to be as effective together as we are. 

Do you try hard to stay in your lane, so to speak, and not get into the creative stuff?

Brandon Harp: I think at the end of the day, you have to have a creative vein in you to work here, right? That's ultimately what we do. We're constantly pushing the envelope of what's possible, but we also have to put the trust in our partners, and I think we do a really good job of that.

We've never been a company that's done content or experience design, and the reason for that is that we have a multitude of partners who do and who do it very well, and so for us, it's more about playing that supporting role with making sure that the technology is something that they can work with when they're creating their content but it's also something that is gonna be easy for the end user to use if that's a requirement, and really just play that supporting role. 

I think that, at the end of the day, what people see in what they view on these large displays, as you talked about, is really the product of the creative minds that go into the content and the storytelling, and we're there to play that supportive role.

I think that's more what I'm asking is: you guys conceivably could have a creative team that would produce the big visuals and so on, but because you work with some great partners, you do your thing and let them do their thing and don't get into a competition.

Brandon Harp: That's right. There's no competition there. Where I think we do is supplement them very well is our executive consulting. So we have Will Bolen, Chris Conti, and Chris Moore, who are executive consultants who work for us, those three individuals are super talented. They've got a great deal of experience, both working hand in hand with clients to help them think through what it is that they're looking to do with their space. But they're also very technical, right? So they come up with sketches and little drawings and things like that can really make them multi-faceted individuals within the company, and that's why they're so effective. 

Oftentimes they get paired with the likes of Moment Factory or Gensler or an architect or an experienced design firm who's looking to help their client uncover what is possible with the technology and then from there, we work it through design consulting and into systems integration, and then all the way through to service. 

Do you have end users who are coming to you and just basically saying, “I want that!” because they've seen something? 

Brandon Harp: Yeah, believe it or not, they do, and I revert back to SUMMIT One Vanderbilt again because it's very unique. It's award-winning and it's just something that everybody, I think is aware of or familiar with now, especially in New York City and they constantly are saying, how do we create that, or even in the airport environments like we just did Terminal A at Newark, I've had multiple airports say to me, “We want that 232-foot long video wall right at departures or behind the check encounter” and our response to that, Dave, is often, do something different. 

It's great to be able to pull inspiration from other projects, but no one wants to see the same project replicated. So how do you pull inspiration from something that's that unique, but then put your own spin on it? And especially in an airport environment, because it is high traffic, it's a public place, millions of people and users go through there. How do you do something that differentiates? And that's what we always try to coach our clients into thinking about, what is it that's gonna make you the next talk of the town? How do you get yourself to that point where people are taking selfies or people are talking about the technology and the experience that they had as they moved through the airport? So those are the kinds of things we keep in mind.

Yeah, there are really two tracks in airports. You've got the big immersive experiential, almost like public art installations, but then you've got a lot of LED and flat panel displays that are just about making the experience of getting your way through the airport to a gate and onto a plane easier.

Brandon Harp: I actually think there are three, Dave. I would add the digital out-of-home experience as well there, because there's the Clear Channels and the Intersections of the world all have these large contracts with these airports and real estate owners who have their screens as well And in a lot of these airport environments, like Newark for example, there are over 80 displays there that is specifically geared towards targeted advertising. 

Then you've got your art piece, which you mentioned, which is more experiential and immersive, and then the third pillar is the typical airport communications, right? Because people have to know where their flight is and how to get from point A to point B, whether it's wayfinding or something of that nature. But there's really a multitude of digital endpoints that go into any airport or terminal experience.

Yeah, I have been blabbering away lately that if you really wanna see the state of the art of digital signage and how that technology is applied in different ways, go look at a renovated or new airport terminal. 

Brandon Harp: It's true, and the government's flushing a lot of money into obviously the infrastructure and redevelopment of these airports.

That trend we feel is gonna continue and it's gonna continue to push the envelope for what is possible. I think at the end of the day, you're finding that these old, outdated airports really just need a refresh, something that's gonna make people wanna fly out of there. Something that's gonna set the tone for the trip that they're about to go on. But also just as silly as it sounds, put a smile on their face. If there's a way to make people feel at home or comfortable or keep them entertained so that they're buying more concessions within an airport environment, that's a huge win for that terminal and that airport.

I just wanna know where my gate is, how to get there, and how long is it gonna take me to get through the various lines.

Brandon Harp: And maybe where the bar is? 

Never. (Laughter)

Is there a trend that you're starting to see emerge?

Brandon Harp: Yeah I think there is. I think, just at the start of 2023, we've seen a real uptick when it comes to experiential and immersive environments in higher education, but also in sports. 

We're finding more and more of these higher education institutions wanna give students access to a big video wall that may have a multitude of interactive touchpoints and ways of being able to use the system itself and interact with it across a multitude of different tracks throughout the school. 

So there's been a lot of that recently and then sports as well. These kinds of one-off experiences within stadiums and training facilities and things like that. There really has been an uptick in those through since the start of the year and we're expecting that trend to continue. 

Is there a big project that you're allowed to talk about that we're gonna see in the next calendar year? 

Brandon Harp: I can't really get into the specifics and the name of it, but the one that comes to mind for me is an immersive museum experience that's gonna be happening downtown in Manhattan, just outside of The Oculus, so a well-traveled area. It's a building that probably anybody who's from New York or has been to that part of the area is gonna be revamped and it's gonna be led by an immersive artist and a team of people who are really invested in not only the video but the audio portion of any given museum experience.

So you can expect upwards of 20+ video walls and large-scale rooms with huge projection-mapped walls, floors, and ceilings. Just a variety of different experiences as you travel through each room. So it's something that's on the horizon, and the scheduled opening date is right around Labor Day of this year. So we'll see if that holds true. But in any case, it is something that's upcoming and we can give you more information on it as it unfolds. 

That’s led by a real estate developer? 

Brandon Harp: It is another real estate developer, so much like we were talking about earlier in the conversation with SL Green, this is another company that's very prominent in New York. This is the first real venture for them into more of the attractions type of space. So they do need a lot of help, but we're there to provide it and the support that they need to be successful, and we really anticipate this being a game changer for them and especially for lower Manhattan.

All right, Brandon, thank you! 

Brandon Harp: Yeah, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on today.

   

Mark Ossel, Global Signage Alliance

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

When I was doing my initial recon walk through the many halls of ISE a few weeks back, I went by a stand that was highlighting something called the Global Signage Alliance, which was unfamiliar to me and made me curious.

The stand's occupants weren't there, and I was on the go, so I never got a chance to get filled in at the show. But I asked some questions and made some contacts after the fact. I assumed this was a Euro-centric version of the Digital Signage Federation. There have been 2 or 3 of those, I think, and maybe this was another. But it turns out that's not what the GSA, as it is called for short, is all about. It's a formalized user community for Samsung digital signage software and smart display products.

The cynic in me thought "OK, this is kinda like big pharma and energy companies that form institutes." Imagine me doing air quotes around institutes. But that's not what this is, according to GSA chairman Mark Ossel. He says the organization was initiated out of common needs among companies - starting in the Netherlands - who wanted to share information, ideas and business opportunities ... who were all, also, using Samsung's CMS software MagicINFO, or Samsung's smart signage displays. It's the shared purpose, strength in numbers thing at play here.

However, Ossel did say that Samsung does now provide some financial support. This makes sense, at least to me. A user group has the interest and mission to stay closer to a product and its evolution, as opposed to being disparate end-users that end up with new functions or features just getting dropped on them by a technology company. Which happens.

For Samsung, they can be closer to some key customers and support a user community, without perhaps doing as much heavy lifting to build and nurture that community.

Have a listen.

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TRANSCRIPT

Mark, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what the Global Signage Alliance is all about? 

Mark Ossel: Yeah, my pleasure, thanks for asking. The Global Signage Alliance is a user group, meaning a group of companies, and individuals from the digital signage world, coming from the creative side, coming from the services side, or being an end-user company using digital signage. So it's all kinds of companies who basically come together in the organization. It's a nonprofit organization, on a global scale, to exchange information, and share experiences but at the same time where there are opportunities to work together because these days more and more opportunities cross country boundaries as well as of course cross the own area of specialism. So you want to join forces with other companies to basically be able to fulfill the requirements of a proposal, tender, or procedure where you basically need to combine hardware, software, services, implementation, installation, integration, whatever it is, beyond what your own capabilities are.

So it's working together as well and then last, but not least, joining forces for marketing events or all kinds of exposures, which we jointly do to promote digital signage and the capabilities of the group. Moreover, the group as well secures the quality of what is being delivered by, in fact ensuring training to employees, and staff members, raising the bar in the quality of what is being delivered.

In the future, we want to create a quality stamp to let the market and the buyers know that these are companies that have the right skills to deliver a quality solution. 

What's the backstory? Where did this come from? 

Mark Ossel: It started in the Netherlands with a few companies in digital signage who basically understood that it makes sense to work together as well as to exchange experience, and information sharing and those companies had in fact an informal network, then it was growing with other companies across Europe, and then basically, yeah, it came to the point that we said it makes sense if we formalize this as a nonprofit organization with the structure of members, have a dedicated staff, have a formal board and comply with all the necessities you want to have as a decent organization. 

When I was at ISE two-three weeks ago, I was walking through one of the halls, the digital signage hall, and walked by the Global Signage Alliance stand. Unfortunately, someone must have stepped away for a break or something like that, there wasn't anybody there to chat with, so I'm catching up after the fact. 

I assumed when I was walking by that, oh, this is like a European version of the Digital Signage Federation, and there's been a couple of runs at that by different organizations In the past, I'm not quite sure where they're at, but when I'm digging into it a little bit, I actually see this is not necessarily a broad community, it's really focused around Samsung and Magic Info and its platform. Is that accurate? And why is that if so?

Mark Ossel: Well spotted and, no one was there at the time you passed by, but it was interesting because we wanted to raise awareness for the GSA at ISE and ISE basically does recognize that we now start to represent a segment of their target audience and of the market, and they were willing to give us the ability to be there on the stage. 

Yeah linked to Samsung platforms, not only Magic Info but any Samsung platform. The reason is, you need to make a choice as a company on what technologies you use, and approximately half of the screens come from Samsung. We do believe in the architecture and the embedded capabilities in the screens. So it made sense that all those companies joined forces using the Samsung platforms and believed that it was a proper way forward. We also get some support from Samsung and that works both ways. 

As a user group, we are now recognized by Samsung as well as a proper sounding board for them, providing input on the requirements of the market. So they listen to us, we talk directly to their developers and give direction to the developments and the next generation, based on what we feel we need as a market and with new products, of course, we are the Guinea pigs to test it before it gets to market. So it works both ways. It works quite well to have a loyal dedicated highly skilled group of companies working with Samsung on moving digital signage to the next level

Yeah, I could certainly see the business advantage to companies to stay close to Samsung or some other company that's developing a platform like that, because you can either have the new advances, the new thinking dropped in your lap, and hopefully it makes you happier or you can be contributing to what that development roadmap and product roadmap looks like by being tight with them.

Mark Ossel: Exactly, and now we not only get to know it in the beginning, but we basically drive development as well in the direction, and we have the discussions on next-generation technologies because there might be a time delay of one or two years from development to market release. So we are involved in the early stage but as well with any changes to current products and new requirements or taking with new products as well, the migration path from one to another or the coexistence. It all comes to play, and then, yeah, being able to provide feedback from the market, from real people who work with it on a daily basis. That is to the development team of great value as well. 

Did Samsung as a corporate entity approach a loose-knit group in the Netherlands to formalize something? Or was this something that this group formalized and then went to Samsung and said, hey, we wanna do this but in order to make it happen, we need some financial support ‘cause there's just the day-to-day of a nonprofit and you may have a small budget, but you still have costs?

Mark Ossel: Yeah, sure. So it went the first way. So the group of companies coming together created the organization, regardless if Samsung could support it or not. Because we saw the need and the benefit of a group of companies working together, like exchanging information and all the things I said to work together on larger projects and we had seen the benefits already of that. So the drive came from the market and Samsung, they do welcome it. 

What happens if you are a digital signage company that works across a number of platforms and not necessarily just Magic Info and Samsung's embedded smart displays? Is there any value in being a member and can you be a member?

Mark Ossel: Good question. Although many of the members we've got today are dedicated to using the Samsung platforms because that's where their skills and knowledge are based upon. So I don't see many of them using other technologies as well. But if there would be a company that has a mix of technologies, yeah, sure, they're welcome as long as they use the Samsung platforms as well. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense to join. I'm pretty confident that over time, they will use the Samsung platforms more and more because of the added value of focusing on a specific platform and technologies. If you spread your knowledge over a number of platforms and development tracks, your staff becomes too thin, instead of being really deeply focused and trained on a specific technology. I'm in favor of focusing in every respect, that means as well on skills. Knowing a little bit about a lot of platforms does not give you the advantage of knowing some technologies and platforms very deeply.

How many members do you have right now? 

Mark Ossel: We started, in fact, just before the Corona. The timing was unfortunate, so we had to put it on hold. There were no events. It was a bit of a strange world. So we held a ceasefire for some time. And in fact, this year we relaunched the organization. We have a few dozen members right now. It's good to see that even during ISE quite some companies basically were interested, and a number of them signed up on the fly immediately. There are some, of course, who have had to request permission internally or approval from their senior management to join.

But most of them, if not all, see the benefit if we talk and explain what we're doing, and the fees are so low that it’s not a showstopper to become a member. We expect during the course of the year, to bypass a hundred companies as members, and then of course grow beyond. 

When you have somebody walk by the standard at ISE or elsewhere and they say, okay, give me your elevator pitch. Why should I join? What do you tell them? 

Mark Ossel: Ah, good question, and that question of course we answer quite a lot of times. But basically, If you are in digital signage and if you have projects which cross your own area of expertise or cross geography boundaries, you need to act to basically have a partner network of companies you can rely on, data level quality as well. You build a family network. You can work together as well as you can benefit from the experience or the complimentary solutions which the other parts of the family have, then it makes sense for you to join as a member. 

If you basically now look at the memberships they're mainly from Europe, but we are now expanding as well. In fact in Africa, and South Africa, we have members in mid-Asia, and Eastern Europe is growing. We get some interest from the United States, so it's getting more global as well. 

Is Samsung helping raise awareness? 

Mark Ossel: Oh yes, they welcome it in many respects. First of all, this has become a channel to market for them. A way to communicate to the market as well as new products, provide training. We are using doing where Samsung does presentations as well as where if our members do presentations or demonstrate showcases of successes they have implemented, then we see Samsung staff joining those webinars to learn about how their products are being used in the market. 

So in that sense, it works and vice versa. They like the success stories, they like to understand how those products are used and see those showcased, and we basically create a portfolio on our portal as well through online sessions, get the messages across on what can be done or what has been with the technology. 

So in a lot of ways they're encouraging a user, community, user forums, and user discussion without having to directly manage that themselves and not create the illusion, but have that degree of separation so it doesn't feel entirely like, “Here's our Samsung forum. Come here, and oh, by the way, while you're here, we'll sell you our pots and pans.” 

Mark Ossel: Correct. It's to some extent, of course, related to technology and discussions on exchanging information about how they deploy the technology, but it's the other wider discussion on trends as well. Take the trend to the cloud. Not only as storage but also as software in the cloud. The integration of all the social media, the metaverse type of concept, and the impact on digital signage. We spent quite some cycles on security. We did as well security audits on some solutions. Interconnectivity and interactivity as a topic is being discussed, where more and more sensors of any kind, any format are being applied where the interconnection between applications to basically have more data-driven content, use more artificial intelligence in the backend, between the different applications, which through APIs, access data. 

The market demands more flexibility, and more real-time interaction with the end user, and the consumer as well. There are so many trends in the markets that can be discussed and discussed between members. If you look at the younger generation, they want experiences in every respect being in a museum or in a retail store. How can you create that experience? How can you create that interaction with the social media platform? It all comes to play. It's as well, regardless of the lower level technology, these are the topics that are of interest to all the members and yeah, if you talk about it, you hear the different ideas, and it triggers your creativity as well. 

So once in a while, we have those sessions where it's a bit like sitting with friends at the bar and discussing major things and trends, which basically trigger your creativity to gain some new ideas on how to apply that as well. 

For the interest that you've had from North American companies, has there been any kind of pushback or questioning about, “I'm already a member of the Digital Signage Federation, why would I also join this or do I have to choose?” 

Mark Ossel: No, I don't think we get the matter of choosing. In most cases, we talk to them and they see the advantage specifically for American companies that they now get access to a network in Europe, and if they have a customer, like a retail chain, which basically has a global presence, it's of great interest to have access to partners network, friends, and family in Europe, which basically in rollouts or in that kind of thing, it's beneficial to basically expand the network, in fact, beyond the United States.

So if there's a let's say an integrator that is using Magic Info for actually, I'm thinking of a school district in Florida that has an integrator that does a ton of stuff like that if they somehow end up getting questions about, could you take this platform to France or to the Netherlands or Belgium or whatever if they're part of your alliance, conceivably would have business ties or at least exposure to companies over there that could maybe do this in tandem with them or in collaboration with them?

Mark Ossel: Exactly. You got it, and of course, if they have built a great solution, why not promote that in Europe? And it might be something that works, as you said in the case of that school district, maybe that is an application that could be a perfect showcase here, and it gives them access to this market through the network of partners here.

One of the things that were happening at ISE, apart from the black-walled fortress that Samsung weirdly had limited access to their whole stand, was discussion around the evolution of Magic Info and how there was a new platform coming called VXT. Is that something that your group has been aware of and has been talking to Samsung about?

Mark Ossel: Oh yeah, sure. Long before ISE, we started discussions with Samsung on that new platform, VXT. So yeah, as said our alliance is not limited to Magic Info, but all the platforms of Samsung, so this will be part of it as well in the future, and we have discussed functionalities as well as coexistence migration between platforms and so on with Samsung.

So would you say there's been a benefit around that in that you somewhat have insider knowledge of what's coming ahead of perhaps some other companies that are just now starting to get exposure to what this thing is? 

Mark Ossel: Yeah, absolutely. Before ISE, we had conversations about it already and at ISE we even had a specific session with Samsung and some of the members were present on this topic as well. Yeah, we are at the forefront of that development as a group. 

Now, there would be some people who would suggest, it's got some similarities to, let's say, pharmaceutical manufacturers who create institutes and associations and alliances and things like that as a front for their company. It gives them separation by doing it that way. 

Are you getting those kinds of questions or even criticisms at all, like this is just a Samsung thing and they've called it an alliance, but it's not really a nonprofit, and so on? 

Mark Ossel: No, in fact, I don't get it.

It is truly a non-profit organization and independent. It's our own choice to work closely with Samsung, and we see it as mutually beneficial. We get early insight, we have the ability to give feedback and change direction where we feel it would be required. Samsung sees the advantage of having a loyal group that provides professionals with proper technical knowledge to provide valuable feedback. 

It's a win-win. There is no dependency either way. It is beneficial for both sides. 

And what's your background on this? How did you get involved in the work that you do in digital signage, what is that? 

Mark Ossel: I started a long time back, with a video company that goes back to the early 80s.I have been in the IT industry as well since the early 80s. So the combination of audio, video, and digit digitization has been my path. Been on the board of a signage company for 30 years. 

Oh wow. Which one was that? 

Mark Ossel: It’s DVC, a Dutch company, pretty significant. One in digital signage and in traditional signage. But yeah, I have some other activities well in the energy sector, and it's funny to see that all those things now perfectly come together. Energy and sustainability have become even big things in digital signage. It's one of the major topics and concerns of many customers, ranging from, how much energy a screen use? Or how can I manage the energy consumption or sustain it? 

In a broader sense basically reflects everything from packaging to your total CO2 footprint which now becomes a topic in many discussions as well. So that's one we see as well in the development conversations of hardware and what you can drive and manage through software in this sense on this hot topic.

Yeah, that's such an interesting area now that people in North America, like me, have looked at Europe and thought, okay that's a different circumstance. Few people in North America seem to be asking questions about energy consumption for computing devices and displays and so on, and then Ukraine happened and everything else has happened around it and now you're even hearing people in the United States and Canada asking the questions around, how much power is this consuming and how do we limit that? 

Mark Ossel: Exactly. It's simple things like, what's your standby power? How can you control the energy? How can you measure it? And I'm assuming it goes a step further. Even if you look at content, some content can be created to use less power than others. 

You use all white it's blinding and it's really sucking it up. If you use black backgrounds, it's not using power.

Mark Ossel: Yeah. Those simple things start to make a difference. But then as well, if there's nobody walking nearby can you dim it, can you have the sensors checking and dims if there's nobody it's the area, why would you have streetlights on if there's nobody in that area at all, huh? And so more sophisticated solutions to address this topic are hot right now as well. 

So if people want to find out more about the Global Signage Alliance, where do they go? What do they need to do? 

Mark Ossel: First of all, look at the website, gs-alliance.org.

That's where they basically have the initial information and the contact details to our staff who basically then provide them with anything they want and then we'll take it from there and welcome them as a member. 

And it's just one tier of memberships, right?

Mark Ossel: Yeah, it’s simple. 

EUR 250 and you're in, as long as you qualify, right?

Mark Ossel: Exactly EUR 250, then you're in and you start making money if you really use take advantage and use the network. 

Thank you very much for spending some time with me.

Mark Ossel: Thanks, Dave, for asking the right questions and giving the opportunity to get the GSA across to your audience as well Thanks for that opportunity, and continue with your great programs.

John Hoyle, Sook

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

If an entrepreneur or an established brand wants to open a temporary pop-up store on a busy retail street, there's a lot of planning, work and cost involved in making that actually happen.

So what if there was a retail space in a high profile location that could be rented for as short a time window as an hour ... that uses LCD video walls and software to establish the look and feel of the shop?

That's the operating premise behind Sook, an interesting UK start-up that has digital-first spaces for rent in attractive locations around the UK, including London's retail-lined Oxford Street.

I visited that Oxford Street location when I was in London recently, and had a good chat with Sook founder and CEO John Hoyle.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

John Hoyle: So it's really easy to quickly create a clean and bespoke environment and so that means you can literally do whatever you want in these places. It's a space that is as much about non-retail uses as it is about retail. It could be somewhere to have a screening of a movie, it could be somewhere to do yoga, pilates, or meditation or it's a shop in the more traditional form. 

The whole rationale behind this is that if you facilitate hourly access to units like this, which would otherwise be empty, you can actually drive three to five times more revenue than a traditional lease because you are making use of the time before, you know, standard rent is over a 10-year period, deeply inefficient because someone sits in a space and expects there to be effectively making all of their money on in the peak hours whenever those are, which is like a Saturday. Using this you can drive your own footfall, drive different peaks across 120 hours of the week and generate more revenue, as well as make it much more efficient for occupiers to come and engage with the space. 

It's completely modular. You can take this entire fit-out away and move it elsewhere. It's all free-standing so there's a selection of furniture. You can see the hanging rails and shelving units here which makes it super easy for someone to come and self-serve if they want to. So using QR codes, you can learn exactly what you need to do, full WiFi, utilities, audio, et cetera, anyone can come quickly turn this into a space to use for whatever they want. These modules obviously can be disassembled and moved to another space. So we don't take leases. We are just a device that operates as an asset management tool within specific spaces. If a landlord wants to move us, they can, there's a small cost associated with that, but it's much more economically and environmentally sustainable to have this fit-out that can be reused in multiple other locations.

This one is slightly compromised because we're over two stories and the rear loading is in the basement. It actually works better on one level with a big back of the house. It's a bit like a theater set. All of the physical preparation happens out back so that you can efficiently roll into the space for your activation. 

I'll show you downstairs. Everything that’s here, we can take away. There’s storage out back, but this has been everything from a rave for Jaegrmeister who launched a party, to the launch of a High Streets Reports by a big industry insider to a salsa dancing class. So it's all about using the same space for multiple different activations and doing it in a way that allows digital content to drive how you make that place appropriate.

That's why it's interesting to me that they have started to add digital screens to retail kind of after the fact and now we're in the situation where you have people who look like this, that are setting up pop-up retail with digital as the enabling part of it. So you can change the feel of a store, change the message, and everything else with a few keystrokes. 

John Hoyle: Absolutely. If you think about where the brands of the future come from, they are gonna predominantly start online because the barriers to entry are much lower. But they need that IRL engagement to have an authentic touchpoint with their customers. But they don't wanna scale as the private equity-backed retailers in the past have by taking 120 leases and then marketing them. They want to dip in and dip out and have an online-type solution that's agile to determine where works best for their product and to make use of the fact that they can drive their own footfall through social media. 

So if you think about it, I suppose a good example in the UK might be a, let's say Superdry, a challenger brand that's had to play the game of real estate to get where it is, to become AN established brand. We believe that we can facilitate that happening for the brands of the future without them having to need a real estate department to negotiate leases, to deal with the portfolio of assets. In fact, there will be this agile solution that they can use as they see fit, and what's interesting about that is that suddenly you are changing the role of a shop as a static distribution channel for stuff, and you're making it much more of a point of engagement for customers to actually meet IRL, the people that sit behind their brand and the products, and that can happen everywhere. There's no need now for perhaps the flagship in Central London or the concept store in Coven Garden because the various entries are lowered by this solution, you could take your product to secondary locations around the UK, do it for a weekend drives an enormous reaction because the people in, let's say Northeast England are not used to seeing something like that and then get out without any of the legacy, liabilities or commitments that you would normally get through these. 

It's a service in just about every respect, right?

If I'm a fashion designer, which is a very novel concept, if I wanted to open up a pop-up store for the weekend, I wouldn't have to worry about the AV. I wouldn't have to worry about any of that stuff, I just do a deal to have the space for six hours or whatever it is and you guys can take it from there, right? 

John Hoyle: You can dice it in whatever way you want. So you could be completely absent and we would run the entire piece for you, including fulfillment, staffing, and even the design of your space, and you can obviously have complete control because using Canva, which is an Australian Photoshop unicorn, you can drag and drop whatever you want onto the walls and you can walk around in 3D before you come here. So you can be in the US and control space in Oxford Street without having to be here. So that opens up enormous opportunities where at a fraction of the cost we can serve you.

But it's more about just that flexibility for occupiers. It's also making physical spaces available for all sorts of uses that are not necessarily traditional retailers. Social media is becoming increasingly important as part of the customer shopping experience. So working with those sorts of brands to engage IRL, onboard customers online, and complement what they're trying to do online is really powerful.

But equally, if you think about amenities. In the UK, retail banking branches are closing down in record numbers because they just don't make any sense with the rise of online banking. There is a real community value to those places for some people. Could we run a banking offer in the lunchtime slot, which is when people wanna go to the banks and not be there the rest of the time? Can you bring digital art into play? Gaming, estate agency, car showrooms? A whole spectrum of retail uses that basically haven't existed in the physical high street for all sorts of reasons previously to be used in a much more agile way in our spaces. 

Is there a typical time window, like the amount of time when you are seeing bookings?

John Hoyle: It completely varies. We've had a guy take the space for an hour, turn it into a shrine to his girlfriend and propose to her. Equally, we were a Corona testing center in one of our spaces for I think 14-15 months, which is a sign of the times. We have three-month bookings. We have three-day bookings, and that's the point, different people wanna do different things at different times and that really is the core of what we do. No one needs a shop seven days a week, hardly, practically, no one needs a shop for a decade. Think about the time that you need to do activations. Let us manage the headache of all of that, learn from it from analytics, and then get out and do something different. 

The old mantra in real estate about location. I suspect that still applies, right? 

John Hoyle: It does, but it's a mindset rather than a reality. My belief is that footfall is a flawed metric, and that's what really underpins that location piece. The way we've done retail traditionally is that you found a location that suits you. Adjacencies are important, but you are really basing it off the demographic in the area, and then footfall, and that's a deeply inefficient model when you think about it. To make a 10-year bet on a place based on a data set that you see at that period in time, sit there for a decade, and only make money on maybe a Saturday or a Sunday. The rest of the time you have a loss-leading asset. You can't be agile and change if something about that location changes, and you're not learning anything about customers elsewhere.

