Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

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.

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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.

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TRANSCRIPT

Gerhard and Zuzana, thank you for joining me. Gerhard, can you give me a background on what Easescreen is all about and how long you've been? 

Gerhard Pichler: Sure, Dave. Easescreen started in the late 90s, so actually, my first company, which still exists, is an AV integrator, so we come from quite a strong technical background, and in some of the projects, the customer requested solutions, which we now call digital signage. So we started, more or less, as the second role on the market as a manufacturer of software, as I told you, more than 20 years ago and now this year, we have rolled out more than 10,000 projects in nearly 100 countries. So it developed quite well, I would say.

Would you describe what you now do as being software-first? Or do you still operate as an integrator as well? 

Gerhard Pichler: Software-first, but in our home country (Austria), we have two offices there, one in Graz, which is in the south of Austria, and the other in Vienna, the capital. So in this home market, we also do AV integration so we still keep our knowledge regarding network, transmissions, protocols, screens, and so on quite high. My team does this kind of job but definitely, the most important thing within the company is the digital signage of the Easescreen.

I assume having that capability and current knowledge of the hardware market and the installation challenges and all those things is probably quite helpful in giving you insights as to what the end users and the resellers need versus just guessing and talking to people about it? 

Gerhard Pichler: That's for sure. Especially one thing is the contact with the other manufacturers. So for our businesses, we have very close contact with two manufacturers: LG, and Samsung, and on the other hand, we know how the integrators, which actually are our customers with who we do indirect business, how their mindset is, what their pains are because we experience the same. So that's quite helpful. 

I'm guessing that you got into the software side of this business, back in ‘99 because there weren't a whole bunch of software options out there at that point, right? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, you're right. There were some dinosaurs, like Scala or Omnivex in Europe but the options for the customers weren’t many compared to now. I would say in the 2000s and on, there were quite a lot of solutions coming up and disappearing again so it maybe was not very helpful for the signage industry because many of these solutions were not really professional, so the customer had a bad experience. They didn't touch signage for long, but I would say 10-15 years ago, it started again when customers trusted in professional solutions, and now the markets as you know as well, it's merging and there are a lot of solutions out there and there's some kind of consolidation going on.

Of all those different deployments that you have, do you have some large ones? 

I think I saw that recently you did some sort of a deal where you have, I think, roughly 8,000 displays for a tobacco company in stores in Germany. Is that correct? 

Zuzana Yalcin: Yes. That was Japan Tobacco International. They carry brands like Camel, Winston, et cetera. I believe they're the third largest tobacco company in the world. 

Yeah, and what are you doing with them? Are there screens at the point of sale? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, point of sale. So each point of sale has, I think, between one and three screens and behind each screen, there's an Easescreen license. So this is one of the larger projects. 

I told you we have 10,000 out there and the project means networks the small network consists of 1-3 screens, and the larger ones like JTI for example, with at least 6,000 or 7,000 screens. The larger networks have more than thousands of screens in one network.

So do you have a reference case or two that when you meet a potential business partner or customer, they say, “give some ideas on the kinds of projects that you've done.” 

Do you have one or two go-to's that you tend to mention?

Gerhard Pichler: We go through the channel, which means our strategy is just all the know-how we have about our solution and all the things around digital signage software, we transfer to our resellers. The resellers are 20% AV companies, 60% IT companies, and 20% agencies, I would say from the creative side.

Every one of these companies has to go through a training and certification process. For many projects, we don't really know where our license goes because they can stand on their own feet. That's one of our strategies is to be able to multiply without having hundreds of employees. Usually, the customer asks for signage. In the meantime, digital signage is some kind of expression that the customer already knows, and if the project has some specialties, like integration of databases, or something like that, which is not which cannot be configured out of the box with our solution, then we work together very closely with our resellers and with the end customers, and we help them to integrate all solutions in their not only network but the environment, but most of the projects, we are not involved in it as a manufacturer. 

So you stay behind the scenes and you're not even really marketing that you did this, and let your partners shine?

Gerhard Pichler: We call our solution the Austrian Army knife. It’s like the Swiss, but the Austrian Army knife. It's a toolbox for our integrators that is very full of features, and functions that now after 23 years can be used out of the box for various vertical markets. 

The most important for us is definitely the corporate market. So most projects are in this field. Companies use our software to inform the employees and the customers, on production lines, for example, real-time data showing to the teams there, digital door sign canteens. So these are the kind of projects we do. The project with the many licenses, I mentioned before, 1000-10,000 are more in retail because these are the projects with a lot of licenses, but besides corporate and retail, we identified ten verticals where our solution is widely known and used, for example, higher education, transportation, healthcare, for example, is very interesting because we are certified in Europe with some kind of protocol so we can show patient names. So they can use our software for calling the next patient on one side, but also for showing their offers that the hospital has or some advice they give, or for wayfinding, things like that. It's quiet interesting.. 

I often say to companies that are marketing CMS software that I encourage them to find a vertical market or a specialty of some kind that has a lot of opportunity associated with it versus being a general offer because if you're a general offer, you are mainly competing on price because the functionality is maybe different across different companies, but in general terms the same. 

But it sounds like you're doing fine with being a general offer because you've got 20-plus years in the business and established resellers.

Zuzana Yalcin: Yeah, so that's where our sales channel comes in because our integrators have specialties, so they are the experts on different vertical markets. They know how to customize our software to the end customers' needs. So it's also an example of where you empower the integrator, you empower the reseller, and then they're able to do amazing things. 

Is the software white labeled? 

Gerhard Pichler: There are some examples, yes.

So if a business partner, a reseller wants to say this is Brand X’s software, you guys are behind the scenes entirely, but driving it? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, we are prepared for this so we can easily white-label it for partners. Usually, this discussion comes up with large integrators. They say, okay, I want to hide the name and I want to add my own branding to the solution. But when we talk to them, it often turns to the opposite. They say, okay, it's better that we have a very close relationship with you, and we can start with all the references we bring to the table. 

Still, there are some examples where Easescreen is hidden behind the different names.

We met on the floor at a Digital Signage Experience in November and you agreed to do a podcast, and one of the things that intrigued me was that you're an Austrian company, but you are in the United States looking to expand into North America and build up partnerships here. I gather that's been something that's been an ongoing effort for the last couple of years.

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's true. So from time to time, we do get some projects in the US. For me, the US is definitely the Mecca of digital signage. There are a lot of really professional companies there, which could be great partners for us. There are so many opportunities. The market is that huge. So for me, it's a challenge to start a business there, and I wished to do this many years before, and we decided I think two years ago to install some guy there to do market research, to find ways how we can sell it, through which channels, and so on. He is a very experienced guy out of the AV business and after we see that there are enough opportunities, there are chances for us with our solution. 

The market in the US does not really have a lot of software that is comparable to ours. So then we decided, okay, we go to the next step. The next step was founding a company called Easescreen America LLC in Miami, which we did this year, I think it was in June. Because we have had success in the US for a long time, it's definitely important and necessary to have a company there, and I think 2023 should be our year. The pipeline is quite full now with projects. 

So some of our guys were doing the DSE in Vegas, they were on the East coast visiting future partners or partners, which already signed contracts with us, and they brought I think five or six projects to Austria. So I think the start is quite successful up to now.

If you're an AV integrator or an IT systems integrator, whatever it may be, there are a lot of options in North America. There are a lot of companies selling software solutions and it wouldn't be that you'd get a meeting where they’d go, “oh finally, somebody's got software that can do this.” Why are they choosing to partner with you when there are other options out there? What's ticking their boxes? 

Gerhard Pichler: One thing that we experienced is that we tell them and they seem to trust us. We only go through integrators. So many examples in the past, the integrators told us that manufacturer, they promised us they promised not to make shortcuts directly to the end customer, but they didn't do it. The integrators, they're waiting for, I think manufacturers who they can trust.

Other thingsinclude things like we have so many options in the setup, we can be installed on-premises, for example, which many other solutions are not able to be because they're only cloud-based. We have a cloud infra as well if the customer wants to use it, they can use a private cloud, and so there are many options for the integrators and multipliers, it seems for them very interesting, and besides that, we have technical feature wise I think so many things on board out of the box which nearly no other solution can bring to the table, and these are some of the reasons why they change because many of them when you talk to them, they would tell us about the bad experiences with other solutions. With us, it's always good if some company is experienced and tells us the pain and we can show him how our solution would do it, then you can win them very fast.

So it's interesting and very good for us if companies give us the chance to talk to them, they have already had experiences with solutions, then these companies are the best us and for them, we can be quite fast. 

In terms of partners, do you have a kind of partner, like a profile that you would prefer to work with?

Gerhard Pichler: It seems the larger projects are done by IT companies. So in the US, they're large IT companies, they do the job for digital signage for companies, and so on. So the profile seems more to be IT-focused companies than AV. But we have experienced in the last months, the really interesting projects, they come up more from bigger IT companies.

So one way to the market was through reps, so they introduced us to the integrators there. So we cover now I think nearly 45 states, reps like Simco or BP Marketing, and these guys, who have a large network of AV and IT integrators behind them. For Easescreen, this is the way we can reach the integration network quite fast. 

Is it a challenge on the educational side? 

One of the things I've heard over the years is if you're going to have a reseller channel, you have to invest a lot of time in ensuring that the people who are talking about your product and solutions, fully understand what it is, and if they're an IT systems integrator, they're thinking about all kinds of things, including network security and bandwidth and so on. 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, of course, it's a challenge, but since we have been so long on the market, there are so many slides and training programs exactly prepared for these kinds of topics. We can talk about the language they talk. So you have to talk to IT companies differently of course than to agencies, and in the end, in the US market, we have to learn our marketing lessons because the first step to the customer more than here is by a colorful brochure and things like this, which is quite old fashioned, but it's definitely necessary.

And here, I would say, comes in Zuzana again. So what has been your experience on the marketing side, comparing the North American market to Europe, and what homework we had to do? 

Zuzana Yalcin: So definitely from a marketing perspective, it’s way more abot storytelling. Of course, at some point it's about the USP, it's about the features, it's about all the amazing things you can do. But the first story is always: who are you? Where do you come from, and how do you actually serve the people all around the world? 

So for me, this has been a big lesson in trying to focus on the human side of software because in the end, our partners are human, the end customer is human. The user is human, so how can I translate that story in a way that makes sense to everybody from a professional integrator all the way to an amateur user? And I say that without any negative connotation, but just so they know what digital signage is, what the screen is, and what it can do for them.

This is something I'm noticing actually in Austria as well, most people see digital signage every single day, multiple times, if not countless times, but they have no idea what it is. They cannot label it, and if you talk to them about digital signage, they think it's maybe digital signatures or something like that, so just raising awareness in general is a pretty exciting thing for me. 

Yeah, I was gonna ask about the evolution of all this. Given that you've been involved in it for as long as I have that, what have you seen changing through the years? Obviously, something's never changed. There's still a limited understanding of what it is, but I suspec I find in my own life that I don't have to go on and on at length to explain what it is I do and what I'm involved in. They get it pretty quickly versus it was, a five-minute conversation back in 2005. 

Zuzana Yalcin: I think software is definitely becoming more accessible to the end customer in general, and it also changes customer expectations because they expect to be empowered more. They expect to be involved more. But I think, 10-20 years ago, you could be a genius technician with amazing software and rely on people coming in. Now you definitely have to tell the story if you definitely have to go out there and share the message. 

Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, but you are right, Dave.

Of course, the awareness now is different than 20 years before. In shows like ISC or Infocomm and so on, we've been part of ISE, I think 15-17 times. In the first years, you had to explain even to the people in the industry, what is digital signage and so on, and that changed completely. Now, people quickly understand what it is. I would say that changed. 

The trust in signage is there. That means customers who want info screens and systems for showing content, know that if they make the right choice they can buy systems that are stable and reliable. That is different than it was 5-10 years ago. I think what didn't change is that the end customers are not aware of which kinda tasks they have when there is a digital signage solution. When we are involved in projects, we try always tell the customer, I hope it's clear to you that there will be a technical, very perfect system for you, but in the end, you have to think about who do you want to reach? What are the contents? How is the way that content coming to the screen? Who is responsible? So in many projects, this didn't change. The customer is not aware that he has to give resources, that the digital signage system is successful and lives and is active, I would say. So that slightly changes, but it's the same story as many years before I would. But we help them in creating concepts, for example. 

How is the company set up? Are you privately held or do you have a private equity backer? 

Gerhard Pichler: Oh, private, a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the code is made in-house and we are privately held.

What's your headcount? 

Gerhard Pichler: 25. 

Has that grown much through the years? Obviously, it started with one, but... 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes. I would say by one or two per year, so we are growing but not that fast

There's a lot of companies that are your size like you have larger companies, particularly private equity backed ones, actively looking at as potential acquisitions, I suspect you're getting those emails and phone calls pretty regularly? 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, that's right. But we didn't decide on one until now. 

You're staying on your own path. 

Gerhard Pichler: Yes, up to now. Our mission is not completed yet. 

So if people wanna know more about your company, where can they find you? Obviously, you're going to be at ISE in a couple of months, but online they would find you find you at…

Zuzana Yalcin: www.easescreen.us, and of course we are on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Simply type in an Easescreen and you will find us. 

Simply put, I like it. Thank you very much for spending some time with me. 

Gerhard Pichler: Thank you very much, Dave.

Zuzana Yalcin: Thank you. The pleasure is all ours. 

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!

Sean Riley, Barvanna

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

There are many, many stories of ad-based digital signage networks starting up in bars and restaurants, but many and perhaps most of those stories have bad endings - because of the high cost of the hardware that needed to go in and the limited ability to manage that tech.

A company called Barvanna is taking a different approach - effectively operating as a free channel on satellite TV receiver boxes. So if a sports bar in the U.S., for example, uses DIRECTV to drive the screens around its seating areas, staff can switch on the Barvanna channel by grabbing the remote and just switching to it. No logins. No software to manage. No dedicated box to tie in to local WiFi.

On the other hand, there's no localization on ads and no ability for local managers to do things like create and run spots for things like drinks specials.

Barvanna co-founder Sean Riley comes out of the broadcast business and gets all of that, stressing his service is not intended as an alternative to what a digital signage platform might do for a bar. It's complementary.

I had a good chat with Riley about his company's business model and footprint, and his team's challenge of making some 300,000 DIRECTV business customers aware that there's a new channel they can switch on to drive conversations in bars, and ideally get patrons to stay for another round or two.

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TRANSCRIPT

Sean, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what Barvanna is all about? 

Sean Riley: Hey, Dave. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. Barvanna is an out-of-home entertainment network. So the network itself, the content is a combination of trivia questions, conversation starters, and action sports videos. So we do all short-form content. 

Nothing in the network is more than three to five minutes long, for the most part, and if you are at an out-of-home location and you see Barvanna, what you're gonna see is what we call glance-digestible content, and by that I mean you can glance up at Barvanna at any time on any screen, and immediately digest what's happening on the screen. So it could be a trivia question, it could be a conversation starter would you rather, or what would you do if… 

And to break up the text, we also deliver action sports videos in a way that works really well with our customers. We've got a lot of really positive feedback thus far.

So what's the business model? 

Sean Riley: So we are primarily an ad-driven model, right? What that means is that our primary revenue stream, of course, is gonna be in the form of advertising. So we need to find ways to measure the audience that we have in out-of-home, which we can talk about in a few minutes, and deliver a lot of value to advertisers that are interested in reaching these out-of-home consumers.

You know better than I do, Dave, about the out-of-home environment. I have an entertainment background. I spent 25 years in the television business with Fox Sports, with Liberty, Latin America, in the Caribbean, and some time with the Golf Channel, and so my focus is delivering a really top-notch entertainment network that works very well in, out-of-home with or without audio and with respect to the monetization, it's all about delivering tens of millions of impressions every month and showing advertisers that we can get them results. 

Because you come out of the programming side, by the sounds of it, you understand that you can't just put something and run ads and just assume people are gonna watch it?

Sean Riley: Yeah, that's exactly right, and that is, one of our biggest challenges, so our distribution model is a little bit different, right? So you have other out-of-home networks out there that are delivering Android boxes or Apple TV boxes, DirecTV in locations, and delivering networks that way, and that is really easy to measure because you know exactly how many screens you have, you know where they are, and you can do estimates on how many viewers are in each location. 

In our case, because I have a distribution and entertainment background, we've taken a different approach and we're working with distributors. So distributors like Direct TV and other cable and satellite providers, as well as really any distributor that can get us into these homes. I can't really go door to door or deliver boxes to these out-of-home locations. I just don't have the resources at the moment, so we feel a better model is to go through distributors, and so that creates some challenges, right? Our DirecTV agreement, for instance, has us in 300,000 locations. So what that means is that any out-of-home location that is a subscriber to DirecTV for business can access Barvanna just like they would ESPN or the Golf Channel or any other network.

