Digital Signage Solutions

So my trip to Minneapolis yesterday was wildly successful, if I do say so myself, meeting with a corporate communications team who clearly "gets it" and sees the advantages of the MediaTile's Digital Sign in a Box (at least that was the impression I got).

One of their team members was insistent on finding a flaw in our digital signage solution. "What's the catch? There's got to be a catch." Turns out there aren't any.

Okay, well maybe one. The one request mentioned sometimes is whether or not the system can display live broadcasts. It can, but it's not an "out-of-the-box" solution and will likely add unnecessary stress to your IT network and complexity to your digital signage system.

Given how cheap and easy it is now to create video, I'm not sure there's any reason to do live broadcasts anymore. "Live" works great covering political conventions, dramatic car chases or approaching hurricanes. But for employee communications? Eh, I don't buy it.

Live broadcasts use a tremendous amount of network bandwidth, which inevitably will make your IT Department nervous. (An ugly scene for sure.) And, while you're at it, you're also going make Legal nervous because basically anything can happen live. . . ANYTHING.

With recorded video, you have complete control over the final message and can easily remove any damaging content and publish straight to your digital signs. I'm just not sure there are many advantages to using live video. Just look at the success of YouTube. No live video there and people go nuts over it.

And if there aren't any advantages, then why worry two groups (IT and Legal) who don't handle "worry" very well. If you have push execs who think you have to live video, they are probably also the same ones who think you must do the big quarterly, full-color internal communications magazine because well it's always been done that way. Preach to them the advantages of recorded video when conducting your digital signage research.

Just say no to live broadcasts. Some day, you'll thank me for it.