So what we are saying is why not be far more granular, why not figure out which hours of the week your product works in? So Greg's, which is an incredibly successful restaurant brand essentially, it's famous for its sausage rolls, and they sold more Greggs sausage rolls last year than there were Big Macs in the UK, to put some scale on it. So their biggest selling unit is at Birmingham New Street Station and its peak time is from 10:30 on a Friday evening. It's people who've been drinking in pubs, buying sausage rolls, and are out on their way home. The other time they do a lot of business for essentially the building trades very early in the morning. So they are completely different profiles to an apparel brand, for instance. What we're saying is why don't you blend all of those different uses into more concentrated, more efficient spaces? 

Is it nimble enough that you could do multiple occupants in a day?

John Hoyle: Yes, absolutely. 

Have you done that?

John Hoyle: Yes. When you think about it, most shops don't open till 10:00, and most close at about six. Then you've got four, maybe five hours in the morning, which lend themselves to wellness, for instance, and then in the evening when shops sit dormant, this could be an event space, and that's pretty lucrative. In fact, in its own right. I think we could hang our entire business model on what shops would see after hours in certain locations to use this amazing digital tool, to be a private room for a restaurant or could it be a Deliveroo restaurant for instance, or could it just be a party, but rather than renting a bar and having a minimum bar spend of a few thousand pounds, you can have something bespoke, where there is amazing digital content of the person whose birthday is, for instance. Children's parties, and meetups, there are limitless ways of effectively monetizing space when in normal retail times, it's just closed.

Yeah, I've certainly heard of restaurants that are daytime cafes that have realized, okay, we have a kitchen and everything else, but we shut down at 3:00 PM, why don't we have a breakfast place in the evening? It's a Mexican place or whatever, and they're using the same kitchen, but you're sweating the asset more.

John Hoyle: Absolutely. The same principle applies here, just we've gone to extra lengths to make it more versatile. The food and beverage pieces are probably our most challenging use case because of the infrastructure that's required. You can't just have bare walls and exact screens, so that's our limit.

Although you can cater in these places, you just can't really prepare food through cooking. But yeah, given that there are fast approaching a hundred thousand empty shops in the UK alone, and that problem persists throughout developed markets, why aren't we making use of these assets better and doing it in a way that can be financially sustainable? 

If you do it, what's really interesting is that there is a market for people who want to use these spaces at the right price point, and in the UK, if you have an empty shop it becomes a business rate liability, which is like property tax in the US. So an empty unit isn't just an empty unit, it's actually a liability for landlords. So what we're saying is let's bring them back into the community, let's make them accessible. Let's engage with customers in a completely different way, to the risk-free basis that has been the important use of the real estate asset furniture for so long and engages with a whole new spectrum of occupiers that just didn't exist 10 years ago.

If you have a hundred thousand empty shops, is it a risk to you with that many available spaces, the rental property becomes commoditized, the price comes down, and it becomes a challenge for you to be competitive with that?

John Hoyle: Not really, because our model is an arbitrage on whatever the rental levels are. Right now empty shops are a huge opportunity for us, and when you think about it from our customer's point of view, actually rent shop occupation costs are only about 30% of the total costs of having a shop. When you think about the cost of staffing an empty shop. To my point where if your shop is only really profitable on a Saturday, It is really painful having to staff it for the other six days of the week and a landlord will demand that you do. If you're in a shopping center, you have to be open. That is part of the deal, and you think about the inefficiencies around stock, people buy, and there are billions of pounds of stock sitting on shelves around the UK. It's absurd. Why not lend an online demand model with an IRL activation?

Yeah, create a public showroom and get fulfillment on the back end. 

John Hoyle: Exactly, so we believe that we are creating the opportunity for massive efficiency across the board. It is hard to get brands to think differently. There is a huge amount of inertia around some of the big established brands who just have always done things a certain way.

It's the, “I want that unit. I want it for 10 years with a five-year break, If we get X amount of football and we price our stuff at Y, that will convert into profit.” There are lots of guys that cannot think beyond that and that's one of the challenges of being changemakers like we are is getting the 10% of early adopters to think differently about and do stuff, right? 

So where did this come from, this idea?

John Hoyle: I launched it out of an accelerator called Zinc, which is all about delivering social ventures for profit. My background is in real estate. I'm a landlord, formerly at Grosvenor in Central London. So I was deeply frustrated having been on the other side of the fence about the inefficiencies and the huge numbers of occupiers who are excluded from shops. 

The reason there are a hundred thousand empty shops is partly price points, but partly accessibility. All the ancillary costs around lawyers, agents, and these guys are all set up to do deals that have to be at least a year, but generally five and ideally ten. That struck me as such an enormous opportunity for disruption. That we've seen in the office space. We've seen it in the huge residential space. Huge global unicorn businesses have disrupted those sectors, but no one has done that in retail yet, and it's slightly more complex. There are the customers of your customers to think about. There's stock, there's a brand, and that's why a fit-out is necessary to facilitate all of that. 

So if I'm an apparel designer who has just come out of some fashion school and I wanted to open my own, the commitment to do so would be many hundreds of thousands of pounds to do that, and through this model, I can open up on Oxford Street where we are for a day and have a popup and it's gonna cost well, what would that cost for a day?

John Hoyle: It depends. So it's demand-based pricing, so it's cheaper on a Monday than it is on a Saturday. If you can drive your own footfall, then you might as well take a low-value retail allowance. But you can on a good day get this space for probably just under a thousand pounds on Oxford Street, which yeah, no commitment, no utilities, no legacy issues. You come, do your thing, and when you work it works, you've got clear evidence of that that it is really useful as part of your entrepreneurial journey in terms of building momentum, it's great for content, et cetera, and the halo effect that we all recognize of our engagement is massive for your future on mindsets.  

Are you funding this yourself or have you got financial backers? 

John Hoyle: We have done four funding rounds. We are fundraising at the moment as well. This is our seed round where it's running for the next three months.

We're likely to have strategic partnerships with big asset managers who are invested and some retail groups. To date, it's been largely angels in the UK. There's a really vibrant ecosystem of angel investment in the UK because the government gives some great tax breaks called EIS. 

I'm curious if when you approach people if they give you when the tilted head looks or they get it quickly?

John Hoyle: I think as with anything that's new, there is a bit of adoption. So we find that for our first booking, we insist that there is someone in our sales or customer service team present to help people because there's an element of anxiety. It's a bit like if you organize a party for your other half or family member and you're a bit nervous about the caterers and are people gonna turn up, et cetera, then the party starts and you relax. We see that a lot from our first-timers, but we're at 40% repeat customers, and so for subsequent uses, when you know where it all lies, you know what to expect, it's much less stressful for people. 

It's just like your first day at the office when you don't know whether the photocopier works or what your password is, all of that becomes far less scary. So I think the answer is that onboarding involves more friction than we hope will ultimately be the case, and we are very much pushing the envelope of change. There is a bit of a learning curve, and then you see the penny drop and the opportunity. People's heads essentially explode with opportunities to do things that they could do because everyone's got an idea of how they might use a space like this more.

I'm a digital signage guy, so that's what makes me awfully curious about it. How fundamental were the digital screens to make this work? 

John Hoyle: Absolutely fundamental. So there is a business that is failing at the moment that I was a customer of. They are effectively a booking system for empty shops, and they're pioneers in many ways because they've pushed the idea of flexible occupation, but they really are no different from a normal real estate agent, and the problem with just being a booking system is that you don't provide any of the services that are absolutely essential to launching a shop.

They're renting an empty cavity. You gotta figure out the rest?

John Hoyle: Yeah, and if you do that, they'll only rent for a minimum of a week. You turn up. You spend the first day setting up, and the next couple of days, no one comes in because it's Tuesday or Wednesday. Maybe you have a launch event on Thursday. A few people pick it up a bit Friday or Saturday, and then it's over. You spent probably 15,000 pounds. You've had to buy all of this deeply unsustainable, both financially and environmentally stuff in order to facilitate the fit-out, and you've got nothing really to retain from a legacy perspective With ours, the digital screens are utterly fundamental because that's your fit-out. That's what gives you the environment. You can take that content, you can reuse it on your socials, and can reuse it in other Sook spaces. You can send your stock around. But we will provide essentially the entire platform to allow your Sook to take place without you, wherever else you want. 

Could you do these locations without the screens? 

John Hoyle: It would remove a USP of ours, and of course, there is sometimes demand, but what we are trying to do is a hundred percent occupancy, and a big part of that is out-of-home media. So when we're not actively booked, we can be a billboard for your screen, which is a super light touch. It can operate when shops are closed throughout the night and generate revenue.

It is a really powerful, utilitarian way of squeezing revenue out of latent assets, and obviously, an empty shop's just an empty shop, and you can't do any of that. 

Do you have a handle on what you're using for the displays? The screens are obvious, but, are you using a particular piece of software or…?

John Hoyle: You have to ask the AV guys. We've been through several iterations and in classic startup style we've tried lots of tools, we keep the ones that work, we discard the ones that don't and we're constantly iterating and I would describe that device upstairs, like a massive iPhone. Obviously, it's way less sophisticated than the iPhone today. But the principle is the same. Physically, it iterates just your Apple device and then the software behind it upgrades, but without you needing to change the device. So that is the process that we're constantly evolving. 

When did the first Sook open?

John Hoyle: I opened one in 2019 as the sort of first MVP in Cambridge, and then we won a few prizes straight off the bat because it had such success in Cambridge. 

Why Cambridge?

John Hoyle: That's where I live. I wanted to prove that there was demand, which we did, and enough so that Legal in General, the insurance company, and pension fund, gave us our first proper site in a shopping center in Cambridge, which we opened in January, 2020, but of course, we all know what happened a month later. We were pretty quiet op operationally throughout all of 2020 and quite a lot of 2021 for obvious reasons. But we emerged from the pandemic with this site on Oxford street, one on South Molton Street, and one in Edinburgh. So it was clear that we had identified a need from landlords and we've expanded.

Is it important to be on high streets like this, like really well-known ones?

John Hoyle: Yes and no. So at this stage in our business, the startup, people don't know what it is to your point, people wanna understand it and they wanna be in great places, and we have to prove that investing is a success, and then we can generate revenue. So it is really helpful being on Oxford Street as opposed to somewhere unrecognizable.

But our goal is for it to function everywhere and for it to be a platform where Nike can reach a customer in a place that is utterly undesirable from a profile perspective, but where there are still obviously many customers and we believe actually the impact in those places could be bigger, and you asked me earlier about whether the erosion of the retail market could affect us. Well, one of the things that brands will pay us for is the opportunity cost of being able to do this, which is often in less desirable retail locations with a much higher ROI for us than on Oxford Street.

I'll give you a good example. MasterCard used our space in the Metro Center, which is in the northeast of England, it's probably one of the least affluent areas in the UK. We're in big shops, bigger shops and regional shopping centers there, and they're paying us London prices in Newcastle for the opportunity to have those spaces. 

My dream is that there can be a Sook on every high street and it can address all of the community goals in the same way that maybe a town hall does, as well as being a state-of-the-art retail space for brands to dip in and out to engage with those customers and create a halo effect.

Because a fashion designer can be in Newcastle and, doesn't have to come here to launch?

John Hoyle: No, it's bigger than that. Why can't they be in New York or Dubai or Beijing? Stock light, you can use physical stock, but so much of it can be digital, purchases get made online, which through using QR codes, it's not necessarily about leaving with physical stuff, but if you are a global brand on a mission to scale, what a brilliant way of dipping your toe in the water.

And because there are so many empty sites, landlords love something that is gonna delight, that's going to be good for placemaking and community and that in some instances is more important than actually a business case for the space. It's a tool for asset managers to drive footfall into assets.

You see lots of distressed real estate where somebody's put in a gift shop or a calendar shop or whatever, and they don't have a lot of money and it just looks sad and it doesn't lift the street. It takes it down.

John Hoyle: Exactly. We wanna be the opposite of that. And I really believe that constant rotation of activity is the way to bring life back. Because you could have the coolest brand in the world in your unit, I always use the fashion apparel one, but maybe there's a better example of that, but if its peak hours are only on a Saturday, the rest of the week is to all intents and purposes in an empty shop. So it isn't adding anything to those high streets. 

But running up the costs. 

So how many Sooks do you have now?

John Hoyle: We've got 11. We want to double it next year, and part of that is reliant on fundraising.

We're also allowing some other systems to list on our site, and we have our first overseas site agreed upon in South Africa, Johannesburg. Got opportunities in the UAE, the US, Canada, and Europe. As you would not be surprised to hear, I'm just balancing the amazing demand we have for our product with a fundraising environment that's a bit tepid, thanks to all sorts of reasons, not least in the UK because of very recent economic turmoil, which is completely self-inflicted. 

Where is the business out overall, given what you just said about the economy and Covid?

John Hoyle: We doubled our sales last year on year. I'm really happy about that. 

But that would be in an anomaly year. 

John Hoyle: No, I think we will potentially quadruple it this year, and even if we don't add any more sites, we should double it again. The demand from global brands is through the roof. TikTok, Quikr,. Sonos, Universal Music Group, Uber, MasterCard. 

So they're finding you, even though you're a startup in most respect?

John Hoyle: They're finding us so that's incredibly encouraging.

My challenge is not having today, although I expect to rectify that in February, the capital really to run at so many of these opportunities. This is a brilliant time for a disruptor to emerge. The sector is on its knees, asset managers are desperate for a solution. We have a solution. It's proven. It can get better, it can get more exciting. The fit-out you saw upstairs can evolve dramatically, and in fact, there's a very exciting space that I'll point you towards up Oxford Street, which we hope to take over quite soon, that you should go and have a look at, which is really the next generation of what Sook could be even more immersive.

Could you have a larger, almost like the department store, level place with multiple shops, like there are lots of department stores that I've shops within shops now.

John Hoyle: Yes. So we've talked to two department stores about providing that service.

My personal view is that the department store model is inherently inefficient because you go to some amazing stores that I love in New York, like SHOWFIELDS which is the new age department store, and just like every other shop it has a peak and then a massive drop when no one's in there, and that just to me, as a utilitarian, who is very focused on the revenues that real estate assets can yield, just seems a bit mad. 

So the answer is yes, we could work in a department store, but we'd be in that instance much more beneficial to the department store than to us in terms of driving feet at times when they don't necessarily have customers. 

If people wanna find out more about your company, where do they find you?

John Hoyle: www.sook.space. Everything is on our website. We're at Sook Spaces on social media, across all channels. Follow me on LinkedIn. I'm John Hoyle, and yeah, tell the world about Sook because it is coming to a street near you.

All right. Thank you. 

Ben Maher, Outernet London

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

I spent a few days in London, UK ahead of Integrated Systems Europe - in part to break up the trip and flights, but much more so to meet with several companies and see some projects that I'd only been able to see in photos and videos.

The one I particularly wanted to see was Outernet London, a very ambitious, multi-faceted development in the city's center that has, as its visual centerpiece, a huge set of wall and ceiling LED screens that are fully open to the public and positioned in such a way that they can't be missed as people flow from a main exit of the busy Tottenham Court Road Underground station.

I assumed, wrongly, that this exists primarily to run Digital Out Of Home advertising and compete with big screens like those in nearby Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. But there is much more to Outernet, as I learned walking and talking with the developments Chief Commercial Officer, Ben Maher.

The audio may be a bit hit and miss, as we did this on the go and in the crowds that were there even on a chilly January afternoon.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ben Maher: We have this incredibly famous set of assets on this side of the district, which is Denmark Street. So as a business, we've been a landlord on Denmark Street for over 25 years looking after the music stores and we've made, as we said, a huge number of acquisitions, meaning that we own nearly all of the property there by Parcel two or three, and we run a baker for Baker Policy. So if we lose a music store, we replace it with music because we wanna maintain it, sorry, I don’t know how familiar you're with Denmark Street, but as an asset, we wanna maintain this as one of the nice, iconic music streets in the world. 

The first music store opened in 1911, Charlie Chaplin wrote the song, Smile here in 1926. The Melody Maker was founded here in 1954. The Enemy was found here. The owner of the Enemy went around the street with a ledger of all of the music that was sold, and that became the first-ever music chart, which was compiled on this street.

Elton John had his first job as a runner here, and it was the home of the labels, the writers, it was the home of the lawyers, and the management, so people would hang out here in the hope of being discovered. But importantly, talent would wanna be discovered and they'd hang out in the cafe here, this was called the Gioconda Cafe and you'll see Tim Hannaly, the home of British music. But importantly it would be people like Marc Bolan, it would be Jimmy Hendrick, and David Bowie moved and converted an ambulance onto the street and lived here. So it really was an incredible, authentic crucible for music. We’ve maintained the music stores. We put in a 55-room luxury hotel residence, so you stay in the rooms where Frankie Fraser, the Richardson, the Gangland fame, their bar, which was called the Pannaly Bar. Number six Here, out the back is the News House that Malcolm McLaren rented for the Sex Pistols. So you can now stay in that, that's the Anarchy Suite. It's complete with their original graffiti. 

Did big pressure wash it down? 

Ben Maher: No. For better or worse, it's there and it's good. It has a great two listings on it now, but again, in a building like this, incredible history, and Hypnosis were based here. They were the world leading album cover designers. So they created album covers for the likes of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon was created in that room.

When you stay in the rooms, they have names. Like Hypnotized for that room, and then Kiss the Sky is the name of the room where Hendrick used to jam. This is the store where Bob Marley bought his most famous guitar, which was destined for a dustbin for a car mechanic from Essex. This is where the Stones did some of their first-ever recordings and people recorded here all the way through to the likes of the Brit Brats, Adele, and other incredible artists.

So all of this is part of the district, and as I said, we've not tried to Disney-fy this area. We've tried to preserve it. The area dates back all the way to about the 7th century when the church was created to support the Hospital. But once you build infrastructure, communities develop, so this became one of the first slums in London. It was home to 3000 residencies, and over 500 distilleries and this is where Hogarth depicted the Gin riots. So when you see things like that's where that occurred, and this is where it's depicted.

You have elements like Dickens who live down the road in Bloomsbury, wrote Oliver Twist here, and Robert Stevenson. There's incredible history to the area. That is all really important when you're creating platforms and telling stories so that you understand the context within which you exist, not just the recent history. I'll come to some of the other music venues.

So now we’re going to enter the district. Importantly, we have 30,000 square feet of offices, we have 18 retail units, we have popups. We have 13 bars and restaurants and we obviously have screen-enabled spaces. So this first space is the arcade, The Now Arcade. As you can see, it's a full-screen enabled, three-mill pixel-pitched laden environment. All are equipped with acoustic audio. So we have venue-quality audio in all our spaces. 

And the audio is on the bars down below? 

Ben Maher: The district as a whole, through all the spaces, is made up of 230 million pixels. It has 192 kilometers of CAT6 table enabling this and I think it is really important, we have positioned this as a canvas. We've positioned this as a storytelling platform, and that's really important to start with content first so that you can establish the context and the interest of the audience to allow you to tell better brand stories and deliver brand messages. So that has always been the ethos of what we're doing.

We don't stand with one editorial voice or polarizing thought around what we say. We try to democratize access to the platform. So we try to provide as many different interest groups and users to create for the platform because, in all honesty, screens are relatively cheap against the cost of actually feeding them, and creating environments that remain interesting all the time is the biggest challenge we have. So again, one of the things we want to do by using multi-sensory environments is to hand back some of that control to the audiences, not only to create for the platform but also to control their experiences. So although we start with audio-visual, we're on a sort of a technical journey on a path to bleed out new technologies and ensure that people can then interact and control generative experiences for themselves. 

All of the spaces have cameras in them, for example, which will allow for interactivity. So you can come into this space, you might receive a standing ovation or trigger a Mexican wave. The joy of technology as it stands at the moment, and you won't hear talk of Covid. But the reality is people now understand better the reasons to be utilizing QR codes. So these screens can become a launchpad or anything: to commerce, obviously AR experiences, or anything else that we wanna leave. It makes data exchange a much cleaner and more natural sort of methodology. So really important for us to be able to control all of those elements.

As we head down, this provides a queuing function for our venue as well, we have a 1500-person capacity music venue underground, which is the largest new music venue built in central London in the 1940s. This is load in, load out, for the venue. So again, we've configured the streets so that we can have a clean, easy ecological load in, and load out so vehicles can come and jack power straight from the main rather than running their engines and things like that, which is smart.

As we come into the district now, you'll see that we have what was a very traditional maze of News Street. So this was Denmark Place, and we've got here the ability to gate and control the environment so we can create all sorts of experiences and fields and allow people to have events or dress a district in any interesting manner. So five different egress and ingress points across the district. On this side, we've got 14 more hotel rooms because the residences are based in 16 different buildings. So a really different unique point for the hotel. 

Here we have what will be the Denmark Street Recording Studio which will be a pro bono recording studio, again, adding to the ecosystem that we have, bringing people and rewarding talent, just as Denmark Street always did. This is the more historical and music side of the district. This is the more modern screen-enabled place. On the rooftop here. We have an 8000-square-foot modern Chinese restaurant called Tattoo. We have another restaurant on the fourth floor, which will open later this quarter that's called Cavo. They have a rooftop garden here which is joined by a glass bridge, which leads over to the fourth-floor restaurant.

So what you'll see here is we have 2600 LEDs across the runway here. So when we create a red carpet leading to the venue, we can light it up through LED color hues so that we can control those environments. 

So you've got show control, so you can orchestrate the whole thing?

Ben Maher: Brand colors, mood, you name it. We've obviously lifted up causes such as Holocaust Memorial and also for the Ukraine crisis and things like that, that's really important. We understand our environment, we understand the mood.  If you think of the context of certainly out-of-home and. storytelling, smart cities, and IoT play a big part in city planning now, and our environment should be able to adjust to those needs and requirements. We shouldn't just be screaming at audiences. We should be creating dialogue and also understanding the context within which we sit.

So for example, or within GDPR, if somebody comes in, I know if they're looking for WiFi, where their SIM card originates. I know what their default language is. I don't need to invade their privacy. But I can assume when the 50th Dutch person or the 200th Canadian crosses the threshold, I might play the national anthem and change the color of the district. So that creates incredible surprise and delight. 

And that would be data triggered? 

Ben Maher: Completely. We can utilize a custom stack, which controls all of the programs for the district, and that proprietary technology allows us to configure different environments, to configure the different spaces, either in unison or alternatively to have them operate autonomously. And I think it's really important, our point of difference is having that versatility of space. It doesn't just do one thing. We do four core things. We can hold events in our spaces, so that could be a private or public events. We have 32s spots in our spaces, which is, essentially a standard TVC, monetization.

We can do sponsorship. BMW has been a sponsor of our art program. We've presented our wellness program in association with Panadol and importantly, this new stage is gonna be about branded content, telling stories in a slightly longer form in an audiovisual sense in the public domain, and I think it was one of the most incredible moments I've had since being here, reaffirming that we've got an environment that has that versatility and what we wanna do is bring that longer storytelling moment to the form because brands are doing things with brand advocates, with talent.

They're doing things based on purpose or the craft that they create. So we've had driving stories. We've had the launch of the Beatle's actual master Revolver album, the videos that went with that, and again, that creates a different environment. It creates a different context. We've done interactive games, so again, as I said, what you don't wanna be in any environment is a terrible magician. If you do your best trick on the first day, or second day, it's diminishing returns. You're not doing anything innovative or different. 

That's a mistake made over and over again?

Ben Maher: Yeah, and I think it's also quite been quite cathartic knowing that we don’t know everything about this space because no one's ever done this anywhere in the world. So to say that we don't fully understand how the public reacts to work, we have to embrace versatility. So knowing, for example, on the left here we have popup two. On the back corner of the building, we have another popup, which is about twice the size.

These spaces are fully screen-enabled and audio enabled as you see here. If they're not being used for an event, they'll be programmed with our content so that they're relevant. TMP, for example, Take More Photos is a grassroots creative collective. They release briefs on social media and people can submit their photographs and then it curates an exhibition based on the brief. So they do one on Welcome to London. So this one's Welcome to Love in London. They'll do one for International Women's Month, or they'll do one for Black History Month. They did one for the World Cup, for example.

Now these are organizations that don't have budgets typically. So this is pro bono stuff, right? 

Ben Maher: Very much, but again, it exactly comes down to what I said before, which is we want to give access to the platform. We wanna hear different voices to be representative and inclusive of our communities.

Was that part of the pitch as well to Westminster Town Council or something like that? Look, we're building, but it's going to have all sorts of community involvement? 

Ben Maher: Good question. So importantly, when we were talking before, when I showed you everything in front of us, that's Westminster, the road here literally the line down the middle is Camden. So Camden has a very different approach to Westminster. They're just different borrows and it's what you expect, different councils. So we were applying to Camden for our licenses. This area historically had a number of late licenses and bar licenses for the different premises that were here previously and have historically been a musical district. So again, it's quite an entertainment-based space. 

Yeah, I was gonna say they'd be in the mindset anyways for this. 

Ben Maher: Importantly, they have embraced what we're doing, but they have also gone on the journey of understanding what we're doing. Because it's very new. So that is always a challenge. The building and its main purpose of it though is an interesting public space. So if we had created a new private, totally private and shut environment, I don't think we would've been received in the same manner. 

If you've got a second, you might want to stop for a second only because we're gonna watch the Summer Palace and it's about two and a half minutes long and you'll want to see this, but this is a good example of our house content. Something we commissioned to play in the public domain, which allows brands to sit alongside incredible experiences, and as you can see, people naturally get their phones out to record.

I'll tell you the story about how it began. So we ran a camp home for Italian Airways before Christmas, they were one of the first brands to use the space for a commercial message, and they made us nervous. We didn't know what was gonna come cause no one had we've got best practice guides. We've got creative specs, and they created an experience where planes fly over the head of amazing landmarks in Italy and people applauded. For somebody who's worked for 25 years in advertising, yeah, that's an incredible thing to be able to say, quite a lovely experience.

But this was part of the commission that we did or RFP that we did for people to create for the space, and it's an ethereal journey through space-time. But interesting it uses the ceiling as the main communication plan. 

I'm a big fan of these kinds of environments where you look at it and there will be any number of people here who will assume that that's real.

Ben Maher: Oh yeah, and the joy is we’re using a 3mm pixel pitch so you can create that depth of illusion. The total resolution size here is about 6k, so it's not without its challenges, and we have found it unforgiving for things like raw photo footage because it's just so unforgiving on talent so then we can use templating and things like that to accommodate lower resolution assets, but still have them looking credible in the space.

The use of negative space. So not always trying to fill every pixel is also incredibly powerful, so we're trying to utilize that as well. For this, I used to present this in VR, so people are presenting on teams and zoom in VR during the lockdown, trying to explain what we're doing because it's one. It’s one thing explaining a new ad format, but it’s a different thing explaining a new environment altogether. 

Yeah, I'm somebody who's been around this medium, if you wanna call it the technology for 20+ years now and not seen something like this before, particularly the way it's stitched together with everything else, quite honestly, not just, here's this big screen. Be excited!

Ben Maher: Yes, and I think we have to create, as I said, multipurpose and interesting use environments because cities deserve them. You've got, as I said, as many on the weekends as 350,000 people coming through this area and it is becoming an attraction. You, we have six to eight hours of free art programming in this building on a Sunday.

And people email and go, can I see this? When is this happening? And that I think is a good testament to doing things the right way. It's new. We are learning. When we first opened the now trending space, which is the smallest of the spaces, that silver Line proved an incredibly challenging threshold for some people. Because it was like an anthropological experiment. They didn't know whether they could step in. They didn't know what the transaction was. Because they'd never seen a free public entertainment space like that, and as you'd expect children and people who'd had a drink were the first ones to cross the threshold.