And it's my job to work with our partners like DirecTV to market the channel to let people know that it's on, it's available, on their lineup, in their location. Whether it's a health club and people are working out, or a cart, a service shop, or a bar or a restaurant. That's the biggest challenge is getting people to know it's on, turn it on and then step two is measuring that viewership, and then the final step is monetizing that viewership with advertisers, and so we've done a lot of tests and we've learned a lot about what works and doesn't work in terms of what viewers like, and we're getting a tremendous response thus far and we believe that we can, like I said, deliver tens of millions of impressions every month through that distribution. 

So would this be like when I'm late at night reading and I just want some company and I'll go to Channel 585 on my cable box and it'll be the Fireplace channel? Is it one of the sorts of higher-level channels or a set of channels that you would just select using a remote and off you go?

Sean Riley: That's correct. It's not exactly a fireplace channel, but correct, it is a TV network on the lineup. It's designed to complement ESPN and the Golf Channel and complement regional sports networks that are commonly seen in out-of-home locations.

It's not available on the residential lineup of DirecTV, but it is available to every one of their businesses. Every hotel lobby and every car dealership, health club, bar and restaurant, et cetera. So that's how our model works. Now look, we have the technology, Dave, and we do have a number of customers that take our network directly. We have delivered Android boxes out under the street. There are bars and restaurants that have our network today. We can do more customization with those, but we really believe in the distribution model. You get a lot of benefits from working with a large distributor who can help you market the channel, can give you massive distribution. 

If you think about our competitors, and we don't even look at them as competitors, I'll tell you why in a second. If you think about people like Loop or Upshow or Atmosphere, I think the maximum number of screens for any of these guys you probably know better than I do is less than 25,000 or 30,000. Now I think that's from those that have been publicly announced and when you look at Barvanna, we have 300,000 screens out there. We have 10 times the distribution of our nearest competitors, and so granted, we've gotta get people to turn it on, we've gotta get people to watch. But even if only 10% of our base, of that 300,000, is using us for a few hours a day, that is 30,000 locations right there, times X number of user viewers in each location, and you can see how the impressions at an ad load of 8-12 minutes an hour can add up really quickly, and so that's our approach, and thus far it's we're very confident that we can generate significant ad revenue and deliver great value for advertisers using this model.

So your challenge is less about technology and raising the capital to deploy boxes in all these locations, you've got this big installed base, but you have to drive awareness and then usage based on that awareness, right?

Sean Riley: Yeah, exactly, and that's a battle for sure. It's gonna be a challenge, right? 

So what do you tell them, or what do you tell the bar owners and the restaurant owners like, why use this?

Sean Riley: So at the end of the day, what Barvanna does for any location is it allows the location to have an alternative entertainment option. All these locations naturally already have DirecTV in the example we're talking about and so what happens a lot of times, as Dave, during the day or into the early fringe hours, early evening hours, there aren't any live games in most cases, especially during the week, and even in the summertime, in particular, there are only one or two interesting games that are on. And so Barvanna gives patrons in the bar another entertainment option. It's designed to have something interesting all the time. It helps drive engagement. So it's not exactly a fireplace channel, it's not exactly a background channel. , it's designed to drive engagement, to get people talking. Everyone loves trivia and, at the end of the day, because everyone loves trivia, it is family-friendly, it's fun, and people get it as soon as they see it. 

So once a bar owner or a health club owner turns it on and leaves it on for a little while, they totally get the value because they see people engaging with it. They see people laughing along with some of the, would you rather questions and the engagement that they're receiving thus far. Based on our tests both in the United States and in the Caribbean, we're getting really positive results, and so from our perspective, when we go to a bar owner and we send them a direct mail piece and say, Hey, this channel's available now, check it out. We remind them that it's just another way to enhance the experience in the out-of-home location and that ultimately there's been research that shows that drives repeat business, keeps your customers happy, keeps them engaged longer, increases the dwell time, and again, provide another option because Dave, who wants to watch 16 screens of a talk show on ESPN when the guy is muted? 

So look, I mean ESPN is a great channel, don't get me wrong. ESPN, Golf Channel, regional sports channels, these are fantastic channels that every one of these locations has to have, right? Our theory is you really can't, in particular, if you're in a bar or other out-of-home home locations like a health club, it's really hard to cut the cord. You can't say, I don't need these other channels. You need them, and those are great channels, so we're placing a bet that all these locations will continue to have a package of networks, whether it comes from DirecTV or another cable operator, or even some of the new emerging platforms.

We're convinced that the package that includes sports channels like ESPN sports channels like Fox Sports One, and sports channels like the Golf Channel, will continue to be delivered in these out-of-home locations, and we just wanna be there right alongside them. Man, we just wanna say, look, this is another cool, fun option for people to have when you're not showing games or alongside a game, right?

Are the businesses paying for these channels? Is it an upcharge on their DirecTV subscription or does it just come with it? 

Sean Riley: Barvanna is part of the basic package, so everyone who gets a subscription to DirecTV for business receives Barvanna at no additional charge. 

Okay, and how many channels are there?

Sean Riley: We have one main feed at this point of Barvanna and at some point, we'll be expanding and growing and spinning off various versions of our channels. 

Can you do any kind of localization? 

Sean Riley: Not yet. So when we talk about the challenges, some of the challenges are that we can't tap into programmatic ad networks yet. Like a lot of out-of-home and a lot the fast channels can do today. So it's gonna be up to us to get out there and pound the pavement and get advertisers excited about the impressions that we're delivering. 

We can't regionalize the feeds yet. So I can't provide regionalized advertising. But over time, a lot of these savvy distributors are getting really smart with how they're delivering their content, and it's only a matter of time before we can do some more regionalization that will allow us to do customization. For instance, if we had a betting company like DraftKings that wanted to advertise on Barvanna, which is a perfect advertiser for us, we would be able to essentially serve ads in regional locations, if that makes sense. 

So all the ads you're selling are national ad buys?

Sean Riley: Yep. So we're doing a hundred per cent national ad buys and we have different programming blocks that we think are gonna appeal to advertisers. For instance, on Saturday morning, when you go into a bar or a restaurant to watch the college football games, that day one of Barvanna is showing College football trivia all morning, and so it's a great opportunity for a bar or restaurant to entertain their guests before the game, and the same thing on Sundays, we'll do pro football style trivia every Sunday morning. So if you come into a bar and you're there an hour early, rather than having to watch those muted pregame shows right on some of the networks. And that's okay. If you do at least one or two screens, we'll have a Barvanna on and you and your friends will be able to play along with pro trivia in those locations and it just delivers a great amount of value. It's really fun for the bar and restaurant, and it gets customers engaged and hanging out both before and after the game to play sports trivia along with their friends.

I think you did a deal, going back a little bit, with Radiant, a CMS software company involved in digital signage. That's a little bit different. Is that a different distribution model? 

Sean Riley: It is, yes. Radiant's a slightly different distribution model. Dave, with respect to Radiant, it’s a great company. They're really savvy in terms of getting their software technology out there and we wanted to align with them, with Barvanna, and we look at them as a distributor, right? I don't know the number of screens that they have today, what I do know is that they're out there pitching our network in a slightly different manner than DirecTV does, but at the end of the day, it allows their customers to access Barvanna as part of their portal.

So Radiant provides a tremendous amount of really high-quality options, and these are folks that are looking for display-style menu boards and the traditional, I think display networks, and they love the fact that they can offer some entertainment-style content and so we did one of our first deals with them early on, and we've been really happy with the success they've been having, and in their case, there's a fee for aligning. If you have Radiant, you pay an additional fee to access Barvanna, and we've been pretty successful with that. People really like it, and so that's where some of our feedback is coming from. Radiant customers have reached out to me directly and said, could you do more of this or less of this? Or we love what you're doing and so it's pretty easy to access my information, and so they've been getting some good feedback from them.

Are you working with any other CMS software companies, and if you were to work with them, what do they need to do at their end?

Sean Riley: We aren't yet. Look, as I said, we have our own technology. If there was a location that wanted to access us directly, we can certainly talk to them about doing that.

We haven't focused on really many partnerships yet with other companies, we've spoken to all the companies that you'd imagine with, RockBot and UpShow and Loop and Atmosphere and they're all doing similar entertainment networks in this vein in terms of what Chive TV does with all their action sports and their user-generated videos and what Loop does with their music videos, and so everyone has their own kind of unique offering and look. I don't really look at them as competitors, Dave. I really don't. I don't look at them as a competitor any more than I look at Fox Sports as a competitor, or ESPN as a competitor or in Canada, TSN or Rogers Sports.

And that, I think, our channel is designed to compliment them, and so if a bar's got Chive TV, great, that's fine. They're still gonna have a DirecTV subscription. They need that for all the great stuff that DirecTV delivers, and so if they've got Chive TV on one tv, great, it doesn't mean that they're not gonna take another monitor in the bar restaurant and put Barvanna on. So we don't really see them as competitive. We're offering a complimentary service that ideally is going to deliver value in any out-of-home location, whether it's a hotel lobby or a health club or a spa, you get your haircut or get your car fixed or even in a hospital, hospital waiting room.

So in some cases, going back as Bar TV networks have been around for as long as digital signage has been around and digital out-of-home home the venue operators have said, this is nice to have, but this does nothing for me. I need screens that are going to help me push drinks and appetizers and things like the high-margin items. How do you counteract that or address that? 

Sean Riley: Yeah, that's fair, and I get that and we do hear that, and I think there are solutions out there that are designed to drive food and drink, whether it is your own display network with menu type style, traditional type, advertising, traditional style display networks, I think there's inexpensive software, that you can get off the shelf, that you can create those types of offerings inside your location, and so you're right, in some cases, if I had to go out there and say, look, I'd like every bar or restaurant to pay $80 a month or $100 dollars a month for this service, that would be a tough sell if it was just a network. Now I can customize, I can certainly send that location a box, an Android box with our content on it, and I can customize that location and you could get, and I'll tell you right now, we have gotten over a hundred dollars per location in some instances for customized versions of our channel but if you think about the labour-intensive model that, we think it's way more effective and just as good for really the location to have Barvanna as the network feed, right? The nationwide network feed, and we're constantly making tweaks and changes and we're very cognizant, Dave, about what's going on in the bar, right?

On Halloween, what are you gonna see on Barvanna? You're gonna see six hours, from 5:00 PM till midnight and beyond just creepy, Halloweens type stuff. You're gonna see a little bit of Halloween trivia, but for the most part, we wanna complement what's happening in these out-of-home locations. On St. Patrick's Day, the whole channel just completely converts into a green sea of Ireland and trivia about St. Patrick, and we really try to make sure that we're complimenting what's going on in those out-of-home locations because that's the kind of stuff that really adds value.

And on Halloween, we get so much positive feedback from all the creepy, fun, Frankenstein-style videos that we put on Halloween night because it just adds to the ambience. So during the Super Bowl, a great example, I don't expect bars and restaurants to turn on Barvann on six screens during the Super Bowl. They wanna devote all their screens to the game, and so, during that time, Barvanna will put up something a little bit different. We'll put up some Super Bowl style trivia or some NFL-style trivia that if they wanna turn on at halftime or before or after the game, that really adds to the ambience, right?

So that's the kind of thing we try to do. It's a good question, right? Because this has been tried before. It's a distributor, bars and restaurants kinda shrug and say, nice to have, but wouldn't wanna pay extra for it, and so this is why DirecTV said, look, there are companies out there propagating a cut the cord message. They're saying, you don't need it, you don't need DirecTV, you don't need cable. You can just take our Apple TV box or our Android box, and we have enough “content” on there to satisfy your location, and that's just not the case, and so what DirecTV is saying is, look, we can do that too. We can deliver these types of networks, and so when they found out what I was doing, we talked to them and they and they decided to do an agreement with us. They don't like to work with companies that are trying to undercut them, undermine them, and so we look at ourselves as very friendly to cable and really any distributor, we're very interested in working with them because we think it's a good business model for us, and we get a lot of value from them just as much as they get value from us. They get to deliver a high-quality network that these out-of-home locations seem to like, and we get the benefit of broad distribution combined with some marketing and the ability to generate some advertising revenue.

So this isn't a case where you, as an operator, have to decide, this is gonna be my digital signage solution. I can't use anything else. I'm just gonna go with this. You could in theory have Barvanna, you could have Atmosphere and you could have UpShow running in the same venue at the same time?

Sean Riley: Absolutely, and that's really how we look at it, and that's perfectly fine with us because from our perspective, I think the more entertainment options you can give in these out-of-home locations, I think the better off everybody's gonna be. I think they could let the customers choose what they wanna watch and we would encourage anybody listening, when they go into a bar restaurant, ask them and see if they have DirecTV, and ask them to turn on Barvanna that's part of our business plan, and see how people respond to it and see how bars and restaurants like it and go from there.

There was a variation on this roughly 10 years ago with a company called RMG Networks that no longer exists at least not in the form it was in back then. They did a deal with DirectTV and at that point, I believe they had software that could do things like reverse-L wraparound bars and squeezers and things like that, and I thought at the time, oh, this is interesting. They've got a lot of distribution as you've laid out and everything else, but it didn't really go anywhere. 

Was there any history and understanding of that within DirecTV when you engaged with them? 

Sean Riley: We didn't actually talk about that in particular. One thing we have talked about is interactivity, right? I think there's another company that came out several years ago that really went all in on the technology and they had iPads on the tables, and you could interact with them, with trivia and things that are happening on the screen and we decided not to go that road. We just don't think it's necessary. We think that's a huge tech expense. We didn't feel like when people are in these locations they don't wanna do anything more than really glance up, play a few trivia questions with their friends, have fun with it and go from there.

We'll eventually create some complimentary apps and things, but I think that the networks that have tried this in the past and failed, have invested a lot of money, and all the interactive stuff and made all these promises to their investors about all this great cool interactivity we're gonna do, and we're going to collect all this information from these users, and we're going to get them to play along with all of our trivia, and it's just at the end of the day, when you're at a bar or a restaurant, when you're at a health club, you're on the treadmill, you wanna glance up, be able to have some fun, answer a few trivia questions, maybe goof around with your friends, if you're at a bar. But the idea that you wanna take your phone out or a tablet out and start interacting, I'm not convinced that is something, even for people in their twenties, in their teens and twenties. I just don't think it's something that is as engaging. 

Look, we wanna get people off their phones and engage and entertain and so that's our model, and so I'm not concerned about looks, as I said, I don't expect all 300,000 of these locations to turn Barvanna on, Dave. I think I expect a large percentage as we grow and as people learn about it, to understand the value and leave it on for long periods of time, and as I said, if we get 8-20% usage, we'll be thrilled. We'll deliver great value for DirecTV, we're delivering great value for our advertisers and at the end of the day, customers are gonna have fun. 

And do the restaurant operators get a piece of the action or their piece of the action is that they get a free channel? 

Sean Riley: That's it. It's just another value add from DirecTV that doesn't cost them anything additional. They don't pay for putting it on. Look, there are ads on ESPN, there are ads on the Golf Channel, there are ads on all the channels they deliver, and we want people to look at this as just something that naturally blends in. With the 5 or 10 or 15 other channels that you'll often put on in your location, and frankly, in some cases it is a better option for, say, a doctor's office where you have The View on all morning with muted sound, or you have CNN on, even these days, like news channels that become so polarizing that it's more challenging to put on a news channel these days because people create an opinion of your business based on your news network.

And so DirecTV has said, look, let's give them another option, let's give them an out-of-home channel that's only designed for out-of-home. It's specifically designed to entertain people when they're waiting to get a haircut or when they're about to go into the doctor's office. It's fun, it's entertaining. There's always something interesting on, it's family-friendly, and it's not controversial. It's designed to be used with no audio, and so all those checks, all those boxes, and when their competitors come out when DirecTV competitors come out and they say, cut the cord, take our out-of-home networks, distributors like DirecTV can now say, look, we have a channel just like that guys. We have a channel just like that, go to this channel on DirecTV, it's called Barvanna, check it out, and we're gonna deliver more over time so you don't need to do that. We have those and all the great sports channels. That's how we look at it.

I assume that your business partners, investors, I'm not quite sure how you're funded and backed and so on, but the people who are helping this growth are pretty happy that there's not a big capital cost involved in this? 

Sean Riley: That's fair. There's certainly a fair amount of capital with respect to acquiring sports videos and creating the content and curating the hours of content. There's certainly a fair amount of that, but you're right, I feel really confident with our business model that the numbers work. We're still a pretty small company with less than 10 employees, and we are growing really fast.

There are definitely some costs involved. Technology is also an expense, and because we still have to create a network, we program it full-time, and we still have to have a master control style playout system. In this case, it's cloud-based. We still have to deliver that to DirecTV. We have fibre costs and all that. Not to mention all the content costs. So there's a cost basis. I think it's better than probably most, but at the end of the day, there's still some cost there that we have to contend with.

And as we grow, we look to maybe start launching additional style networks that might work in the residential space and or other networks or DirecTV maybe we do roll out, we're looking at a channel called Easy Vibe TV, which is more of an Atmospheric type channel that you're talking about, where it's more of scenery and calm beach views and things along those lines that might also work out-of-home. So we intend to pitch those networks to our distributors as well and say if you like Barvanna, why don't you go with this type of channel as well for your out-of-home customers, because that seems to be working? 

