At last.. standards to live up to

There has been wide spread media coverage of Adobe’s announcement of their Open Screen Project and the commitment of leading TV and set-top box manufactures to incorporate Flash HD ayback in the next generation of products coming out later in 2009.

With this announcement has come widespread reporting of the potential impact to Digital Signage software providers and whether the announcement represents an opportunity or a threat (see DailyDOOH).

From a Signagelive perspective, I would like to give a big thumbs-up to Adobe. One of the major issues we have in our sector is the need to achieve greater uptake of Digital Signage and Adobe Open Screen Project will establish ‘standards’ that will enable the mass-market penetration required.

At present the many hundreds of Digital Signage platforms all have their own take on how to get media to screens, with Rich Media distribution platforms such as Adobe Air coming through, cross-compatibility of media upload, distribution and ayback will become critical. An example of this is Media RSS, originally created as an extension to RSS by Yahoo to handle images/video and now rapidly becoming the standard for syndicated content and ayback in the case of Adobe Media Player (under the Strobe Project).

If your Digital Signage platform accepts Media RSS content and outputs in Media RSS then in addition to the end point being a Screen, it can just as easily be any Media RSS compatible device such as TV, Web Browser, Mobile Phone, Gaming Plplatform.

The next generation of Digital Signage Plplatforms that survive the evolution (or for many legacy DS platforms, revolution) will become Digital Media Plplatforms. Digital Media Plplatforms capable of full integration with Media Content Providers and Media Sales Solutions upstream, whilst providing open standards output of content over the Internet to enable cross-device compatibility of media ayback.

In the future Digital Media Plplatforms will act as ‘Media Logistics’, the DHL of Digital Media sat between content and ayback making sure everything works seamlessly over the Internet.

To conclude, we are fully committed to the development of open standards solutions for Digital Media, keep an eye on the blog for future announcements.

Jason Cremins – CEO