But then interestingly put seating in there and people act completely differently. So the psychology of the spaces is also important. Another thing that may be of interest is that this hero screen here on the south wall and the east wall here is permanent deployments, as you can see the slight lines between the wall here, these screens on the north and west are on rails and they can completely retract ah, and the building can open up. So it's one of the first buildings in the world with kinetic staging built in. 

You do have doors too, so you can close the area off for private events? 

Ben Maher: You can see better with the white there. You can see the slacks between how they work. So we'll be bringing new appointments to view to city centers where you'll come with a real-time of day to actually see something happen. You can see, in fact, these ones are usually completely closed and they've been open today for windows. The small area here can operate as a retail unit. It's been a trainer store for Puma. It was a classroom for Mercedes F1 MG with Toto Wolff. It was a studio for the photographer ranking. It was a red carpet zone for Sky. It's been a party for Apple, and NBCU. So again, having addressable spaces that can do a lot, this pixel pitch at 3mm is akin to what they use in the Unreal Engine SFX studios. So that's essentially the backdrop that they shoot. White, shiny floor shows content. The resolution there, as I say, is 3mm-5mm pitch on the outside here because up higher which is still the highest resolution out of in Europe currently certainly at that scale. 

Yeah, I've heard a few 6mm in New York, but not 5mm. 

Ben Maher: So we're really pleased with it. But at that resolution, it's interesting. We do need higher-quality content. Because of that pitch, it can be unforgiving. You'll see Netflix is doing an incredible job. They're a very frequent client of ours, but the animation on here will always look incredible cause it obviously scales infinitely almost. But they produce beautiful output and the resolution is incredible. 

That space, is it also leasable for if BMW wanted to launch a new electric vehicle or something, you could block off this?

Ben Maher: Absolutely. So we held the launch of the new FIFA 23 there and did the FIFA Women's Summit. We've done live boxing with DAZN and Matchroom, so we've held boxing there. We've done events for UNICEF. We've done events for Mothers of Gucci, which is a Gala event. So yeah, we can do private things, but the best way we like the district is having the public in because the more spaces that you privatize, the less inviting the world is, and we want people to come in, experience things free, be entertained, and create moments that ultimately they wanna share and create a destination In the cities we're in.

What would you do if there was a big England football match and I remember Lester Square got kinda destroyed, would you just close this off?

Ben Maher: So we face the challenges that any public destination would face, and we have to manage the environment. So we do risk assessments on anything. We have a really good security team and we do all of the listening and monitoring of those feeds to know what's happening.

We get advice from our partners like TFL, which are local. We've got Camden, and then we liaise with the greater London authorities and also the Emergency response services. So we got a good understanding of what's happening. But yes, we'll make a call based on what's going on to decide how we manage the district because we wanna keep people safe. 

How many people work on this, setting aside security and all that, working with the canvas, and everything else?

Ben Maher: So the Outernet team as a whole is around 80 people. So that'll divide up between everything from the scheduling to the sales teams to the data and center people, creative teams, et cetera.

When did it open?

Ben Maher: Officially, the arcade and the trending spaces opened around late August, and what they’re now building came online from midday each day in November. So it's not been open for long, we're still very much in our infancy but it's nice as I said, to see the behavior of the public and have been here just over four years, to see it come to fruition is very rewarding. 

Did it go through a lot of revisions? 

Ben Maher: Yes, in terms of what you were good at? I think there were about 11 years of planning before I was even anywhere near this, and then once the planning is in place, you have to then reinterpret it as an experience as a platform, both for how stories are told, how stories are configured, how content is rendered out, how content is served and then how it can be taken to market for brands, storytellers, creators, you name it. So yes, a lot of revisions, and we're still revising. 

There's a number of businesses, operating hotels, everything else. Is this element of it or its own business unit with its own P&L?

Ben Maher: Outernet is a media business, and we control the screen-enabled spaces that you see above ground here. 

I'm gonna assume that you're not plugged into programmatic or anything like that because it's a very distinct kinda canvas.

Ben Maher: That is correct. We're not plugged into programmatic. It's not to say that we would never do it, but the reality is the way that the content needs to be served today, it is very unique. As I said, it's a proprietary stack. It uses lots of familiar techs but it's more programmed like a channel like a traditional broadcast channel as opposed to a media. There's a little bit of rendering that's required, let's just say. 

I assume you know who was the LED supplier?

Ben Maher: The screens are from AOTO. We went and did an analysis globally of the best screen providers and for what we needed AOTO had a great product, and this is certainly the biggest one of the first in, certainly the biggest deployment that they've done of this product.

We're running one triple GPS and are now building a load. We did go as far as doing a sort of quality assessment. We visited factories. We even went as far as looking at where raw materials were mined, because of the importance of having single-batch silicon on a canvas of this scale to ensure that you didn't get that different, particularly obviously on the reds within this car, within this canvas was really important. Another important thing about the LEDs, we degrade panels at the same pace that they are running, so that if we need to replace them, we're replacing them either from our own environments or right into the environment. So again, they're in the same life stage of the panels to ensure high quality. 

You have a pretty big spares pool, I would imagine?

Ben Maher: We try our best, it's a revolving. If you look at this, this is a drone shoot done by one of the Wrigley Scott Associate directors that we met, and he shot it on an Icelandic beach and it is a music video. But if you look at how some of the B rolls so creating doesn't need all new assets, it can come from existing architecture.

The supplier of this kind of creativity told you, here's what we would like you to do with it, or do they give you a license to say, look we'd like to do an edit, this is how it's gonna look? 

Ben Maher: It depends on the creator, and it depends on where they are with them. If they're shooting for us, then we'd say, this is the brand kit and this is what you need to produce and this is how you need to play it out. We're always updating our learnings. We get new challenges and new opportunities and we learn from those. But as we see these mega canvases across the world. These sorts of fantastic pieces become more relevant because they'll play out across networks. Across other major cities. I think one of the questions you posed was, is London a model for elsewhere?

It is, and we're in discussions in New York, LA, the Middle East, and Asia, at launching these networks and then sharing experiences, interestingly, might always be this exact look and feel. This was put together over 26 years across a horizontal plane. If you go to Manhattan, you're probably gonna have to use a vertical plane, and so it becomes a completely different onboarding process and journey. So it's gonna be interesting how we take our learnings and then we utilize those in other environments. 

If you're gonna take this to other locations, does it have to be multifaceted in the same way, and that there's a retail component, there's a hospitality component, there's a restaurant component?

Ben Maher: Every case is different. So if you look at environments creating a campus or a district in other cities, particularly New York, or more challenging real estate payment tables or even the planning commissions. So we have to look at them in each case often partnering with other established institutions is wise.

We're lucky enough to have a huge foot here. In places like Manhattan, you have those big footfalls. In the other cities, you don't necessarily have this natural footfall. So you have to create a different style of destination or with another key destination to ensure the right sort of, so yeah each case on its own and understanding the needs and nuances of those cities and audiences as well.

Yeah, because there are a lot of immersive attractions popping up now. They're almost all projection, but they're very much ticketed locations and it's programmed and it starts at this time and you're there for 45 minutes and exit through the gift shop. 

Ben Maher: We're very happy to have you exit through the gift shop here as well.

And don't get me wrong, there is some incredible projection technology out there. We've looked at it in our venues and in other places. We have other locations with theaters and other things and, we would certainly consider projection there, but for the kinda canvas and certainly some of the gaming engines and things and future-proofing, we wanted to do this pixel pitch to create a very unique and beautiful canvas that to be fair, I don't think we could have achieved in the same way with projection. 

Yeah, it's very interesting. I've written about it and but it's so much more interesting to see it in person, but I think more than anything else, to kinda understand the macro idea as opposed to, oh look, a very big set of screens. 

Ben Maher: What are these guys doing? 

Why did they do that?

Ben Maher: Which again, isn't a difficult question always, and I think just seeing the way the public interacts with it has been enough of a validation that cities deserve these interesting cultural spaces and they deserve to be free and in the public domain. 

We're early in our journey. We need more brands coming and telling their stories as well, but telling them in a way that will ingratiate themselves to the public and, out-of-home has done an incredible job at providing public utility forever, in major cities. If we can this model out, certainly for multisensory spaces delivering that as well, I think it sets a good precedent for other cities and other developers across world.

Are you affected at all by energy conservation requirements or requests? 

Ben Maher: Yes, of course.

We are obviously subject to the rising costs of energy as anyone naturally would be, but we have developed the most energy-efficient product that was available on the market. So the sort of coolness and the control of the environment, importantly, isn't prohibitive to doing this. We're not creating a huge carbon footprint that we cannot manage. We have all the relevant ESG scorecards. We're working with the ISO qualifications for energy and for our social corporate responsibilities.

But it's also this sort of magnet or those people who are concerned about all the voice energy on these things, do they really need them versus other stuff that's drawing way more energy, but it's not anything you think about?

Ben Maher: I think the fact that we're providing a storytelling platform and we're not just screaming at people in the public domain. We're supporting arts and culture everywhere. We have a charitable foundation that donates time, and money for different projects. So we've done projects around sustainability with Unger. We're doing things around social mobility. We've done things for AIDS charities, so we work with lots of different interest groups to provide them with platforms. We even audit the popups so that when we're looking at the brands we're working with, we're not just working with the same generic brands that you get on every high street in the world, right?

We wanna ensure that these spaces are different and unique. So whether it's non-white owned businesses, whether it's LGBTQ+ owned business, female-owned, sustainable business, so again, being a conscious member of society, we don't just wanna be a bastian for people who want a big ass billboard. 

So I think we've gone around things in a very different way. There is some incredible landmark out home structures in the UK and across Europe. But I do think we have good USPs and we do complement what is already in the market but with enough points of difference, yeah. We wanna attract people to this space and not cannibalize out-of-home budgets by sticking the same offering up. So if we can get more AV budget and that encourages people to do better and more in out-of-home, then that's a fantastic thing. 

That's very impressive. Obviously, people like it. 

Ben Maher: We're getting there. There's a piece called Heaven's Gate that is the new art exhibition and it is on Sunday and it was absolutely crackers in here, it was just crazy to see how people enjoyed it and it just says conceiving something and then seeing it come to fruition is such a unique and pleasurable thing to be able to do. So we're very proud of what we've done here.

Ted Romanowitz, Futuresource Consulting

Ted Romanowitz has been around the commercial display and tech sectors for a whole bunch of years, and for the last two or so, has been an industry analyst for the research firm Futuresource Consulting.

Futuresource is in the UK, but Ted works out of the Portland, Oregon area - spending his time looking at professional display technologies, ranging from projectors to mini and microLED video wall products.

He was at CES and he'll be at ISE this week, meeting with manufacturers and walking the halls, seeing what's new and interesting.

We had a good chat about where the different display technologies are at, and how miniLED is seeing a lot of traction for fine pitch LED displays. We talk projection and we spend quite a bit of time discussing the state and vast potential for microLED.

One thing I particularly liked was his qualifier about "true" microLED, as all kinds of manufacturers market their premium products as microLED, when they're really miniLED.

Ted, thank you for joining me. Can you explain what you do for Futuresource and what Futuresource is all about? 

Ted Romanowitz: Oh, I'd love to do that. I'm a principal analyst at FutureSource Consulting in our business-to-business (b2b) practice. I lead the entire professional display Segment. So we cover everything Projection, LCD panels, tiled LCD, and interactive displays, as well as my forte, as you may know, is LED. I have more than 10 years of industry experience in LED with Planar, Leyard and Christie Digital. It's wonderful. There's a lot going on in pro displays right now. 

So what would you be doing primarily? Are you producing research reports? Are you talking to companies? You know, what's your day-to-day?

Ted Romanowitz: We do three really big things. One, we do quarterly trackers for all these technologies. So you can look at the data by company, by specification, by country, and comparatively by brand. We also do annual reports. We've just published a video wall report as well as a strategic market outlook. We've got a big digital signage report coming in the springtime. We're looking forward to publishing that, as well as a refresh of our true micro-LED report coming in the first half of the year.

So we do a lot of annual reports, and then the third bit is custom research. So if there are any companies out there that have a specific business need for the information, they can reach out to me and we'd love to talk to them about a one-off type of project to get the analytics that they need to make an informed business. 

How hard is it to get the data from all the different display manufacturers and to talk about their sales and their market size? 

Ted Romanowitz: It is definitely a challenge and I think, especially during the Covid timeframe, to keep relationships established has been challenging. We just came back from a major trip to the Asia Pacific in November, so we were literally the first company meeting these large pro AV vendors in Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. We spent two weeks over there face-to-face and you just can't say enough about building face-to-face relationships and having those conversations and that's why we're so much looking forward to ISE this year, getting everybody back together. 

So when you say you are the first company, what do you mean by that? 

Ted Romanowitz: A lot of these vendors haven't had research companies or other people come and visit them face-to-face. So they were really glad, almost ecstatic to have us show up at their doorstep for a meeting. It was wonderful to rebuild a lot of relationships. It's so much different to do it face-to-face. It's more meaningful.

As opposed to at a table in a trade show booth?

Ted Romanowitz: That's also face-to-face, so I think those are good as well. 

It's hard to get good data, setting yourself aside, there are one or two other companies that are focused on this, but there's this avalanche or a steady torrent of crap coming out of research factories from India. Do you have to fight against that? 

Ted Romanowitz: I think what Futuresource is really good at is having these long-term relationships. We've been doing this for two decades. We have relationships with the brands. We're getting data, hard data. We're having not only quantitative discussions, but we're having qualitative trends impacting the industry, what's coming next, and those sorts of things, so it's much more robust practice that we do, and that's why people are coming to us wanting our research. 

And part of your routine as well is going to the big trade shows, I believe you're just at CES and you're planning to go to ISE as well?

Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely. It was my 14th trip to CES in my career, and it's like a little bit of a family reunion for me actually. But it was amazing to see the energy and people actually queuing up to be able to get into some of the booths there, the larger booths because they were controlling the traffic for Covid and everything. But the energy was there, a lot of great new technologies. It was quite exciting, and as a little preview, I know we're gonna talk about micro LEDs at some point, but I was able to see the industry's first true micro-LED displays, so that was worth the trip, just that one thing. 

Yeah, I get asked every year, am I going to CES? And I say, I've done it, don't want to do it again, too many people line up for everything. But the biggest thing is it's consumer electronics and it's pushing away to some degree it seems at least from displays into gadgets and cars and everything else, so I'm curious if you said that one thing alone was worth the trip, but for somebody who is maybe not as well versed as you, is it worth going to CES if you're in the digital signage industry? 

Ted Romanowitz: There were digital sign signs everywhere, even in some of the smaller halls like North and West, there were LED signs in almost every single booth promoting different technologies and companies, brands. It was amazing. But yeah, I was also amazed at how some of the big consumer brands were starting to bring in LED technology in particular, and showing the consumer applications of that and it's still not gonna be sold through a CEDIA channel, it's going to be sold through pro AV consultants. So it's our heart and soul still for some years before it becomes priced for the mass markets if you will.

Do you get cues from CES about, a product that comes out for TVs whether it be OLED or QLED whatever the case may be, are those cues to what's gonna happen on the pro side or does it not necessarily track that way?

Ted Romanowitz: There's not one way or the other, but I definitely think, specifically to LED technology, that is primarily a pro-AV thing and it is starting to creep into CES and that's exactly why I was at the show. 

Venetian had three floors of smaller companies, and it's amazing how much of our ecosystem is starting to show up there. Different companies looking for ODM and OEM arrangements were in the Venetian, showing prototypes and whatnot of not only LED but also see-through LED and transparent OLED. 

I was curious about one of the announcements at CES where LG unveiled an OLED TV that was wirelessly powered. Now there was a box that you still had to plug in, but between the box and the display panel itself, there was no wire. It was being transmitted by IR or something or other, I forgot. Is that something that you see as coming or is it just an outlier that nobody would actually use?

Ted Romanowitz: LG had a wireless OLED display. But my understanding is that it was wireless connectivity on the data side and not necessarily on the power side. But that's certainly something I think it'll be interesting to see if that shows up at ISE, and definitely, a trend that we should all watch, especially in historic buildings across the east coast of America plus Europe, where you have a historical building and you wanna hang a display in this space, but you don't have power to it, and you don't want a god awful power cord, video signal cord running down the beautiful brickwork or whatnot. There could be some real applications for it. 

Yeah. I know a company in Israel. I did a podcast with them and they now have wireless power technology and they insisted it’s safe and everything else, and you don't get fried if you walk in front of it, or anything.

Ted Romanowitz: Interesting. I'm not aware of that. I'll have to get the information from you so we can have a good look. 

So what display segments are growing right now? 

Ted Romanowitz: Overall, the pro display is growing over the next five years at about an 8% compound annual growth rate, which is healthy. That's really being driven primarily by direct view LED, which is, over 20% year-over-year growth. So that's really where the growth is. LCD is still showing basically flat growth over the next five years. It's very slow growth, but yet by 2026, it's still 50% of the pro displays marketplace, and we won't see that shift between LED and LCD until we have some of these advanced technologies like mini LED, as defined by flip chip COB, which I think we're gonna see some really interesting demos at ISE on this technology finally.

There have been technical and manufacturing issues that have held it back from mass production. So I think 2023 will be the year, we're predicting that 2023 will be the year when companies will come into mass production and resolve these manufacturing and technical issues. So that's where you get pixel pitches under 0.7, 0.6, perhaps even 0.5 with flip chip COB that will start to challenge LCD panels, which are really that close-up viewing experience really predominant. 

Yeah, I remember Leyard’s CTO or he some kind of title like that, he was saying once you get to about 0.7, you're very close to the pixel pitch that you would have on an LCD. 

Ted Romanowitz: That is correct. It's around 0.5-millimeter pixel pitch on an LCD screen. So yeah, LED is getting there, and then the really last bit is, once you have that close-up viewing experience, you can put it into, let's say small to medium room sized meeting rooms as well as digital signage, eye level, close up wayfinding, informational displays, those kinds of things. It gets really interesting for LED, but the price differential right now is still fairly substantial.

What is it now? I understand there are a whole bunch of variables.

Ted Romanowitz: That's a loaded question. I wish I could just say, oh, it's X percent but it depends. I hate that answer, but it's the truth. We're seeing these advanced technologies in LED come in the mass volume where you get economies of scale, you're gonna see that differential shrink. So that's first with this flip chip CEOB, mini LED and that gets you to around, 0.5-0.6 millimeter, certainly 0.7 so you're on the verge of competing with LCD panels and then with what we're calling true micro LED technology, that is sub-100-micron chiplets mass transferred onto a TFT backplane with an active driver technology.

So that is what one of the brands was showing at CES Samsung. They had from 55-inch to about 140-inch displays. They weren't able to give me pricing on that officially, but we know they estimated it last year at about $150,000 for a 4K display over 100 inches. And that's probably not gonna go into your house or mine, although we aspire to that. But over the years as they come into mass production in the next five to seven years, it's going to drop from $150,000 down to around $4,000 is what we're estimating and volume production, once you get under, let's say 40,000 or 30,000, it'll start showing up in the CEDIA channels. So it'll start shifting from pro AV consultants to the CEDIA channel but they'll need lots of help to figure out how to do it, and then once it gets into the $4,000 to $5,000 range, it's definitely more of a broad consumer electronic, still very expensive for you and I, a lot of people will really want to jump on this technology. It looks really beautiful.

The stuff that Samsung was showing at CES was that when you frame it as true micro LED, as the Samsung stuff part of the wall series and they're now doing genuine micro LED with that? 

Ted Romanowitz: That's a great question, but they had the wall separately. These were consumer television sets that are true micro0LED, but they weren't ready yet to do an announcement in the pro AV space but one could reasonably assume that might be coming, that they'll offer this true micro-LED display, and whether they brand it ‘The wall’ or whatever else they're gonna call it, that's up in the air. 

But it looks fantastic. It'll start to impede LCD panels in a significant way, and then shift the industry towards that where right now, LED is already in video walls the predominant technology that has the highest value. Within five years, it'll be three times the value of a tiled LCD. So LED  is taking over the video wall. We see in the broader pro AV space, not in the next five years, but certainly, within the next 10 years, LED will be the number one display technology. 

Yeah, I think there's always going to be a demand for LCD for some kind of meat and potatoes digital signage, like menu boards and ticketing information, all that sort of stuff, but you get into any kind of specialty application or something where shape needs to be flexible, they're gonna go to mini or micro-LED once the price is there.  

Ted Romanowitz: Yes, true micro-LED eventually will also challenge LCD panels in that more, I guess what you would call hang and bang, on the commodity side.

I believe that it'll bring LCD prices down. There'll always be a place for LCD technology but LED will start to take over where image quality, where impact is really important and there's just a smaller uplift in pricing for that better experience where people and customers want that big impact, it's going to be LED. 

I was at Touch Taiwan about four years ago, pre-Covid, and I left that trade show with a distinct impression from manufacturers that they saw mini-LED as kind of an interim technology, and it was mostly gonna be used for LCD backlighting like addressable zones, local dimming that, all that stuff. But it seems like mini-LED is getting a lot of take-up as a direct-view LED product as well. 

Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely, and LG has a version of their consumer LED product showcased at CES. It was about a 150-inch display and had some really good features. I think it was 1.2 millimeters with beautiful image quality but it's $300,000. It's still the consumer market that is very expensive for them to get into. But, then again, personally, as a product manager for LED, I've worked in multiple companies where we have done high-end homes with LEDand, putting up a $750,000 wall in a Bel Air home wasn't a problem They have the budget. That's again, not my house as much as I would like that. 

Yeah, as much as I'd like to be a midfielder for Manchester United, I'm too small and way too old, I don't think I'm gonna have that kind of salary.  

Ted Romanowitz: I think you and me both, but we can still hope, can't we? It's not too late. 

Oh, I think it is for me at least.

Ted Romanowitz: I think another important thing is with projection, you were talking about where the pro AV industry is going and all of that, projection both front and rear are in relatively steep decline, and some people would say, oh my gosh, that's super scary, there are so many projection companies out there, and we see so many demos at ISE and at CES, there are a lot of consumer protection companies displaying products. Even though projection is in decline, double-digit decline over the next five years, in the end, it's still a $4 to $5 billion market, it's massive, and so it's not like projection is gonna go away, it's just getting a little bit smaller. 

So I think there's some hope there and we're seeing high brightness being a big thing over the last year. Already we've heard whispers from several of the projection brands that they're gonna be unveiling new high-brightness projectors. A lot of demos on projection mapping, blending, warping, and those sorts of things to support immersive, really engaging interactive displays. 

Yeah, in the right physical environment and lighting conditions and everything else, projection is awesome because it's got that ability to surprise you. It just shows up and forms around things in a way you can't do with more conventional displays.

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, and if you need to have a large display of information or whatnot, there's no more cost-effective way to do that, to show a big image, let's say in a theater or something other than projection, right? LED is just far too expensive to do that, although some brands are in customer-facing theaters. Some very large technology brands are putting in LED displays to impact their ecosystem, and their end customers in a very impactful way, but still, projection is wonderful. It has legs to continue for decades but LED is the up-and-coming thing. 

Why is projection getting better, like they're able to do brighter, is it because of laser, or are there other factors?

Ted Romanowitz:  Yeah, it's the laser technology that they're implementing. I think smaller form factors, are quieter, as well as the prices are coming down as well. Those are all factors that are gonna give it legs for quite some time. One other thing too, I think there are so many immersive exhibits that are happening now, right?

In Portland, Oregon, we get one every month or two where they're using projection and or a blend of projection in LED to provide a really amazing sensory exhibit. And when our team was in Japan, we went and saw the Team Labs exhibit there and it was wonderful that you actually took your shoes off, and put them in a locker. You roll up your pant legs and you're about knee-deep in warm water and, it was really cool, the projection map Koi onto the water that you're walking through, and the fish react to you. So you can reach out or, as you approach one of the fish, it'll look over at you and then scurry off as if it was a real fish. It was just an amazing experience to go do that. 

I'm curious as well about OLED and light field displays and I recognize that light field displays are still probably a few years off, but are you seeing advances in that? 

Ted Romanowitz: That's one of the things that we're going to be doing some further research on at ISE and it'll be interesting to see how that trend emerges, and OLED is really interesting. On the transparent side, a lot of companies have been working on that to help with merchandising or promoting products, putting them in an OLED box and putting marketing messages around the product even while you're able to reach in and touch the product. 

Those are some super creative things, but at the LG booth at CES and a couple of others, they're showing transparent OLED and transparent LED applications where you can get a 10-foot high glass wall and cover it with an image. It's just cool. It's beautiful. It'll be interesting to see how corporations and other organizations invest in that, and what the adoption rate will be, and that's definitely an area where we're going to be researching further. 

Yeah, the LED on film and LED embedded in glass particularly when micro-LED matures, that seems exciting as hell in terms of the amount of brightness you can get and the fact that you can just make it part of the building material.

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, yes, and you look at all these big cities. I don't know when you were in China last, but you go to Hong Kong and you're sitting on the Calhoun side at night and the choreographer does some choreography with music and a light show of all the major tall office buildings on Central. It's just amazing. And Shenzhen, Shanghai, a lot of cities in China are doing these light shows and lighting up all the buildings and in America, we're starting to see that as well. Obviously, Las Vegas is a great example, but I think it'll be interesting to see how that evolves, not only in America but also in Europe with all of the historical buildings, what the regulations will be and you know how they'll allow technology to be used architecturally and artistically on some of these historic buildings, or if we'll just keep doing projection onto them.

Which you can do without affecting the building, which I'm sure makes the people who protect buildings happy. 

Ted Romanowitz: Absolutely. 

You're going to ISE, I assume. For somebody who's going and they're particularly interested in seeing what's new and what's emerging and what's important to know on the display side of things, what would you recommend? What should they be looking for?

Ted Romanowitz: I definitely think the big trends will be the flip chip COB, and mini-LED. I don't know if a true micro-LED display will be shown, but they're certainly, if not from one of the big brands, I would expect some of the manufacturers like BOE or Seoul Semi might be showing some things in their booth, so that's one thing to look for. I think projection is gonna be sexy. People are gonna be doing projection mapping and blending and warping and all of that. 8K displays, I think you'll see more and more of those out there. Yeah, those are some of the big things. There's the digital signage section as well. We're gonna be spending a lot of time out there. 

As I mentioned, we are doing a digital signage report in the next few months. So we will be looking at that as well. 

Would that be a display report or software? 

Ted Romanowitz: It'll be both. It'll be the whole ecosystem. 

This is great because it's so hard to get any credible research on the software side of this business. 

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly, and It'll be hardware and not only just the displays itself but the media servers, players, the content in the cloud. All of the above. It's gonna be a really exciting report. We're very much looking forward to that one. 

Good. All right. Ted, thank you so much for spending some time with me. 

Ted Romanowitz: Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you in Barcelona. 

Absolutely. Tapas!

Ted Romanowitz: Exactly. See you there!

Darren Wercinski & Kiersten Gibson, Reach Media Network

Reach Media Network has been around the digital signage ecosystem since 2005, and like many of the companies in this sector, its focus and strategy has evolved a lot based on customer needs and marketplace conditions.

The Minneapolis-area company got its start as a place-based media network, putting screens in venues on its own dollar, and making that investment back through ad sales. As pretty much anyone who's done a Digital Out Of Home network will confirm, ad sales is hard work, no matter the environment and audience.

Reach was generating real money from ad sales, but with a business focused first on screens in community ice hockey rinks, the network's growth potential was finite.

For the last several years Reach has been going to market instead as an end-to-end digital signage solutions provider, building up a pile of clients in sectors like corporate and health care ... and realizing reliable, recurring revenues from SaaS licenses.

Reach is seeing a lot of success, despite operating pretty quietly, by servicing the hell out of its customer base, and putting a lot of investment into software integrations.