Would that be the same 300,000 seats, so to speak? 

Sean Riley: Potentially, we would hope. That's what we'd want and look, we talk about DirecTV has 300,000 customers, that's just step one, Dave. Having worked in the cable industry and the entertainment business for as long as I have, we're certainly reaching out and we're talking to at least two other large distributors right now about Barvanna as well.

The idea would be to get Barvanna off the ground, let's see if we can generate some great value for our advertisers, deliver a really high-quality product for DirecTV, and expand it to other distributors if they like it, let's talk to them, let's talk to these locations, let's talk to our distributors, see what else they might be interested in and try to create products that meet their needs.

What's in it for the DirecTVs and the other distributors? Like, why do they wanna do this? Is it just another carrot for getting people to sign up or to retain them? 

Sean Riley: It's for sure a retention model, and there's cord-cutting going on at the residential level, and when I say cord-cutting, sometimes it just means you're cancelling your Comcast subscription and you're signing up for Sling TV or Hulu or YouTube TV. So all you're going to do is come from one package of channels to a different package of channels. You could argue that's not necessarily cutting the cord, you're still getting a great package of channels. But regardless, I think bar owners, and health club owners said, look, I cut the cord at home and now I'm just getting all my stuff from on demand. Could I do that in my business? And in most cases, the answer is no. In most cases, the distributors are still out there providing great packages of channels.

It's too difficult, David, if you're trying to run a sports bar, if you've got an office building or a hotel or lobby and you're trying to find stuff on Netflix and on other subscription services, which are great for all of us, we love those services, but, at the end of the day, it doesn't work for a business. You wanna have a package of channels that you can easily flip through, that when your customers say, I wanna watch the game or they wanna be entertained, you can easily go to networks like that. I believe in the model. I think that's growing, but at the same time, as I mentioned earlier, there are people out there saying, you don't need it, you don't need a cable operator or a satellite provider in your location. Just get rid of that and just take our music video service, and I don't think there's much of a threat right now. I think DirecTV is very well positioned. Even, despite the fact that you hear reports about some other subscribers going down, I think every location that wants to entertain their customers when they come into their location is gonna need a package of channels. That's my theory and my belief and that's why I think Barvanna is gonna continue to succeed really long term. 

Yeah, and certainly my impression of people who run or work in bars and similar kinds of entertainment environments, is they've got five seconds to make a decision and change something on a screen or whatever. They can't be standing there for 10 minutes going down the rabbit hole of what I should put on. So it's gotta work quickly. 

Sean Riley: Yeah, it's a good point. I think DirectTV recognize the value in that, and they've said, look channels are coming to come and go. Who knows what happens with the Sunday ticket package in the US and who knows what happens in Canada with some of the Premier League packages? And so you never know, when these things are gonna go, are they gonna come and go? Are other players gonna pick them up? And so I think smart distributors like DirecTV say, let's put the most entertaining content we can on in the out-of-home space so that if we do have a weakness here and there over time, then we'll be able to show what we're really trying to provide unique, different family-friendly options, entertainment options to retain our customers and to provide a ton of value for them. 

Your website says you have about 8,500 sites right now across the Caribbean and the US. How many do you expect to have, let's say a year from now?

Sean Riley: So we launch DirecTV officially next Monday so that will be the 24th of October, so we're gonna be in 300,000 locations starting on the 24th of October. We have now close to 12,000 locations in the Caribbean. That deal is also through a distributor. A distributor called, Cable and Wireless, which is owned by Liberty Latin America. I don’t if you're familiar with those guys in the Caribbean, but there are a number of countries they deliver us to, and, in their case, they have us in almost every hotel room as well.

I went to St. Lucia recently and I went to my hotel room and I was happy to find that Barvanna was on the channel lineup, so me and my friends hanging out having some rum in the Caribbean as we typically do, and, playing along with would you rather… would you rather be Super Man or Batman? We had a big debate about that. It's really great to see that they're having success. That was because our first launch was across those countries in the Caribbean. We do a different feed down there. 

Dave, the sports fans in the Caribbean are all about cricket, man. They love cricket and in Canada, they love cricket. They love football, of course, meaning soccer. They love track and field, Olympic-style sports because of all the great sprinters that come out of Jamaica and Barbados and Bahamas. So our sports trivia is a different feed in the Caribbean and we focus on all of those sports. We can't really show aside from the Dominican Republic, can't really show baseball trivia in the Caribbean and certain American sports. So we focused on Olympics soccer. Cricket and it's been very well received, and so we, again, it just goes back to being aware and cognizant of what's going on in these locations and what our viewers want and doing our best to serve them and to make it as relevant as possible for anybody who's partying or waiting or dining or having fun with their friends.

All right. This has been great. If people wanna know more about Barvanna, where do they find you online? 

Sean Riley: Yeah. So thanks for taking the time to chat with us. It's been really fun, Dave. I'm glad we had a chance to talk. So you can go to barvanna.com, and we have contact information on there, but we're gonna continue to grow and provide new products. So check back from time to time and you'll see other products that we're rolling out, and if you have suggestions, if you have videos you wanna send us and put us on Barvanna, we're certainly happy to put your videos up. We're certainly happy to take trivia questions and suggestions, and as I said, because we're a small company, I love having access to the viewers and access to bar owners and access to all of our customers so we can really get that feedback and make the channel as engaging and as relevant as possible, and look, you guys are doing great work at 16:9, I read you guys every day and we really appreciate all you're doing in this space. You guys are the experts. I'm still learning this space, Dave, so I'll be probably reaching out to you too, for more advice and feedback, but thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it. 

All right thanks again. Have a good one!

Erik DeGiorgi, MediaVue Systems

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

Mediavue Systems has the somewhat unique experience of being a PC manufacturer that started in digital signage, versus any number of companies that had personal or industrial computers with the dimensions, specs and pricing that met the industry's needs and desires at the time.

One hell of a lot has changed in the intervening 15 years, and the Boston-based company has shifted with them. Erik DeGiorgi co-founded the business with his dad Dave. He's now its President and focused on what he says is a major evolution of the company and brand.

His goal is changing industry perceptions about what Mediavue does, to a point that he now talks about the company more as a software shop than a hardware manufacturer.

That's because Mediavue has been steadily developing software tools - most notably for configuration, deployment, remote device management and security. The IT people they work with think much more about uptime and efficient management than they do about the size of the box or, in particular, the price.

I had a great chat with Erik about the roots of his company and where PC hardware and software sit in an industry landscape that now also has options for low-cost smart displays and single-purpose media players.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Eric, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown on MediaVue systems? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, sure, Dave, first and foremost, thanks for having me on, and also thanks for the invite next month. Looking forward to seeing you and everybody else at the mixer. Nice to get back to reality there, huh?

No kidding. 

Erik DeGiorgi: But yeah, sure. I'll give you a snapshot. We've been around for about 16 years at this point. So MediaVue was founded in 2007. The initial product we brought to market was now what's called a media player. We started designing and building bespoke hardware for the industry back before there was really a name for it, and so we brought to market our first hardware device, I believe it was probably 2008 when we went to market, and the company's evolved quite a bit over the past 15 years. We initially went to market through our channel relationships with CMS partners.

So back in the day, we were a heavy SCALA house long before the StrataCash acquisition and everything. But we partnered with CMSs. We started to develop operating systems, include that on our devices and embed CMS and try to make it as turnkey as possible. The evolution of the companies really centred around the kind of product innovations and responses to needs in the market. So again, at the very beginning it was, let's build a device that can go and be turned on 24/7, play videos and not break as they all were. Then it was, okay, we fixed that, then how do we create it more turnkey because of all the problems we were encountering? The integration, putting the software in the hardware. Then once we resolved that it became an issue of scalability. So, if you remember back, 10-15 years ago, these large-scale networks would be deployed, but there'd be no network management.

The people would transition, and there'd be no way to know what was in the field. There'd be no way to cope with the problems when they would arise. It was just really an operational nightmare for the system integrators and certainly the end customers that were trying to scale these networks. So we responded to that and built out a robust network management platform. So that really was the kind of pivot point where we moved from being really a hardware company to a software company. So today, fast forward, what we deliver is really a turnkey operating platform. So it's a combination of hardware, it's a combination of our software management tools, support that goes along with that. It's the integration of CMS software. It's audience analytics, whatever you need to design and deploy and manage signage networks in an array of markets, we now have a fairly robust platform that supports that at scale. 

That's interesting that you describe yourself as a software company. I would think most people who know MediaVue would think, they're a hardware company. They make small form-factor PCs for signage.

Erik DeGiorgi: And I may be getting ahead of myself because, as I do, but we are actually poised to go extensive, top to the bottom rebrand of the company right now and teaser come January, the look and feel of MediaVue is gonna be quite different. 

So did you start the company with digital signage in mind or were you doing industrial computing and found your way into it?

Erik DeGiorgi: So David, our CEO was previously, his previous company was actually in display repair. So this was back in the 90s and the early 2000s. When people used to fix things, he was repairing CRTs and was doing that for all the major brands. He had service contracts with Dell and ViewSonic and Mitsubishi. If you bought a PC at Circuit City, you know the service contract would go to him. So he was doing large scale monitor repair, and by virtue of that, he got pulled into the digital signage industry because of early projects, this is 20 years ago, he had the service contract for the display and this was back in the day of, hanging a Dell Optiplex on the back of a screen in a large harness, and those things were failing left and right, and by virtue of having the contract for the display, they asked him if they could fix those, and so he got into that business and then looked at that and said, is there a way to build a better mousetrap here?

And that was the origin story. MediaVue was started, and we went to work on what became our first media player, but it was very much in response, having the exposure to the earliest deployments, seeing the catastrophic failure rates, and then coming up with a solution.

David DeGiorgi is your dad, right? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, you will see a common last name there. He and I sat down and started MediaVue in about 2007. 

Is he still involved? 

Erik DeGiorgi: He is still involved. I've read some of your recent postings and things, there comes a time in life when you maybe step back from some things and focus on some other things and, Dave, will never slow down, don't let me mischaracterize him.

Yeah. He's a bit of a live wire from what I remember of meeting him. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, he's 110% at all times. But yeah, we certainly work in tandem and have since the outset. 

And you're in the Boston area, right? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yep. Our HQ is just south of Boston, and we've got an international presence. We've got sales teams out in MEA and spread across certainly here domestically. But one of the things that I think is unique, going back to our roots, in hardware, we still have our assembly line in Boston, so since day one and continuing today, I think the majority of what we do is really in the kind of management tool set and all of the software stack and the integration and everything that we do at that level, we still design and assemble hardware, and we do that in the back half of our headquarters and we've got our assembly floor right there along with the front of house.

And how does that resonate with resellers and end users? Is that important to them that it's domestically made? 

Erik DeGiorgi: I don't know if it's there's a Made in USA badge on it, and that's important to me. I think where the value comes from having control over that process. So our assembly line is very adaptable. So we can very quickly respond to the needs of customers. So whether that's a hardware configuration, whether that's a setup and an integration with different software, we can do all of that and make very quick adjustments to our assembly line to accommodate the customer and I think that's where the value is.

Yeah, I'm sure there are people who do wanna buy products made in the USA but I, I tend to think there's probably a lot more who are buying for other reasons and like the idea that there's the support that is in 12 hours away and in Mandarin. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, absolutely, and the full experience that you get with MediaVue is based domestically, So everything, the account rep you get obviously is regional, you get attached with a Sales, Engineering, and CSE at the beginning, that's a person that's domestically based. That individual works with you through pre-sale. When it converts to a sale, that person maintains the attachment to that account. You have continuity there throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's how we differentiate.

Our origins are certainly in hardware, we're doing a lot more now. But we're never gonna be able to compete on cost with some of our OEM competitors out in Asia. There's just absolutely no way. So we have to create a lot of value add. We have to create a lot of it's an experience working with us. It's the whole lifetime of the engagement and the deployment, it's very hands-on, and that's how we've been able to differentiate. 

You describe the old days of Dell Optiplex hanging off the back of monitors and back in 2007, at that time, it was a big deal to come up with a small form factor PC. That doesn't really matter anymore, does it? Cuz everybody is like that. 

Erik DeGiorgi: The playing field has levelled, certainly on the hardware side it's, but it's in form factor, it's in computing power. The value proposition back then was, how many bits and bytes can I put in the smallest form factor and, run my 720p video and, do that successfully, and the playing field is flattened there. It's not as competitive as it was. The computing's kind of caught up. 

I always get a kick out of how many pixels can you actually put on a display before you have to be three inches away from it before you can tell, so it's like hardware is caught up, I think, to the industry's need if that makes sense. So now it really becomes about the value of Integration. How do you successfully roll out a deployment? How do you have that go as seamless as possible, both in the installation and in the ongoing management and maintenance of that network? Because we all know the greatest cost to doing that is getting people in the field, turning wrenches and screwdrivers. So the more you can minimize that ease, the burden for the integration partner. Certainly, that brings value to them as they're reselling things in managed services contracts. It brings value to the end customer because the cost of operating the network in total is far less. So really honing in on the stability, reliability, the scalability of these networks is, I think, more of our present challenge rather than, packing pixels on screens and having more gigabytes of processing power. 

I'm gonna guess that resellers and integrators understand that a lot more than end users.

Erik DeGiorgi: There’s certainly a learning curve. The ones that have been through it and felt the pain know it very well. You have to go through it to see that. We still get opportunities to come across and people will haggle on price and this box is a hundred dollars less than that box or something and we try to educate, we try to help people see the light, if you will, and look at the total cost of ownership of these networks a little bit differently maybe than they are, and it's one of those lessons that you have to learn. 

And I noticed on your product list that your small form factor, I forget the name of it, but it was a small box and it just had a Celeron running in it, and it used to be the case that people would pay a lot of attention to the generation of the processor and everything else and they might think that a Celeron not powerful enough, but they are now, right?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yes, certainly years ago, it was very much spec driven, and it was very important to, gigabytes of this and megabytes of that. Like I was saying before, the technology's kind of caught up to the needs of the industry and there's only so much you're doing. Compute power really is now doing onsite analytics and doing things like real-time decisions and stuff like that, that's pushing thresholds. It's just not as important a factor because there's just enough there. 

When you started it was PCs and PCs, that's what people used for digital signage. There was the odd sort of dedicated player type, like the old digital view boxes, and there were a few others out there. But then smart displays came along, BrightSign bubbled up, and now you have two categories that you're competing with. How do you sell against those? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, so that's a great question. So we're rooted still in that PC tradition, and we do so because we're looking at the life cycles of these deployments and we believe that kind of platform has the required adaptability and scalability where some of these other architectures don't, simply I look at it as, if you're rooted in kind of this PC topology and architecture, it's built to do a lot of things versus doing one thing very specifically if that makes sense. So it has the ability to adapt not just to the initial customer needs, but throughout the lifetime of the deployment, and that's getting into some of the things we're gonna be rolling out first, at the beginning of next year, really rely on that adaptability, that topology.

There are also some big security issues, and it's something that's not discussed in the industry that is very much overlooked when you get into ARM-based products, and I will try not to get too technical here, like smart displays when I say system on a chip and stuff like that, that's a hardware stack, that's a chipset that is licensed and manufactured by any no name, chip house that you've never heard of versus say an Intel, AMD and the major difference from a security perspective is that you need to maintain Operating system, you need to maintain your operating system and have that be updated because a lot of your security, a lot of your threat mitigation comes from having a stable and current operating system.

What happens is when you use these unknown chip manufacturers to develop the SOCs and things like that, they don't maintain driver support for the current operating system updates. So what happens is you are unable to continually update your operating environment because you don't have strong driver support for those chipsets. So in our opinion, that creates significant security vulnerabilities. So it's yet another reason why we maintain the kind of traditional Intel and AMD chipset topology. 

Is it your opinion and perspective, or are you hearing real-world stories talking about that? 

Erik DeGiorgi: I don't hear many people talking about it.

I think it's one of those things like many things in the security world that is just unknown, and it's not something that comes up. So it's a message we're certainly trying to get across. 

So the devil's advocate argument would be if you're not hearing about it, maybe it's not really a thing?

Erik DeGiorgi: Maybe. I can't argue with that but it's not likely. We're a very technical company, so when we all sit around at the lunch table, these are the kinds of conversations we have about vulnerabilities. So we're on the pulse of it may be a little more than others and paying attention to it a little more than others, but yeah I do think it's there, and so it's a combination of that. It's a combination of a kind of being there are inherent limitations, capability, and limitations when it comes to those types of chipsets as well, you're not able to just load any software on it. You're not able to go and connect peripheral devices to it. It doesn't have that degree of adaptability. So it's for all those reasons, we've stayed with the kind of technology stack, the topology that we have. 

