Demystifying Digital Signage software

When choosing a software solution to manage your Digital Signage network, you are faced with the daunting task of selecting a product that meets your current and future needs from a choice of a reported 300 offerings available today.

I am not going to attempt to convince you that Signagelive is the best ‘price against performance’ option for you, a free trial will enable you the opportunity to decide that for yourself.

What I want to do is to demystify the selection process by breaking the 300 packages available into two camps, thus making your choice half as hard as it was originally. The two camps are:

• Camp 1. Digital Signage Software that incorporates proprietary design tools for creating content.
• Camp 2. Digital Signage Software that manages media content created in industry standard packages.

To clarify, Signagelive is firmly in Camp 2 and whilst it allows you total control of multi-zone page layouts to achieve the exact style you require, the zones are then populated with media content created in third party packages and uploaded to Signagelive and scheduled as required.

The reason for making the above distinction is that many Signagelive competitors incorporate design tools within their software and then try to justify big ticket prices by trying to convince users they can only run a Digital Signage network with them.

This ‘black magic’ approach to selling Digital Signage coued with glossy marketing has been successful thus far for the companies in question, but with customers becoming better educated and more confident in choosing Digital Signage software many are seeing through the hype and making informed decisions to choose solutions in Camp 2.

In a recent real example, a Signagelive reseller working on behalf of a customer requiring a Digital Signage platform to run 2,500 screens across 600 locations compared Signagelive against two major competitors from Camp 1. Not including the considerable cost savings on infrastructure from using our SaaS platform, Signagelive came in at 25% of the cost of the cheaper of the two other offerings.

When asked by the reseller to justify the vastly increased costs, both competitors tried to defend the cost with all sorts of arguments related to what the customer could design using the tools in their software. Basically, they were focusing on style over substance, when 100% of the customers actual business requirements was serviced by all three options.

As a Digital Signage solution in Camp 2, Signagelive allows users to use industry standard and readily available skills and programs to create content for use on screen. All of these packages have been around for many years, have worldwide support and use beyond Digital Signage so that content created can be utilised across other media channels such as TV, Websites and Print. In many cases existing media content created for print and web can be adapted for Digital Signage use saving both time and money in the process.

Add to this ‘open standard’ in content creation the accessibility of third party companies and individuals you can emoyee with skills in these programs and you have to ask the questions;

Why would you want to learn a proprietary set of skills exclusively for creating content for a single digital signage software package?