I spoke with CEO Darren Wercinski and Kiersten Gibson, the company's EVP for Sales and Marketing.

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TRANSCRIPT

Darren and Kiersten, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the summary that you would rattle off when someone asked you what your company's all about? 

Darren Wercinski: Sure. Thank you for having us on the podcast today. We're excited to finally get to talk to you and share a little bit more about Reach. We actually started in 2005 and I feel really old as I tell stories today, thinking about sort of the company in general, but right now we have over 6,000 clients, and we manage around 30,000 screens. We really run the gamut, from large Fortune 500 clients, we do signage for Hormel, Caterpillar, and a lot of the big companies that you might be familiar with on a lot of college campuses so Northwestern, UCLA, and USC are all of our partners, and then likewise, I guess we've expanded a lot in the healthcare and Mass General and just a lot of industries and verticals. 

If you've been in the industry as long as we have, you definitely get customers for every vertical, but the company has about 50 team members right now, we actually have 10 open positions. So we're really growing and we tell this to a lot of our clients that we feel like we're in a sweet spot of just big enough to provide a robust digital signage solution with a budget that we can afford to invest in things, but at the same time, kinda that small focus on customer service and support.

Quite honestly, we've been in the industry so long, we've seen lots of things change. Dave, especially you’d know companies have come and gone. Business models have changed. Our own business model has changed and evolved. There's been consolidation in the industry, but as a whole, it's been a lot of fun. It's been a really great ride. 

So where do you start and stop in terms of your services? You've got a software platform. Do you do managed services, aftercare, or that sort of thing as well? 

Darren Wercinski: We would consider ourselves a full-service solution and what I mean by that is there are some signage companies or CMSs, and that's really what we are, that really focus on just downloading the software and you're good to go and go off and running. 

Ours is a little bit different because we do provide the end-to-end solution. So our clients may say, Hey, we want screens, players, the signage, we'll sell them all that and then in addition, we'll actually use install cords to get them up and running and trained. We'll use our own creative team to build all their layouts and assets and really get them up and running from that perspective, along with technical support that's unlimited and account managers help them along the way. That's the way we look at the business of providing that end-to-end solution, which is a little bit different than other people as well.

Is that an ask that you're seeing quite a bit in the marketplace? 

I get a sense and have for a few years now, that large companies are interested in digital science. They see the benefits and everything else, but they don't wanna fully manage it and they would really prefer to have an outsourced solution that says, “This is what we want, you guys to do it”?

Darren Wercinski: I wouldn't say we're an outsource solution. I think that our tool is so easy to use in terms of our content management platform. We try to make it so that clients can easily go in there and update and publish their content. Really, at the end of the day, that's all they really wanna do. So that's why we build the layouts for them, all the integrations, everything, and they can come in and easily manage the content. 

Kiersten, what are your thoughts on that? You deal most with the clients. 

Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I would say, it boils down to the service and what the client’s looking for. As Darren said, we'll be as hands-on or hands-off as needed in terms of that implementation, getting them up and running, building out everything for them. 

In terms of the ongoing managed services, we're not necessarily creating the day-to-day content for them, but we are providing them with the support that they need. So for example, six months down the road, they might have a rebrand, or they might have a whole new group of users, or maybe their content is going stale and they want to get some automated applications into the signage, just so then maybe there's safety messaging or health tips or something like that that we can really assist with and provide that automated content.

So I would say it just runs the gamut of what the client's use case is and who they have managing it. I think that's one of the things we've learned, especially with these larger projects. If they don't have that from the beginning, it might be something that they implement in six months and that's where we come in. That's where that support continues to be unlimited and ongoing, and we provide that whole service solution. 

Darren Wercinski: I would say that reaches a very hands-on customer focused, client-focused company. We are here to help them. We're here to be flexible with their needs and I think that's really been part of our secret sauce in terms of adding a lot of clients across many industries.

Kiersten Gibson: Just the one thing to add to that, with really the shift from our business model, we are SaaS-based and that service at the end is really the thing that we focus on. As Darren said, it's the software, but it's also the service and we provide, both end-to-end solutions that way.

Yeah, I was gonna say that I've certainly run into companies through the years, software companies that are very good at sales, but it falls apart in aftercare. They close the deal and they're onto the next one, and they're not really paying much attention to their clients and as a result, you see a lot of attrition, a lot of churn, where end users have a contract with one company for three years, and as soon as that contract is lapsing, they're moving to somebody else because they're not seeing the kind of service they want.

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, I mean we love the fact that these companies keep getting bought up by private equity firms and the first thing they cut out is their support. Even though I know you got bought out by a private equity firm, our secret.

I'm on our support team, so… 

Darren Wercinski: But I mean that for us is good news because it's just that model, which is when consolidation happens, usually support is one of the things to go, and that's where we can differentiate ourselves against bigger competitors and say, listen, they might do some things. They might be bigger, but we're certainly gonna be better on the support side, and we've seen a lot of new customers come over from companies that have and industries that have been left out there and we've swooped in and one I can think of, we just took over Texas A&M from a competitor that was for a number of years and now it's a network of over 400 licenses and they seem really happy with the service and excited to keep expanding. 

I'm curious about that one in particular. We don't have to dig into it very much and cause any trouble, but I'm curious when they're making a switch, it's more about service and that sort of thing, as opposed to price, which used to be, and I guess still in the case in some situations where the reason why people switch is that they just wanna trim their budget.

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and I definitely think that and I'll just say the names, I don't care, it doesn't matter. When we go do RFPs against Four Winds or AppSpace or even Spectrio to some degree, it does come down to price and we try to add both the value component and our software, the service component and the price component, we're certainly gonna be under those three in particular, and we try to bring that value equation and lots of references from our other partners who may have used those guys or others in the past, who say, Reach is a great option and they're a little bit less expensive and they frankly do a better job. 

I've been aware of Reach for many years now. It's been a little bit confusing because there's a whole bunch of companies out there that use the term ‘reach’ if they're associated with media in some way and of course, there’s RMG Networks, which confuses things for me. 

Darren Wercinski: We actually, at one time, this is very long ago, I think his name was Gary McGuire, correct me if I'm wrong, and so that's how long we've been around. And so we were actually working with Lifetime Fitness and Lifetime Fitness was both working with our Reach and Reach Media Network and RMG and we had even a legal at Lifetime Fitnesses send us each individual contract for the wrong company, so that's how confusing it was and stuff. So we've just been around a long time in space, but really in our roots and I think that's maybe where some people don't know as much about Reach or just our story. 

So we actually started out with Mark Klein, my business partner, and co-founder, this was years and years ago, so I think in 2005, we were thinking about a business model that could really attract in sort of the youth sports space and so I was working at Best Buy Corporate at the time in the strategy group, the one thing I realized was going to be a real challenge for Best Buy was the price of Plasma screens, if you can think that far back were gonna collapse. They knew this capacity was coming on in China. We knew the cost of screens was going down and so a $3,000 screen for 50-inch plasma was gonna go to $250 in two years or whatever the number was. 

I was thinking about that space. Mark really liked to use Sports space and we decided to actually go with an ad-based model where we would give, in this case, ice arenas, which are big in Minnesota, by the way, in Canada, as you know. We would provide them with the software and the technology that could show their locker rooms, and that was really their pain point because they used to have those white easel boards out that would show you like they'd write on them the locker room assignments. So we actually started and integrated with some software companies that would show the locker room assignments and we'd go out and sell basically local ads to really fund it and so that's how the company grew and grew.

Outside of Minnesota and Canada and a little bit on the East coast ice arenas just aren't really that big of a deal, and that's how we started expanding into other verticals, really more fitness-centric, so YMCAs, community centers et cetera, and we grew this ad-based market, and if you know anything about ads, and I think you do, especially in the digital signage, ads are certainly not bought, they're sold and it is a very grinding business. You're cold calling, you're relying on reps to really mow some commission base to go out and sell every year. There's not a huge high renewal rate on ads renewing every year. So that means you're going back into these same locations and trying to resell ads, and I'd say Reach has been a startup twice. So we actually built that business model just through ads and I'll say we think we had about a network of about 500 screens at the time.

We built it to about a 5 million local ad business, which in that space is pretty amazing. So I'm always indebted to our ad team who helped build that out. But really at that time, I could see the writing on the wall that, in terms of trying to scale that business, which is next to impossible and actually there were some other companies doing that as well, and about that time, we either got to the point that our good locations or ad locations, they didn't want ads, they just wanted to use our software, and they said, “Hey, we really love your software. We don't want the ads on the screen. Can we just pay you a fee?”

And I started thinking, yeah, that sounds great because it's that recurring fee, and at other times, we had ad locations that were terrible and in a bad part of town, or we couldn't sell ads, so we went to them and said, listen, we're gonna close this thing down unless you want to pay a fee and they said, sure, we'd love to, and so we slowly started transitioning our business model and we started getting into more colleges and just using our entire application to solve many of the use cases that we still have today. 

Do you do any digital out-of-home stuff now?  

Darren Wercinski: We do a little bit just because I'm so damn loyal to all those reps who've helped build the company. So we do still have a little bit of that business, but primarily it's almost everything is geared toward software as a service.

At one time, I'll say eight years ago for the platform we had about 20 reps, one IT guy, maybe one other support guy, and the rest were just grinding through ads, and so now we have almost 20 developers and IT people, we have a variety of different teams.

Kiersten, you could probably tell me more about how the company's changed over those years. 

Kiersten Gibson: Starting out with what Beer Pong lunches on Wednesdays with a group of 10 of us?

Darren Wercinski: Those were the good days. Those were the fun days, Dave, where you could just relax at lunch and play some Beer Pong and sometimes the problem was a Beer Pong extended from lunch into the afternoon, into the evening.

Kiersten Gibson: There's a lot more structure. 

Darren Wercinski: No, there are maybe some good stories.

Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, I was gonna say, definitely 10 years ago, that's when I started with the company, I sat next to our one developer. There was one support guy who also installed too. So we still installed the screens for these ad-based facilities, but, the one thing I would say, as Darren said, is we have 20 developers now from the one when I started, but then also just our customer success teams. We always knew that support obviously was a big component. We've always had at least one support person when the company started. But now we have just different customer success teams that we continue to build on.

As Darren said, our install coordinators are more or fewer project managers for that implementation. We have an account management team, we have a support team, we have a design team. We're building our marketing. So one of the things that are really exciting, especially what I've been involved in, is not only expanding our clients but building our partnerships, not only with our hardware providers but some of our integrator partners. Like Darren was mentioning with the locker room schedules and everything, just really expanding on that because at the end of the day, building their confidence with us is only gonna help build our client portfolio as well.

I found it interesting when you were talking about the locker room schedules, Darren. 

Going back to the mid-2000s doing data integration like that, and that's fundamentally what it was, was pretty rare. You would see it in airports on departure screens and so on. But that was pretty much it. So you were doing what I call boring signage, but boring being a good term, going way, way back. Is that still a substantial amount of what you do?

Darren Wercinski: The integrations are the key to our entire business, and that's how we also differentiate ourselves in terms of our integration. So it's a skillset and a capability that we built early on, and you're right, you have to think of a way that makes the signage actually useful to your end users and creates value to not only the people seeing your screens, but into the locations, and so they have something that people actually wanna see, and so in our case, our first hook was really around pulling and scheduling information, and we've expanded that into so many different areas. So our capabilities around the integrations are really key.

And I know Dave, I've seen in some of your other podcasts, or you even mentioned a little bit about the way you think that some CMSs are too generic in nature and that they should be industry-focused, and I agree with you in one respect, but I think on the other, you have to have a capability that's really meaningful to clients over time, that actually does give you some stickiness and the other thing I was thinking about and why you don't know as much about Reach is I think we took a little bit different path in terms of our own marketing and how we grew a lot of our clients, whereas some other CMSs may have just focused on going to the sort of the industry trade shows, which we went to as well, we would go heavy into a vertical trade show. 

So we would find a vertical we like, maybe it's churches or car washes, and we'd start hitting all these industry-specific shows. So we would be the only digital signage company that would be setting up a booth at these kinds of random verticals and it started to really grow because we'd be the only ones there, and you'd start to take on 10, 20, 40, 50 customers. So you develop some capabilities within these industries. So you'd become the car wash guy or you become the church guy, or you become this variety of verticals, and I think that really helped in our growth.

Now that we've expanded with so many clients, we don't do quite as much of that anymore, but it's really the way in which we navigated our client growth and our go-to-market strategy. 

Yeah, and I think that's really smart. I've written about that a few times, about companies that don't put all of their marketing eggs in the Infocom or the DSE basket. They show up at these weird little shows like airport technology or airport security conference. Yeah, and like you say, you're the one pretty girl at the dance. 

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, it's made a huge difference in terms of that, and I think that kinda gets back to our support too. When you start to build these relationships and people refer you and you grow your market space there. 

You mentioned, you're doing more work in hospitals and corporate, is that because you've focused on it, or is it just an area that seems to be growing?

Darren Wercinski: Kiersten is our EVP of Sales and Marketing, and she is the one that's really talking to the customers and has the most insight. I'm just the one that watches the sales come in, and smiles at the end of the month, hopefully. 

And yells at people if they don't come in!

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, that's right. I do that. Thank you, Dave. I like that. 

Kiersten Gibson: I would say in terms of hospitals and our corporate clients, it wasn't like we were going after that industry by any means. I always think of it as a use case. We could provide the same exact use case for a corporate company that we provide for a hospital, that we provide for education, and my examples always go back to say break rooms. So employee communications, it really doesn't matter which vertical you're in, that use case is pertinent to any type of industry. 

I think with Covid, that's where we saw the biggest uptick in corporate and healthcare for us, Mass General was one of the biggest ones that came to us pre-Covid and really working with their Head of IT to build the network within Partners Healthcare, which that's what Mass Journal is a part of. So that's just one example. But in terms of our corporate and employee communications, where we really started seeing it taking off again, going back to those integrations, we really focused on the integrations that were most common amongst our entire client portfolio. So one example is Power BI. We were one of the first CMSs to build a Power BI app that was easily authenticated by pulling their reports and dashboards, we built a OneDrive integration. We built Zoom, WebEx, and Teams integration. So all these are small integrations that they don't have to pay extra for, they can easily do it themselves. That is something, I think that's where we saw our corporate footprint really start to grow.

Darren Wercinski: The other thing that's funny about that, because I was on some of those calls, and I was thinking about the Power BI one in particular with the client and they're still our client, they've been with us for five or six years and they've grown quite a bit.

We were on the call, and they said, can you do this? And I'm eyeing my Head of IT. His name is Nate Davis. He's outstanding, our chief technology officer, and Nate's always great cuz he says there is definitely a way we can build this, how much it's gonna cost and how much time it's gonna take might be a different thing. But we ended up building this and I committed to the customer at the time, we're gonna get this Power BI app built and we built it in, I'll say four weeks or whatever. But it's a great application and that's kind of the way in which we go to market in terms of if our clients are asking for something and we think we can build it for them and then, and obviously leverage it to other clients as well, that is certainly something we will do to help win some deals and show that flexibility and our willingness to partner with our clients over time.

Is that why you have 20 developers? Because it seems like a lot of people for a relatively small company to be focused on development, but there's a lot of work to do those integrations, right? 

Darren Wercinski: There is, but that is twofold. One, we have a goal of doubling our revenue in the next two, basically two years. So we feel like we're in a really good spot. We're really aggressive now in hiring people and coming out of Covid and realizing the success that we've had and we'll continue to have. We really wanna hit the accelerator. So I've been spending a ton of money on the team. We're doing a giant CMS rewrite that we're spending almost $2 million on and we're all in to try and take the company to the next level, and I don't even mind telling people this, because it's just part of our vision, a year ago we were at $5 million in recurring revenue and. We had a great year last year and we expect to be at $10 million by the end of 2024. So those are some big aspirational jumps, but that's what we're going for.. 

And how is this being funded? Is it just out of your own revenues, or are you docked? 

Darren Wercinski: I guess I had some original investors. Thank you, mom, my uncle, and my cousins, but it's all been I just raised a little bit of seed money when I first started, this is 2005. We haven't raised money in, I don't know, 10 years, and I bought out a lot of the investors along the way. They literally put in $10,000-$20,000 bucks. It's a lot of money, but relatively speaking, it was small, but I've always focused on making money. So that's the one thing. I never wanted to be beholden to investors or banks or anybody else. I've never taken VC money because I had a vision for the company. I wanted to control it, and I was perfectly fine by the way, running on a path that was different from others, I was fine with incremental or continuous growth and making a profit at the same time and maybe that's why we didn't grow as fast as we could have because I had a budget and I stuck to it. But at the same time, I think it puts you in a much better position. 

When you're scrappy all the time, it forces you to do different things, and I'm not saying Kiersten and the team would call me cheap, would you ? Don't answer that! 

But I was very prudent, and I really wanted to invest in the things that I thought added the most were the most meaningful for our clients so support and, being flexible with them and trying to, provide free services, like creative and all these things that, that really add value over time. To answer your question, I think our paths have been a little bit different but certainly one, I won't go back on. 

Are you getting the phone calls and the emails and, how are you doing from private equity and VC people? 

Darren Wercinski: I do, but I don't respond, and it's been nonstop, and actually, so there are different stages in the SaaS company: if you can get to $1 million, you can grind out and do that. If you can get to the $2 to $3 million, that's a win, and when you get to $5 million, it's an interesting thing because private equity and some VCs, start to come hard because they like the model and it's working. They have a lot of cash available too, that's in the industry. So they're trying to make investments and do things. But for me, it was never really about the money or trying to sell. Obviously, we have had the company for almost 20 years, I love the employees. I love what we're doing. I think for me, resetting our goals of trying to double our revenue was really exciting because we also had to redo, we had to add staff. We're adding some new leadership right now in terms of a Customer Success Director to really manage the team and hopefully take our customer success to the next level, and so to me, the challenge is trying to grow that revenue and really redo things in a company and build in new processes that are gonna make us scalable to that $10 million bogey.

Put it this way, I'm not gonna be sitting on a beach and Nova Scotia with you, Dave, counting all the cash that you made. 

That's right. You wouldn't want to today anyways. It's snowing, although not as bad as it does in Minnesota.

I was curious, about one thing you said where you are doing a complete software rewrite, and is that kind of a nod to web services and everything that's emerging with technology right now where you can't just continually build out something, traces back in some respects to 2005. I know a company in the UK that built their platform in I think 2015 and by 2019 or so, they said, you know what, we're tearing it up and we're gonna rebuild just because they could see all the new capabilities out there. 

Darren Wercinski: There are two answers to your question.

One is: we were getting customer feedback which may have been great by the way. Our NPS score is super and we love that stuff they give great feedback every time that we can really use, and some of it was: It's a little hard to use now. It's a little clunky. It's a little this thing. We love your stuff, and we really needed to just take a look at our c m s and make it easier to use the challenge. So going back when you try and please every customer, you end up building a lot of one-off stuff along the way, and all of a sudden you look at your application, and yeah it's robust, but it's not exactly intuitive because you have to do X, Y, and Z.

And we built a lot of this stuff quickly to try and get those deals closed and build it out. So one first part was just, you know what? We need to refresh and reset and get more customer feedback and more UI and UX capabilities into our platform. So that was the trigger number one.

The second was: the industry's changing too, by the way. It's not just signage on a screen anymore. You have to be able to reach people outside of your traditional office setting or facilities, and so we've spent more time trying to make our application flexible so people from home can see our digital signage on their computers through teams or through websites digital signage, or just a more flexible approach to meet people because they're not always coming into the office anymore. And the communications team still wants to reach people. We just wanna be a more flexible platform to do that. 

Kiersten, do you have any additional thoughts on that? I know you talked to the clients quite a bit. 

Kiersten Gibson: I was gonna say, going back to when I started too, one thing you might not know about me, Dave, but Darren hired me as our project manager for our mobile application that he thought was really gonna take off

Darren Wercinski: You test and you'll learn, okay, Dave, you test and you learn and you evolve. I have no problem making mistakes, a lot of mistakes, and learning from them. 

Kiersten Gibson: So learning how to code without having a degree in coding was very interesting. But we did it. But no, I would say, one thing I've learned over the years is, we tried to add on all these additional solutions. What we learned was we can't be everything to everyone and really focus on what we're good at, which again goes back to that digital signage. But we do have these additional solutions we still support. The mobile app still brings us a decent amount of revenue. So our mobile application that employees can download to view more information, it can be, again, going back to those fitness centers, maybe they're viewing schedules, things like that. But what we've really tried to push people towards is, like Darren said, the website digital signage, where it's say, embedded in their intranet. 

So they can push the same messaging from their digital signage into the website. So remote employees can view the same messaging and it's right there too. So you're not expected to say it's a screensaver. It's not something that a particular employee can disable. It's something that they're forced to see because they have to go on their intranet every day. So I'd say that's what we've seen. It's just kind of an add-on to their digital signage network if you will. 

Are you finding that the average customer is more equipped with knowing what they want and how they're going to use it than in the past when, I'm sure, 10 years ago the conversations you had were just explaining what the hell digital signage was and I assume now that they know exactly what it is and they know how they wanna use it? 

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, if you think about it, I'll say even five years ago, we used to sell a hell of a lot more hardware in this all-in-one solution where we would sell them the screen, the media player, the installation, the mounts, we'd sell all because that's all they knew, and so over the last couple years, our hardware has gone way down, which is awesome because that's one industry we don't want to be in, and we're repurposing a lot of stuff. So we repurpose some competitors' players at times, we start to just sell more software and it's already set up as well where we're just replacing stuff that they have.

I am also curious about AI and how that plays a role in future development, or does it? 

Darren Wercinski: For us? Not really. I can't say that's been a question, I know there are other companies out there that actually do that. They may be more retail-centric or whatever. I wouldn't say retail's a huge industry for us because there are certain things that other companies do better than us. We have not spent any time really thinking about AI. We're really trying to focus on trying to expand our “reach” outside of the traditional office setting through those applications that Kiersten had just mentioned. 

Yeah, I know all the AI stuff for digital science to date has been focused on computer vision, but I could imagine all kinds of capabilities around content production, smart scheduling, smart triggering, and all that sort of stuff down the road. But it's still just evolving right now. 

Darren Wercinski: Yeah, and it's just a capability. As Kiersten mentioned, we can't be everything to everybody, and we're really trying sort of stick to that. 

Reach has been notoriously famous for creating applications that were about 80% done, we would get them to work, but we never really got that full implementation, and communication out to the client. So that's actually the one thing that I changed last year in terms of the beginning of 2022, maybe it's all my fault, but it was a direction we set where we really were trying to always, and now it’s like no, let's just hit the pause button, let's do things that are meaningful, let's say things that are purposeful that our clients are asking for, and that we can communicate back out.

And so that was one of the big shifts that we made at the beginning of last year, and to get user feedback, we would build stuff sometimes with basically never talking to our clients or assuming what they wanted, and then it would sometimes be right but sometimes be wrong, and so we really hit the pause button and changed our strategy around real development, and that's also why I think we added seven developers last year and just changed some processes. As I said, these are big investments in space. 

All right. This has been great. If people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online?

Kiersten Gibson: Yeah, you can find us on our website. There is a contact us form that they can fill out to learn more. So our website is reachmedianetwork.com 

As opposed to the four or five other Reach Medias that you'll find if you Google it? 

Kiersten Gibson: Reach Media Network Digital signage.

Darren Wercinski: You know what's funny? One last thing is we were actually BroadSign's second or third customer, just to give you a sense of how long we've actually been in the space. RIP Brian Deseo because I was sorry to hear that. But I remember working with Brian and they were actually out in Idaho at the time, that's how long ago it was. But I just thought about it, thinking about the company and our journey over the years to see Broadsign where they're at and where we're at. But we actually were the second or third customer way back in 2000. 

Back in the day, yeah. All right. Thanks again for taking the time with me.

Darren Wercinski: Appreciate it, Dave. We look forward to seeing you at your next party. 

Kiersten Gibson: Thanks, Dave. 

Jannatul Choudhury, PosterBooking

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

Jannatul Choudhury found his way into the digital signage software business out of frustration - writing his own cloud-based platform because the one he was under contract to use and maintain gave him endless headaches.

The Manchester, UK software developer wrote the code and is now growing out the functionality and installed footprint of what he and a business partner then launched as PosterBooking, a SaaS digital signage CMS aimed at the small to medium business market.

The goal was produce something that was easy to use, and met marketplace needs. One of those big needs was minimal cost - which steered Choudhury to offering a freemium model. Offering the base platform for free to end-users also allowed him to spin up PosterBooking more quickly, because that eliminated a big chunk of work needed to develop a payment gateway.

I had a good chat with Choudhury about his boot-strapped start-up, his love of coding, and how his business operates when the code product is free.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Jannatul, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the background on what PosterBooking is all about? What would be your elevator pitch if I asked you that? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, sure. Thank you for having me on your podcast. I love what you're doing for the digital signage industry. It’s phenomenal, without a doubt. I think I started following you about a year ago on LinkedIn. I was thinking to myself, I'd love to be on your podcast in the near future so thank you for making that happen.

A little background on what PosterBooking is: PosterBooking is a free cloud-based SaaS platform for digital signage. We make it really easy to display images, videos, webpages, and other content on any device like tablets, TVs, LED screens,s and so on from your computer or your smartphone. The platform can be white labeled and is available in seven different languages. 

So how did we start PosterBooking? Me and my co-founder, Monsur, we've known each other for quite a long time now, we've had various startups along the way. We were managing some screens for the NHS in the south of England and we were using an existing digital signage platform and every now and then, we used to have some issues and we'd have to travel down there. It was like a six-hour round trip just to make some changes or if the screen was down, we didn't have any playback on what was actually happening. We'd have to go down there with our laptop, keyboard, and mouse just because it was like a Windows machine. And from that we thought, yeah, let's look at alternatives. See what's there, are there any cost-effective solutions? And it has to work on mobile. So we were looking through a handful of them and we couldn't find exactly what we were looking for, like we were looking for a solution that could either be free for a couple of screens so that we didn't have to exactly pay, we don't mind paying for add-ons, et cetera, if it benefits us, and is something that's solely usable on mobile. 

Obviously at the time, I don't think that there were many platforms out there that provided that so we thought like, how hard could this be? I've got a tech background, so I thought why not give you a crack? And that's how PosterBooking started. 

So you're a coder, right? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah. I graduated in 2016 with a software software engineering degree. So I've got quite a bit of a background in tech, especially SaaS as well.

And you're based in the Manchester area? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, that's correct. Manchester, England. 

When you were servicing this NHS install any of coming to grips with this not being the solution that you needed, I'm curious if you canvased the marketplace and looked at the options out there because there's a whole bunch of “easy to use, affordable” all those kinds of terms CMS software options out there. 

Did you half pause when you're thinking, okay, I could write something, but there seems to be a lot of this out there already, or you thought you could do something different? 

Jannatul Choudhury: That’s a great question.

So we did have a look at a number of digital signage companies as a consumer and during that research, before forming PosterBooking, we thought, yeah, there's certainly a gap in the market, and with obviously my background and our idea of what we actually wanted to do. I'll probably get into that shortly. The name PosterBooking comes from do you know how you can book posters? So the idea was to essentially build a platform that allows customers to advertise on different screens. So it basically gives the power to customers to open up their screens to other advertisers and generate revenue through that.

So we did quite a bit of research and we found nothing that's completely free and that helps with our end goal. So we just thought, yeah let's build this platform and see where it goes, and quite frankly, it took off really quickly. To begin with, during Covid, we launched during Covid, it was a bit slow, but that actually helped us with servicing a couple of users and building at the same time. 

I'm curious about a post on LinkedIn that you put up, maybe where I first came across the company name, you talked about the five things that you've learned along the way in this journey of building up your company and I thought I'd run through those and ask you about them.

The first thing you said is, “building a startup isn't easy, know when to ask for help.” Where did that help come from and what kind of help did you have? 