My perception, and I'm definitely not a hardware expert or a software expert, is that these days, if you have a simple application like digital menu boards or FIDS displays, those sorts of things you probably don't need a PC for that. But if you're getting into anything, complicated and challenging, and as you say, it needs to evolve and have some malleability to it, you're probably gonna lean towards a PC. Is that a fair perception? 

Erik DeGiorgi: I think it's a fair perception. I think it's consistent too with where we position in the market. There are so many kinds of more simple use cases, I got a menu board and that's up and running. I'm gonna say that with a caveat but I'll get back to that in a second. The majority of digital signage is putting a picture on a screen, right? And that's about as simple as it gets, and we obviously can do that. I don't think our value is in that kind of In that type of use case. 

And you're probably not gonna win on price? 

Erik DeGiorgi: We're certainly not gonna win on price, and we’ve got no problem with it, it's just not our market. We're really focused on how we can be a technology partner for a large-scale enterprise that wants to deploy signage and communications infrastructure as an asset for their organization, and we partner closely with them.

We work with, like I said, all of our software partners on the CMS side, and all our integration partners to put together a technology platform and an implementation program in order to deploy and manage that at scale. That's our sweet spot. Going back to the QSR example, menu boards, I guess you could say are simple, right? You're putting it up there. It doesn't really change much, It's just but then what happens when a menu board goes down? Because that's your business. If you don't have a menu, how are you gonna sell it? It’s where we bring value to say that the application is doing things where you might have content switching. You might have redundancy in those menu boards. So do things with a bit more sophistication to make sure you're managing uptime and maintaining uptime. You can look at something and see it as simple, but at the same time to do it well at scale, there's always increasing layers of complexity.

Yeah that's an interesting point because I think of digital menu boards as being really simplistic applications, but they can go down. So you need that failover and everything else. 

Erik DeGiorgi: There's that, and then it's also a really dirty environment. We’ve done QSRs and gotten devices back that you have to scrape the grease out. Again, there's always more complexity than you see at first glance. 

Is it fair to think that you probably tend to get more involved in projects than other companies that are just basically selling boxes? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Certainly, yeah. That's our value proposition, that's our model.

Our sale is as much our management tool, our ongoing support and service, as much as the device, if you will. We're very hands-on. We're able, again, to be very flexible and adaptable to the customer's needs and that's not just to get the project going. That's the long-term maintenance and management and of course in conjunction with our integrator partners. 

You have something called an Active Network Manager. What is that and why is it needed? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Sure. So that is the name of the management stack of our software that I've been referencing. And so that was designed and built. We started working on that maybe not quite 10 years ago but pretty close, and that was to solve the problem with scalability. As I had mentioned previously, the devices work, and the integration with the CMSs works, but it was very difficult to deploy and manage at scale.

So what that tool enables now, so if you partner with a MediaVue and purchase our product, what you're gonna get is you're gonna get an endpoint. You're gonna get a media player, a device that's gonna have an operating system installed on it that we design specifically for the content management software or other software that's being used and that is maintained. So part of our offering is not just the deployment of that, but we actually have a quarterly update scheme for our entire operating environment. So we will aggregate all the different updates and security patches and everything for the entire software stack, and then we test and validate and then bundle everything. So you don't get that kind of experience where your iPhone updates and all of a sudden your app doesn't work, so we eliminate that as a possibility, and then obviously stay on top of security. So you get that, and then the kind of software that brings all that together is our Active Network Manager, and that enables an installer to plug in the device, push the power button, and then have the network owner, the person that is, is managing the network to see that come up, to register CMS to go and set all of the, whether it's network settings, we that can take control of the display so we can make sure the display is on when it's supposed to be.

All of that comes through an Active Network Manager and that's the toolset that enables it. It's really IT team-focused. So whoever it is, we don't do anything with content. We don't do anything with that. Never have, never will. We're strictly focused on having a robust technology stack and a toolset that enables the IT team to manage effectively. So an Active Network Manager is the heart of all of that, right? And, facilitates a lot of the kinds of a lot of customer interaction with the platform and the user experience that I've been describing. 

So 10 years ago when you started developing that a lot of the CMS companies had either no or pretty thread bear device management capabilities within their software. You had companies like Diversified who had kick-ass device management way, way back then, but a lot of these guys have caught up now. So are these parallel things or can they work together?

Erik DeGiorgi: Yeah, I mean there's certainly management as we're describing it now is considered a necessity, so everybody has got on board. There are certain things baked into the CMS, some certain CMS offerings that have some device management. There are some things that we can do for various CMSs, like I mentioned, registration and plug and play and stuff like that. Yeah, and there are certainly third-party companies, good friends that just have a management platform for anything. So management has become ubiquitous. I think what differentiates what we're doing is we're really looking at it as a total platform. So it's the combination of hardware and software. It's the depth of integration that we're able to do by virtue of owning that entire ecosystem. So it just enables more. You can do more. 

Sparing you all the technical details results in greater stability, greater security, and greater longevity of the network, and that's something that's different as well. We look at a successful network being 5+ years. So if we install the devices, we don't want them to be touched for five years. The current hardware is about 10 years old. It's obviously like iterations of that and it's not the same exact stuff but we have stuff that's been deployed that is the previous generation for 10+ years.

So we look at a 5+ year lifespan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think industry standards might be like two to three would be considered successful, without any major intervention. But we look at it as for at least five years. We wanna get the stuff out, we wanna manage it, we want it to physically work. We want to have the remote capabilities to make necessary changes without having to deploy people, and I'm careful with my words cuz we're gonna be releasing some stuff that even greater enhances that remote capabilities in the coming months. 

Do you have metrics around fail rates, like people talk about 99.59s and all that sort of thing? 

Erik DeGiorgi: It's funny you bring that up because we exchanged an email about potentially doing an article around that, and yeah so what I proposed and what we're looking at doing is we actually just did a full audit of every intervention last year that we had on the support side, and I think those kinds of numbers and statistics, it's almost cursory. It's just fine, how many .9999 can you put in? It's just, I don't think it really tells the story, and the story that I'm interested in telling and sharing, certainly with the industry is, yeah, the physical devices work. It's the stuff that works. Software is fairly stable, but it's usually like the interaction of things. 

I'm just thinking through the kind of statistics that we pulled from last year. For as many actual hardware issues as there were, there were many more issues with something happening within the operating system, a software bug coming up. It was an interaction between, third-party software that we've integrated onto the devices. It was a failure in setup, in installation. There were so many. 

Or stupid shit like the janitor unplugging the thing. 

Erik DeGiorgi:  Oh, for sure. That happens. That's real life. It's absolutely real life.it's that it's someone going and stacking boxes on the device and having it burn up, you know what I mean? We've seen it all. I hope it doesn't come across that I'm trying to avoid answering your question.

The complexity of these things, just tells a different story rather than, one out of a thousand failing every year, or even like MBTF, it's not even a really accurate way of analyzing things. I'm hoping that if we collaborate on that, we can share some insights on what is a company that's deployed this hardware and software like this for well over a decade and has tens of thousands of devices that are currently managing, what it actually looks like in the real world? And I'm excited to be able to share that. 

So in January you're gonna do a brand refresh and push a revised proposition out there. How's all that gonna roll out? 

Erik DeGiorgi: Well, with your assistance of course. So I think what we want to do and it is very consistent with what you're saying. Our legacy is that when people think of our company, they think of hardware, what we're doing and what we are, the company we are today is just so different. And it's really that entire ecosystem platform that we've created and we deploy, it's the way we interact with our customers throughout the lifetime of the deployments and the support and everything that we offer. 

How we're going to do it? It's gonna be digital, so the look and feel of the company online is gonna be very different. We're going to be making announcements through all the industry publications. So we've got a hard date right now of January 17th, so we'll see if we make it. But we're hoping to put out a kind of industry-wide blast and when people sit down at their computers on that day, they see something that they haven't before. 

All right. If people wanna know more, where did they find you online? 

Erik DeGiorgi: MediaVueSystems.com 

All right. Eric, thank you so much for taking the time with me. 

Erik DeGiorgi: Dave, thanks for having me on.

Marian Sandberg & David Drain, Digital Signage Experience

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

Digital Signage Experience is coming up in four weeks and I suspect a lot of people are very curious about how the long-running show will be rebooted by its new owners Questex.

I certainly am, as I had long thought the old DSE was a dead trade show walking, and that something different was needed.

Is this it? I dunno, and I guess the industry will find out in a few weeks in Las Vegas.

I asked Marian Sandberg, who runs several shows for Questex, and David Drain, who was brought on by Questex to build the programming side of the event, to join me for a chat about what people can expect from a new and different DSE.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, thank you for joining me. Maybe the first thing to do is: Marion and David, explain what your roles are at Questex and DSE. 

Marian Sandberg: Sure. Thanks so much for having us, Dave. It's really an honor to be with you and your audience and to have an opportunity to talk about this. 

I'm Marian. I am the Vice President and market leader for Questex. I oversee the DSE show, which we acquired last year, and we have not presented yet. It'll be presented in November, which is what we're gonna talk about, and I also oversee a show called LDI, which I know you'll have questions about.

And market leaders tend at Questex tend to have two or three or whatever number of shows that they have under their portfolio? 

Marian Sandberg: Sure, yeah, that's exactly right, and tend to be in verticals that make sense together, if you will. So I oversee a couple of brands that have to do in some way with technology. We have verticals in hospitality, bars and restaurants so they're clumped together. 

Okay, and David? 

David Drain: David Drain. I'm the director of event programs for DSE. So DSE is my sole focus at Questex. 

And a lot of industry people would know you from your dark past with Net World Alliance and The Digital Signage Association?

David Drain: Yeah, it changed the name to Digital Screen Media Association for a while.

So you've been around the industry forever? 

David Drain: Yeah, I have. I attended the first DSE in 2007. 

Yeah, that's early. I think the first one was in 2005 or something like that or maybe in 2004.

David Drain: 2004, but I wasn't there. 

Yeah. I started in 2005, so I've been going even longer than you. 

David Drain: Yeah, you win!

Marian Sandberg: I can beat you both, but not in the digital signage area with our LDI show. I've been with that brand since 2004, so a little one-upsmanship there. 

There you go. You must be so proud. Alright. So how is planning going? As we're speaking, it's about four and a half weeks out. 

Marian Sandberg: It's going great. We're super excited and when we get to this part of the year, frankly, because this has been more than a year in the making we're just ready to get out there and produce the show. We definitely have in the weeks rolling up still sales to do, and still registrations to bring in. But in terms of producing the show and the things that we know we're gonna offer that's mostly set, right? So we have all these great networking experiences we're excited to put forth, and as we're right across the hall from our LDI show, we're really excited to see the synergies there.

When we acquired this brand, we did a lot of due diligence. We spoke to tons of customers and tons of attendees, so those customers as well, to see what we should keep from the old show and what we should bring back, and I think the number one thing that we heard from people was maintaining the sense of community for the digital signage industry, that it's a dedicated show and that people still wanna come together in that community that maybe isn't addressed by other events. So that's been our number one focus, and we're in the home stretch now. 

Yeah, I'd certainly got that impression as well when DSE went down. I thought that it was a show that for many years was in trouble. You could see it in the diminishing numbers and diminishing enthusiasm in a lot of ways. But the overarching thing I heard after it went down was a disappointment because there needed to be some sort of an annual event, at least in North America that really pulled together the industry, so to speak, and was the only thing people were talking about that week versus like an Infocomm or ISE or those kinds of shows, which certainly have digital signage as a component, but it's one component among many endings.

You could bump into people in elevators and see they were going to the same show and realize we have nothing in common other than we're both generally in AV. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that was obviously one of our main focuses from the beginning in acquiring the brand is we immediately saw the value we knew of the show and of the market, although no one on our team back then had worked directly in it, and then bringing professionals on who were very much veterans of the market, like Brad Gleason, who joined us very early on, and David, of course, who has been running a curating and will be running a fantastic education and content program.

People have been really supportive of that effort and from the beginning saying, we absolutely want there to be a show in this market, specific to this market and there's a need for it. 

Because the old show has had its hair, so to speak, there are things that people loved about it, things they didn't like about it.

I've been referring to this as a DSE reboot that maybe isn't all that fair, but it's what I'm going with, and I'm curious what you think in terms of how would you position the show? Is this DSE 2 or should people go with the idea of don't expect what you saw before?

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, and I think that's a great question because I think we would be really remiss if we did not acknowledge that we are bringing DSE back in a sense, right? We're not gonna abandon everything that DSE was and that we want it to be, and people have asked us for it to be. So we have no intention of reinventing the wheel in that case. 

However, from our experience, and again from a lot of the outreach that we did, I think our intention is to put a new spin on it. Now, when you say, reboot, I absolutely agree, and I think that's gonna be maybe a little bit of a challenge for people to get their heads around.

David has said it quite eloquently, we wanna really hold onto the things that people liked and maybe not the things that they didn't. So some of the new things, for example, which I guess we consider new. We know that networking opportunities have always been super important. So now that we're right across the hall from the LDI show, we are really trying to leverage those two audiences without cannibalizing, and I don't think there's a lot of potential to cannibalize those two audiences anyway. We hope to bring in some new people and some new buyers, and we're tracking our registrations very closely, of course, and the kind of demographics that we have. And to date, I checked them just yesterday in preparation for this, of course, half of our registrations have never been to DSE before. Now I'm not talking about LDI people, I'm talking about people registered directly for DSE and as event people, as event producers. That number is super encouraging to us.

Now it could be in the last three years that we've just gotten more people in the industry. We all know that during the pandemic, on both sides of our business, people have left the industry, and people have come into the industry. It's just a natural ebb and flow when you haven't had a show in three years. But that number, even if you expect a lot of new people it is a great statistic for us that there are that many new faces. So we really hope that people coming to the network are gonna meet new people, but like-minded people like your reference before about having that sense of community and people who do similar things. But also that, of course, we want our exhibitors to meet new customers. So that's a really important thing for us.

For the people who don't know LDI, can you explain what it is? I've never actually been myself, even though I've certainly heard of it.

Marian Sandberg: LDI is a 30+ year organization and brand. It is a trade and show conference that addresses what we affectionately refer to as entertainment technology. So that would be basically everything in and around a stage except the performance. So concerts, touring, theatre, even clubs, venues, lighting, sound, staging all that kind of technology that goes around a performance or in a venue, and so a typical exhibitor at LDI would be moving light company, intelligent lighting as it's referred to in that in that sector or consoles. if you were at a concert and you wanna go up to the console guy or gal, ask for the set list, that stuff that's behind that in that pit is stuff that you would see at LDI.

So there's technology and creativity factor there that I think sits well along DSE so maybe there are people who do similar, are somewhat like-minded, but do different things. So I think it'll be interesting to see, who crosses over and comes together, 

Yeah, I guess the crossover as you say, more than anything would probably be the backdrop displays that you increasingly see with touring acts and the technology that drives those displays like LED backdrops and transparent or semi-transparent, LED backdrops, all that sort of thing.

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and the sort of persona who would attend LDI could be anything from very creative type, Let's say a creative director for a show, a lighting designer, and then, someone those folks usually tend to be creative and technical, and then we'll have very technical people who are like tech technical directors at a theatre or production manager for a concert tour.

And just like the way that AV and IT are worlds that are converging. The live events world and digital signage are converging to some degree because I spoke on a podcast a few months ago with the guy who does the wow factor stuff at the new arena in Seattle for the NHL team there and he was talking about programming at building not just what you see at the pre-show. It's the whole darn building that's coming together. I suspect that plays into how live events will increasingly be done. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, it’s interesting, we use the term, experiential, right? And immersive experiences and the thing that I think is so interesting, having come from that LDI world and that entertainment technology world is that, if you go to a theatre it, okay maybe immersive isn't the word, that kind of means something different. But experiential is what entertainment already is, right? You go to the theatre to experience something, you go to a musical or a concert tour, to be in this experience, and over the last few years, the way people are buying materials left and wanting to relish experiences. It's interesting how areas like retail and venue design and even museums are taking a cue from entertainment and that's what experiential really is, right? It's about being entertained more. 

So in a way that sort of LDI world has been informing a lot of other businesses in our spaces. So exactly what you're saying is if you're walking down the street and all of a sudden you're seeing all this fabulous screen, that content is trying to draw you in. Cuz it's being paid attention to, cuz you have to work harder to get people's eyeballs these days. 

Can we talk a little bit about where you're at in terms of numbers and how they would compare to the old DSE that we know? 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, absolutely, and I'm glad you brought up the reboot. We are thinking of it exactly the same way. So we don't have any intentions of trying to compete with the last 2019 DSE. We've had shows in our portfolio that was a record year and of course, the pandemic happening, we're cautiously optimistic about kind, trying to get back to those numbers. So especially with DSE that hasn't happened in three years, we don't think we're gonna replicate that in any way, and that's fine. Our goal for this show is to be between 4,000 and 5,000 registrations. We're absolutely on pace to hit those numbers. We're really pleased with the way registration has been picking up and people registering for content.

