Digital Signage for Schools

Options Paid Vendor Systems PowerPoint Open Source Systems Others???? $$$$ PowerPoint Open Source Systems Rise Vision Digital Signage.com Xibo Others????

Hardware Flat Screen TV - $500 ish Wake Up and Shutdown are nice options TV Mount - $100 Media Player - Anything that will run Win 7 should be fine. I currently use a ChromeBox!  I used a 5 year old HP Recommend Quad Core for HD Video

Digital signage vs. Kiosk Digital Signage - No User Interaction Entrance Displays, Athletics, Menu Boards... Kiosk - Accepts user interaction Can do both, show content until someone walks up Maps, Directories, Video Library....

Delivery Methods IP Coax Need a Media Player and Ethernet at each location Each sign can be different Coax Centrally locate Media Player and use a digital channel modulator to send signal ~ $1000 All sign show same image

Powerpoint Pros Cons Simple to use with little or no training Can add limited dynamic content Live Web Content http://skp.mvps.org/liveweb.htm Cons Looks like Powerpoint! Cumbersome to manage edit doc, reboot or remote media player to update I could not find a way to integrate live web using open office/Gdocs

Free vs. Paid How do they do it??? One Word - Quantity!!! Actually they hope to sell add on Design Services, Premium Features and Hardware What if they go Belly Up? Monitors and Wiring can be reused, find a different provider and move on. For this reason I would stay away from Proprietary hardware!

Open Source – Built on Google App Engine Very little end user training – Drive content with Google Docs Cloud based control – No Server Needed Setup feels like Publisher – Box Based Display devices Windows 7 Unbuntu 12.10

Open Source – Built on an Apache Project Feels like Video Editing – Timeline based Windows, Mac, iPad and Android Clients They also sell boxes from $100 to $600 All Content managed in Editor – End user training will be required.

Open Source – Company Backed Feels Like Video editing – Timeline based Windows Client/Server Based Donations based Can do iframes etc so it should work with Google Docs, but no direct integration

My Random Thoughts! We chose Rise Display for the following reasons: FREE! DUH... We can recycle existing hardware for media players Simple to maintain content using GDocs for source Lots of Gadgets and ability to write my own Cloud based - Tired of patching servers! Paid support is available if needed

Resources http://www.risevision.com/ http://www.digitalsignage.com/ http://xibo.org.uk/ This Presentation: http://bit.ly/ZXXir9 BACC Production: http://bit.ly/ZeNlGH Demo Video Site: http://bit.ly/16N5u3x