Jannatul Choudhury: So I've been in a lot of companies before starting PosterBooking. So I've been in SaaS, healthcare, e-commerce and legal tech as well. So I know a lot of people, say my managers and CEOs, et cetera. So anytime I had issues, I'd go to them even with coding issues or I recently spoke to one of the CEOs at my first place and he actually gave me some advice on how to go to market, et cetera. So that really helped.

And I've got quite a few advisors as well that have been in the industry and any questions I don't hesitate to ask. I've even spoken to CEOs in our current industry, like I've spoken to MarkScreenCloud so that was pretty good. I don't shy away. If I need something, obviously, it's definitely good to ask, right? 

Your second point was, “Perfection doesn't exist, so release the product as soon as possible.” I guess you can do that sort of thing with SaaS, right? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, definitely. To begin with, we probably launched within a couple of months and I was working at the time as well, so I had a full-time job and during the evenings, I would literally code all night or evening. We launched within a couple of months, so we had our first end-to-end solution which literally allowed customers to create their screens, upload their images, and we had our web player, so it was literally the web player and it was wrapped on the app, so like a web frame and that was literally it.

And that allowed us to get into the market straightaway. We didn't have any payment gateways which was probably a big chunk of development time as well that we saved simply because the software was free at the time.  

So then you could just layer on functionality and things like payment gateways and so on as the need developed?

Jannatul Choudhury: Absolutely, that's correct. 

You said, “Build a community and allow that community to make suggestions.” When you describe a community, what do you mean by that and what did they guide you? 

Jannatul Choudhury: So with PosterBooking, we've got a community group on WhatsApp and that's got over 200 businesses worldwide and every so often we'll send them a message, it's like a community group where all the businesses in that group communicate with each other. If they have any issues they'll put it on the group and either we'll reply back to them, or if someone else gets there quicker, like another business, they'll reply. So it's very much like a close-knit family. 

So say there was recently a couple of businesses that wanted a certain feature and we obviously looked at how that goes with PosterBooking, if it's beneficial, and then we actually released it. T]here's a number of features actually, say two factor auth or multi-user or even little tweaks to allow them to miss a few steps from the content management page, upload images directly onto their playlist from there. So these little things, the community is absolutely huge, right? We're pretty close to them and our online chat as well. We have an email system as well, but when someone messages us on the website, on chat, they'll come directly to us so we're pretty hands on in every aspect of it. I think that really helps a lot. 

Is that community culture unique to what you're doing here, or is that pretty common in that if you're running a SaaS platform, it's the one of the things that you do?

Jannatul Choudhury: To be fair, I've not found that to be a common thing, but it does really help our business staff, especially when you're a startup. You have that communication with the businesses. They feel like they're part of the business, giving ideas and updates, like sending images through how they're doing, just a sense of community, 

I guess it's important for you and whoever's doing your development. It just gets you a lot closer to them. 

Jannatul Choudhury: Definitely and in terms of development, I'm the only one that's doing development on the CMS.

So whatever people will tell you, it's useful?

Jannatul Choudhury: Yes, definitely. And so sometimes it's really important, like some updates, or even if you make a release ,they'll point it out to the group if there's any bugs or anything and I'll get there and fix it straight away. 

Your fourth point was, “Use a freemium model with premium upgrades.” I assume that the upgrades are how you actually make money because you can't make money out of free too easily. Do you need a lot of scale to work at your licensing costs and any costs? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, I'd say most of our customers are SMBs so say 90% and most of them will have like under 10 screens as well. So it's not the focus for us right now. It's not all about making a lot of money because we have very low overheads since it's like just a couple of people. And I'm developing it, so we don't have any development costs to begin with. But with our pro services that we've recently brought out it's literally keeping the lights on as well, with our service and bandwidth usage, et cetera. It really helps with that. Moving forward we will probably release more pro services and see how it goes.

Do you have any sense of what percentage of your user base is opting into paid services? 

Jannatul Choudhury: I couldn't really tell that off the bat, but we are somewhat cash flow positive, but obviously we put all that back into the business. I'd say about 10% are on pro services because we have a bunch of white labeled users, some people want reports, some people want to see if their screens are down so we have downtime alerts via email. We also have large uploads. So obviously being a free platform, we need to try and make some money somehow so we offer large uploads, 4K uploads, et cetera. And it does help and we've seen a massive usage on larger uploads and 4k. 

So freemium is something that's been around for 20 years or so and not necessarily in digital signage, but just broadly in web-based software. Is that a challenge or does it help that the marketplace assumes that like with Gmail and products like that, that you can get a pretty good service for free and that therefore, particularly for smaller SMB customers, that's an expectation?

Jannatul Choudhury: So I've worked in SaaS before, right? And we had a premium model as well, and it did really help. And with us, we've seen tremendous growth. Just like some businesses, they won't even consider using digital signage and for us to have 10 free screens, it just allows them to put their foot in the door, right? And customers are really happy. There were a handful of customers that genuinely didn't believe our pricing for the free tier which was not shocking to be fair. 

I think we've all downloaded apps and signed into services only to discover that the download is free, but to use it costs money.

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, they’ll have purchases. 

Your final point was, “Most importantly, believe in yourself!” 

What do you mean by that? Is it just simply that to put in the extra hours in the evening and everything to do this, you've gotta have a lot of belief in this? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, for sure. Like with me, I love coding, right? And it's probably like my only hobby right now. And if you ask my wife, she'd probably say I'm glued to the laptop. But it's similar to how people play video games. I just love coding and it's just something that makes me happy. So it's a difficult journey, probably not for everyone, but it does bear fruit.

Have you identified particular vertical markets? I know you said SMB, but does it tend to be pubs, restaurants, clubs, churches, schools, or all those things? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, we're pretty much open to everyone really. But our biggest vertical would be say QSR franchises, we've got a couple of hotel chains, zoos, bowling alleys, really just institutions and even non-profits are signing on really fast.

Your focus mainly on the Amazon Fire Stick lineup of products. What's been the experience with those units? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Initially we had a device that we were selling for about a hundred dollars. But we thought in order for customers to really get the screens up and running without any issues, we need something that's affordable and easy to access. So the Amazon Fire Stick was probably the only one at that price point that they could. So we focused on creating an app for that. We're also Android as well so that really helped to get it off the ground. 

So is the Firestick attractive, obviously because of price points, but also because it's familiar, there's a huge distribution network to get one, like you can get one the next day if you really needed that quickly. Was that a big sort of determining factor?

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, definitely. We have been looking into other solutions. Some Android boxes or even Raspberry PI, but they're not exactly easy to get a hold of. So, we really focused on Fire sticks. 

Yeah, you get into those lesser known Android products coming from Shenzhen and so on, and the build can change from shipment to shipment.

Jannatul Choudhury: That's what we found with our own made device. 

Should end users be nervous at all about deploying a consumer product for a commercial job with those Fire sticks?

if you talk to digital signage veterans, they talk about having high reliable industrial grade very durable devices to put out in the field for QSR and so on, versus consumer devices that are not meant to be running 24/7. People use them for six hours in the evening or whatever the case may be, and therefore they're not appropriate for a commercial job. 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah. I understand what you mean. So I've not seen a major problem with that, mainly because our predominant market is the QSR.

So we've got a client with about 400 screens and it's a restaurant franchise, and they use Fire sticks and it's pretty much plugin and go really but obviously in the future we do realize that we do need more robust hardware. We're looking into integrating with BrightSign and Chrome OS in the future, which will really help with the enterprise clients. 

I'm curious if the folks who are in the Amazon hardware team that develop Fire sticks, the whole product line, are they aware of commercial uses of their product? And do you ever keep in touch with them about software releases and things?

Jannatul Choudhury: Every time you make a release on the app, I think compared to Google, they've got a more rigorous testing. So they'll test literally everything on your CMS, on the app, how you communicate, they'll make accounts, so they do have a very good idea on what's going on. And if anything goes wrong, they just straight away fail the app. They won't really release it up for you. 

Oh, okay. So you're on some sort of an App store and that's how distribution's done? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yes. So you don't need to sideload the app. You can just download it straight away from the Amazon store.

And they do all the vetting there and do their best to break it before they approve it? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah, for sure. 

What do you see evolving in this space? Web services have changed a lot even in the last 3-4 years. Are there things emerging that are gonna make your life easier or open up new possibilities?

Jannatul Choudhury: We were looking into using sensors for more information on customers. So say we use sensors to identify how many users are in your store, something like that, and in the future we're looking at more enterprise level features, so say integrating with more apps, giving two factor authentication with their accounts, et cetera. 

But that's all stuff that you as the only developer at the moment would have to do, right? 

Jannatul Choudhury: Yeah. That's very much true. But 2023 is very exciting. We'll be looking at hiring people. 

It’s the two of you right now, right? 

Jannatul Choudhury: That's correct. So we've got me and my co-founder, and we've also got two freelancers that are working on the app side of things. 

By the sounds of it, it's all bootstrapped right now, right? 

Jannatul Choudhury: That's correct. We're pre-capital, privately-funded and have not had any investment as of yet.

Is that something you anticipate doing or is your a great preference to just do this on your own and see where it goes? 

Jannatul Choudhury: No, for sure. If the right investment comes, then we'll definitely look into it. 

All right. This was great. The one other curious question I have and it's completely out of left field, is are you a City or a United guy, or are you supporting another team?

Jannatul Choudhury: United, for sure. 

I saw you went to the University of Salford, so I was curious if you supported Salford. 

Jannatul Choudhury: No, Salford is in a lower league at the moment.

Yeah. That's the one with some of the former Manchester United players, right? 

Jannatul Choudhury: That's correct.

All right. For those people who are listening and wondering why we're talking about football, my apologies, but I was curious. 

I appreciate your time. That was quite interesting. 

Jannatul Choudhury: Thank you, Dave. Thank you for taking the time and I look forward to speaking with you in the future at some point.

Gerhard Pichler & Zuzana Yalcin, Easescreen

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

The roots of Austria's Easescreen are as a AV systems integrator, but when the company looked around in the late 1990s for software to use for jobs that weren't yet being called digital signage, there weren't many options.

So Easescreen wrote its own software, and the company is now, by far, a software company first ... though it still offers hands-on solutions work in its home country Austria.

Now Easescreen is looking beyond central Europe and actively developing partnerships and business in North America.

I had a good chat with CEO Gerhard Pichler, and marketing manager Zuzana Yalcin, about the roots of Easescreen, how it differentiates itself from the many software options out there, and why they now have their sights set on this side of the Atlantic.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Gerhard and Zuzana, thank you for joining me. Gerhard, can you give me a background on what Easescreen is all about and how long you've been? 

Gerhard Pichler: Sure, Dave. Easescreen started in the late 90s, so actually, my first company, which still exists, is an AV integrator, so we come from quite a strong technical background, and in some of the projects, the customer requested solutions, which we now call digital signage. So we started, more or less, as the second role on the market as a manufacturer of software, as I told you, more than 20 years ago and now this year, we have rolled out more than 10,000 projects in nearly 100 countries. So it developed quite well, I would say.

Would you describe what you now do as being software-first? Or do you still operate as an integrator as well? 

Gerhard Pichler: Software-first, but in our home country (Austria), we have two offices there, one in Graz, which is in the south of Austria, and the other in Vienna, the capital. So in this home market, we also do AV integration so we still keep our knowledge regarding network, transmissions, protocols, screens, and so on quite high. My team does this kind of job but definitely, the most important thing within the company is the digital signage of the Easescreen.

I assume having that capability and current knowledge of the hardware market and the installation challenges and all those things is probably quite helpful in giving you insights as to what the end users and the resellers need versus just guessing and talking to people about it? 

Gerhard Pichler: That's for sure. Especially one thing is the contact with the other manufacturers. So for our businesses, we have very close contact with two manufacturers: LG, and Samsung, and on the other hand, we know how the integrators, which actually are our customers with who we do indirect business, how their mindset is, what their pains are because we experience the same. So that's quite helpful. 

I'm guessing that you got into the software side of this business, back in ‘99 because there weren't a whole bunch of software options out there at that point, right? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, you're right. There were some dinosaurs, like Scala or Omnivex in Europe but the options for the customers weren’t many compared to now. I would say in the 2000s and on, there were quite a lot of solutions coming up and disappearing again so it maybe was not very helpful for the signage industry because many of these solutions were not really professional, so the customer had a bad experience. They didn't touch signage for long, but I would say 10-15 years ago, it started again when customers trusted in professional solutions, and now the markets as you know as well, it's merging and there are a lot of solutions out there and there's some kind of consolidation going on.

Of all those different deployments that you have, do you have some large ones? 

I think I saw that recently you did some sort of a deal where you have, I think, roughly 8,000 displays for a tobacco company in stores in Germany. Is that correct? 

Zuzana Yalcin: Yes. That was Japan Tobacco International. They carry brands like Camel, Winston, et cetera. I believe they're the third largest tobacco company in the world. 

Yeah, and what are you doing with them? Are there screens at the point of sale? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, point of sale. So each point of sale has, I think, between one and three screens and behind each screen, there's an Easescreen license. So this is one of the larger projects. 

I told you we have 10,000 out there and the project means networks the small network consists of 1-3 screens, and the larger ones like JTI for example, with at least 6,000 or 7,000 screens. The larger networks have more than thousands of screens in one network.

So do you have a reference case or two that when you meet a potential business partner or customer, they say, “give some ideas on the kinds of projects that you've done.” 

Do you have one or two go-to's that you tend to mention?

Gerhard Pichler: We go through the channel, which means our strategy is just all the know-how we have about our solution and all the things around digital signage software, we transfer to our resellers. The resellers are 20% AV companies, 60% IT companies, and 20% agencies, I would say from the creative side.

Every one of these companies has to go through a training and certification process. For many projects, we don't really know where our license goes because they can stand on their own feet. That's one of our strategies is to be able to multiply without having hundreds of employees. Usually, the customer asks for signage. In the meantime, digital signage is some kind of expression that the customer already knows, and if the project has some specialties, like integration of databases, or something like that, which is not which cannot be configured out of the box with our solution, then we work together very closely with our resellers and with the end customers, and we help them to integrate all solutions in their not only network but the environment, but most of the projects, we are not involved in it as a manufacturer. 

So you stay behind the scenes and you're not even really marketing that you did this, and let your partners shine?

Gerhard Pichler: We call our solution the Austrian Army knife. It’s like the Swiss, but the Austrian Army knife. It's a toolbox for our integrators that is very full of features, and functions that now after 23 years can be used out of the box for various vertical markets. 

The most important for us is definitely the corporate market. So most projects are in this field. Companies use our software to inform the employees and the customers, on production lines, for example, real-time data showing to the teams there, digital door sign canteens. So these are the kind of projects we do. The project with the many licenses, I mentioned before, 1000-10,000 are more in retail because these are the projects with a lot of licenses, but besides corporate and retail, we identified ten verticals where our solution is widely known and used, for example, higher education, transportation, healthcare, for example, is very interesting because we are certified in Europe with some kind of protocol so we can show patient names. So they can use our software for calling the next patient on one side, but also for showing their offers that the hospital has or some advice they give, or for wayfinding, things like that. It's quiet interesting.. 

I often say to companies that are marketing CMS software that I encourage them to find a vertical market or a specialty of some kind that has a lot of opportunity associated with it versus being a general offer because if you're a general offer, you are mainly competing on price because the functionality is maybe different across different companies, but in general terms the same. 

But it sounds like you're doing fine with being a general offer because you've got 20-plus years in the business and established resellers.

Zuzana Yalcin: Yeah, so that's where our sales channel comes in because our integrators have specialties, so they are the experts on different vertical markets. They know how to customize our software to the end customers' needs. So it's also an example of where you empower the integrator, you empower the reseller, and then they're able to do amazing things. 

Is the software white labeled? 

Gerhard Pichler: There are some examples, yes.

So if a business partner, a reseller wants to say this is Brand X’s software, you guys are behind the scenes entirely, but driving it? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, we are prepared for this so we can easily white-label it for partners. Usually, this discussion comes up with large integrators. They say, okay, I want to hide the name and I want to add my own branding to the solution. But when we talk to them, it often turns to the opposite. They say, okay, it's better that we have a very close relationship with you, and we can start with all the references we bring to the table. 

Still, there are some examples where Easescreen is hidden behind the different names.

We met on the floor at a Digital Signage Experience in November and you agreed to do a podcast, and one of the things that intrigued me was that you're an Austrian company, but you are in the United States looking to expand into North America and build up partnerships here. I gather that's been something that's been an ongoing effort for the last couple of years.

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's true. So from time to time, we do get some projects in the US. For me, the US is definitely the Mecca of digital signage. There are a lot of really professional companies there, which could be great partners for us. There are so many opportunities. The market is that huge. So for me, it's a challenge to start a business there, and I wished to do this many years before, and we decided I think two years ago to install some guy there to do market research, to find ways how we can sell it, through which channels, and so on. He is a very experienced guy out of the AV business and after we see that there are enough opportunities, there are chances for us with our solution. 

The market in the US does not really have a lot of software that is comparable to ours. So then we decided, okay, we go to the next step. The next step was founding a company called Easescreen America LLC in Miami, which we did this year, I think it was in June. Because we have had success in the US for a long time, it's definitely important and necessary to have a company there, and I think 2023 should be our year. The pipeline is quite full now with projects. 

So some of our guys were doing the DSE in Vegas, they were on the East coast visiting future partners or partners, which already signed contracts with us, and they brought I think five or six projects to Austria. So I think the start is quite successful up to now.

If you're an AV integrator or an IT systems integrator, whatever it may be, there are a lot of options in North America. There are a lot of companies selling software solutions and it wouldn't be that you'd get a meeting where they’d go, “oh finally, somebody's got software that can do this.” Why are they choosing to partner with you when there are other options out there? What's ticking their boxes? 

Gerhard Pichler: One thing that we experienced is that we tell them and they seem to trust us. We only go through integrators. So many examples in the past, the integrators told us that manufacturer, they promised us they promised not to make shortcuts directly to the end customer, but they didn't do it. The integrators, they're waiting for, I think manufacturers who they can trust.

Other thingsinclude things like we have so many options in the setup, we can be installed on-premises, for example, which many other solutions are not able to be because they're only cloud-based. We have a cloud infra as well if the customer wants to use it, they can use a private cloud, and so there are many options for the integrators and multipliers, it seems for them very interesting, and besides that, we have technical feature wise I think so many things on board out of the box which nearly no other solution can bring to the table, and these are some of the reasons why they change because many of them when you talk to them, they would tell us about the bad experiences with other solutions. With us, it's always good if some company is experienced and tells us the pain and we can show him how our solution would do it, then you can win them very fast.

So it's interesting and very good for us if companies give us the chance to talk to them, they have already had experiences with solutions, then these companies are the best us and for them, we can be quite fast. 

In terms of partners, do you have a kind of partner, like a profile that you would prefer to work with?

Gerhard Pichler: It seems the larger projects are done by IT companies. So in the US, they're large IT companies, they do the job for digital signage for companies, and so on. So the profile seems more to be IT-focused companies than AV. But we have experienced in the last months, the really interesting projects, they come up more from bigger IT companies.

So one way to the market was through reps, so they introduced us to the integrators there. So we cover now I think nearly 45 states, reps like Simco or BP Marketing, and these guys, who have a large network of AV and IT integrators behind them. For Easescreen, this is the way we can reach the integration network quite fast. 

Is it a challenge on the educational side? 

One of the things I've heard over the years is if you're going to have a reseller channel, you have to invest a lot of time in ensuring that the people who are talking about your product and solutions, fully understand what it is, and if they're an IT systems integrator, they're thinking about all kinds of things, including network security and bandwidth and so on. 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, of course, it's a challenge, but since we have been so long on the market, there are so many slides and training programs exactly prepared for these kinds of topics. We can talk about the language they talk. So you have to talk to IT companies differently of course than to agencies, and in the end, in the US market, we have to learn our marketing lessons because the first step to the customer more than here is by a colorful brochure and things like this, which is quite old fashioned, but it's definitely necessary.

And here, I would say, comes in Zuzana again. So what has been your experience on the marketing side, comparing the North American market to Europe, and what homework we had to do? 

Zuzana Yalcin: So definitely from a marketing perspective, it’s way more abot storytelling. Of course, at some point it's about the USP, it's about the features, it's about all the amazing things you can do. But the first story is always: who are you? Where do you come from, and how do you actually serve the people all around the world? 

So for me, this has been a big lesson in trying to focus on the human side of software because in the end, our partners are human, the end customer is human. The user is human, so how can I translate that story in a way that makes sense to everybody from a professional integrator all the way to an amateur user? And I say that without any negative connotation, but just so they know what digital signage is, what the screen is, and what it can do for them.

This is something I'm noticing actually in Austria as well, most people see digital signage every single day, multiple times, if not countless times, but they have no idea what it is. They cannot label it, and if you talk to them about digital signage, they think it's maybe digital signatures or something like that, so just raising awareness in general is a pretty exciting thing for me. 

Yeah, I was gonna ask about the evolution of all this. Given that you've been involved in it for as long as I have that, what have you seen changing through the years? Obviously, something's never changed. There's still a limited understanding of what it is, but I suspec I find in my own life that I don't have to go on and on at length to explain what it is I do and what I'm involved in. They get it pretty quickly versus it was, a five-minute conversation back in 2005. 

Zuzana Yalcin: I think software is definitely becoming more accessible to the end customer in general, and it also changes customer expectations because they expect to be empowered more. They expect to be involved more. But I think, 10-20 years ago, you could be a genius technician with amazing software and rely on people coming in. Now you definitely have to tell the story if you definitely have to go out there and share the message. 

Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, but you are right, Dave.

Of course, the awareness now is different than 20 years before. In shows like ISC or Infocomm and so on, we've been part of ISE, I think 15-17 times. In the first years, you had to explain even to the people in the industry, what is digital signage and so on, and that changed completely. Now, people quickly understand what it is. I would say that changed. 

The trust in signage is there. That means customers who want info screens and systems for showing content, know that if they make the right choice they can buy systems that are stable and reliable. That is different than it was 5-10 years ago. I think what didn't change is that the end customers are not aware of which kinda tasks they have when there is a digital signage solution. When we are involved in projects, we try always tell the customer, I hope it's clear to you that there will be a technical, very perfect system for you, but in the end, you have to think about who do you want to reach? What are the contents? How is the way that content coming to the screen? Who is responsible? So in many projects, this didn't change. The customer is not aware that he has to give resources, that the digital signage system is successful and lives and is active, I would say. So that slightly changes, but it's the same story as many years before I would. But we help them in creating concepts, for example. 

How is the company set up? Are you privately held or do you have a private equity backer? 

Gerhard Pichler: Oh, private, a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the code is made in-house and we are privately held.

What's your headcount? 

Gerhard Pichler: 25. 

Has that grown much through the years? Obviously, it started with one, but... 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes. I would say by one or two per year, so we are growing but not that fast

There's a lot of companies that are your size like you have larger companies, particularly private equity backed ones, actively looking at as potential acquisitions, I suspect you're getting those emails and phone calls pretty regularly? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's right. But we didn't decide on one until now. 

You're staying on your own path. 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, up to now. Our mission is not completed yet. 

So if people wanna know more about your company, where can they find you? Obviously, you're going to be at ISE in a couple of months, but online they would find you find you at…

Zuzana Yalcin: www.easescreen.us, and of course we are on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Simply type in an Easescreen and you will find us. 

Simply put, I like it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Gerhard Pichler: Thank you very much, Dave.

Zuzana Yalcin: Thank you. The pleasure is all ours. 

Brian Nutt, Adificial

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

There have been a few companies that have come along in recent years offering a platform that used templates, image library and stored data to largely automate the production of videos - but few if any of them had their heads wrapped around how that might work with and for digital signage networks.

A Louisville, KY start-up is taking a run at the concept, and the big difference with Adificial is that its CEO and co-founder started and ran a digital signage software company for many years ... so he has his head around the desire for content automation when it comes to videos that find their way to screens.

Some listeners will know Brian Nutt as the founder of Codigo, which had built up a strong and interesting business focused mainly on regional banking. That business was acquired in 2018 by Spectrio, which now also owns and publishes Sixteen:Nine, and Brian spent a few years away from the business, before thinking about and pulling together Adificial. It's a platform that uses web services and the scalability of cloud computing to enable HTML5-driven motion media files to be generated quickly and easily, by the hundreds or thousands. At scale, a motion file unique to a person or place can cost only pennies.

Nutt is a digital signage guy, but he's launching Adificial with a focus on media embedded in staff and customer emails. That makes sense, as the idea is that this platform can generate many thousands of custom videos for emails, versus the dozens or maybe hundreds that might be needed by a digital signage network that wants different messaging for, let's say, each store in a chain.

But the capabilities are there to make this relevant for digital signage. Have a listen.

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TRANSCRIPT

David: Hey, Brian. Thank you for joining me. For people who don't know you or maybe recall you from your past, can you give me your background and what you were doing with Codigo? 

Brian Nutt: Sure and great to talk to you again, Dave. Codigo was a digital signage company that I founded back in around 2004, so set up kinda early on in the trajectory of digital signage. That morphed into us introducing a number of different retail media products, interactive kiosks, overhead music, on-hold messaging, all that type of, and we had a focus on financial institutions, really, like regional, local banks and credit unions. Although towards the end there, when I sold Codigo in 2018, we had installations around the world and all sorts of different industries from restaurants, universities, office complexes, and all the places that you would see a digital sign installed today, or retail media, as I said. 

Did that and sold that in 2018, took a few years off and launched this new project which is pretty exciting. 

David: So what is Adificial? 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, so Adificial really began I guess in terms of me thinking about this back before I sold Codigo, so Codigo and I think like a lot of digital signage products, at least today, maybe not back then, but we had the pretty robust online content engine for creating content that could be either sent down to a kiosk or digital signage or any of the devices, whether it was on-hold messaging or any of those things, you could create the content on the web, and so I had this idea that might be an exciting product as a standalone product.

We never launched it, and it's probably a good idea because folks like Canva came along, and Promo and these other products came along, and they did a pretty good job so I’m glad I didn’t do it, but after little time off, I was still thinking about the product and just how video is forcing businesses to do things differently, and this requirement today to personalize content for folks that are your customers or are interested in the product.

So the idea of an Adificial is to solve the problem that's traditionally been around video, which is, it's expensive, it's time-consuming and yet the requirement of it by consumers continues to race forward daily, and then the age today where data, people are willing to share their data with brands freely and why is video passive still? Why is it that it's audience-based where I press play and I watch it and Dave gets the same video as I do, even though we have totally different lives and we live in different spots and have different ages and all those things. 

It's this idea that you can make videos personalized with data. What I know about you, I should be able to map brand assets, audio, video, and language even, and insert interactive elements, calendar invites, pdf, downloads, buttons, and anything like that into the video. So it's fully interactive and engaging in ways that just really haven't been largely available and at reasonable rates.

David: So this is a content automation platform? 

Brian Nutt: Yes. I would wrap it up by saying we're not in the marketing automation space. We're not trying to compete with Mailchimp or anything like that, what we're trying to do is automate the production of the video with data and available assets and return that piece of content back to the market automation platform that would then send it out, primarily via email, although I can see this transition to social and SMS in any other way that you communicate to consumers. 

David: So if I'm running a digital signage network, and I have a hundred different stores and I want a video for each of those stores, but I want it localized to each of those stores, instead of getting an agency or in-house designer to generate a hundred different videos, you would run it through this and it would use data to generate those hundred videos?

Brian Nutt: That's a decent comparison, but this product's really not built for digital signage. So imagine a little bit bigger than that. You know the value of data on your consumer today is tremendously high. So if you have a CRM that has 10,000 people that are either current customers or leads or somewhere along the customer journey.

What we do is we could produce videos for all of them and you insert video into your marketing stack, into the customer journey and send it out via email. 