The new certification that Bron Consulting is running for us. It's not new, we've newly added it let me be clear. It's the same certification you all know and love. So yeah, the numbers are really encouraging to us and I think what we're gonna see, I think is gonna be surprising for people in the next four weeks is how much our registration picks up, right before the show, traditionally the last six, to eight weeks of the show or when Red registration really hits, and we saw that from the numbers in 2019 also, right? So when we acquired the brand that's just the way the show paces we're absolutely on pace to hit that 4,000 to 5,000 number.

Is that number unique registrations or is that roll up people from LDI who have opted to come over or whatever?

Marian Sandberg: Nope, that's absolutely DSE distinct registration. For the LDI show in 2019, we had 16,000 people registered for LDI. But like an average for LDI would be 12,000 to 13,000. So the numbers for DSE are unique. 

So Potentially you could have a couple thousand or more people drifting over from the other show hall to wandering into DSE, cuz I think you have reciprocity, you can get into one or the other. 

Marian Sandberg: Yes, your badge for DSE or LDI can get you into either one or the other as well as there are some great offers and discounts for the conference on either side, which are obviously, paid conferences. But also some of the networking events that are being offered on both sides I think is gonna be really nice benefits. Just an example. LDI has always had great after-hours nightlife offers. With your badge, you can get into a different club each night, and if you don't know, the clubs in Vegas are very expensive, right? It's not like your $10 cover charge to go see a band at your local club. They're very expensive. We have great deals with LDI that we've been able to extend to the DSE audience to go to a club, for example. Your badge gets you into the club, for free, which can save in some cases 70 to 100 dollars a night, and then we have some networking events. There's an on-floor party if you will, a networking reception for LDI that DSE guests will be invited to, and vice versa, LDI people will be invited to the DSE opening reception, and we were really careful, obviously, to not have them overlap or compete with each other.

Cause we want these two to come across the aisle, as it were. So I think that's gonna be interesting to see, and the LDI community, they're curious. They have that tech curiosity and that creative curiosity. So I think it is absolutely reasonable to think we might get a thousand or so people coming across.

So you're at parity or maybe even ahead of, ultimately ahead of what past DSE have done in terms of headcount, and with the spillover from LDI, almost certainly, where I sense that it's not going as swimmingly would be on the exhibitor signup side? 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, we are where we've expected to be. I know that you love to look at the show floor as you should, and when we were in South Hall, when the show was in Southall, before my time, obviously, the show floor looked different. But I think that our expectations for relaunching the show were exactly where we wanted to be.

We had expectations that were in line with, we have amazing exhibitors presenting, and we have over 90 varieties of exhibitor sponsors, people who are gonna be partners and presenting in some way, and I'm not talking about speakers, I'm talking about people on the show floor, and then I think probably in the next few weeks we're gonna see that number go over a hundred. So that's perfectly respectable, and we're proud of those numbers. 

Yeah, in certain respects that's a reboot and it's a startup again cuz you're having to win the confidence of vendors who have had a rough couple of years anyways and when DSE went down, I don't know if all of 'em were left whole after that. That's somebody else's story in argument, but yeah it, you couldn't, I would imagine just expect that, hey, all you guys who used to do this, come on back. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah. There's so much more of a story to tell there too, isn't there?

We have to regain some trust. We have to have people, who really loved that event and kind of look at us and say, Who the heck are you guys? Which is all stuff we expected. Early on when one of the first things we did was form an advisory board, and I know that you've reported on that, now.

Probably everybody on our advisory board and really we wanted that input and that help, and that was just kind of part of the research we did from the beginning. What was good, what do we wanna change? And I just think that journey has also included spending a lot of time with customers and there's absolutely our sales team talking to people, 3, 4, 5 times. It's not a slam dunk and that's okay. We didn't expect it to be, We never came in here with. Some kind of ego that we're event producers. So we could just walk into a new industry and take over a brand and do it without thinking about it with our eyes closed. 

We're good at producing events. We have a lot of leverage across our company with other verticals that we can look at to draw other buyers that maybe didn't come in from the acquisition, from our regular DSE lists, but we're really excited about presenting to those people. That kind of is where those first-time attendees are coming from.

I'm also curious, you've mentioned the community a number of times and the appetite and aspiration for the industry to get together. If you build an event around attendees, particularly if you're offering a lot of free passes to get into the show proper, then you really have to lean heavily on the exhibitor dollars and sponsor dollars and all that to do it. 

So does that become a challenge long term, that you've gotta build up that trade show side of it for this thing to work? Or can it work the way it's positioned right now? 

Marian Sandberg: We intend to grow the show? There's no question, and David can talk a little bit about the conference program also but, of course, we need to have a viable business here.

There's no question, and I think also, bringing in the right people and making sure that the audience is there was absolutely paramount for us, especially the first year. If you have the right people in the room and you have the right buyers in the room, the exhibitor's gonna be happy and they're gonna come back.

And I think it's a two-sided coin. You have to keep feeding both of them, right? To make everyone happy. The attendees wanna see certain exhibitors, the exhibitors wanna see more of, X, Y, and Z types of attendees. Yeah, our long-term plan is absolutely to keep growing. And we'll see how that goes. We have some plans we won't I won't reveal yet for next year, but I'm sure we'll wanna talk after the show. 

That was one other question I wanted to ask you, Marian, just before we jump over to David on programming and so on: for 2023, is it in November in Las Vegas?

Marian Sandberg: Yes, and I bet you're gonna ask about the Formula One race.

It will be in November, we are gonna move it about a week early. Yeah, we looked at that and thank goodness, being in production, we were hearing from all kinds of production folks about that kind of thing before it was even officially announced.

We were talking to the LVCC about doing it earlier and, we could try to produce something during Formula One, which would just be crazy. But even just for our exhibitors and visitors, we don't want to position the show to make it cost-prohibitive for people even to stay in hotels or have hotels sold out. So just moving it about a week or so earlier is just gonna be the solution. 

Yeah, that's gonna be like a CES week or something. Just insane pricing for everything and impossible to get around. 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, exactly. 

Good move! 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, thanks. 

David, tell me, you're somebody who has been to DSE many times, very familiar with it.

So if people are coming up to you knowing that you're involved now and they're asking, okay, what's different, particularly on the programming and education side, what are you gonna tell them? 

David Drain: When I first joined Questex, really my first job was to think about the program and to focus on the conference and the education and the speakers. And so wanted to do that first, and that's, I would say, how we built the program and ort of the exhibitors came later, right? They needed to see what it is you guys are gonna do? What's your plan? And working with Brad and with Marian we looked at the flow of the event and so I think it's got a slightly different flow. There used to be a lot of conference programming before the show happened, and so what you're gonna see this year there is some programming in the morning, just before the show opens. Some, a bit of uninterrupted time during the show floor hours with some on-floor sessions and then ending the day with more sessions.

Really we have three keynotes. I don't know if DSE has done that before. So I think that's different. We will have one each morning. We're very excited about those, of course, Rafiq and Jason Cothern from SoFi Stadium talking about that 5 billion mixed-use development with the stadium and the retail and all that. Having everything from wayfinding to digital menu boards to of course the huge halo infinity screen by Samsung. So I think there's gonna be something there for everybody, and then, Nveen from Google, who you also interviewed for this podcast.

We've got a great lineup and the program came together in three ways. There were things that I developed. There were things that are Association partners like DSF and DPAA and OAAA developed, and then we got session proposals from folks, so we really tried to curate the best agenda that we could and so I think that people will see an increased focus and concentration on the content and the programming, and building on what Marion said earlier, I think just the number of networking events throughout the week and then the crossover with LDI, I think that's what's gonna feel different.

I heard there's a mixer on Wednesday night. 

Marian Sandberg: Mixer. I'm so pleased that you're bringing it to our show. So we can't wait to attend and we're registered, so we're showing up. 

Good. I'll make the bouncer aware. 

One of the things as the education programming curator, person, organizer, whatever you wanna call it, is you, I suspect, have to walk a bit of a tightrope at times, because you have paying sponsors who perhaps have expectations, realistic or unrealistic around what they can say and do on the stage, and you have to balance those needs with the needs of the audience because God knows, maybe not in the most recent versions of DSE, but earlier year versions of it, one hell of a lot of the presentations were just like product pitches by sponsors, and I would sit down, listen for two minutes and I would go and leave, and that's a tough one to manage, isn't it? 

David Drain: Yeah, and I've been managing these types of events for a number of years and so I certainly know about how important it is to make sure that it's got an education focused and so when I was building the program, really sponsorship had nothing to do with it. When I was building the conference program, what we determined as the best topics and the best speakers, and the program really came in process of building this show before the exhibitors that there really wasn't that kind of impact. We do have the on-floor sessions, and those are sponsored. We make that clear on the program. 

Those are kinda product demos and things, right? 

David Drain: They are product demos and even encouraging those speakers, those sponsors to have an education focus so they teach rather than pitch. 

Yeah, I always tell people, look, if you just get up there and pitch, people are gonna leave. If you say smart things, you will leave the impression that this guy and or this woman and this company seem to know what they're talking about, so maybe I should have a chat with them after. 

David Drain: Yeah, be a thought leader or present a case study, and then people will understand. You'll have an opportunity to tell them what your company does. You don't need to spend all that time going through the features and benefits of your product. 

Without trying to put you on the spot, are there one or two sessions that you know that aren't keynotes but are ones that you think are gonna be particularly kick ass and ones that people should have a look at? 

Marian Sandberg: You're asking to choose a favorite child. You're asking him to choose a favorite child, Dave.

David Drain: Yeah. There are just a number of great sessions and if you go to our agenda, there is a way to filter by type. So if you're into digital out of home, you can see the programming aimed at that, and I'm excited you know about the session you're moderating and I'm really not blowing smoke here.

Denny Levine came to me and proposed that session, and of course, he put together an all-star panel and people are very interested, obviously with these Vangogh experiences, immersive experiences that have popped up and been very successful around the world. So I think that will be similar, there's another session with Moment Factory and Dimensional Innovations on transforming lobbies into experiences, that's pretty exciting. 

Yeah, you got some good people like Jackie Walker who was just like, when I talk to her, I just, I always hang up thinking, that's a smart person. She knows her stuff. 

David Drain: Yes, and I listened to her podcast that she did with you and so certainly when she wanted to do a presentation, I'm like, yeah, I will just give you the room. You're gonna do great, and people will walk away with a lot of great information.

All right, so wrapping this up. This has been a great chat. If people are undecided and are on the fence, but hearing this and think, oh, maybe I will go, what do they need to do? Where do they go to find out more about DSE? 

Marian Sandberg: Yeah, they can go to digitalsignageexperience.com. As we rebranded also, so it's digitalsignageexperience.com, or if you have any questions, you can certainly just email me, I'd be happy to answer, and my email is msandberg@questex.com. I would love to have your feedback, 

I suspect it's ddrain@questex.com, right? I'm smart that way, it had to be something. All right. Thank you so much for spending half an hour with me. That was terrific. 

Marian Sandberg: Thanks for having us. We're honored. 

David Drain: Thank you, Dave.

Ori Mor, Wi Charge

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

Anyone who has been on the ops or finance side of digital signage and digital out of home knows how complicated and expensive it can be to realize the simple task of getting power to a screen.

It's a particular challenge in settlings like retail - because store designers, until recently, didn't think much about the need to get power right in the aisles and in merchandising locations.

Battery-powered displays are one answer. Power over ethernet is another. And there's of course the often expensive and possibly unsightly option of running electrical infrastructure - wires and maybe conduit - all the way to the screens and other gear.

Wouldn't it be great if wireless power was a reality?

Turns out ... it is, and one of the companies leading development already has small displays for retail and hospitality that get their power over the air, using ceiling transmitters and receivers built into the screens.

Right now, Wi Charge's screens are just tablet-sized, but that will change.

I get the rundown on wireless power from Ori Mor, who is a co-founder and Chief Business Officer at the Israel company.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ori, thank you very much for joining me. Can you give me a background on what your company does?

Ori Mor: Hi, Dave, happy to be here. We are doing over-the-air wireless power, and over-the-air charging. But when we say over-the-air, we mean a range of 10 meters (30 feet) and not proximity charging, like charging pads.

So this is very different from just those close contact charges where you put your phone down and it does it that way? 

Ori Mor: Yes, very different. The phone charging is a type of docking station without wires, but a docking station. You still need to do it on your own, knowing that you are now taking care of charging and the docking station, the pad itself is being wired. We are talking about something that is more close to WiFi for power. 

Is this a commercial product or something that's still in R&D? 

Ori Mor: It's not in large volume yet, but it's a commercial product. It's deployed in Canada, the US, and Israel, and it's going also to a few locations in Europe and actually at the end of this month, also in Brazil.

And the company is in Israel, correct? 

Ori Mor: Yes, the headquarters and R&D are in Israel. Marketing and Sales are mainly in the US, but also in Korea and Europe. 

And how long has the company been around?

Ori Mor: 10 years. 

Did it start trying to solve this problem or was it something else that found its way into this?

Ori Mor: We started by doing over-the-air wireless power. The main application was charging smartphones, but the technology is capable of powering other devices as well. 

I was curious about the application for digital signage. I gather that you have a digital display that you could use in a retail setting, but it's a small display. You're not at a point where you could power a very large display? 

Ori Mor: Yes, that is correct. We started with the five-inch display based on demand that we got from prominent retailers and CPGs from across the world who were interested in being able to power devices at the edge of the shelf. Obviously, we can't power 16 displays. So we started with a small display. We are now doing seven-inch and nine-inch as well. But the promise is, as you said, being able to power devices at the edge of the shelf without the hassle of running wires or replacing batteries.

And is that the problem that's being solved here, just simply the unavailability of power, right at a, like a shelf edge? 

Ori Mor: Simply put, yes. People do display, people do CMS, and people do Digital advertising in retail space already, but usually, it's limited to very few locations and we are enabling it to be widely spread relatively easily. 

And the problem is, in a lot of older retail and older can be like 10 years old, That there just isn't power on the shelves, right? 

Ori Mor: Yes, That is correct. The gondolas are moving, The shelves of Heights are changing And as you said, there are in most of the retail locations, there are no wires. Maybe near the wall, but certainly not in the middle of the store. 

There's power over ethernet, but I gather that has its limitations in terms of where you wanna put it and the cost of it.

Ori Mor: Power over ethernet is capable of powering displays. The problem is, again, routing it to something that changes with time, usually twice a year or even more, and you need to wire it to every different shelf, which is expensive and cumbersome.

So the setup with this is a transmitter and a receiver? 

Ori Mor: A transmitter, and a receiver that is embedded within the display device. 

Could you do a retrofit, like a bolt-on receiver? 

Ori Mor: Actually, no. The displays are designed by us at this stage because we know how to optimize in terms of power consumption. It's a dedicated development optimized for wireless power. 

In the future, I believe that we'd be able to support existing displays but we start with something we can control. 

Is the power stable, or is it a bit like WiFi where it can kind of drop momentarily here and there?

Ori Mor: There is always a rechargeable battery in the device. So we charge the device and the device draws its power from the rechargeable battery. So it gets steady power from the battery even if power drops. 

Are you restricted with the displays in terms of what you can show, like is it just static images or to run full 30 frames per second video?

Ori Mor: We are doing full videos. 

Okay, and was that a mountain you had to climb or was that right out of the gate that would work? 

Ori Mor: It was pretty simple. That wasn't the challenge. 

With the transmitter, how does that manifest itself? I think it's something that you mount in the ceiling?

Ori Mor: Yes, think of it like a router in the ceiling with a range of 5-10 meters, the transmitter locates client devices and beams a directional infrared beam to the device where the device converts the infrared beam back into electricity. 

Does it have to be like a line of sight?

Ori Mor: Yes. Wireless power with meaningful power is the line of site technology. You can do non line of sight using RF, magnetic and even with infrared, but the amount of power that you can deliver with sight will be very low for reasons that I can explain if you wanna dive into. 

I probably wouldn't get most of it.

Ori Mor: Oh, you would get it. When you do non line of sight, it means that energy is being spread in the room and you only harvest part of it. It has two drawbacks, a) the amount of power that you draw that you receive is lower because you waste a lot, and b) you fill the environment with unwanted radiation that the regulator and the customer wouldn't want. So if you do choose to do a non line of sight, it's for very low power. 

And what are the safety issues? 

Ori Mor: We passed all the safety certificates worldwide. FDA in the US, IEC in UL as well. It's approved to be safe under all conditions and that's the claim to fame for the technology we can deliver meaningful power yet it is as safe as your optical mouse. 

You're walking around a cafe or something where this is set up and you let's say you work there. Are there any long-term implications of being around this radiation so to speak? 

Ori Mor: No. Think of it like it's even safer than your wifi router. The beam is very directional. So outside the beam, there is an absolute zero. It's not a wifi router that sends radiation to every location and only part of it is being harvested or absorbed by your cell phone. The beam that leaves the transmitter, a hundred per cent of it, reaches the receiver, a centimetre away from the beam, and there is an absolute zero, and when you cross the beam, it shuts off automatically, 

Hence the need for or the value of having a battery on board?

