#CETW – New digital signage solution by Signagelive, Advantech bridges high reliability and low cost

NEW YORK – An optimized digital signage hardware and software solution that bridges extreme reliability and performance with low cost is being showcased by Signagelive and Advantech at the upcoming Customer Engagement Technology World trade show in New York.

The Signagelive open standard digital signage management and playback platform, developed by Remote Media Group,  has been specially configured to drive smooth 1080P HD video off Advantech’s ARK-DS303 rugged, fanless PC, while using just 10 per cent of the unit’s processing capability. The tiny Advantech media engine uses Broadcom’s Crystal HD decoder to ensure maximum media playback quality without stressing the PC hardware.

“It’s really tempting for digital signage network operators to choose the cheapest consumer PCs they can find, and hope it all works out,” explains Remote Media CEO Jason Cremins. “But a cheap PC uses consumer-grade components that are not designed for unattended 24/7 use, and comes with an operating system that includes thousands of components that are not required for running digital signage, and can badly affect stability and performance.”

Advantech is one of the world’s largest industrial PC manufacturers and optimizes its technology for long-term, unattended use in environments made hostile by such things as ambient dust and wide temperature swings. The ARK-DS303 reflects two years of development and testing, and comes with a long-term life cycle that ensures availability of the same product for several years. By comparison, consumer-grade PCs are subject to near-constant revisions.

The ARK-DS303 was purpose-built for digital signage and ships preloaded with Signagelive Display Edition onboard and a Windows Embedded operating system stripped back to only the components needed to run and manage digital signage playback.

Remote Media is also a global innovator in the use of SMIL-based non-PC media playout devices that offer high performance video playback and dynamic content using Media RSS in tiny packages and equally small price points. Several SMIL-based devices by Iadea will be showcased, running Signagelive’s virtual player client, at CETW.

Remote Media’s Signagelive is an open standards, web-based digital signage platform designed to support anything from small private corporate networks to large enterprise networks with 1,000s of end-points. The UK’s Digital Signage Manufacturer of the Year in 2009, Remote Media has a global reputation for making effective use of emerging web services and media technologies to provide a platform that is current, flexible and highly affordable.

Among new software advances to be shown at the New York event are HD content synchronization and control. Players and media content can now be time-sync’d to within 1/100th of a second across an unlimited number of units, allowing for spectacular, super HD screen/player arrays. For example, a sports arena can target content to players driving individual displays in strips or clusters, and then sync them on demand or schedule to run large content sequences across the entire strip or cluster. The latest Signagelive capabilities also include interrupt capabilities to trigger a range of real-world, on-demand content on displays.

The Customer Engagement Technology World show is Nov. 10-11 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York. Visitors are encouraged to come by Booth 240 to see the product range in action and sign up for a trial. Visitors will be entered into a draw to win an Iadea XDS-104 10” all-in-one signboard. The unit, just introduced by Iadea, includes a one-year Signagelive Virtual Player licence. CEO Cremins will also be speaking at the show, as part of CETW’s Pay It Forward: Lessons learned session.