David: Oh, okay. Are the files not big enough to run on a large format screen? 

Brian Nutt: They could, and in fact, when I initially started this, the idea was to send content to any device, but we've narrowed that down and focused on market automation platforms. But there's no reason it couldn't morph into a digital signage play. It’s just not today. 

David: Right, because there's more scale in those and it's just a bigger business. 

Brian Nutt: Yes. 

David: So it's one of those things like Poppulo, App Space, and some of these other companies that are starting to blend platforms, where it's one stock that can send to a digital screen, that can also send to a smartphone, to a tablet, to a website, whatever. It would kind of plug into that kind of thing. 

Brian Nutt: Yes, and here's the other reason that I've gotten into this, and I'm a huge believer in power digital signage, obviously. But at Codigo, our growth was really built around this incredible drive to build more stores, more locations, more branches in the banking space, and so we leveraged that and grew off that and really benefited from it. But today what's happening is, in fact, I was looking just recently, they're suggesting that in the next five years, 50,000 retail stores will close.

Since 2009, when we were going into the great recession, banks and credit unions numbered about 15,000 total, that's not branches. Today, there are about 7,000. So it's this consolidation and push not including the number of locations that close during the pandemic, what 20,000 retail stores, something like that. 

So what's happening, in my opinion, is the store or branch does a couple of things. One, it's meant to educate a person in person on the product, build trust, and sell products. But if stores are closing, people aren't going to the store, how do you communicate to them personally and to me, the conversation today is done in data. If I'm willing to give a brand my data, trust them with that, even if it's unreasonable. I'm not going to the store. I never wanna meet a person that's going to tell me about a shoe or a bank loan or whatever, but that doesn't mean I don't expect you to communicate back to me with things that are specific to me, to help me learn about products, build trust, and ultimately sell me something. So that's taking it from the digital science in-store installation, that's the next progression of what we're trying to solve. 

David: It's another output. 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, exactly. 

David: So how does this work?

Brian Nutt: I guess, where do you want me to start? It did take quite a while to figure it out honestly. You start with this gigantic idea and then try to distill it down into something actionable. So that's where we are now. 

But at the finest level, it's really not that dissimilar from digital signage. It's just one level deeper in how you're delivering the content, so you know the right time, right place, right person, all those things. And a large well of content that's either procured the third party ShutterStock, et cetera, or first party to the brand and then using technology to map these pieces of content to data, and data could be something like just knowing your name and having it be, “Hello Dave”, and so if the first name equals Dave, then show the text Dave on the first screen and if language equals Spanish, say, “Hola Dave”, and that's really what it is. 

It's mapping data smartly to assets, no matter whether it's something as simple as text or a background image or a video, things like that, and then you stitch those together based on where you are in the process towards, or whatever it's you're involved in. It could be something like onboarding an employee. It could be obviously selling someone, onboarding them on a product, or following up with a customer service issue, and you do it at scale. Because you can automate it. 

David: So if you have the data tables, you have the image assets, and you have maybe some core templates, you could conceivably generate 10,000 videos that are all tailored to each individual?

Brian Nutt: That's exactly right. 

David: Are you dependent on templates?

Brian Nutt: Again, it’s very similar to digital science in many ways. So what we're doing, just like we did at Codigo, is leveraging a high degree of design skill and allowing folks to manipulate that as they choose. Now we've done a couple of things a little smarter this way, which is we're building in functions where we call it a branded function, which I guess is kinda out there in the market in software where you just click a button and it'll map your brand assets the best it can to template that we're building, but the same thing with Codigo is that we have a pretty high-end content editor that allows you to build whatever you want. 

David: Do you need to have graphic design skills?

Brian Nutt: Not a high degree of them. As I said, it’s very similar to what we did at Codigo from a user experience perspective.

David: So you wanna have somebody using this who has some core design chops and knows not to use Comic Sans for a font, or use pink and everything? 

Brian Nutt: Exactly. I can barely sign my name much less, create a piece of content that's gonna be sent out to thousands of consumers and I'll never do that. But the thing about this is not the design skills. It's meant to be, the whole set it and forget it attitude, which is once we have content mapped and I have the data that's associated with different pieces of content, and I have the story, we call it a story setup, and maybe I'll give you an example:

If they use a CRM and I have David Haynes who showed interest in Red Wine and you wanna join the wine club, the Friday Wine Club at the local wine establishment. So you show interest in that, and in their CRM you meet a condition that says, “Hey, Dave just joined the wine club” and what traditionally happens is when you meet that condition, you're sending an email and the email says, “Hey Dave, thanks so much for your interest in the wine club”, and it's got a picture or something of it, there, and maybe it shows people what the wine club. Well frankly, that's boring.

So what we wanna do is take that same approach and it's all that is: a form, it's all merge fields. “Hello, first name” - it just that it happens to be Dave. “Thank you for your interest in Product ID” - wine club, or whatever that it might be. Brian might be a white wine drinker, but it all comes from the same engine, so it's effectively a similar approach. We're taking data from those systems, current systems, we're not trying to be a CRM and mapping that to assets that we have, whether they're the first party to this, in this case, the wine club or something that we've provided you from a third party library, and then turning that into video, right? Stitching each of these assets together with dynamic fields that represent, “Hey, Dave, thanks for your interest in the wine club. All the red wine drinkers are meeting down the road on Friday afternoon. Come by. Would you like to attend?” You could click yes. 

David: Gotcha. So this is rules-based, it's not AI? 

Brian Nutt: Today, no. 

David: So there's a plan?

Brian Nutt: There's a grand plan. 

David: So what are the outputs like? What's the output file? 

Brian Nutt: The output file as well as a URL, and so what we're generating is a PURL, a personalized URL. 

David: So it's not an mp4, it's not a video file of any kind, it's an HTML5 file?

Brian Nutt: Yes. 

David: Do you work in parallel with a CRM system or how do the two platforms play together? 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, now we're going to beta in February. Today, there are a number of different ways to do it. You can either upload it yourself or you can, there are a number of systems that can automate the transfer of data, like Zapier, et cetera.

And you map these just like anything else. If you have a list of people that meet conditions, like the Red Wine Club, you take that data and get it to our system. As long as we understand what the fields are, then we can choose the correct content to weave together and return it back to you as a PURL, which can then be sent out as an email.

David: How seamless will it be? 

Brian Nutt: It should be very seamless. Take any system, let's take Mailchimp for example. There are custom fields and automation that allow you to insert links into an email template or a landing page. So we're routing on top of those existing systems and the features that they have and so once you have that, you can have a custom record for each person, like Dave O'Brien or whomever that updates itself, and when those conditions are met, it knows to send the email. 

David: So would you use APIs or would you use middleware like you were mentioning like Zapier? 

Brian Nutt: That's the first way to do it. Oddly in the financial space, it's more of a security requirement. Rather than doing that, oftentimes I'll just use SMTP, which seems old school, but there are reasons to do so, like man-in-the-middle attacks, and things like that. But there are ways to do this. Now, do we wanna integrate with as many systems as we possibly can? We'll let the market dictate that. 

David: Because it's HTML5, is it responsive? 

Brian Nutt: Responsive to the size of the device? Is that what you mean, like web responsive? 

David: The screen resolution, and if it's going out on Facebook, it's a 4:3 square and if it's going out on a larger screen, it's a 16:9 rectangle? 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, again, it's very similar to the product we had with Codigo, which is, you can do custom resolutions, you can do whatever you want, but then again, it's gotta be responsive to the area of the device, or in this case, the browser, whether that's mobile or your laptop or tablet or whatever. 

David: So when you look at this from financial aspects, what's the benefits argument of doing this versus producing individual videos? It's pretty obvious, but tell me nonetheless. 

Brian Nutt: As I said, producing videos is incredibly expensive, and I've termed it the content gap, which is what I call, it's the distance between what consumers require in video - and they want everything in the video - and what businesses can reasonably produce. So it's not just the cost, a lot of times people outsource this stuff, and then it's got a shelf life. 

But with what we're doing we think we can reasonably produce hundreds of thousands of videos, for pennies on the dollar, and I say video because that's what people understand, but it’s actually HTML that you render, that's the other component that is good. It's favorable.

Now, will that be something that every brand wants? Do they want rendered videos? Sure, there might be folks that require rendered video, and maybe we'll do that at one point we actually did, at Codigo, we ended up using a very similar approach. Then we built a rendering engine that rendered as HTML5 to true video. But today it's HTML5 and it's just from hosting to production to the delivery of it, it drives the cost down to prices that were impossible.

David: So when you go to market in a couple of months, two or three months, what am I paying? Am I subscribing to something? Am I buying an enterprise license?

Brian Nutt: It's a SaaS model, and it's usage-based too. So it's a tiered-based model similar to the digital signage space, there definitely be some content creation elements to it where we assist clients if they need the content made, and you probably remember at Codigo we did that as well. It’s the same approach here, and it really depends. It's hard to give you a specific pricing point. But I think most customers will probably land somewhere between $500 and $1500 a month. That's where I think it would be. It could be far higher, depending on usage. 

I was at a trade show recently and there's a customer of mine, who said that they sent out emails last month. Well, If you make 140,000 videos, it might be a little higher, but that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to do the same thing as the last business, which may get a very attractive price that they can leverage. 

David: So that's the scale argument why it makes more sense for a cable company or a phone company or power company, something like that, that has tens of thousands of subscribers and customers versus something like a digital signage network, which as I said, might have a hundred iterations of a similar ad, and you don't get the same economies of scale from.

Brian Nutt: That's right, and in a lot of ways I feel like this is very similar to when I started Codigo. I remember telling people, I'm going to replace printed posters on the wall with flat screens, and they're like, what? And I'd say it's called digital signage. They'll say, oh, you mean like those LED, those red blinky lights that go across like that? I'm like no. That's not what I mean, and I would go around with a 42-inch screen, and those things were heavy, and so it's almost the same thing where I have to show this to everyone so they can understand this, and go oh I can use this. There are all these different permutations of a relationship with a client or an onboarding of one or whatever it is and then they kinda get it so that's where we are.

David: Yeah, that's very familiar to me. Years ago, back in the mid-2010s, I had a little spin-out product that I did with a Korean partner called Spotamate, and it was automating videos based on templates and by far my biggest challenge was education. Because people just couldn't wrap their heads around it. So how are you gonna deal with that? 

Brian Nutt: I think that today, the state of the consumer today around video is totally different, and the other thing is that I think Spotimate was sort of Adobe-reliant, right?

David: Yeah, it was an Adobe plugin. 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, so we're skipping all that. So from a user perspective, it makes it a little easier to get started, since it’s a lot fewer steps to take, but from an education standpoint, I think people are starting to expect this. It's like if you log in to Netflix and you see all these interesting shows that you know, that makes you think, oh, wow, boy, that's something I would watch, you understand that there's a data-driven decision behind that, and whether it's content while you're scrolling through on Instagram or across the web, all these technologies exist and I feel like most folks understand that when they see something like this, they get it, where before it might have and it still can be creepy. I'm not saying it can't be, but depending on the use, before it was perceived entirely like that. 

With the pandemic and, if you go back before the pandemic, or let's go five years back, a lot of people didn't wanna take videos. They didn't wanna do a zoom call or whatever. They wanted to do it on the phone or they shut off their camera. But today, if I have a Zoom call with you and you don't turn your camera on, I think something's wrong. What's going on? So it's this drive to video and the requirement of a personalized experience that when people get this, I think they'll be like, oh yeah they'll understand. 

David: So I realized, as you've said that your core market is email marketing, maybe social media, some of those things. If you have digital signage, software platforms, or solution providers who are interested because maybe they do this whole omnichannel thing and they see this as an opportunity, how would they work with you? Would it run in parallel? 

Brian Nutt: That's a sort of broad question to ask. I'm not sure I don't have that nailed down yet. But I'd take all inquiries, so to speak. Because again the idea is to insert this into the marketing stack. So whether it's digital signage or traditional email marketing, or any omnichannel approach, as you said, contacting a customer, why aren't you using video? And so it does seem as I said from my perspective, the growth of digital signage, which isn't anywhere, relies on footprint and as it declines or appears to decline at least from different ways. This is one of those ways to pick that up. 

David: Yeah, and I think you're gonna start seeing a lot more screens, but in places other than what people thought about, which was, in stores and so on, but there are all kinds of operational messaging that could stand to be personalized based on location, not personalized to individuals, but to the dynamics of that, area of a building or whatever.

Brian Nutt: Sure, and the same thing holds true. The level of personalization is all really based on the quality of the data that you have and if you try to make it too deep and too complicated, folks I think will shy away because, yeah, it might not be possible, remember, it's the same thing with digital signage. You can make things super, super complex, and try to do all these really neat things, but the reality is a lot of people don't have that capability.

So you can only deal with what is reasonably available to you from a data perspective, but there's no reason you have to be specific to a person. Obviously, digital signage doesn't do that but automates it specific to an area, of the work floor, or whatever that's doable.

David: You've been out of digital signage for roughly four years now. I'm curious now having kinda left the industry, what's your perspective on it now? 

Brian Nutt: I think there has been a tremendous amount of consolidation, including me, right? So a lot of the players that existed before have been rolled up in some ways. So it's like the wild west that existed when I really was looking back in the wild west, but it's gotten a little more sterile, at least that's my opinion. I think that the interesting pieces of it are in the hive stack arena with retargeting and programmatic ad buying, which I was never a really big proponent of the ad model. I think we talked about it before, but there are interesting ways to serve content and that's really more, kinda what, where you're going with what your comments were before, how do you serve that content to folks in a unique and timely way, and I think there will be, and there already has been this approach to multi-device from a screen, just one big screen, but honestly, since I got out, I haven't paid a tremendous amount of attention to it. 

David: What you're doing is very current in terms of the shift more and more to using data integration and automated content so that it's always relevant, so you're doing what the industry's doing.

Brian Nutt:  All right, there you go.

David: So if people wanna find out more, where are they gonna find you online? 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, it's www.adificial.io - we're signing up beta users, although it'll be a closed group and already have a pretty good number that we've signed up from some past relationships.

But anybody who's interested, just go on there and there's a beta sign-up little form there, and you can learn about it.

David: And you're bootstrapped? 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, bootstrapped in entirety. I've got one co-founder who was actually with me at Codigo as well, and we've got a team of six developers working on this thing full-time and are pretty excited about it.

David: All right. It was great to catch up with you. 

Brian Nutt: Yeah, you too, Dave. 

DSE 2022 Mixer Panel: Mergers and Acquisitions in Digital Signage

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

Ahead of the networking mixer that Sixteen:Nine pulls together during DSE week in Las Vegas, we tried a panel discussion in the hour before the actual mixer started.

I zeroed in on mergers and acquisitions as the topic, as I am aware of numerous companies either selling or buying. To get a sense of what's going on out there, and what companies are looking for, three CEOs of top software and solutions companies kindly volunteered some of their limited time to sit and field questions.

We had Kevin Carbone of Scala, Tamara Bebb of Spectrio and Rick Mills of Creative Realities.

My initial thought was that I'd be moderator, but I quickly realized that I was needed in 15 different places in the hour before the formal mixer started - talking to my check-in team and to staff at the venue. So I drafted Christian Armstrong of Spectrio, who has lived this both by looking for potential acquisitions when at Industry Weapon, to experiencing the transition after that company was acquired by Spectrio.

I didn't do a transcript for this as there are four people speaking, and it would take a bunch of time to assign names to comments from an audio file.

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Daniel Smalley, Hologram Expert From BYU

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

I'm not sure why seeing all the product references lately to holograms makes me a little crazy, apart from the simple fact that none of them really meet the definition. It's not like that's the one term marketers abuse. We've seen bezel-less displays that had bezels. MicroLED displays that aren't actually microLED. And on and on.

I don't entirely know what really does meet the definition, so I thought I'd ask an expert. Daniel Smalley is an associate professor of electrical engineering at Brigham Young University in Utah, and a genuine expert in the field. He's working, his CV says, to make the 3D displays of science fiction a reality, using "waveguide-based modulators and optical tractor beam technologies."

The short summary is that we're not there yet, and in this conversation, we get into why that is - with the biggest reason being bandwidth and the immense computing power needed to genuinely make the holograms of Star Wars and Star Trek actually happen, and work.

We also get into a discussion of the various products already on the market that have co-opted the hologram term, and also talk about the real world, practical applications for holograms.

Daniel went to MIT and has his masters and a Ph.D, so he's approximately a billion times smarter than me. This talk gets technical in spots, but I tried valiantly to keep up!

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TRANSCRIPT

Daniel, thank you for joining me. Can you explain your role at BYU and your interest in holograms? 

Daniel Smalley: Certainly, I'm an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering here at Brigham University. My research primarily has to do with advanced 3D displays, including holographic displays and volumetric displays. 

Okay, and when you say you're doing research, what does that mean?

Daniel Smalley: So it is our group's manifest destiny, as we see it, to recreate the displays of science fiction, specifically the Princess Leia projector from Star Wars and the Holodeck from Star Trek, and so research in my mind is the steps we take to get from where we are to those places 

And where are we in those steps? 

Daniel Smalley: On the holography end, as we'll talk about, I'm sure, the primary challenge now is that we can make little teeny tiny holographic video displays, but the bandwidth issues, the sheer computational power required to make big displays remain an obstacle. Some estimates have suggested that we will colonize Mars before we have the capacity to easily feed a big holographic display with all the pixels it's hungry for and on the other side, on the Princess Leia projector side, we're in a similar space, but with more hope. That is to say that we can make little teeny tiny Princess Leia projections, but I think we're not far away from getting moderate and maybe even large-size volumetric images in the near future.

So let's do a level set here. How do you define holograms and holographic visuals? 

Daniel Smalley: Yeah, that's an excellent question. So there have been meetings of the minds where we've discussed and debated what these things mean, and I think the best way to think about the different display families is that there are three of them. So a trifecta of holographic display. 

The first is a “ray” family of displays, the second is a “wave” family of displays, and the third is a “point” family of displays. Now the ray displays are the displays we're already familiar with. These are lenticular displays, stuff that you might see at Best Buy or in a magazine. These crisscross rays of light and space form an image point that we perceive, what we would call a real image point. A holographic display is a step up from that. Instead of taking rays and intersecting them in the air, what it will do is it'll take its whole surface, so you'll be gazing at a screen and this whole surface is focusing light, it's curving away in front of a light, in order to focus at a point, and your eye perceives that focal. As a display point. Now the magic of holography is you can take that surface that's shaping light and you can superimpose many such surfaces, one on top of the other, and focus on multiple points and in this way, build up an image in the air, and these images can be optically indistinguishable from real objects. 

So if you've seen a really good hologram in a museum, you may be tempted to pick it up and look behind the glass to see if there is a real object behind it. Even a seasoned holographer will occasionally mistake a hologram for a real object. Now it comes with the price of the fact that there is a glass, that you have to be looking through a screen of some type. But the reason for this is that wave shaping is being performed by a pattern of lines, a diffraction pattern, where there are three ways of bending: light, reflection, refraction, and diffraction.

And in a hologram, diffraction is the active ingredient in creating this wave shape. So you have to be staring into those lines. You gotta be staring into that pattern if you hope to see something, Now that said, imagery can be very deep. Looking into that hologram, that window, you can see imagery that comes out and tickles your nose or goes way back to infinity, back to the horizon. But you've always gotta be watching it like you watch a television set, even if what you'd prefer to do is watch it like a water fountain, right? Where the aperture is flat and then there's content shooting up out. Then you can walk all around it and see it from every direction. Now, that type of display exists, but it's not a hologram. It's called a point display or a volumetric display, and unlike ray displays and wave displays that require screens, a point display can be screenless. 

In fact, maybe the best way to think about it is you take its screen and you grind it up into little pieces and you scatter them into the air, and then each time you're looking at one of those little pieces, you're looking at an image point as well. And that's the technical definition of a point display is that every time you're looking at an image point, you're also looking at a group of atoms, a physical scatterer, which is to say, unlike the ray case, where you're looking at an intersection of photons or the hologram case where you're looking at the focusing of the wavefront, here we're looking at physical atoms scattering light. So in some ways, a volumetric display is a lot like a 3D printer that just destroys the object it's creating every 30th of a second and this endows it with some remarkable properties. So you can make images that you can see from every angle. It can be relatively low bandwidth images if they're sparse and they have what's called perfect accommodation, which means you can focus on them. Your eye believes even if you close one eye, you can focus really tightly on them and have really strong 3D cues. Now, the downside is that with these types of displays, it's hard to achieve the same level of realism that you get with a holographic display, and the reason for this, is you can imagine if you had a jar of fireflies and you're trying to make images out of these fireflies, no matter what, you'd always have this problem where you can the fireflies in the back of your image at the same time, you can see the fireflies at the front of your image and in the result is that everything looks like a ghost or a hole, right? So this problem of self-occlusion is a big one, and it's one it's part of the research we do is try to come overcome these issues so that it can be a complete display of the solution. 

In terms of array display, you were describing lenticular. So in the context of this stuff that people listening to this might relate to. Going back a number of years, there were what were called glasses-free 3D displays that were basically LCD displays with a lenticular layer over top of it and if you looked at it from different angles, you would see something was popping up from the screen. Is that basically what a ray display would be? 

Daniel Smalley: Absolutely, that's exactly right.

The wave display when you were describing that, I was immediately thinking of that little company in Brooklyn called Looking Glass and the little loose-eyed blocks that they have. 

Daniel Smalley: So Looking Glass and I don't want to misrepresent them or anything but Looking Glass, I think I will admit they are a ray display technology.

If you look at a Looking Glass display and you move left and right, you will see the image change perspective. But if you move up and down, you won't. And that's an indication to the viewer that you're looking through a cylindrical lens as opposed to an array of circular or spherical lenses. Now the difference between them is that if it's a lens-lit array as opposed to a lenticular array, then you can move up and down and you'll also see 3D in that direction. But you can dramatically reduce the information you need by just making it horizontal, parallax only. They're just providing information for the horizontal and your eyes for the most part don't care. They're horizontally separated. You don't do a lot of bobbing up and down, so you get the most bang for your buck with just horizontal parallax. 

Yeah I've seen the Looking Glass stuff, I think I might have seen it at a trade show but I was underwhelmed. It's like, I'll shift to my right and I'll shift to my left, and it does seem like the image is subtly different, but it's one of these things where I'm going that's nice, but so what?

Daniel Smalley: Yeah, that's true. There is also some fatalism about three 3D displays that when you get really good, you've just now duplicating reality, which is something we're very used to, and it just becomes suddenly banal. It just suddenly looks like everything. 

So what would be an example of a wave? Are there real-world examples of a wave family display?

Daniel Smalley: A wave display that you could go out and buy today, I don't know, but there are certainly many good static displays. There are certainly commercial companies making an effort to create wave displays. Two approaches that are gaining traction commercially, I think, are holographic displays, which are a pattern of lines that refract light to form a wavefront or a nanophotonic phased array. There is a caveat, there's a merging between the ray and the wave family at the moment when the rays come from emitters that are very small, smaller than a wavelength of light. If those emitters are super small, number one and number two, if all the emitters can see each other, that is to say, they have some fixed phase relationship with each other. The technical term for this is coherence. They act as a team. If all those things are true, then you can start shaping wavefronts with what would've been rays. So essentially if you have a big emitter, the ray comes out like a laser. But as your emitter gets smaller and smaller, the ray doesn't come out like a laser. It comes out more like a, I don't even know how to describe it, a spray, right? It defracts out more and more until now you've got a spherical emitter and all those spherical emitters see each other and they interfere with each other in ways that allow them to create arbitrary wavefronts. Any wavefront you want, you can create from a collection of spherical emitters, assuming they're small enough and assuming they're coherent with each other. 

So that's another approach that some people are taking. But the problem is, in each one of these cases you've got just an intractable information problem. For example, any display could be made into a holographic display if its resolution was sufficiently high if it could achieve holographic resolution, which is roughly a thousand pixels per millimeter linear. So imagine taking all the pixels in your computer screen right now and squishing them into a 1:1 millimeter area and then refilling your computer screen at that density.

So that's a million times more pixels than what you're currently using to create a display the same size as what you're currently using, and so you're talking about if you wanted a meter-size holographic display updated, at a reasonable refresh rate you're looking at in the neighborhood of hundreds of billions of pixels per second, maybe trillions of pixels per second to create that display.

So you've got challenges with computing power, with graphic processing, with bandwidth, and everything else? 

Daniel Smalley: Yeah, but primarily bandwidth. The feeling I think, broadly, is that optical electronics is a solvable problem. We might even be able to get pixel densities where we want them, maybe. But that compute power, that remains a big deal. 

Now there are shortcuts and workarounds. One particularly good workaround was by SeaReal back in the day, what they would do is they would look at the viewer's eyeballs and they would only shoot light into the eyes, light that was diffracting in other directions they would ignore entirely. It wouldn't compute any of that, so they could dramatically reduce the amount of the information they had to process and they could increase the pixel size because they only needed just a little bit of diffraction, just enough to cover your pupil, and then they were done. It’s unfortunate that we haven't seen more from them.

They started out with a kind of mechanical version of the display that worked really well, and I think there was a struggle to make something that was solid state. But it was a pretty clever trick to reduce this bandwidth while still preserving the benefits of a wavefront-shaping holographic display and the realism that comes with it.

So where do light field displays fall into all this? Are those waves or points? 

Daniel Smalley: So this is the most controversial of all of this syntactic infighting that we have right now, because there are displays out there right now trying to commercialize light field displays, and they don't want anyone thinking that they're any less, that consumers are getting anything less than what they might consider being a holographic display.

And how they use the term and how we use the term are often very different. So those of us who've gotten together and agreed on this, say a light field display is a ray display. That is to say, it's a pixelated display that's shooting rays in different directions, and it's those intersections that create image points that our brain perceives. Though I know there are displays out there, or at least they're attempting to create coherent Wavefronts, that is to say, these nanophotonic phased arrays. They're trying to create phased array wavefronts potentially, and I can't be sure this is the case, but they do have wavefront shaping capabilities and that’s when you've crossed the bridge from ray display to a wave display. 

Are hologram and holographic Interchangeable terms or are they different things?

Daniel Smalley: So hologram as we see it, the way we decided to specify this term, we define a hologram as the surface with the lines on it that's actually diffracting the light. So if you go to a museum and you see a hologram, the glass plate that you look into, the screen itself, that is the hologram, and the image that's the holographic image. And then the process of creating that is holography. So we use holography to create holograms, and when we illuminate those holograms, they create holographic images. 

Is a spinning LED light stick that are these individual sorts of fan blade things and arrays of them that are being called holograms? Are they holograms?

Daniel Smalley: No. There's nothing diffracting. So if there's no diffraction, then it can't be a hologram. Now it could be a volumetric image. What's happening with most of these is there is a fan that spins in a single plane, however, if you just move that fan in and out, you just oscillate it in and out, or if you add a bunch of fan blades stacked on top of each other and spin them, now you've created a volumetric display. Now, every time I look at one of those image points, I'm looking at a physical object in a volume and I'm getting a volumetric image and it will have all of the benefits and all the deficiencies of that family of displays, of that point family, but not a hologram. 

So when you say it's volumetric, it means if you went off to the side a little bit, it's not just this single flat image, there's a dimension to it or depth to it? 

Daniel Smalley: So when I say volumetric, I mean that If you look at an image point, you're looking at a physical object, in this case, an LED. Of course, it's just a flat screen, it's just spinning in a plane.  If it wants to be qualified as a 3D display, then it needs to have pixels or voxels that exist off a plane. So you just need to stack these or move one of them in and out, and then you could achieve this effect of having a volumetric image. 

It's yet more moving parts in these things, which would worry me even more. 

Daniel Smalley: That's right. If they weren't dangerous enough. 

Is a transparent LCD a hologram? 