Ori Mor: Yes.

So how long would that last if somebody put a large chair or something in the way, and it was blocking, would that mean eight hours later, it stops working? 

Ori Mor: Yeah. It's a design criterion. We designed it to be able to last a full day on a battery, but you can design it differently. It's a trade-off between the size of the battery and the thickness of the display. 

So if you talk about larger displays, a 30-inch display, a 55-inch display, which is quite common in digital signage, at least. How long off are we from that being a possibility? 

Ori Mor: That's too big of a question for me. I'll tell you that we are not even trying to target this at this point in time, but I'll give you an example of how technology develops. You probably know that when we started using the internet, we used 2.4 kilobytes or something like that. 

I go back to 256K modems, I’m old. 

Ori Mor: Yeah, and we are now doing a podcast where I'm sitting on probably 200 megabytes per second. Whether the technology would take us there, we will have to figure it out by seeing. 

So this is a matter of time, more than anything else.

Ori Mor: Yes. Time, the economy of scale, components becoming more capable and scaling up performance. 

I would assume also that you guys don't wanna be a display manufacturer. You're doing it right now just to demonstrate what's possible, but I'm thinking you'd like to license this to the display guys, as opposed to making your own? 

Ori Mor: That is absolutely correct.

Wi Charge is a company that knows how to deliver wireless power and we do that for many different applications. We chose a few to show how it works. There's a big opportunity here in terms of market demand. We chose a few applications, one in commercial, one in smart home, and one in consumer, just to see the market and then to license it to the relevant guys that can do it much better than us.

When do you see that happening? 

Ori Mor: We've already had deals that are licensed-based and it's like a domino effect. It's like how penguins jump to the water. They all stand at the edge of the ocean knowing that the food is in the water, but still hesitating and then one jumps in and immediately after a hundred thousand jump in. So by showing the way, we would unlock this domino effect. 

There are some Korean university researchers I wrote a piece about last week that were also doing wireless power. Are there any number of initiatives out there doing this? 

Ori Mor: Yes, we have seen more and more companies or universities doing wireless power. What they're doing right now, we did 10 years ago, so it's nice that they’re catching up. 

We see over-the-air charging happening already and it's happening in different ways with different technologies that allow different value propositions. So you can expect to see more and more of this. 

Is your focus right now mostly on B2C (Business to Consumer)? 

Ori Mor: No, we are actually doing commercial applications, like the displays. Even the consumer applications that we do, start with commercial settings. It's simply easier for us. Consumer, we are doing very cautiously and very few applications, but actually, before the end of the year, you'd hear announcements about consumer applications from us. 

Right, because you've been at CES a number of times and before we turned things on here to record, you mentioned that the company would be back at CES in January.

Ori Mor: Yes. There's another reason why we are doing the display. It expedites the go-to-market. When we can actually do the turnkey product, rather than only the wireless power, we can offer solutions to end customers without hesitations. 

It's easy to do it in B2B, but we already have a few consumer applications.

What's getting traction for the product right now, like a particular use case? 

Ori Mor: The displays are seeing tremendous, overwhelming demand. The other products that we do are smart door locks, which you probably are not so smart, not because they can't be smart, it's because people are worried, designers, OEMs are worried that if they would add smart functionalities, batteries would run out way too fast and then the end user would be stuck locked outside over a dead battery. So we are unleashing this as well in parallel. 

Yeah, it would be the same with those surveillance cameras that people have at their homes, the Nest cameras and so on.

Ori Mor: Exactly. Since they need to go to sleep to preserve their batteries. There's a phrase, I think a professional phrase, which is called the back of the thief. By the time they wake up, the thief is already on the way out. 

You mentioned you were seeing tremendous take-up on displays. What's going on there? How are they being used? 

Ori Mor: In various ways. Edge shelf displays in retail locations. I'll tell you what I can say and there are a few other things you can publish, we will send you when they go live. 

It's the usual thing. The clients don't want you talking about them, right?

Ori Mor: So what I'm disclosing right now are things already out there that are available and in a few weeks there will be other use cases as well and I'll be happy to share them with you, both images and videos. So we are doing table-topping restaurants, this is already out there. We are doing edge shelves in grocery locations. And we are doing other devices for grocery locations, which are quite cool, but I'll wait on how they look till we launch them. We are also doing displays in shopping centres like jewellery and other stuff, it's a display it's so generic, you can put it anywhere. You can wrap it and you have advertising at the point of decision. 

And this is not just in Israel? 

Ori Mor: No, most of it is outside of Israel. Texas, New York, Michigan, Idaho, Toronto, and Sao Paulo.

I'm sure one of the determining factors out there is the overall cost. What this does in terms of cost versus what you would pay to run conduit, run power or ethernet cabling to a display that way and people would do a spreadsheet exercise and decide, okay, this is less expensive to do it your way. 

Ori Mor: Exactly. 

What is the cost of a transmitter? 

Ori Mor: Oh, you'd have to ask our partners. They're selling the solutions to the end customers, not us.

Okay, but is it hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars? 

Ori Mor: Hundreds, not thousands. 

And it would install in the ceiling just like you would put in a ceiling light? 

Ori Mor: Yes, it takes a few minutes. 

For the display, understanding that these are your proprietary displays and you've tweaked them and everything else, but the hardware cost for a receiver, is that something that's also hundreds of dollars? 

Ori Mor: No, much less.

It's nominal, so it'd be like another component inside a display? 

Ori Mor: Yes. 

Does the system also radiate WiFi? 

Ori Mor: Yes, the communication with the display is over WiFi, over 3G. So with the end customers, it depends but they can run the content through a CMS on their own, independently.

So in theory would a company that makes WiFi equipment, like routers and so on, could they conceivably add your capability into their product line? 

So if I'm a company that makes networking equipment, like Cisco or more B2C stuff, could they add Wi charge capability to their WiFi routers?

Ori Mor: Yes, but I'll explain how. These companies are used to creating infrastructure and delivering connectivity. They can do the same for power, power as a service, not just data as a service. The only difference is that transmitters should be located most of the time on ceilings rather than hidden in the closet, that's the difference, and now the 5G routers are on ceilings for the exact same reason. They are almost in the line of sight. 

You mentioned metering. With the energy issues that Europe's facing right now because of Russia, there's a lot of concern around energy consumption, and I wonder whether we're gonna get to a stage where power would be metered for this sort of thing.

Ori Mor: Let me answer this in two ways. Since it's a service, it can be metered. It's an extension of the electricity grid and the same as you paying for watt/hour for electricity, you probably would be paying a watt/hour for wireless electricity, so it's only a natural extension. Regarding power in general and sustainability. What we also discovered is that a single transmitter that we are now shipping saves up to 5000 AA batteries and that's even on our first gen only. So it's probably your and my body weight in batteries saved by each transmitter that we deploy. 

Is the transmitter always pushing out energy and therefore the meter's always going or is it more of a demand thing?

Ori Mor: No, it's a demand thing. When there's no demand, it goes to sleep. 

All right, interesting. That would be a lot more efficient. 

What about distance? You mentioned 10 meters right now. Will that improve, just like the other things? 

Ori Mor: We did a test for a government agency for 100 meters successfully. But then we decided that as a company we need to focus. It's either we do indoor for consumers or commercial, or we do outdoor for other types of devices and we chose the short-of-range options.

So the technology can easily do a hundred meters or probably more, and there's actually a company that does that. This is their forte. We chose to focus on the inside. 

Okay, but you could, in theory, have advertising displays on a sidewalk, and the same in drive-throughs, a lot of costs involved in trenching and everything else to get power out to the display?

Ori Mor: Oh, there's actually a company that we work with that is considering using our solutions for care pickup and drive tools. 

And there would be enough power cuz those are extra bright displays?

Ori Mor: So for them, we are considering making animated e-ink displays. As I said the large displays with LCDs or OLEDs are out of our range at the moment.

So if people wanna know more about Wi Charge, where do they go? 

Ori Mor: Website and LinkedIn. 

It's www.wi-charge.com

Ori Mor: Yes. 

Perfect. All right, Ori, thank you very much for spending some time with me.

Ori Mor: Thank you, Dave. I enjoyed it.

Paul Ciolino, OptiSigns

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

It has been nagging at me for the last few months that I didn't know a hell of a lot about OptiSigns, even though the Houston-based company was a main advertiser on Sixteen:Nine.

That's been fixed, having had a great conversation last week with the company's sales director Paul Ciolino.

We got into a whole bunch of things, from the company's roots, how software development bridges the US and Vietnam, and their go-to-market model. OptiSigns is focused on making a product and services available that manage to tick the much-demanded boxes of intuitive and affordable, but also have a lot of sophistication and scalability.

Ciolino works out of New York City, which will help explain why you might hear sirens in the background.

Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS

TRANSCRIPT

Paul, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the background on what OptiSigns is all about? Because I know them, but I don't know much about your company yet. 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, absolutely. Dave, thanks so much for having me. First of all, excited to be here. You're my first podcast ever so it's a wonderful honor for you to have, but OptiSigns is a cloud-based digital signage solution and really the key tenets of OptiSigns signs are: Can we make it a low barrier to entry? Can anybody use it? Is it easy? Is it accessible? Can people deploy on myriad, different platforms or OSs? 

And we try to check all those boxes as much as possible while making it all cost-effective. 

And the company's based in Houston? 

Paul Ciolino: That's right, yep. 

How long has the company been around? 

Paul Ciolino: So it was founded in 2015, but really the growth started happening within the last three years and we're seeing incredible year-over-year growth now. 

Back in 2015, there was already any number of easy-to-use, I don't wanna say entry-level because that kind of diminishes the product, but friendly, price effective, on and on, and I'm curious what prompted the founders to look at the market and go, okay, there's an opportunity here, because, from my perspective, there was a lot of what you've described already out there?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good question. I think when you think about digital signage top-down and you're looking at it with a bird's eye view, there's just a huge TAM there, right?

Even if it is a saturated market, there are hundreds of vendors that do it today. There are a few really big players and there are a few really big players that do it really well. The key differentiator for us is probably just going to be on the usability side of things, and I think that was where, the powers that be, were sitting in a back room somewhere saying, how do we put our footprint on this industry? What can we do to make ourselves stand out and be late adopters of getting into the industry while also being a significant factor? 

Yeah, it's an interesting balance that has to be struck in that I've seen a few times promotions for companies who say that we have a very easy-to-use friendly platform and when I've looked at it or other people have looked at it, they said, it's not really all that friendly or easier, or sure, it is friendly, but it doesn't do much. 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, I think that's a good point. When we have this conversation internally a lot, and sometimes I talk to our customer base about it, but really the idea behind designing OptiSigns from the ground up with our engineering team and from a product perspective was like taking a look at something like an iPhone, right?

When you purchase an iPhone, you get the iPhone, you take it out of the box, you put a SIM card in it and you just start using it. You've got an iPhone now. So we thought about that with a digital signage lens, and that's where we started putting our plan into motion. 

So when you are a new user of the system, how does it work, is it software as a service? 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, absolutely. At our core, we're a software company. We don't do the installation. We don't do hardware sales outside of a couple of pre-configured devices that you can get. Really, what we do focus on is just that UX/UI component. We have 135 native app integrations now, from a simple weather app to Tableau, Power BI and more sophisticated web scripting and an open API, so we run the gamut of what you can do with digital signage. 

Is there a particular market that you guys are targeting? 

Paul Ciolino: So the nice thing about digital signage is that there's just so much variability in actual implementations. So when we think about targeting somebody specific, we do have our eyes on a couple of industries like logistics right now is something that we're making a big push into. We're also looking into things like healthcare, we've got a pretty good customer base with healthcare already, but we're seeing a lot of organic conversations happen there. So we're like, hey, what do we do? How can we accelerate their growth into this vertical and things like that?

That's interesting because I was waiting for you to say, yeah we're chasing retail and QSR and then I'd be rolling my eyes because everybody and their sister is, but logistics and healthcare, I think that's really smart. They're not all that addressed yet, and I'm curious, what's the ask in logistics, is it for visualizing data like Power BI and Tableau?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times these people are using more bespoke dashboards as well. So when you think about trying to take something out of the box, and then you think about maybe the staff over at one of these logistics companies, let's call it a trucking company or something like that for example, maybe they don't have the bandwidth on the it side of the ball to have somebody spend three weeks creating a custom integration with an API or something like that, which they can do with us. But we offer OptiSigns where you can basically take your internal dashboards that are gated by username and password, and you can script the authentication and the execution of that username and password, and then get to your target resource that way. 

Why do they want that? Where are they showing on these screens? 

Paul Ciolino: They're showing everything from lead times to rotation schedules to availability to weather, to all kinds of different, increment factors that could be going into either a trucking scenario again, or maybe we've got some type of supply chain issue, and they're doing a full SWOT analysis in their backroom and they have to have all of this real-time data come up as they're planning around the next week, month, quarter, half year, whatever they're gonna do. 

So it's really myriad, just like all of our deployments are as well in different verticals, you can use it however you need to. 

I find that interesting because so much of the attention in digital signage is around the wow factor, creative like amazing displays and all these things that are going on, and to me the long tail of digital signage is the stuff that you might describe as boring, just like showing KPIs on a screen or giving instructions on what to do when something happens like an alarm trigger or whatever, like that stuff doesn't get anybody's pulse racing, but it's incredibly valuable to the day to day of a company, right? 

Paul Ciolino: I think there's been like this large front end push to make signage sexy when I think, at the end of the day, the reason that somebody's gonna go pay for anything in a digital signage space is that they need it and they need specific things to be up on the screen.

I'm not saying you can't make things look sexy with OptiSigns, obviously, you can do that, but at the end of the day, we want people to be able to take anything that they need to have up on their screens and deploy it easily and efficiently without breaking the bank. 

You mentioned breaking the bank, your pricing tiers are pretty friendly in that. I think I saw it was $10-12 a month, depending on what you're doing. Is that accurate?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, that's about right, and that's gonna be the starting price, obviously, if people are gonna be looking at growing their business with us and scaling, which is something that we specialize in as well, just making that ease of scaling, something that comes out of the box with us.

It could be anywhere from $10-15 a month per screen, unlimited users, unlimited resources uploaded into the cloud, and all that kind of stuff. 

The $10 one gives you a lot of functionality, but as you scale up or tier up, so to speak, you are just adding more capability.

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, basically the way you can think about it is, let's say somebody's got maybe they even have a hundred screens or something like that, but they're gonna be putting the same thing on a hundred of their screens. They probably don't need to go into the conversation about creating manual permissions or a brand kit or reporting for their advertisers that are paying for ad space or things like that, so they can live with that standard plan that we have and be happy all day. 

They still have access to 95% of the functionality on the platform. It's just gonna be some of those more robust features binding to an IDP or an SSO provider or something like that or creating a monitoring and alerting system where they can enable triggers for different events to go to specific people and make sure that they've got as much uptime as possible.

That's all quite interesting because when I think of the pricing tier that you're at, it's usually small to medium business operators who the company is targeting and they're never talking about data binding or anything like that, it's just about you can put this menu on a screen and you can change it on demand.

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, and you hit the nail on the head there. We have incredible organic growth within those verticals where you're looking at QSRs gyms, and places like that. But I think the thing that we've been doing really well this year, especially, and especially in the last quarter and a half or so, has been getting into really earnest more of those enterprise deployments, where we're talking about, we've got a GDPR situation in Germany or something like that, and we have facilities on five different continents and we need to make sure that everybody's got the right access and we've got audit logs that they can enable and we really do pair very well with very robust security concerns. 

Yeah, that's interesting as well in that I've talked to a few companies who started out targeting the small to medium business market and have migrated to enterprise because of the demands of customers, but also it's just that if you're dealing with the entry level market, you're being beaten up on price and it's not necessarily easy to scale that kind of management of all those different customers. 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, and I think that's something that's, again, credit to our engineering team, they make it so easy for people to scale on multiple different levels, whether you're talking about headcount as users within the platform, you're talking about multiple locations, or you're talking about multiple screens within a single location, and it really does just make it very intuitive. We've got our support team as well who's great. I think the CSAT that we talked about in our H1 review was like 94 or something like that, and that's an objective number, I'm not putting a lens on that one, but I think when you think about implementing something new and you're looking at a by process that maybe has 15-20 touchpoints or something like that, you're making a pretty big commitment just from a G&A perspective as a client, and then you think about, okay, is this gonna save my needs for the next year, three years, five years, ten years, and if so, how is that gonna look? What is my hardware, reliability gonna look like and things like that, and we kind of cover all bases. 

Is it important when you're dealing with those kinds of pricing tiers to minimize the number of customer touches, make as much of your offer and your software self-service and not have to provide a lot of support and customer contact? Not that you don't wanna talk to your customers, but it's just that if you have a whole bunch of them, that means you need a whole bunch of people to deal with them.

