Everything you need to know about Sony BRAVIA for digital signage

Sony BRAVIA, with its market-leading range of TVs, has become the undisputed king of home entertainment, but what can it do for digital signage?

The Sony brand has introduced a cutting-edge range of 55”, 65”, 75” and 85” digital signage displays with the launch of its hotly anticipated BZ40L series. In the design and build of the digital signage LED displays, Sony BRAVIA has incorporated many hallmark screen technologies that have been widely credited for delivering an ultra-immersive viewing experience for TV. As with its TV ranges, the BZ40L has also been made with sustainability in mind, from the chassis design all the way through to the packaging. In real-world terms, though, what does this all mean? What can you really achieve with Sony BRAVIA for digital signage, and how does it work with other digital signage technologies to deliver an all-in-one solution?

Sony BRAVIA BZ40L Series

The first thing to note about this series is that the screens all come with System-on-Chip technology. This essentially means that you don’t need to invest in a separate media player to feed content through to your screens. It’s a cost-efficient and space-saving option that’s likely to suit those looking for a more streamlined solution.

Sony BRAVIA viewing experience

As you might expect with Sony BRAVIA, the selling point of this series is the brand’s screen technologies and the powerful viewing experience they promise to offer. Features, such as Sony’s TRILUMINOS Pro enable the screens to display a wide colour gamut, so that a greater range of shades and hues can be more faithfully reproduced and displayed. TRILUMINOS Pro is an important feature, which can help bring promotional material to life with eye-popping vibrant colour, and contrast.

With Sony’s 4K X-Reality PRO processing, you also have more flexibility to run the content you want. In other words, your on-screen material doesn’t have to be 4K to look good. Sony’s processing will help upscale, refine, and sharpen your content in real time so that it appears closer to true 4K quality. This is great if you want to draw more eyes to the screen and keep customers entertained with RSS feeds of sports or the latest entertainment news.

If you plan on running fast-paced content, another plus for this display series is that it comes with Motionflow XR technology. Designed to help your displays keep up with the on-screen action, it’s a technology that helps sequences of movement flow more smoothly and naturally.

Sony BRAVIA digital signage features

While this series certainly shares many similar features with the Sony BRAVIA consumer TV range, it also comes with a whole host of technologies that make its screens suitable for commercial use in a wide range of environments.

Sony BRAVIA anti-glare and anti-reflective feature

Perhaps the most hyped Sony BRAVIA pro AV feature is Sony’s deep black non-glare coating for displays, which can, according to a Sony spokesperson, reduce on-screen reflections by just under 45%. This may not sound like an especially exciting development, but in fact, it has the potential to make a big difference to the viewing experience. While it probably wouldn’t achieve much in our homes, where lighting is generally optimal for TV viewing, it is likely to have an impact in commercial environments. With this feature, your digital signage can essentially be installed in a wider range of places, even in, for instance, sun-lit shop front windows, or harshly lit studios, where the lighting would otherwise eclipse your on-screen content.

The efficiency of this solution is worth pointing out. Typically, to offset bright lighting conditions, professional screens must be equipped with 1000+ Nit brightness levels. The BZ40L screens, with their deep black non-glare coating, operate at a more energy-efficient 700 Nits, but can still offer comparable anti-glare and anti-reflective support.

24/7 operation

Unlike Sony BRAVIA TVs, this pro AV range is designed to work round-the-clock, which makes it ideal for most 24/7 businesses, including hotels, hospitality venues, and mission-critical control rooms.

The Multi Display Setting (MDS) app

As you might expect from Sony BRAVIA, given its wealth of experience in home entertainment, the BZ40L series is designed to help you put on a show. The companion Multi Display Setting (MDS) app makes it simple for you to create larger-than-life video walls with multiple Sony BRAVIA screens tiled together.

Large 32GB internal storage

The BZ40L series also comes with 32GB of internal storage. This might seem like a small detail, but it allows you to do more, enabling you to store and run all your data and apps, without experiencing any slow-down in screen performance.

B2B tamper-proof design for public venues

With the BZ04L screens, you’re free to disable input or remote functions and block buttons – all important if your screens are going to be on public display and within reach of passersby.

Sustainability

Sony BRAVIA is starting to become well-known for its green credentials. In a commercial environment, where screens are likely to work harder and run for longer, this matters, especially for businesses that are committed to reducing their overall energy consumption. The introduction of Sony’s own unique recycled plastic, SORPLAS (Sustainable Oriented Recycled Plastic) enables the brand to use considerably less plastic for the BZ04L chassis design. Made up of optical discs from discarded DVDs and the optical sheets in LED screens, this recycled plastic is being used for the back of BZ40L screens.

However, it’s not just the screens’ chassis that are eco-friendlier. Even the screens’ slim, lightweight packaging has been designed to cut energy consumption, as it helps cut the number of vehicles needed to transport the units. It’s a small touch, but one that helps to reduce C02 emissions per unit by fifteen per cent.

Sony BRAVIA built-in digital signage player

Thanks to their SoC functionality, the BZ40L screens also come with built-in HTML5 support. This gives you the option of uploading content to your screens via USB. Once a USB is inserted at the back of a BZ40L screen, the on-board BRAVIA Signage Free (BSF) software will kick in and automatically play your videos and photos.

SONY BRAVIA digital signage partners

While the built-in HTML5 functionality is great to have, especially if your network is small, you might eventually want to try out a dedicated content management system (CMS) that can do more for your digital signage. The BZ40L series gives you the option to do this by offering compatibility with cloud-based CMS platforms, like Signagelive. The benefit of using your BZ40L screen with a CMS is that you can remotely schedule content to one, some or all your screens. You’re free to upload imagery and videos at a moment’s notice, or to use the CMS advanced scheduling features to select exactly the time and date when you need your messaging to run. Such systems let you edit live content, and schedule when your messaging should be removed automatically from the content line-up. It’s a fail-proof way to ensure that any on-screen content you display is always timely and relevant.

With the right CMS partner, your BZ40L screens can also be used to deliver experiential digital signage experiences – that is, interactive experiences that enable customers to forge an emotional connection with your brand. This could be by using the CMS to synchronise control of your content and relevant connected devices, so you can set exactly the right ambience for your on-screen promotion.

Sony BRAVIA may be best known for its TV ranges, but, it has much to offer for digital signage too. With such a rich history in TV, the brand has been able to incorporate many trusted screen technologies into its digital signage range, along with other dedicated, and often, unique professional display features. Importantly, the Sony BRAVIA BZ40L series now also offers the compatibility required to build more comprehensive overall digital signage solutions to help businesses manage the content process and deliver more engaging customer experiences.