Daniel Smalley: That is a good question. So that depends entirely on what are you displaying. So first of all, it could be a hologram if you're displaying a pattern of lines on your transparent hologram meant to diffract light so that far away it's converging to a point for somebody to observe. That kind of display would not be very useful unless the pixels of this transparent LCD were very tiny. Now, in the case of some microdisplays, for example, there are transparent LCD microdisplays for projectors, that could be a legitimate holographic display that would actually create an image that we would appreciate as a holographic image. 

Now, those microdisplays are micro, they're small maybe an inch, maybe one or two inches on a side. So they're not particularly well suited to humans. But they would make great pets or insect displays. The challenge now is to keep that same pixel, those teeny tiny pixels, those teeny tiny transparent LCD pixels, and then scale that size up while keeping the pixel small to something that a human would appreciate, something in the 20-inch diagonal range.

So these shower stall dimension displays that are transparent LCDs that are just nicely lit, white screen captured visuals of people who were standing in one place and it's reflected on the transparent LCD inside the shower stall thing, that's being described as a hologram, and when I've written about it I describe it as hologram-ish. But it wouldn't qualify as a hologram, would it? 

Daniel Smalley: It would not. But I will say this, I think that the tradeoffs made there are actually pretty compelling. So when it comes to representing full-size humans, we have to recognize that humans are flat, especially if you're looking at somebody standing on a stage, the six inches of depth from the front of their nose to the back of their head is not much in the grand scheme of things, especially if you're looking at them from 50 feet away or a 100 feet away, which is why the two 2Pac “hologram” was so compelling, because the further away you get from an object, the fewer 3D cues your eye is able to use to determine. 

So when you go to a play, they can paint the background, the mountains, and the sun, because those things are so far away. The only 3D cues we get are occlusion. The fact that one is in front of the other, but it could be totally flat and those pictorial cues are all we need. As objects get closer, we start adding things like motion parallax. When you're driving down the road, now you see these telephone poles moving with respect to each other, and then as things get a little closer, now you get left eye, right eye disparity, and it's only when they get really close within a few meters does your eye start being able to focus on the near and far parts of that image and you get these accommodation effects, and then when they get within arms reach, you can touch them, and now you have keen aesthetic cues. So it's really when things are up close, within arms reach that you get this rich set of 3D cues, but if you push imagery back far enough, you can really get away with a lot. Things get much cheaper, and much easier, and if the intention for these shower displays as you call them, which I think is a pretty accurate description, if it's just to give the sense of the presence of another human being in a room, and if they're a few feet away, that might be a reasonable trade-off, especially if they're pushing all those resources into creating really high dynamic range, which they do, good color saturation, and high responsibility. 

Those things are gonna be much more compelling to a human viewer than those six inches of depth. We're boring as far as 3D is concerned as humans. 

Yeah, I've seen light field displays at the SID trade show and I have seen the shower stall devices at different trade shows, and if I think of the two, the light field display is arguably closer to what people are thinking about as a science fiction hologram, but they're also six inches tall, and I suspect that most people having to choose between the two would say, I like the life-size thing a lot more, even if it maybe isn't quite as sophisticated in certain respects.

Daniel Smalley: Absolutely! 

When I talked to the guy at Portal, David Nussbaum, who founded that company, it used to be called Portal, and that's the shower stall displays. He says, I know it's not a true hologram, but we have to call it something and it's something that consumers have their heads wrapped around so that's why we use that. Is that a fair approach?

Daniel Smalley: Yeah, I think so. As I say, we're all very defeated at this point on this. So I think that if you're trying to communicate with humans and it's already entered the vernacular in that way, unless we give them an alternative, then what else is a guy supposed to do? 

I'm curious longer term as this technology matures, what are the real-world applications for this? Because, if you're replicating Princess Leia and Star Wars that's a theme park attraction or a museum attraction or something like that. But are there practical business uses for holographic visuals? 

I did see a demo from a company up in Newfoundland, called Avalon Holographics and that was for energy exploration and shipping and so on, to show the depth of the ocean and all that, and I thought, that's pretty interesting. So is that kind of the more, the real-world use of this going forward?

Daniel Smalley: That's a very good question. I think we have yet to find the killer app for holography,  to be honest. So in any of the scenarios I've been approached with, it seems relatively straightforward to come up with something that's almost as good for much, much cheaper. In the case of oil exploration, they're trying to understand these complicated 3D shapes in the form of oil fields and where to dig and this kind of spatial stuff. But unless time is an important factor and it's not in this case, you can use a really big, nice 2D screen, move your mouse around and rotate around enough to get a real good sense of the 3D shape. People are really good at abstracting from 2D to 3D, and I'm thinking of radiologists in particular who just make this second nature.

However, if you were a surgeon and you were trying to thread a catheter through the vasculature of the body, which can get very complicated in 3D, especially as you approach the heart and the brain it might be useful to have a really high fidelity 3D image that you can see as you're pushing this catheter to avoid getting abrasions on the artery surface causing embolism, that sort of thing, and the reason for that is because time is important. You're moving that catheter in time, you're being able to capture the spatial information at the same time you're moving is sensitive. Time is a sensitive part of this process and so maybe in that case.

Maybe if you're doing aerospace surveillance, we've got all these extra satellites, thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX to keep track of and the possibility of conjunction, which is the smashing together of satellites, I think it's greater and greater all the time, and that's more complicated than airplanes smashing into each other because you got these curved orbits and I'm sure there are all sorts of AI and computer analysis, but there’s still a human loop, I think in most cases, and they have to make a judgment call about whether these two complicated orbital paths are gonna result in the smashing together of two objects, and if you have that rendered in 3D, you've got this moving spatial situation. I think you could understand what's happening much more viscerally than trying and abstract that from a 2D screen so I see those as two, clear and present applications for a really good holographic system. 

Is there a lot of business investment in this or is much of the work involving holography happening in environments such as yours, more on the academic side?

Daniel Smalley: Definitely more on the academic side. If you're talking about the display, the real money in holography has never been in the display. It's always been in things like security or photolithography or some of these other fields. 

So holography for currency counterfeiting?

Daniel Smalley: Yeah, that's exactly right.

So I don't imagine that's going to change. My feeling is the display field is just fraught. It's just a terrible market to be in, it is. If you think about the last century, we really only had two dominant display technologies. For the majority of this century, you had CRT displays, and then for the rest you had LCDs, and during this time, big companies were cannibalizing their own technologies. New things were coming on like miniature cathode ray tubes and all sorts of interesting OLEDs, just think how long it took OLEDs to take off even though they were superior in so many ways. It was just, you've got these multi-billion dollar foundries, and fabs, and you're gonna squeeze every last drop out of those displays, and then the margins are so small and yeah, it's just a rough business to be in. 

So thelast century in the early part of this one has just been littered with good technologies, good 3D technologies that just couldn't get a foothold. In the 90s we had two excellent 3D displays. We had the Actuality display, which is the spinning paddle which was a very nice display, and then, it had a hundred million pixels, I think, per second, and then we had Sullivan's Crystal display where he had these stacked liquid crystals that he would project on to form a volumetric image, are also excellent and solid state for goodness sake, and that both of those, about the 90s, both of those couldn't quite find a foothold in the market. 

Is it the sort of thing that could be revived? 

Daniel Smalley: Oh, it has been revived. So there is a version of this type of display, which I called an enclosed volumetric display where you have a diffuser moving up and down inside, what I presume is an evacuated volume, and then you're projecting on that and it looks beautiful, it looks great and they're making a good try. They're making a good effort to get out there and solve some problems. 

My feeling with most people who are doing 3D displays is that the targets they're looking at are in entertainment, people who are trying to do VR or something like this, but need some collaborative platform to develop on that, where everybody can gather around and that becomes this volumetric display or in this case, Looking Glass is also good at this, and then I think Sony has another beautiful 3D display auto stereo for the same sort of thing, targeting that same sort of market. 

Yeah, I've seen that. Where do you think things will be in 10 years from now? Will there be commercial products out there, or is this still gonna be in the labs? 

Daniel Smalley: I guess we have to dig down a little bit on that question. What are we gonna have? Well, we're gonna continue to have better and better displays for sure, and I think we're gonna start making inroads on niche markets. I think we are seeing companies take this tack of hitting premium markets first. So oil exploration will be in there, entertainment will be in there, and hopefully, we'll have a Tesla-like experience where they'll get a nice premium product with lots of really inspiring features. They'll identify a killer app and then the trickle-down will provide the rest of us plebians with a 3D display in the next little bit. 

Things are accelerating, lots of technologies are converging. I think it's much more likely that you'll see an everyday volumetric display before you see an everyday holographic display just because the information problem, and the bandwidth problem's not going away. And I say volumetric displays. I should also say that displays like Looking Glass, these light field displays or more correctly, maybe these ray displays are also gonna get better and better, and we'll have to make some decisions about whether we are willing to pay the premium to go from that excellent ray display to a much more expensive holographic display. 

This was very helpful, very technical, I even understood some of it. I appreciate you taking the time with me.

Daniel Smalley: Yeah, my pleasure. It’s my favorite thing to talk about.

Sixteen:Nine’s DSE Preview

I already have an interview in the can, so to speak, for next week, but I wanted to do a short podcast that just features me droning on ... to provide some thoughts and ideas about the return of DSE.

Assuming my travel plans weren't seriously messed up, I'm in Las Vegas today, getting set for tonight's Sixteen:Nine networking mixer. More than 400 people have registered and I was writing all kinds of "No ... Sorry" notes to a lot of people who didn't register before it sold out.

I have been blown away by the interest in the event. It has always sold out, sometimes within 48 hours, but I had some doubts about what might happen this time around. It's been almost four years since I last did a mixer for DSE, and the show itself folded and then got rebooted by Questex. 

Would I see 100 people? Maybe 200? I budgeted for 400, published the registration site, and sat back and watched as the tickets were quickly exhausted.

The demand seen for those mixer tickets reflects, I think, what DSE is all about - getting the industry together for an event that's JUST about digital signage. I have always thought the show was as much about efficient networking and meetings as it was about being a technology showcase. I used to joke that DSE was like a Rotarians convention, except instead of people coming to represent their local chapter, people were coming from their companies.

My sense is that's particularly true now, because a lot of people in this industry ecosystem have not seen each other in at least a couple of years. Yes, there have been trade shows going on, and yes lots of people are traveling again. But terrific shows like InfoComm and Integrated Systems Europe serve a lot of interests, and a hell of a lot of the people who attend have zero ties to digital signage.

I did a wholly unscientific reader survey after the original DSE went under, to ask what people thought and what they did and did not like about the old show. The comment that has stuck with me ever since was from someone who said he or she liked DSE because they'd get to Vegas, and know the people, the technology, demos and events were all JUST about digital signage.

There are a couple of Digital Signage Weeks, I know, in New York and London. I think the organizers do a good job of marketing the calendar of events, but it's kind of cobbled together with events that have somewhat tenuous ties. I have spoken with people who've gone to the DPAA conference, thinking digital signage, and left thinking they had no idea what the ad people were talking about. I've personally lived that.

It's a small industry. People know each other, and as much as they compete with each other for business, they're also friends.

An event like this is also super-efficient for people, whether they run a company or sell its pots and pans. You can fly all over the damn place to meet customers, prospects and partners, racking up air and hotel points. An event like DSE enables people to have a whole bunch of touches with people - dinners, drinks or chats in a hallway - out of one set of flights and a few hotel nights.

Because the show is a reboot, there was undoubtedly lots of skepticism and reluctance to invest serious money into organizing a stand and everything that goes with that. The exhibitor count may not hit 100, and walking the show floor will not take long. I suspect there are vendors sending people this time out to check it out and make decisions about whether they book a stand for 2023.

There are not, from what I can tell from the floor plan, any mega booths ... like what are evident at ISE and InfoComm. At the old ISE, Samsung had its own building! Some of the big display guys, like LG and PPDS (which is Philips), don't have any presence at DSE this year.

There are some LED display companies showing, but there won't be a sea of screens like you might see at other, larger shows.

Software companies had to adjust to new ways of marketing and selling during the pandemic, and I'm guessing a lot of them discovered that the demos they've traditionally done at booths were pretty effective using video conferencing and screen-sharing, and cheap as hell by comparison to a trade show booth. So I don't think we're ever going to see a DSE filled again with CMS company stands. 

But I'd argue they were pulling back by 2019.

So why go?

Well ... there are always interesting companies that are new to the market - as start-ups or companies broadening both what they do and who they serve. At past DSEs, I always started off my walkabouts by going to the sides and back of the hall - where the start-ups with teeny budgets would get tabletops or 10 by 10s. I'd see companies I call head-shakers - because they clearly didn't do enough research before coming up with something that already exists. But I'd also bump into companies with interesting new takes on solutions.

I've poked around the exhibitor list and identified several unfamiliar companies I want to check out.

But I'm also eager to get updates and demos from well-established companies, and a small show means I have the luxury of time. I have left large shows, dead on my feet, knowing I never did see this or that.

I want to see what's new with Sony. I can compare what ARHT Media does with its transparent LCD set-up, versus what I've seen with Photo. I can finally see the Looking Glass displays, which are kinda sorta holographic. A startup called SapientX - which I assumed was related to Publicis Sapient but isn't ... I don't think ... is showing an AI-driven chatbot avatar thingie. Vestaboard is there with a split flap display. I can get a better sense of how Google and Chrome OS now fit in digital signage, as it has a stand and people at the show. I don't know what Esper does, or WindowGrin, or Antron ... but I will after this week.

And I'll be able to touch base and catch up with a pile of people and companies I know.

I don't think there has to be a choose one decision about digital signage and trade shows. If you're serious about the business, and assuming the travel budget and time is available, you should go to a big pro AV trade show like an InfoComm or ISE, because all the latest display tech and infrastructure are shown there. And if digital signage is your tribe, your people, events like DSE are just as important to attend.

If you are going to Vegas, safe travels and I'll see you around.

I hope to do some interviews while in Las Vegas, and as I said at the top, I already have next week's podcast done - with a hologram expert hopefully clearing a little fog with respect to that much-abused technology term.

 

Alan Larson, 65cubed

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

65cubed makes and markets a technology solution that has the triple benefit of making commercial displays, like big roadside LED boards, look better, last longer, and still use substantially less energy .

The company has a small box that plugs in between the media player and display controller box of a display set-up, using a ton of graphics capabilities, smarts and supporting technology to make, it says, even lower-end, lower cost product from China look great.

I had an interesting chat with 65cubed partner Alan Larson about the technology - which I suppose is a form of video wall processing. It gets a little technical in parts of the discussion, but Larson does a good job of not taking listeners too deep into the technical weeds.

Color reproduction and image quality are important to brands, but the really intriguing aspect to this is the ability to get another year or two out of the capital investment in a big screen, while also reducing the month to month energy usage bills.

Power usage is a much bigger issue in Europe at the moment, but it's something that every media owner with big, bright displays should be looking at, as energy bills rise and, in Europe these days, energy availability is constrained.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Alan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what your company 65cubed is all about? I just came across it literally a couple of days ago and don't know a lot about it. 

Alan Larson: 65cubed is a color management server product designed for LED walls and other video sources. Its roots are better than a dozen years old in the high-end color management space that you might see in a very eclectic home setting, or more commonly post-production studios where color has to be absolutely spot on.

What we discovered a couple of years back as LEDs came on, was that as we modulated the color signature, there were significant changes in the power signature. So we started experimenting with that and discovered that we could apply our technology combined with some aggressive time of day, environmental conditions style algorithms to create an aggressive product for an environmental impact on LED walls and that's what sort of got us started.

We can make the color on a digital wall look very amazing, we've gotten literally cinematic events on walls before. We usually range between 18-20 to the low 30s on average for a digital wall, especially outdoor settings that are on 24/27 and it varies based on how the customer wants their image and what the foot traffic or automobile traffic might be. 

So when you say 18 to 30, what do you mean by that? 

Alan Larson: If you are using say 100 Amps peak on a digital midsize wall, the second we turn our system on at the same brightness and color correct it, it'll usually drop that peak amperage, down to 75-80% max, more typically it's sitting in the 60s, I would suppose because most people don't wanna blow their eyes out with the brightness, and a byproduct of that is we've noticed that a lot of people that sell wall time, the arbitrage people go through for the bids, is they request about a 10% grayscale on whites to lessen the risk of their walls being overloaded. 

By definition, when we take the power signature down, the advertisers are free to do what they want. We don't care what they do because we're not on that side of the game. But that's a byproduct. You simply don't get the power swings that you would in a wall that does not have our product.

So the advantages are both energy savings and better-looking visuals?

Alan Larson: Yes, and the byproduct of energy is that because you're not stressing those LEDs as much, they run cooler. We contend that lower stress on the system and its ability to react to external conditions of interest that that'll extend the display life and what that means is that the display owner is in it for keeps, in other words, we've noticed that some people just flip the displays. They bring 'em up and they're looking for somebody else, like any property, those that use it as a long-term investment are very interested in seeing the net present value of that asset go up and know it's gonna stay up.

And our guess is somewhere around 12-15% increased display life. In a display the size of a roadside, that's a very substantial saving over time. 

Yeah. So if you can lower the energy costs while extending the operating life, that's a double benefit there, right?

Alan Larson: The studies we've done so far on outdoor signage, to put in layman's terms, we estimate that the savings on an average wall, call it about 25% conservatively, because we can be very aggressive in low viewership time periods like overnight, is about the same as saving two average American homes electricity every year. 

And the media company won't really care about that, but they will care about what it means to their bottom line.

Alan Larson: And to your point, Dave, when I get asked who is your market? My market is typically the guy that owns the OpEx and the EBITDA for the company. As we've found again, our roots are on the studio side, but as we've talked to asset owners the price point and fulfillment of their displays are market-driven. Their costs underlying, they're the only ones that really care about it, because they're gonna get what they can get based on the location and so forth.

So if we can take 25% out of their most consistent ongoing costs, by definition, that asset owner's gonna earn more money. 

So would your typical customer then be somebody in Oklahoma, who has a small media company and they’ve got five digital billboards along a highway and they are looking for ways to save money on that? Is that most typical or are these big media companies?

Alan Larson: We don't care. If they have one sign, to us that savings are linear. Each sign has the same impact, of a given size. Our market is those asset owners. 

For example, I'm working on a project with a company that owns, I think around 40 roadside billboards, and they can blanket it across. Now they're in the rural Midwest, and what's especially of interest to them is that in the overnight hours, we can turn the savings model into the 40+ percent range because of the way we can manipulate the pixels on the screen and drive down the power consumption even further.

How do you do that? 

Alan Larson: It's probably best I don’t give away all our secrets because some of what I'm describing is in the patent-pending process. The underlying technology, I think, has around 14 or 17 patents in the color management space, and just by reference, the roots of this company come out of ex-Kodak people in their digital color division. 

The actual author of most of the patents is the retired Chief Technology Officer for that division with a Ph.D. in Color Physics out of MIT, so it's pretty heavy stuff. When I talk about some of the concepts of the color gamut, most people's eyes go shut in about half a second. So we have to be careful to tone it down a little bit. 

Count me among those! 

Alan Larson: The overnight hours, basically what we do is we sit between the video player and the wall’s controller. So in a production setting, you unplug the HDMI into the video controller and insert our box between the player and that video controller, and then put another little segment of HDMI cable and we're in line between the two, and what happens is, because we know a particular color red, let's call it the OU Crimson color. That's a branded color. We can reproduce that color to that PMS standard if you're thinking of it as a paper representation. We've never seen it. If someone says, I want to bid with pure IBM Blue, I think we'd probably win the deal. Now, what that means is that we put a scope against a screen, and we measure upwards of 8,000-9,000 patches. We call them patches, but they're effectively samples. So if I feed that OU Red to the screen, I'm gonna make this up because the numbers are huge. Each digital pixel gets a digital command that tells it what colors, how to turn the pixels on, how bright it should be, and so forth.

But let's just say in simple terms, the color for that OU Red is the number 1234. We have a very nice reference scope that looks at it and says, we got 1234, but the best that screen could spit back, because all the pixels in the world are made in one big bucket over in China, it spits back 1662. “Why?” It's cuz it does. It has nothing to do with the controller. It has nothing to do with anything else. Then we know. Oh cool. So that means we have to send at the number 1553, whenever we see 1234 for any given pixel and it'll spit back the actual image of 1234, and poof, we do that for all the colors in the gamut and that's what brings out the true color. 

Now, a lot of people talk about, moving the white point. That's a fallacy in our world because a white point is actually what's called D65 or 6,500 Kelvin is pure white. When you properly set red, green, and blue (RGB), when they're running to true calibrated and color-managed perfection, that white is the Venn diagram intersection of those color spaces. It never moves no matter how bright it is. So when we reduce the illumination of a screen, we're actually bringing down the mathematical values that told the LED to be bright, not the mathematical values that keep the color in perfect harmony, which makes a very nice cinematic look. In the evening, you can drive down the freeway or in Nova Scotia, a remote road with trees around it, and the colors are beautiful. And at night we take a much more aggressive use of the color black in a way that people can't see cuz black on an LED wall is electrically the value of 0 Amps. So if we query 20-30% of that screen in a mathematical way, no matter where we had it set, that amount of additional power is gonna disappear cuz those LEDs are physically not doing anything, but it really looks nice and we don't tell people how we do it because we can't do that.

And you're able to do more at night simply because you don't have to drive these things as hard, right? 

Alan Larson: We've never actually put up a light meter, I know we could, but we use the absolute location of the display itself, and the nice thing is the geolocation of every place on the earth has an exact sunrise and sunset time that changes every day of the year.

So that means in Nova Scotia, the Sun's gonna set at 4: 28 this afternoon, which means somewhere around 4 o'clock or maybe a little before, we'll start taking the brightness part of that mathematical equation, slowly move it over, perhaps 45 minutes or so into a full post-dusk mode where it'll be in an evening setting and then when the asset owner says, there's nobody on this road, let's flip in the low viewership mode because from, say 11 o'clock till 6 in the morning, only three cars go by, but we're required by contract to keep that wall alive. So it's a combination of how the marketing people wanna see it and what's appropriate for the marketing setting.

When we do things like Las Vegas, we can't be as aggressive, because they just love brightness out there. But I will tell you that some of those absolutely huge walls that you see, I'm assuming you've been to the strip, it's nothing to take 50 grand a year and cost off of those walls.

So when I am buying your product, am I purely buying the box and the technology that's in there, or am I buying a service and a platform? 

Alan Larson: Yes. The answer is the latter. The box is a computer. It's a very fast computer that has boatloads of GPUs and processors because it's creating absolute color, and saturation is different at each pixel level, which means we can maintain grayscale visibility in an almost black setting. 

Most of the time they dither out and they're just a blob. You can actually see the changes in the subtleties of the shadows, and I'm gonna go back to your question, but a point I wanted to make earlier is because of that purity, that absolute control at a pixel level, your image will be more in focus, and it's simply because the processor captures the subtleties between each pixel to the point where the processor doesn't give up and approximate them as a cheap TV would, and all of a sudden you see what the director intended, not what a lower cost video display processor was able to produce. 

Now, back to your question about pricing. We sell our product in a tier of four ways. For lack of marketing intelligence, we call it the base product. It's the kind of product you would use, say in a conference room or a church where you turn it on and you just want it to look nice and you're gonna turn it off. The energy savings piece is incidental because they don't care, and they plug it into a 110 circuit and call it a day. We sell that as basically the asset with the color management system and everything they want to use on it is basically a manual setting. 

Then the next one, which we affectionately call our Energy module and pops in all of the automated features for geolocation time of day, anything you wanna do that is environmentally based or schedule based, it'll take over. In fact, when we take the color way down to the point where you go, gosh, it's dim, the color management system can actually pull, this is the patented stuff, out warm colors or blue colors or whatever would add a little zip back into the picture. Now is it absolutely pure to the King's English studio? No. Does it look better? Oh yeah, it does. 

So that means you can create a very pleasant brand running it about 25 to 35% of the power signature, and I'd have to show it to you cuz once you see it, you go, huh? What do you know, those facial tones came out. So that part of the product is typically sold on an energy split, software as a service model, either as an asset purchase or as a software as a service, continued service. And it's based on an energy savings model. So technically if you were in Nevada versus New York, the price point for the same asset would probably be different in our eyes. But in all cases, the customer always wins. If they purchase the product, they will always be cash positive in less than 24 months and thereafter.

Yeah, that was gonna be a question was, yes, you could save money on this, but is the cost of the technology at a point where you're not really saving, you're just saving on your energy bill or whatever? 

Alan Larson: No, our play is, I gotta be able to look a CFO in the eye and go, you'll be better off with us. End of conversation. I don't care if you give a damn about color, you'll be better off, and quite frankly, the entertainment companies that have a customer that comes in for three days and gambles, they honestly don't care, right? ? Cause their market is to get people behind a slot machine.

And other people, if you go into a boardroom setting or someone that cares about their brand, oh heck, they don't care about the energy. They want it to look perfect. They're there to impress their customers. So it depends on the market. And by the way, the device is always hooked via a very secure tunnel to our server farm in Rochester, New York, which means nobody can actually get into the server. It's impenetrable, and the only way you access it is through a web app that can run on any device and you can watch the behavior. You can see how much the machine is ready. You can see how much if you elect to put onboard storage and so forth, and you can do all the manipulation of the screen via the web, no matter where you are.

Since I brought that up, I'll shift to the fourth piece of our product, which is smart automation. Because we're keeping a heartbeat pulse on that machine, if the video path goes away, either to or from, the technician on duty will get an immediate alert on his cell phone. If we're hooked to a UPS and the UPS is alive, so we're alive, but the network's connection goes down, then more than likely there's a power failure somewhere else. Once again, we'll notify them immediately, and the reason we can do that is that the server farm is that which actually notifies the technician, not the device itself. So it's saying, “I lost my baby out there in the middle of nowhere. I'm gonna tell somebody about it.” As a byproduct of that, the third tenant that we sell to, and this is for people that just have a desire for it, we've been asked and have done camera installations. There are a lot of controllers that do camera installations, which is fine. It's nothing unique, but again if someone is having a hard time with a consumer paying their bill because they want absolute validation of their display ads, we'll just have the server snap a picture every three seconds and log it both locally and up on the server, and if somebody asks a question, here, knock yourself out. Here's a log of everything that happened, and if we throw an error at the system, then if the camera's up, we would immediately turn a live feed on and make that feed available to the technician via that text. So in rural settings like where you live and a lot of the mountain states, these guys in bucket trucks drive two hours just to find out they didn't even need to go there. 

For example, we were at a sports bar where the network went down for six minutes and the technician got an error. By the time he read the error, the system was back up. So he calls and says, What the heck happened? We go, go talk to your network people. That's exactly what happened. It's that kind of stuff. The idea behind this smart service is that we do not want the distributors that buy and resell our product to get a call at 11 o'clock at night because the consumer found something wrong. We want them to be able to call their customer and say, by the way, “if it's of interest to you, I remediated a couple of issues last week. No problem. That's just what we do for you because we care”, and that's why we built it. That was all based on the distributor. Because they have a business to run and every time they have to service a wall for no reason, it just takes away their bottom line above and beyond what the customer bought. This is a distributor feature. 

So I've been to many trade shows, but trade shows that included booths for companies who were specifically in the business of video wall processing for LED video walls. I'm thinking of companies like Brompton and I understand at a base level, I guess at most, that you're running your signal through these boxes, which optimizes and improves the visuals that get pushed to the screen and therefore make it look better.

Is that essentially what you're doing here or is this like another component? 

Alan Larson: No, it definitely conditions the video signal. In the high-end video market, a couple competitors I can think of, on a studio set, you'll see Black Box, where they actually condition the camera. I've seen Lumigen in high-end settings. 