Paul Ciolino: Absolutely. Yeah, so that's again, credit to our engineering team and the way that we laid the bedrock as a company from our founders to be able to build this thing where it is very self-service. 

Another thing that we do that a lot of companies these days are moving towards is we've got a support blog, we've got a support site. We've got a ticket creation system, a phone number, and an email. It's very multi-threaded in how people can actually go about getting the help they need, and I think that's something that has allowed us to spend time on growth and not as much time on maintenance, while still providing an exceptional level of service to our customer base. 

You've mentioned a lot of growth in the last three years. Why do you think that is? What is it that's resonating? 

Paul Ciolino: So at the end of the day, every company's going to have a little bit of this slow out of the gates kind of motion, right? And once you get the feeling for an industry and a customer base, and you have enough conversations and you get enough feedback, all of those things combined into something very powerful, even from a business owner's perspective, where you're like, okay, I can listen to these things and then I can go act on them. And one of the nice things about us is we run a very agile team, a very lean team, and we have the same communication with the same people, a lot of the time, and so that means that we can go ahead and pivot on almost a weekly basis with our roadmap if we need to, and we can effectively release functional app integrations or just things that maybe we don't think about that our users think about.

And I think that level of service that comes from, even the engineering team level, is something that is really hard to achieve in any business in 2022 these days. 

And some of the software development's done in Vietnam, right? 

Paul Ciolino: That's right. They have a very close working relationship with our founders. They've worked together for a long time. They know how to communicate effectively, and it's really paid dividends for us as a business. 

Is that kind of a historical thing? I don't know South Texas all that well, but I believe that there's a pretty big Vietnamese diaspora there that went over there for fishing fleets and everything else, but I suspect there's still a lot of business ties back?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, absolutely. I can't speak to the geopolitical business ties within the founder's relationship levels. Personally, I've benefited from the influx of the Vietnamese community in Houston via Cajun cuisine, but outside of that, I think it's just something where people have worked together before, I've worked with people and at a few different companies or something like that, and we can talk about anything at the drop of a hat and we can make an effective decision when it needs to be made

How do you sell? Is it just direct to the customer or are you doing things like an affiliate channel or reseller channel?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, so we absolutely do offer that. We have a couple of different options available. We've got an affiliate program to where, maybe you don't wanna spend the time or you don't have the time or the capital or anything else to be able to go and become a reseller, but you have a lot of people that you know in your network that are interested in digital signage.

So we've got that affiliate program. You can make some money off of referring customers to us and it pays out quarterly and things like that, and we try to make it very easy and low maintenance for them to maintain those relationships, and then also generate business for us that are not cold leads at all. They're very warm leads. 

The other side of that is gonna be that reseller pro reseller program that you mentioned and that can work in a few different ways. You can package the software, if you need to, you can white label it, and that's not even in our top-level plan, that's in our middle level plan. It's not like we're gate keeping too much here like we really do wanna make this software available to anybody that needs it, and we're doing that in several different ways as well. 

You're happy enough to be just operating under the hood and nobody even knows it's OptiSigns? 

Paul Ciolino: Absolutely, that's why I'm off camera. 

You have an $80 Android stick that you offer as a hardware option. I'm curious how often that comes up as an ask or are they using any number of different platforms out there, because I know you have a web player or that's the foundational player.

Paul Ciolino: So going back to the low barrier to entry that we're going with at OptiSigns. We're OS agnostic. You can deploy Windows or Linux, we've got an ARM Linux. We've got LG commercial grade native app, an Android native app, and Fire TV so you can use a Fire Stick as well. It really doesn't matter how you deploy with us, that is just there as an Option. We don't make any money off of those devices, they're literally just there in case somebody thinks that's the best deployment for them, and if you go to, like Reddit or somewhere third party where there's no Optisign sales lens on it, you can see that these Android players are generally very reliable. 

We've had them deployed for, I think over a year and a half now, and we've got over 99% uptime with them. So things like that, providing reliability to our customers and, places like Australia, where it gets super hot over there, maybe there's not the best wifi connection, things like that. Those are really good deployments. I think we've got over 10,000 of our Android sticks that are out right now, and that's just one of our deployments.

Oh really, and are people going down that path because they are price sensitive or they just want like a dumb-down device that they can just stick in?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, I think it's somewhere between those two. Okay. So if you think about it like a Fire Stick, it's gonna be a little bit cumbersome, people can go watch ESPN or something like that on a Fire Stick. If you're looking at something like a Raspberry PI, right now those are incredibly expensive. We do sell those too, just in case that's what people are familiar with and maybe they need more granular security pushes or something like that to their systems.. 

That's interesting, I've never heard somebody say Raspberry PIs are incredibly expensive, but I know what you're saying. Once you fully get them out, they're not $35, right? 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, with supply chain stuff happening right now, they're like $300 or something like that. That's what I've been hearing. We're selling them for $130 on our site, I think, but outside of that, you've got the ability to do something like an Intel NUC, or you can do a Micro PC, or you can have a full-blown computer behind a screen.

When you think about something that marries the functionality of what those things can do without the processing power, because you don't need it, but you also have the reliability that's gonna be above something like a Fire Stick, or if you're just using a web browser version or something like that, I think that's a really nice, happy medium. 

One of the devil's advocates arguments around web players for digital signage is: yes, you can get this application running on any number of different kinds of devices, whether they're smart TVs or Fire sticks or whatever it may be, but there's not a lot of device management.

How do you counter that argument? 

Paul Ciolino: Honestly, it's not really our job to counter that argument because it's not gonna be our most recommended deployment. We're not gonna sit in front of the University of Central Florida and say, you guys should be using a web browser version for all 360 TVs that you have or something like that. We're gonna tell 'em like, what do you need? Do you have wifi in every area? Do you need an ethernet adapter? Do you need to go to a Raspberry PI? And so we'll have a very consultative conversation with our customer base before we even get into demoing the software. So that's like the first thing that we wanna nail down with our customers: How are you gonna deploy? And let's figure out the reasons why you wanna do that, and not just because, you're used to doing it that way, or you heard it was the best from like Jim down the street. 

So you are saying that you have native players as well, or you have web players that have device management?

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, so kind of all of the above. So if you wanted to go, like with what's called our managed device route, right? Like you could do something where you get that $80 Android stick, we'll charge you a little bit extra, as long as you have a pro plus package, you're gonna have our version of an Apple Care where we have an MDM, our support team can remote in, they can troubleshoot. You don't have to spend valuable time with your IT professionals or anything like that to go and troubleshoot these sticks. We can do it for you. 

So is that your happy place? If a customer goes down that path where obviously you're making a bit more money out of them, but you remove some of the mystery, so to speak because it's a known device.

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, absolutely, and I think at the end of the day, we're happy if our customers are happy, and that's why we have that consultative approach on the deployment. 

Tell me about the app store/library. You mentioned you have a hundred plus apps on there.

Paul Ciolino: Yeah. So we’ve everything from, something like just a native designer app that's within the platform, or something like the Adobe Designer Suite, or like Canva or something like that. Something simple, something that most people that are creating digital signage are gonna need at some point.

How does that work? 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, it's basically a frame within the platform, it is just like an app. It'll take you to a page where you can design from a template, we've got like 700 plus templates out there right now. Everything from menus to employee appreciation to emergency notices, all that kind of stuff, and then you can go ahead and configure each element on the page. You could even do something like pull from a data source where we can map elements within that page to a spreadsheet in Google or Excel, and so for QSRs in particular, this is really beneficial because they can go into a spreadsheet, never have to log into OptiSigns again, once they get the framework of their menu done, they can just change their pricing by changing that spreadsheet.

Do you have to work with your customers to help them figure out what to do?

Paul Ciolino: Absolutely, and that’s within the fee structure that we have, with supporting meetings, and obviously we've got our blog with really good documentation on it as well.

Where are you seeing traction in the marketplace? I know you mentioned healthcare and logistics. Are there particular areas where there seems to be a lot of interest and more of an ask than maybe in the past? 

Paul Ciolino: We talked about it earlier actually, but one of the places where we see a ton of room for growth is gonna be in that reseller side. So creating those partnerships and channels. We have a couple of partners where if they need to have somebody do install and maintenance, we can do that as well. We're never gonna be that company that vertically integrates all of that under one umbrella, but we can certainly provide the introductions to those.

We predict that the reseller marketplace is gonna be a significant chunk of our revenue within the next two years. 

You also have a mobile app, which I was curious about. Is that a mobile app for control of the screens? 

Paul Ciolino: Yep, nail on the head. So that's just gonna be an admin app. You don't want to go on an iPhone 5s and start designing on there for screens that are gonna be much bigger than that.

We tried to keep it pretty myopic with the app deployment. That's just one of those things where somebody's on the go, maybe it's a small business owner, maybe it's somebody in a larger company that is going around and they wanna show something cool to their stakeholders or shareholders or whatever it's gonna be, and they can go ahead and just control it ad hoc as they need it.

Was that something that you developed because a customer was asking for it, or you could just figure out that this is something that would be useful?

Paul Ciolino: I honestly can't speak to the inception of the idea. But I do know the way that we think about things in general and it’s like: 

Is there going to be a need for this at some point?cHow much is it gonna cost us from a time money perspective? Is it worth it? And then we just go do it. 

You also have an audience analytics add-on, what's that about? And is that something you guys wrote or is it a partner? 

Paul Ciolino: No, that is actually a proprietary algorithm that our engineering team has done as well. We're talking about basically three different statistics here. The first one is going to be gender: Is the person looking at the screen male or female or walking by the screen, male or female? The second is going to be dwell time, and that's gonna be, how long is this person in front of the screen for? The third is gonna be attention time and that's how long is this person interacting with the screen for?

And so when you think about reporting, OptiSigns does it really well in a couple of different ways. The first way is going to be like a proof of play reporting where you've got an advertiser, they're paying for a certain ad to be played a certain number of times over a certain period, you can batch those reports, send them out, do whatever you need to do, make sure that everybody's cool. Everything's transparent. Everything's above board. 

Same thing with AI reporting, but that's gonna be more in the split testing realm of things, right? Where you design an advertisement or you design a menu or you design something and you want to see how people engage with it when you test different versions of it and so you can basically take August 1 through August 31 on this design, September 1 through September 30 on this design. What does my dwell time look like? What does my attention time look like? How's my split looking? Are males interacting more with this design? Are females interacting more with that design? All that kind of stuff.

The audience analytics stuff using computer vision has been around for probably 15 years, and the challenge in the past was that it was expensive and you had to have additional hardware and everything else, and that kind of ruled out much adoption. 

Has that changed? I believe it's $5 a month at MSRP so I suspect at scale it gets cheaper than that, and I'm assuming you're using just simple USB cameras to do the capture. 

Paul Ciolino: Yeah, honestly, I think you could probably just pitch this for me at this point, but basically you need any camera that can see, right? It doesn't have to be a fancy camera that can do like 4k or anything like that. You wanna make sure that you're setting it up at the right distance, obviously, you don't want a $20 USB camera trying to find out who’s looking at the screen 50 yards away or something like that. 

But outside of that, it really is just plug-and-play. Does it make sense financially for you to go invest the time and the little bit extra money for that to get that kind of feedback for your own purposes or for your client's purposes? If yes, then, it's a great option to have. 

Does that change the hardware set-up at all?

I guess what I'm saying is does the $80 Android stick no longer the right device because you've got the extra overhead of the video processing? 

Paul Ciolino: Yep, nail on the head again. You're gonna need to do a Linux or a Windows deployment with something like that, just because of the processing power that's needed to be able to effectively communicate that data back to the algorithm. 

So just going back to the company, how large is it? 

Paul Ciolino:  So we're just sub-20 right now so we're a very small shop. We definitely move quickly for sure, and again, just going into that, learned communication that we all have together, makes it really efficient for all of us to get stuff done.

And it's just privately held, self-funded that sort of thing? 

Paul Ciolino: Yep, precap and no debt. I asked about shares when I was joining and they said yes, but it'll be very expensive. 

So what can we expect out of OptiSigns through the rest of this year and into next year? 

Paul Ciolino: I think more the same, we're gonna be obviously focusing on a few different verticals going forward as we identify some customers, as we continue to move internationally, we've got a decent customer base in the EU, UK. We're blowing out into South America at this point a little bit. We do have a decent customer base in Australia as well, and then I've been having conversations with people in places like Somalia and other countries in Africa. So the reach is wide, right? And we've really only tapped that kind of outreach from a marketing perspective, even. We really haven't put a whole lot of dollars into growing our business internationally. It's mostly been organic. 

So I think you can see that we're gonna be growing organically again. We're gonna be trying to be more aggressive in the way that we ideate on how we're going to tackle new verticals and things like that as well. But yeah, at the end of the day, we want to continue to make a product that will take any screen and turn it into a digital sign that you can use in any way that you and your team or your clients need to use it. 

All right, and they can find the company at optisigns.com? 

Paul Ciolino: Yes.

Paul, thank you very much for spending time with me. 

Paul Ciolino: Absolutely. Dave, it was a pleasure.

Chad Hutson, Dimensional Innovations

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

Experience is one of those terms that's being heavily used and sometimes abused these days, as companies in the digital signage ecosystem talk about what they can do for end-user customers.

Everything, it seems, is somehow experiential or immersive. But what does that really mean and how does it manifest itself in projects that use display technology?

I had a really good chat with Chad Hutson, who very much qualifies as an experience design expert and has the project portfolio behind him to back that up.

He ran a well-respected agency in Chicago called Leviathan, stuck around for a few years after it was acquired, but this past year hooked up with a company that would have been a competitor in the past - Dimensional Innovations.

He's now DI's Chief Strategy Officer, and spends his time working with the DI team and with customers - working a process to understand needs and then develop solutions that deliver on those needs, and realize an experience that can be everything from simple to elaborate.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chad, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what Dimensional Innovations is all about and what your role is there? 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, you bet. We’ll call it DI for short, to make it easier for both of us. DI is an experience design and build firm, based in the US, down in Kansas city, and they are really robust at not only designing and building the physical experiences but all the fixtures that can be built out with the wood shop, metal shop, paint and a giant two-story, high 3d printer, which is pretty amazing, we also use, but also on the digital side, we have deep roots in technology, both in being able to figure out what's the right technology for the experience and then creating the content and the interaction that goes within those experiences as well. 

So I'm the new Chief Strategy Officer, it's a new role at DI, I started about eight months ago with the organization and that role just organically evolved. They were kind enough to say you're making a positive impact and we'd like for you to do a bit more. It's good stuff so far. 

So it sounds like the company bridges a few things like there's some traditional AV integrations side to the business. There are some elements of a creative technology agency, but there's also a fix-your-fabrication kind of company as well. So you're into a whole bunch of things. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, that's a pretty good encapsulation and it’s a team of about 300 people, so they're not messing around.

And you're up in Chicago, right?

Chad Hutson: That's correct. I'm in Chicago when I sleep at home. I travel around quite a bit, both down in Kansas City and wherever the clients are as well. 

And Kansas City is what, like an eight-hour drive or something like that?

Chad Hutson: From Chicago, that's not too bad. I think like maybe six and a half, but I’m always flying though, always in the air.

You don't wanna drive in the middle of the winter? 

Chad Hutson: No, flying in the middle of winter is already a challenge enough. 

So people are gonna wonder, people who know you that you came from a company that you founded called Leviathan in Chicago, much more of, I would say, a creative technology shop, at least that's the term I use. 

I'm curious, as somebody who founded that company, what compelled you to leave? 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, that was an existential issue, I guess you could say, just trying to debate with myself, what can I do in the future? Yeah, Leviathan is still a great shop, although it's going by a different name. My partners and I sold it to another digital agency called Envoy back in, I think, 2017 and I was happy to stick around for a while. I think it's been close to five years since I decided to stay put and continue to run the organization. 

But I'd say where Levithan was just all about that hybrid of digital and physical experience, Envoy as a larger group, they are versed in everything from e-commerce to branding, and I don’t know, just felt like what I love was maybe not as front and centre as was what Leviathan did, so there is certainly no bad blood whatsoever, it was good to stick around and see it through a lot of great accomplishments there. But DI was always in my side view and they were always staying in touch and said, we'd love to talk about what the future could be. At some point, the stars aligned and that's why I went over to DI. 

That's a decent run anyways. When a founder sticks around, they might stick around for a year or something, so three to five years is pretty good. 

Chad Hutson: I agree, and the cool thing about the DI is, for me personally, it filled that missing gap BECAUSE whenever we were contacted about a digital experience, it could be like a lobby or experience for a theme park, it was always just limited to that digital scope, and it was later in the conversation. 

So with DI, because they are involved in the entire experience from even very early days what is the purpose of this space and what can it serve? Who's gonna be there? What kind of experience do we want them to have, digital and analogue? That's really the reason why I went over there, and I really love it over there. 

Yeah, I wanted to get into that. What is the whole process involved when you engage with a new customer? 

When I have done consulting in the past, the first thing I say to a new client, or even just in the early stages when we're having our first conversation is okay, why do you wanna even be talking and looking at digital? And I suspect these days when people start talking about wanting something experientially designed into our new space, experiential is such a huge catchall and somewhat abused term that you really have to enforce some kind of discipline to figure out what's gonna work here.

Chad Hutson: Yeah, you're absolutely right. The process is really, I don't wanna say it's not much different than any other firms, but we're very curious people, and so we want to ask our clients, what do you envision for the space, who is going to be there? What kind of assets do you already have from a content perspective? What's your technology infrastructure for the rest of the space? We don't want to build something just in a bubble from tech and IT standpoint. So really getting the lay of the land and asking a ton of questions, not just logistic or technology-wise, but more just thematic and just really trying to figure out what they know, and more importantly, what they don't know, so we can help discover what that is. So thinking about that space, we want to have the right purpose and the right functionality. 

So then we get into high-level ideas of what it could be more like rough sketches along with even rough buckets of what budget could look like for those experiences, and they may say that's perfect or, that's a bit rich for us. And then from there, we start to refine those ideas and also refine the pricing and what the technology solutions might be and what the narratives might be from a visual and oral content standpoint, and then we start building it and we never leave our clients high and dry. After we build, we always like to be involved when we can in content refreshes, in support of that experience and yeah, hopefully, continue those relationships for years to come. 

There's a business reason why you wanna stick with the customer and do the content refreshes and so on, but I suspect some of that is just simply that you wanna stick with it because it's your team's baby, so to speak, and you’re enrolled in it.

Chad Hutson: That's right, and since 16:9 has a touch of snark to it, I'll say that we would definitely want to keep the good children but for those who are grown up and ready to leave the nest, we welcome them leaving the nest. So we do try to nurture the right relationships in the right ways.

When you're engaging with new customers, I'm curious, about how often they really know what they want to do. 

Chad Hutson: That is a great question because when we speak with clients, we know that they know their brand better than anyone else. We can't come into that conversation with the assumption that we know them inside and out, that's absolutely not true, but from a guest or user experience standpoint, I feel like we can balance out what they know about themselves. For example, sometimes the conversation leads with technology. “Oh, we absolutely want to use VR here”, or “we want an immersive experience” and as much as we get excited about all those conversations, we also have to say, why do you think you need that? And we want to make sure that is the right solution from a narrative or technology standpoint. So yeah, that's what I have to say about that.

I was curious how often you have customers who are saying, “Yeah, we want a big LED video wall in the lobby”, or we want this particular type of technology and they're just thinking in terms of the wow factor as opposed to what this will actually do.

Chad Hutson: Oh, every time, and I'll also pick on architects a little bit. I think some of the larger architecture firms are definitely getting better, they have their own experience design teams.

The Gensler and so on, they've got people who know that stuff now. 

Chad Hutson: Exactly, but otherwise, depending on who's making the decisions, it is truly based on grandeur, so having the largest screen, “I went to our competitor's lobby and they had a giant screen, and I want ours to be bigger.” 

So sometimes it can be down to that, but I think what is thought of just so little is content strategy, meaning, some folks think about content, what can we put on the screen, but okay, that's great, now what's going to be there tomorrow and the next day, and that can become prohibitively expensive if it's not thought of the right way and how to get the right content there. Some of it can be big and beautiful. I know that what used to be Obscure Digital and now they're I think they've been folded into another organization, but people talk about the Salesforce lobby and still talk about it even now, and it is a beautiful experience, but it is that exact same experience over and over again. So how can that be more dynamic? We'll have those ooh-ah moments, but we need something else to fill the space and not just be a pretty screensaver.

Yeah, I've seen some projects and the narrative is describing the projects after they've been lit up where they're talking about how this changes the whole experience of travel or whatever it may be in a rail station or an airport, and a vast screen or a set of screens with all this very expensive content and so on and I'm thinking if I'm a traveller, what would be a great experience for me is something that says, “Track 14 is this way” because that is what really matters to me, not being uplifted by this amazing content and all that, just show me where the hell the train is. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, it has to be practical as well as transformative. I feel like if people are travelling, yes, let's get them excited about their destinations, let's give them a moment of surprise and delight but let's be practical about it too, and use elements of wayfinding. Not everything has to be wow, and flutter and fluff on these large screens.

And I suspect it's difficult at times to convey to the client that there's a technology investment here and so on, but you have to keep this refreshed and, you can't just have your quarter-million dollar data visualization piece from some artist and just run that thing forever?

Chad Hutson: You're exactly right. I think I might know the data visualization artist you might be speaking of, whose work I do love, don't get me wrong, but you're absolutely right. 

If a client's investing upwards of half a million or more on a display and they automatically assume, I need $25k to $50k for a video or I'll just use stock footage, that is just a bad investment. There's so much more you can do.  The reason why you have a screen in the first place is to show content, it's not just to have a static piece of wall art hung up. 

Is it now a case when you and your team, as you’re Chief Strategy Officer, I'm sure if there's a whale client, they pull you into it? You mentioned you're travelling a lot, so that's probably why. You immediately start thinking about how digital fits in here or do you try to kind of park that and listen to the client and then think digital would be good here, but maybe not? 

Chad Hutson: Oh, great question. Certainly from my previous roots, thinking through a digital lens has been instinctual somewhat, but since going to DI, it is definitely starting with more of the basics and leaving digital and analogue out of it.

It's more about fact-finding and learning more about who they are and what they want to accomplish, and then the solutions fall from that. So that's been actually a welcome shift that not everything has to be tech-savvy, but I'm a techie at heart, I can still remember coding on a radio shack color computer using BASIC way back in the 80s. So yeah, I'm a geek and I like technology. It's front and centre of my mind a lot of times. 

When you think in terms of experience design, how do you define experience? And I realize that's a big question. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, that is. So not intended to be a shameless plug, but the thing about DI is that they work across not only pro and collegiate sports organizations, but also larger brands, museums, retail, and entertainment, so theme parks and such, so the experience is different across all those, but I think consistently people want the experience to be intuitive.

I guess some brands don't have a clean brand, but in our opinion, we want the environment to be clean and welcoming and not intimidating. Perhaps if you're going through a frightening exhibit at a Disney park, maybe we do want that to be more thematic and scary, but a good experience just makes you feel something, and I know that some people might roll their eyes and go, oh my gosh, if we're walking through a company's headquarters, do they really want their guests to feel something?

And I would argue, yes, whether it wants someone to buy something, or want them to have moments of surprise and delight, even in a museum, you want them to learn and take that piece of information with you. So the experience, I think initially, no matter what you do or how pretty it is, if you don't feel something that you're not gonna remember that experience and I think that's ultimately what these destinations are about. Do you want folks to remember it, remember you as an organization or tell your friends about the amazing experience you had? So I would say that it is really front and centre, the emotional component. 

But the emotion isn't necessarily “wow” or being bowled over by the scale of a screen or the 3d anamorphic illusion on a screen or whatever, it can be as simple as, “I'm feeling calmer about being in here” because now I know where I'm going” or “I feel better about the meeting I'm about to have with this company” because I'm seeing the company's history on this video wall, it’s explaining everything that they do and I'm thinking, holy shit, these guys are amazing. 

Chad Hutson: Oh, a hundred percent, Dave. I'd say there's a sliding scale of what you want people to feel and we don't always crank that to 11. I think y might need certain degrees of it, like a moment of surprise and delight, in a customer's customer sales centre or in a museum like, oh, wow, I wasn't expecting that, and that's nice, but not everything has to be “whoa” and gigantic and expensive. 

It's adjustable depending on what we need people to take away from that experience. 

Yeah. I just wrote about a project the other day that was in a residential lobby of a building in Boston and it was a pretty small kind of corner wrapped LED that was only 10 feet square or something and I was thinking, okay, that makes sense in that kind of setting, that it's not enough where the residents are thinking well, now I understand why my condo fees are so high, but it's just something that helps give the lobby a bit of a lift, but also has information on there that's useful. 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, isn't that the beauty of display technology? It is dynamic. So it can be so many different things. Sometimes it could be too many things, and so we want to pick the right bitsto have in that space, but it's dynamic and it can be evergreen . 

What about budgets? I imagine, as you were saying in your kind of project scoping and everything, that you're trying to get a sense of what their budget restrictions are, whether they're bottomless or tight, and is it possible to deliver an experience on a pretty modest budget? 

Chad Hutson: Yes, I would say so. There are some simple tips and tricks that can be used. I would say that much like with an artist of any sort or any kind of designer, sometimes working with constraints yields some of the best results, whether you’re out of time, you're out of money and you just really have to become inventive on how to make that work out.

If any clients are listening, I would never want to encourage purposely limiting the budget just to see what kind of brilliance can come from that. But yeah, I've certainly seen some very impactful experiences. It Doesn't necessarily cost a ton, but you can be inventive in how you use those lower cost solutions and make it effective. I think about the analogy of the giant lobby screen, instead of having one giant screen, can we break that up into different sections and pieces so it has an interesting footprint and ne minute, we have content on individual screens and the next we have this larger canvas that is, even though it's broken in pieces, everything works in concert with each other. So value engineering is the mother of invention sometimes. 

I'm thinking of the project in Denver at a Wells Fargo office tower where there was obviously some nod to budget limitations where they did these five or six vertical slats that made it kinda look like you're seeing out through fence slots, and that was a way to have big LED strips that wouldn't cost the same kind of money, and they didn't have to be particularly high rez because you were seeing them at a distance, but that was a way to create visual impact, but not have something like the scoreboard at the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

Chad Hutson: Yes, and I think I know exactly the one you're talking about. They're really tall and narrow as well. But yeah, they are certainly impactful, I would agree.

Do you also have products now at DI? I was looking on the website and it said like you had some package products as opposed to everything just being custom to the client.

Chad Hutson: Yeah. Good eye there, Dave. So there are some products that we have developed and clients say, oh, we really like what you did for this client, could you do something similar? So after doing that a number of times, we just realized we can take some of the best parts of some of these projects and not necessarily repurpose them. But clients oftentimes are saying our budget is limited. What can we do? Can you repurpose this? 

So that is in essence what we have done with a few different things. There's something we call it, coloring wall, which essentially we use gesture sensing technology to let people, oftentimes kids, let's have a low touch, very simple and intuitive experience where they can stand in front of what looks like a giant coloring book page, it's just a white page with black outlines and waving our arms or running past it, and it fills in the color in a very painterly fashion. Once we figured out that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, let's take some of these ideas and repurpose them. We can do them, we can replicate them and we always improve upon them, I think every time we do that. 

And you can also reduce some of the cost too because you've already written and everything, right? 

Chad Hutson: I guess we could say we're trying to be benevolent and generous to clients, but we're also trying to make money off of what we have, IP we have created in the past. 

The gestures that you're describing, kids are naturals to interact with those sorts of things and have fun and all that, but I've seen a number of cases where that same sort of gesture technology is designed for brand advertising or experiential. activation, so to speak, and I've wondered, do these really work with adults? 

Chad Hutson: I remember when the Kinect first came out, I think that was around 2011 or so. My team at the previous firm were actually hacking it before there was even an SDK or software developer kit available and I think we were all just amazed by it and assumed this was going to transform how everyone interacts. 

But what we figured out along the way, I know the DI team has this figured out also is that there's no international language, if you will, for gestures. You can wave and say, hello, you can flip a bird, if you're really upset, you can use a right turn or left turn, but I think that with these sorts of gestures, particularly with adults, they're not gonna wave their arms around like a crazy person. 

I can't imagine many CEOs doing that willingly. So we've figured out that we have to keep those gestures very simple. It's more about standing in a place and it triggering content, or as I mentioned with kids that can run and be silly and that can fill that coloring book page very easily, but for the rest, it has to be super intuitive. If you are having someone raise their right hand or raise their left hand to advance an icon or a cursor, then those instructions have to be given in, I don't know, 15 seconds or less and have it figured out instantly. 

It's been my experience that with experience design, that the ones that really work are those where the architect or person who designs the space, the physical look of a space is involved early, so that the screen technology doesn't look like it was added on, it's built in, like it's part of the original design. Is that a fair assessment? 

Chad Hutson: Oh, so fair. Otherwise it's just just another giant rectangle, sitting in a lobby. It stands out, but more like a sore thumb than it does something that's integrated into the architecture. So I'm a big fan of all the involved parties talking as early as possible. 

An architect's thinking we can integrate a screen here, but speak to the technology partner and think about what's the right pixel pitch, viewing angles could be an issue or ambient light. So I feel like the more that all the right people can talk early on, it can be beautifully integrated and it can be the right technology and the right content.

That's one of the ways you can reduce the cost, right? Because if you really think about it, then you can use like LED ribbon strips instead of a giant rectangle that you were describing to have the same kind of impact 

Chad Hutson: Yeah, absolutely, and getting creative with almost a sculptural version of a display. I think I know a lot of people in our industry who talked about the beautiful work for the AT&T Discovery District, and there were many groups that touched that, but there is a sculpture that was fashioned after AT&T logo that's in that space, and it's it's also has embedded LED ribbons similar to what you described and yeah, it makes for an interesting experience and that brand touch is subtle. So kudos to that team on creating a pretty cool experience. 

Yeah, it's like a halo sort of tunnel thing. 

Chad Hutson: That's the one! 

Yeah, that is nice. 

With LED rapidly emerging and evolving, is that kind of the main go to thing now for DI when you're thinking about digital or are you still looking at OLED and LCD and other technologies? 

Chad Hutson: Yeah. Direct view LED is in almost every conversation I feel like just because it is a great technology. This is not a slam on the AV industry, because I know technology can only advance as fast as it's able to. The supply chain is an issue, the pandemic was an issue. So I feel like not that tech has stalled. It's not the case at all, but I feel like advancement has slowed a little bit. 

Definitely LED ribbons, direct view LED, some things that we've been playing with more recently, there's it's more of a smaller format now, but I'm sure that the size is growing. Actually I'm certain, I've seen some larger versions of it, but displays like the looking glass factories, the display looks semi holographic. You can use other gesture sensors for that. So that is a more of a one-to-one experience versus a giant shared experience. But I'm excited about that. Even outside of display technology, seeing what is being done with AI and creating visuals, platforms like Dall-E and Mid Journey, where you can simply type in a prompt and boom multiple versions of what the computer thinks is the right image for you, and I think that's also starting to step into video creation as well. It’s mostly static, but I've seen some early images of video. 

I think that talk about being able to have dynamic content. Data visualization is one thing, but constantly having even photo realistic or having what looks to be an artist creation being done on the fly is pretty amazing.

Yeah, my son is heavily into all that stuff and DALL-E and he was just asking me to give him a prompt and I gave him some crazy prompt, like squirrels playing croquet or something, and 30 seconds later, there it was!

Chad Hutson: It's nuts. I'm gonna try that, squirrels playing croquet, wearing pink tutus in a desert and yeah, I bet it'll give me exactly what we want. 

Yeah, and god knows why, but there you go. 

Is the kind of flexibility that we're seeing now with LED important in that you actually have physically flexible modules, but you also have ribbons and you have LED on film, LED embedded in building glass and so on. Do those open up new opportunities? 

Chad Hutson: Absolutely, they do, Dave. If anything, the first question is: can we do it? And we get excited and then it's a matter of pricing and availability and that's sometimes because it is so new or brightness could be a factor, or the glass has already been specked out and it's a matter of could we retrofit it, and it's just not as feasible, but now that we know those technologies are available at least for future endeavors, we are absolutely thinking about that as often as we can. Maybe it's a little bit of a gear list, but also it could be the right solution for a space.

Clients sometimes say at least, from a large scale perspective, we don't want anything that's going to obstruct views or have something where you can see wires or pieces or parts of the technology, and sometimes that's unavoidable, but I think if we can have the slimmer format of some of these ribbons or the embedded LED into glass, that solves some of that. So we're really excited about the future of those. 

Is there a particular lesson that you've learned through the years that you apply to a lot of work now? 

Chad Hutson: Honestly, if we're talking about an experience that does have a digital component, it is really pretty much what you and I have been harping on a lot in this conversation, which is just bringing the topic of content upfront, before decisions are being made about technology. 

I'm a huge supporter of the AV industry and that beautiful content can't be as inspiring sometimes if it's not on the right kind of display or the right scale either. But I'm thankful for the integrators and other technology folks that I know that always ask the first question of: Yes, you wanna display but why, and what would go on a display and why do you want that, and yes, we're an AV integrator, but you need to have conversations with the architect or your creative agency, whoever it may be, so that's not falling flat because honestly, for, if there's a lesson learned, it's folks in the AV industry. They can be blamed if I spend a million dollars on this giant lobby screen and it doesn't do shit, and that's absolutely not true. If the right content solution is there and the experience that is intended is considered more heavily up front, then everyone looks good in the end. 

Absolutely. All right, Chad, thank you very much for spending some time with me. That was super interesting. 

Chad Hutson: Oh, thanks. It's good to be back on 16:9 and hope to talk again soon.