We're similar in those products. There's a thing called a LUT box. We are the highest-resolution LUT box on the market. We got our name 65cubed because we're a 65x65x65, that's the cube, RGB-based technology. The nearest competitor that does something like this, I think is 37 cube and most of them are like 17, and most of the calibration style activities we've seen from all companies are one-dimensional, not three-dimensional, and again, we're basically hitting the color management system for a digital wall with a sledgehammer because we happen to own the asset.

Our sister company is owned by the same investor as we are so we have untethered access to all the software assets. 

So is this the sort of thing that you purely sell as a product or would you license it as well to a big-time, top-five LED manufacturer so it would just be incorporated in the overall product?

Alan Larson: We would welcome it because it's a lot easier to sell and implement, for example, there are two ways that our system gets installed. Because we can't control the quality of any given panel that goes on a wall, regardless of the manufacturer, we always scope the system to start with. 

So if someone owns some walls along Interstate 10 and they said, we want these fixed, we'll actually go in a bucket truck for a couple of hours and scope the screen, and once done, it’s done and every display that's of the same bin of LED, they're done. But if it's an oddball, you go do it. 

For a distributor when they receive their great big crates of panels from China, they take one out, they're usually like 6 inches x 12 inches or foot by foot or wherever there are. They just lay it on the floor, hook a controller to it, put the scope against it, and go home for dinner. And then that entire set of crates that came in the same shipment are all done, and so the customer never gets involved in it. But no, the underlying technology of our sister company is in thousands of high-end monitors that are used in commercial settings, high-end gaming, that kinda stuff.

Who's the sister company? 

Alan Larson: The technical name is Entertainment Experience. Their trademark company is called EE Color, and it's embedded in our technology. We're both owned by the same group. 

Is the product something that would be used across any manufacturer?

I mentioned the top five companies that perhaps sell a lot of this stuff at least to the major media companies, for the sides of buildings and roadside billboards, and so on. Or is this more the thing that's gonna really improve lower-tier, lower-cost products?

Alan Larson: I can't speak for the quality management of any manufacturer. The lower quality products, distributors that don't sell the top three or four name brands. They love it because they can go and compete for head to head. We have clever tools we give them. We give them an image that's basically duplicated side by side and play it in duplication on the screen, and then we tell our processor to physically not process the left side of the screen pixels and the right side we do, and it's visually impressive because the telltale evidence of digital walls that are pushing too much electricity and don't portray are people.

We went to the Infocom Show last June, I believe we went with a partner, a distributor that resells our product. We were the only ones that had people, not swirling colors and mountain scenes, right? Because we can produce the facial tones of anybody, whether you're Caucasian, of color, just as if you're looking at them in your face. When you get the people's faces right, I guarantee you the rest of the colors are in. 

Typically what happens is people look like they sat under a sunlamp all day. Another telltale evidence of a screen often aging is that white looks turquoise. That just means the whole color skew is pushed way out, and when we bring that back in, and by the way, when it's pushing purple, it's pushing a lot more electricity too. When you bring it into white, the white is is the byproduct of the red, blue, and green in concert. We don't create white, white happens, is what I'm trying to say. 

For the lower-cost products coming over primarily from China, one of the criticisms is that they use LED light admitters from a really wide “bin”, a wide assortment of bins with different Color properties, and everything else. Is the proposition here that that's not the same worry if you're using this kind of technology? 

Alan Larson: No. We usually tell the distributors who buy those. You have to pay attention to the bin numbers as they come in because yes, they vary widely and you find that the distributors are pretty clever. If they pull some panels out that look odd compared to the rest of them, they literally sort them. It sounds like a big pain in the neck, but they don't want their customer to have a checkerboard on the wall. 

But no, typically the rule is if you receive another shipment that the manufacturer declares is of the same bin, you hope that the manufacturer has integrity then you go with that. What you typically find is, let's assume the bins are off by 5% or 6% in the color signature, and it's on the side of a wall, along a freeway somewhere. The energy curve is gonna be taken care of. These colors won't be textbook, but again, you have a viewing discussion with the consumer for about two seconds when they look at the screen. otherwise, they're gonna hit that semi in front of them. So you don't have to be as particular on roadside displays as you do in company settings or boardrooms. 

You mentioned coming out of the studio world and so on. Is this primarily a product for outdoor displays that you're gonna see from a long distance or is this the sort of thing that you could use indoors for 1.8-millimeter fine pixel pitch walls?

Alan Larson: Actually, today I'm going over to a manufacturer's US distribution center, and I'm gonna be working with their team to set up a 0.5-millimeter, 5x9 foot wall in their boardroom. Now, the finer the pixel pitch, the more amazing the product actually. 

So last question: I was curious about energy savings.

I work quite a bit with a company over in Germany. We collaborate on things and they asked me about energy concerns in North America I say, people are aware of it, but it's not a point of discussion. Obviously, it's a huge point of discussion now in Europe. Are you getting questions at all about that and are the customers interested in that side of it?

Alan Larson: We're more interested than people we've found. In fact, one of the reasons I went to the DPAA shows a couple of weeks ago. One of my missions was specifically to look for potential distributors in continental Europe for that very reason.

I've traveled extensively in my career overseas and have put a lot of time into Europe and the Middle East, and it's a whole different world over there, and the weird thing about Americans, and probably Canadians too, is they've never been more than 250 miles from the day place they were born and like in Dallas where I live, you don't see any news about New York because it might as well be Germany. They don't get it, there's just not something that would register. So the European thing here is nothing more than news on the nationals every so often.

And you don't have US media companies or maybe Canadian media companies as well expressing concerns about the cost of energy and interest in your product primarily because of that. They're more interested because of the color properties? 

Alan Larson: If they pay the bill for that asset, they care. When I was at DPAA, I got killed with acronym soup because I come out of the high-tech industry, databases, applications, and computers, and I could have given you the same three letters and some acronyms, and I would've thought it was something different. So I sat there and just listened and looked for the context and by and large the word “energy”, and the word “perfect color” wasn't mentioned once in the five days I was there, and hence I met with an architectural engineering firm that’s all about energy and they went, you have uniqueness here that we believe as we do these great big installations will give us a competitive advantage, and that was the most productive meeting I had all week, actually.

So back to your question about the majors. I have approached the likely candidates that are the big display owners, the people that make them and some have amazing products, don't get me wrong, We've looked at a couple of them, call it the top three or four, and we go, you know what the difference is between some of the cool things they're doing and what we can provide, that just validates our market. We don't care if we so-called compete against them because that's goodness. Because they're doing the right thing for the environment. That we're trying to do. We're sensitive to that. So the European piece is very important to us. We're just attempting to get a foothold to get our product supported locally. 

All right, Alan. If people wanna know more about the company, where can they find it online? 

Alan Larson: If they go to our website, they can fill out a simple form that says, “I wan to know more” and that's about all it does, and I'll call them right back, or I'll have somebody in our group call them back.

That's 65cubed.com, right?

Alan Larson: Right!

All right. Thanks again for spending some time with me. 

Alan Larson: Thanks very much.

Giles Corbett, Cloudshelf

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

A UK start-up called Cloudshelf has come up with an accessible, heavily-automated and simple platform that helps small, mainly local retailers offer the same kinds of interactive display tools in their stores as deeper-pocketed and more heavily resourced major retailers.

The company has written code that crawls and analyzes local retail sites on Shopify's vast e-commerce platform and produces interactive experiences that are a lot more than just the online site on a screen in the store - something we've all seen and rolled our eyes at. In this case, it is curated and stylized to look and work like an in-store interactive site produced by a digital agency - probably for a lot of money.

I spoke with founder Giles Corbett about the origins of his company, how the platform works and is sold, and why the nightmare scenario of retail lockdowns and restrictions through the pandemic actually created something of a perfect storm for Cloudshelf.

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TRANSCRIPT

Giles, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what Cloudshelf is all about? 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, sure, Dave, with pleasure. First of all, I gotta say it's fantastic to be on the podcast. So Cloudshelf is a really simple idea. We call it in-store eCommerce. Now I bet you and the people listening to this podcast, you've all been into a store at some point, and you've gone in looking for a bike or a pair of jeans or some jewelry and you haven't found what you were looking for and you left the store disappointed. It turns out this issue of walkouts costs physical stores a trillion dollars a year. So it's a big issue, and that's just the immediate loss of sales, without even talking about all of the dissatisfaction, et cetera that it causes later on. 

Now, being such a big issue, it turns out that some of the most successful retailers worldwide have built solutions to go and bring digital experiences in-store that can alleviate this issue. But what Cloudshelf does is it takes this idea and just using an AI-driven platform immediately makes it available to even smaller or independent retailers that don't have the unlimited means or the technical knowledge of some of these super retailers and these retailers can very simply set up Cloudshelf in a matter of minutes and get fantastic digital in-store experiences, either interactive experiences or display experiences that help them sell more and close more sales in the store. That's what it's about. 

So how this would manifest itself in a store, a physical store, would it be some sort of a touch screen kiosk screen, whether it's on a counter or free-standing, or perhaps mounted on a wall?

Giles Corbett: Dave, all of those. It's always using some form of digital display, and Cloudshelf can operate either on interactive touch screens that you're describing, or it can even be on display-only screens. I'll talk about those maybe a bit later on. But indeed, typically retailers will have a kiosk that could, maybe imagine a fashion store with a small jewelry range and on the jewelry counter, you go and see a beautiful screen that's showing off in a stunning way all of the available jewelry, and you go and see the small range on display and you maybe you can't find exactly what you're looking for and the screen next to it will say, discover the rest of our jewelry range. You touch it, you can find what you're looking for, and even buy it directly off the screen. 

Now this is different though and I wrote about this recently, how I walked around the National Retail Federation Show and saw some eCommerce companies at that time. This is going back 3- 5 years, basically pushing their websites and their online presence to an in-store screen, but not changing anything. It was just The eCom site on a computer terminal, basically in the store, and from my perspective, that wasn't enough. 

I'm very old and I go back to the starting days of the internet and online news sites were filled with what was called shovelware, basically shoveling content from another medium onto a smaller screen and saying, we're done, and it looked like that. You're saying this is different, right? 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, putting your website on a screen in the store is a really bad idea. You wouldn't expect to go and find your website just running as it is on a desktop, or on a mobile phone.

Similarly, as a customer, you do not want to go and see the website running on a screen when you go into a store. If I go into a store and the retailer says, oh, I'm sorry, I can't help you. It's on the website. Please take a look at it. I'm thinking, hang on, why did I even bother walking into the store in the first place? Now the whole point is to go and create digital experiences that complement the magic, the delight of being in a store. You go into a store because you think that the person who's there is actually going to advise you on the best shirt that looks the best on you, or the bike that's the best for the kind of road that you want to go on, or whatever it may be. You want that level of advice, of contact, of engagement, and therefore you want a digital experience that complements that, and that's what Cloudshelf does. 

If you just put the website there, it fails miserably. Look, I will give you a really obvious example. Go into a clothes store and you have jeans, you have shirts, you have ties, you have suits, etc. If you've gone in wanting to buy jeans, you've gone up to the jeans area and you've had a look, you expect the screen next to that area to go and show you about jeans, not to go and show you that if you happen to be on the third floor of the store, you could also go and get swimwear or whatever it may be. So it's the idea of having this effectively interactive visual merchandising next to the product, and you want something that enhances that in-store experience, and that's what this is doing, and then there are a whole bunch of other reasons why it's different to the website. For instance, it knows a device it's on so that when you go and buy something, it knows which store it came from. It makes sure that you don't have to enter any personal information onto the device itself. If I was to go on the website and I wanted to buy something in the store, I need to go and type my credit card number into that tablet or that website, that would be crazy. So it does away with all of that, and it does a whole bunch of other things too. 

So the premise here is that you can take an already built and managed and populated eCommerce website from a cloud platform and largely automate and push a version of it, a curated version of it, to smaller screens without having to hire an interactive agency and have a 6-12 month project on a possibly a six figure budget to put it all together, right? You can do this pretty inexpensively and easily? 

Giles Corbett: That is a perfect summary. So indeed, we start with the existing eCommerce website. Why? Because for most retailers, that has now become the biggest repository they have of visual assets, product descriptions, et cetera. So that's what we use as a starting point, and just imagine if you're a retailer, you've invested a lot in your online website. It's fantastic if you can just reuse that automatically to go and create all of these in-store displays, so you're spot on. 

If you happen to be, for instance, a Shopify retailer, you simply add the Cloudshelf app. It analyzes all of the products that you have, and it says, what kind of a display do you want to create? “I wanna create one for trousers or jeans, menswear, whatever…” You want to say what it is, it will then go and propose all of the products to go and put into it, and it will go and create that. You then say which screen you want it to go on, and it displays that on the screen. It updates whenever you update the website. It chooses all of the best-looking images so that you don't need to go and go through and select them all independently. It does the whole thing in under five minutes from beginning to end.

So you would have templates, I would assume that would be the wireframes to do this in different ways? 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, absolutely. You could choose a number of parameters around how you want to go and lay it out, but you don't have to. You can just click ‘Create a Cloudshelf’ and it's there within seconds and then you wanna go and tune it, sure, you can tune it. 

Do you find if people are doing the kind of click-and-forget thing where it's just gonna create something that they're fine with that? Or do they want to tweak it? 

Giles Corbett: They definitely want to go and tweak elements that are key to their visual branding, so brand colors, logos, fonts, and things like that, and most of them will do that. 

But then what is amazing is they can just about forget about it because after that, whenever they do an update to their website, it is carried through and it's there and it's intelligently displayed. They go and put on promotional sales and it is carried through to their Cloudshelf automatically. So once they've spent maybe 5-10 minutes doing those initial branding choices, then the whole thing just runs. 

And that's because you're working at an API level with the eCommerce platform? 

Giles Corbett: Absolutely. So a big part of what Cloudshelf does is an incredibly powerful backend sync engine that just manages the analysis, and synchronization, checking all of the retailers that are live on the platform.

And you've integrated first by the sounds of it, with Shopify, and Shopify gives you a vast audience, correct?

Giles Corbett: Shopify gives us pretty fantastic API access. It gives us a vast audience and it gives us a growing audience. So what we see in all of the countries in which we started operating is that more and more of the retailers who maybe were using another solution are moving over to Shopify, and one of the things they love about Shopify is the ecosystem of apps that enable them to go and find exactly the solution they were looking for to address their issues. So for us, Shopify has been a great place to start and learn. 

It seems to me Shopify was noodling this, going back four or five years ago at NRF and some other eCommerce companies as well, why wouldn't they do their own as opposed to partnering with you? 

Giles Corbett: You know what? I think you are right that Shopify is going to be looking more and more at this. In their recent declarations,  they were really promoting in-store being the next growth vector for them suggesting that this is an area that they will be looking at. And you know what, when they do, I think they'll come up with something that'll no doubt be absolutely fine. 

But if you want to have the very best solution, it's gonna be Cloudshelf because we are the team that's just dedicated to this area of work and development. 

Yeah I've been involved in digital signage for more than 20 years now, and I've seen all kinds of very large, well-funded, deeply experienced companies get into digital signage, but, only kind of sorta, and it's a skunkworks operation. I'm thinking about past iterations of Cisco and Google and companies like that, and they're just not fully engaged and therefore the products are never all that robust. It's just like, “There, we did it!” 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, I think there's a bit of that, and let's go back to what Shopify is doing. They're clearly promoting and investing in their POS and making it better and better. They are going to spend time on this but we are at a slightly different segment where this intersection of digital signage, which is about beautiful displays, and eCommerce, which is all about driving transactions and this space that we've created for in-store eCommerce is all about the union of those two worlds.

Yeah, I would imagine you had to spend a lot of time thinking about the user experience, how it looks to people walking up to it, how they're gonna navigate it, and so on because it's not the same as sitting at a desktop or monkeying around on your tablet to shop. 

Giles Corbett: Absolutely. To begin with, it's a public screen, so the kind of information that you'd expect your phone to know or that you'd be willing to type into your phone, you do not want to be entering onto a public screen, so you need to have all of the handoff, the seamless handoff between what happens on the public screen and then what you complete to finalize the transaction on your private phone, and that is a completely novel experience.

When you're working with a big eCommerce platform like Shopify, were you just working basically tapping into their API and developing something, or were there sit-down meetings with Shopify folks saying, “Here's what we wanna do, here's what we need from you” and they were, in turn, asking you how we manage security and all those things?

Giles Corbett: It's a very interesting question, Dave. When we first spent some months actually prototyping all of this solution as a private app, something that was still allowed on Shopify in the early days, we were trying all of this stuff out and iterating like crazy with retailers. And then at one point we went to Shopify and said, listen, this is our idea, this is what we wanna do, this is what we want to launch, and they were scratching their head saying, “Hang on, we don't really understand. Is this POS or is it eCommerce? Where does it sit?” 

We said no. This is new. This is different. This is taking somebody's website and making it so that it renders and uses beautifully in their store, and so at first, there was some confusion on their side about where does this fit? And then the more we engaged, the more enthusiastic they became, and they've been fantastically helpful at giving us feedback and advice on a bunch of things. 

Do you have the back end sorted out as well? One of the things that I said to some of the companies when I was walking around NRF and they were showing this core idea was, what about device management? How do you know if the screen's active and working properly and so on, and they looked at me like I had three heads, it just had not occurred to them.

Giles Corbett: Dave, in a past life, I was running from West London, a network of 15,000 connected devices in, I think it was 350 cities in China and so yeah, we learned everything we needed to learn about monitoring devices. 

You have been through the wars.

Giles Corbett: Big time. Anyway, what I'd say is that if you go and look at the Cloudshelf code base, the bit that we call the engine, the bit that displays on the screens is probably well under 20% of the code base. The backend and all of the management tools are where all of the cleverness is. 

Yeah, that's an interesting comment because I've said so many times to people that getting media to play out on a screen is a technical challenge, but it's minor compared to all the work needed to keep the stuff playing on the screen reliably and manage it.

Giles Corbett: Yeah, indeed. Retailers are using Cloudshelf because they want to enhance the in-store experience. You do not enhance the in-store experience by having a blue screen.

Yeah, definitely. So where did this idea come from? I was looking at your LinkedIn background and your previous company was Ksubaka and it seemed to be about interactive in retail as well.

Giles Corbett: Yeah, so my background has always been around stuff that drives or is driven by end-user engagement. So it started off with mobile games, and then from mobile games, we thought about how we can use games to go and drive engagements in stores next to products, and would that be the beginning of a fantastic media platform.

And that's what Ksubaka was all about, and we developed that extensively in China, and then that sort of stayed in China, and we'd started developing extensions from what we are doing Ksubaka in the UK and in France, and we were supporting big retailers such as Tesco, Marks & Spencers, Next, and some others. And then the pandemic hit and Every single one of our retail clients closed down in literally a two or three week period, and that gave us an opportunity to think, reflect, go work on some of the back projects that we hadn't had time to work on, and while that was happening, there were two things that happened that I found absolutely fascinating.

First, we just became more and more aware of all of the small independent retailers around us who had closed their stores putting big signs in the window saying, “Come onto our website…” and they were all, every single one of them moving onto Shopify. So we started looking into Shopify a lot more and discovered that maybe there was something there. But you know what, the second thing that was really interesting is that all the way leading up to the pandemic, there'd been this kind of belief that all retail inexorably moving online. That basically, once a consumer had bought something online, that was it. They weren't going back into a store. 

Now in the UK, we are blessed with a lot of very impressive real-time statistics by organizations such as The ONS and they track all of the online and offline sales for the last five years, they've been showing quarter after quarter increase in the share of online, and by the time we hit the pandemic, online in the UK was way above what it was in the US. It was like 24% to 25% of all consumer spending was taking place online. We hit the pandemic and that number goes through the roof, 38%. McKinsey publishes its sort of big report about how basically online has just stepped forward 10 years in two months, and that's it. It's a point of no return, and then the first lockdown ended and it was really puzzling. We saw all of the stores around us fill up, and we started looking at the statistics and the share of online fell back to what it was just before that first lockdown. Now we had lockdown two and lockdown three, and each time the same thing happened: online shot up, but by the end of lockdown, online collapsed back to the level it was at before. 

All of these consumers had found out how to go and buy their jeans or their milk or whatever it was online, but yet when the stores reopened, not for all of those purchases, but for many of them, they decided to go back into the store. Now, that told us for the first time that there was absolute proof that something we'd always believed was true, and that in the future, retail was going to be something that would be completely hybrid. It was gonna be, yes, a lot of it online, but also a lot of it in-store, and the stores that would survive were gonna be those that would've invested cleverly, smartly in the digital experience to make sure that the in-store experience was outstanding and that became our customer base, and they were the people that we started targeting. So all of those things happened, and then a third thing happened. The third of my two things.

And that was the emergence of hybrid working. So initially full remote, then hybrid, and the bet that we took there was never gonna go away, that we would all spend more time working from home or elsewhere, but basically not from the city center than we had done before the pandemic, and that meant that there would need to be a shift in the fabric of retail and the structure of high streets around where people lived and that as there were many more places where people lived than their worst city centers, stores, brands, retail units would have to be smaller, and if they were gonna be smaller, then they'd need more digital to be able to offer the same range of services. And therefore our bet is that we are absolutely in line with all of those trends happening simultaneously. People are moving to Shopify, independent retailers, or retailers in general, learning how to go and digitize, and consumers wanting to go and shop more locally, and that's why we think this opportunity of in-store eCommerce is so exciting.

Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of chatter about the idea that larger stores, like big boxes and so on, would increasingly become showrooms where you could go in and have a look at something, but then you can order online or whatever, and I would imagine that it extends itself down to even small businesses who can expand their product range without expanding their footprint. 

Giles Corbett: Dave, it is fascinating. I was with the owner of a small independent store yesterday called Cherry Moon, and she's got a beautiful selection of designer clothes, and she has these two tables in the middle of the store that has beautiful jewelry by two designers and she was saying that the issue is that many of these pieces are unique or in very small quantities, and the designers can't afford to put all of their stock there in that one stop, so that means that they then can't exhibit it elsewhere, and all of a sudden, what Cloudshelf was helping her do was give these designers the ability to go and sell their entire range in her store without needing to commit all of the stock. And that idea is one that we've seen time and time again. 

I was in a meeting this morning with a retailer we're rolling out with this week, and they have five of their own stores. They have 12,000 SKUs and they have 200 stockers, and their issue has always been being their website is ahead of their stockers, who go and see the website as taking business away from them. And yet with Cloudshelf, it completely turns the whole story around because now they can go and have Cloudshelf presenting all 12,000 SKUs in these small stockers with the stocker knowing that if somebody goes and buys a product via the Cloudshelf, it will be allocated back to their store and they will go and get the same benefit from it as though they'd actually sold the product physically from within the store without having had to hold the stock. Now, that's a pretty amazing proposition, both for the brand and for the retailer. 

So you're rolling out with a customer right now. Where are you at? In reading some of the PR, it indicated you went through a series of trials, the company is not that old, and you went through a series of trials in London and Paris and are now deploying. So you're obviously past the testing stage and getting into operational mode. 

Giles Corbett: Yeah, so we are 18 months old. We started off with a small group of retailers that we called basically friends for life, pilot retailers, and the deal for them was that they'd get Cloudshelf for free forever, they just needed to go and give us feedback on a weekly basis on how they were using it, how their customers were reacting, what else they wanted to go and see in the product, and we worked with them for a year, basically iterating and improving the product, and then indeed, as you said a few weeks ago, we actually made our app live on Shopify and announced that we were now ready for business and I'm delighted to say that in the short time since then, we've actually had some fantastic successes. So we're going to live in Ireland at the end of this week with two retailers. We're going to live in Scotland also this week. So there's definite movement there.

There's been a lot of interest from many partners in France and we've just kicked off some discussions in Germany, and Dave, I really hope that in the next few months we'll be signing up our first retail networks in the US because this solution really scales and works everywhere. 

And Canada where Shopify comes from.

Giles Corbett: And Canada, of course, spot on. Now you know what? To go and help us work out where we needed to target, we built a really nifty tool that we call Store Finder. Basically, I go and put in any address anywhere in the world, and it produces a glorious map of every physical store in that area, and it tells me all of the ones that use Shopify, all the ones that use Salesforce, all the ones that use Magenta, et cetera, to go and power their backend.

So a super useful tool for prospecting. But I can tell you this one thing. Shopify has done incredibly well at promoting itself in its home market because the number of stores in Canada that use Shopify to power their back head is quite phenomenal. So yes, we should definitely be there.

So if I am a digital signage company, and I'm listening to this, and a software provider, and I target retail for, I don't wanna say meat and potatoes, digital signage, but for the other stuff around a store, are you a competitor? Or is there a way to work together? Are their parallel things?

Giles Corbett: Interesting question, Dave. If you happen to be a provider of screens, we are a savior. We are working with a bunch of screen manufacturers and resellers now who basically tell us that when they are selling into retail, oftentimes retailers will come along and say, listen, we want these digital screens, some in store for our merchandising, some in the window, et cetera, and how do we create the content and the digital science company goes, ah, yeah, that's a bit of an issue. 

Clearly, with Cloudshelf, we talked a lot about the interactive mode version on the kiosks a few minutes ago. We also have a second version that we called Display Mode. We haven't yet launched Display Mode. We're testing it still with retailers, but it will be launched in the next two, three weeks most likely, and what it does is it does the same kind of clever analysis of your product ranges and imagery, et cetera, as we use on the in interactive mode to go and create fantastic product-oriented visual displays. So you want to go and have something that goes and shows your various product ranges and et cetera in the store window to attract people to come in, Cloudshelf Display Mode will go and do that on the fly. 

Now what we find, In the retailers we've been interviewing, is that for a number of them, that's fantastic and that's exactly what they want. But we also find a bunch of them that say you know what, actually we want to go into great videos. We want videos from the brands, et cetera. Now you wanna go and put in some, some simple banners, et cetera, Cloudshelf helps you do that automatically, but you wanna go have a very sophisticated loop with all kinds, other stuff other than relating to the products in the store. Then, you know what? You go and find a digital signage company that can go and helps create the CMS to go manage that loop and Cloudshelf can just come in and be part of that loop. So we're currently working with two CMS providers of digital signage and that's exactly what they plan to be using Cloudshelf for. So they will go and see the retailers. They'll say, listen, you can have the Cloudshelf version or you can have a Cloudshelf version and you can go and slot in, the local news, the Instagram feed, whatever else it is that you want to go and have next to it. 

So if the website has something saying, “Baby clothing, 30% off, this week only” as a banner on the website, that could conceivably be curated automatically into a call to action poster for a screen doing that, but your platform's not gonna run a video wall on a big set of LEDs modules or something? 

Giles Corbett: So what our platform will do is it will work out and it'll enable you to go and promote the sale. It will also select some of the best products and the products with the best images. It will go and show those. It will allow passing by, maybe you're walking past the store in the evening, and you go and see a bag that looks super nice. It will of course have a QR code on it. You can scan it and it will take you directly to that bag on your phone. If you buy it, it will be recorded as having come from that screen in that store. So all of our backend magic to help people sell more. But now working also on, on display-only signage. That's what Cloudshelf display mode is about. It's about helping retailers sell more. It's not their whole branding experience. That's something that they'll work with other people to create. 

So what am I buying? Am I subscribing to this? Am I buying a software license? 

Giles Corbett: You're subscribing to it. It's a SaaS model. So it's just like your subscription to Shopify. You go into Shopify, you add the Cloudshelf app, and you get one display for free for life. So you can try it out, there's no limit. You can use it as much as you want, and then as the number of stores expands, or the number of screens per store expands, you then just go and upgrade the license. 

This was great and quite interesting. Can you just tell listeners where they can find out more online about your company?

Giles Corbett: Absolutely. Just head over to Cloudshelf.ai and hopefully, you'll be able to find out everything you want about the company. If you don't, call me, I love speaking with people, at any time of day or any time of day or night. I love it. 

All right, Giles, thank you very much. 

Giles Corbett: Dave, thank you so much for the opportunity!