Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I first spoke with industry lifer IV Dickson about his move from software to the managed services firm SageNet, the company was still in the relatively early days of getting itself organized to chase and then service digital signage opportunities. Five years on, digital in environments like chain retail and QSR are a core, what he calls consequential, part of the Oklahoma company's overall business. SageNet's role has evolved from being an IT-centric managed services company that was adding digital signage to its deployment and network management capabilities, to having a main service line called SageView. It's a full-meal-deal suite of solutions and services that run from the ideation stage all the way through deployment and ongoing management. These kinds of turnkey, all-in solutions are relatively common now in the marketplace, but the SageNet twist is its deep roots, experience and acumen in the hard-core aspects of networking design, connectivity and cybersecurity. Dickson started out at SageNet as the digital signage guy, but as business has grown, and with it the staffing and skillsets associated with that work, he now has a role as SageNet's Chief Innovation Officer - looking more broadly at all the technologies that have a role in or influence customer projects. IV Dickson, how are you doing, sir?  IV Dickson: I'm doing well. Thank you, Dave. How are you this morning?  I am good. We haven't chatted in a while. We did a podcast back in 2019, so I would say it's time for an update.  IV Dickson: We did. A lot has happened in five years, if nothing else, a pandemic, but also just a lot has happened in the SageNet, and SageView world for us. Yes. The last time I saw you, we were walking up a very long hill to the Barcelona Football stadium, and you're probably keeping a wary eye on me to make sure I didn't have a heart attack.  IV Dickson: Yeah, I don't know. It might have been mutual there, Dave, but I do know, though it was worth the walk. I will say that it was worth the walk.  Every little bit of it. So over those five years, quite a bit has changed with your company. I would say the big thing from my perspective is five years ago, SageNet was starting to get heavy into digital signage, but it was one of the things that a larger company did. When I look at the website now, I kind of see SageNet leading in certain respects with what it does in terms of digital experience and digital signage in general. Is that a fair assessment? IV Dickson: It is a fair assessment. And, by the way, my marketing team will be very glad to hear that because I think that's a position that we want to take and have taken. But we've also positioned ourselves in the market to be that, but also executed in the market to be that, and I think if I think about five years ago, one of the things I think I probably even said it five years ago in, in this podcast was we're a managed service provider in an integrator world. That really hasn't changed in many respects. There are still great integrators out there. However, what really has changed for us is the way people are now coming and looking at digital experience, digital engagement, and pure digital signage, right?  Call it passive or a kind of consumable digital signage. It's become more important today than ever to manage that in an ongoing fashion, and management is not just content. It's everything. Is the screen on? Is the player running? If it's broken, or when it's broken, how are you getting it fixed? And that's a big piece of the puzzle, and over five years, we've grown a lot. I mean, we've grown exponentially to be honest in this area. We were a few customers with a few thousand devices out in the world, and now we're north of a hundred thousand devices that are under management in that digital experience realm. So, as a managed services company as a whole, what do digital signage and digital signage-sih activities represent for the company? I don't need an exact percentage, but I'm curious.  IV Dickson: That's a great question because it's something that actually was a driver for me in my previous role at SageNet as the VP of digital signage and digital experience: to make it a consequential piece of our business. And so at this point in time, whereas five years ago, it was just a mosquito kind of on the sideline of our portfolio. It is now one of the pillars of our organization. So if you look at our organization, historically, we still track the traditional managed services of circuitry and router switch firewalls. However, now, the idea of IOT and IOT management, digital experience, and digital signage management kind of lined up in three pillars for us.  I have heard a few times now that one of the things that's really changed in the last five years or so again is how, historically, the first meetings that you would have with a larger enterprise-level customer or prospective customer would be with the visual merchandising people, HR people, business communicators, that sort of thing, and the IT people would be there, but only begrudgingly. And, now they tend to lead these initiatives and guide them.  Have you seen that? Does it help the case for SageNet because they're familiar with the kind of work that you do?  IV Dickson: Yes, and yes. Yes, we are seeing that shift in who's leading the effort, and yes, that has been obviously fruitful for SageNet, but also just for the market as in general, to be honest. What I mean by that is that the marketing initiative has not been dampened; it's still the guiding light or the Northstar associated with the effort. Now, you're getting buy-in from the organization about the importance of this type of infrastructure in a distributed environment. So if you have a thousand restaurants or five hundred or a thousand stores, all of a sudden, when you have a director or even a CIO-level IT person in the room saying this is something that's consequential to our business, that changes the level of investment from a general brand perspective. The other thing that we've seen, to be honest, is that we've seen its scope outside of it, marketing and even operational folks that are in the building, or as everybody's talking about retail media networks and how this bigger trade or merchandiser world factors into that conversation as well, depending on the brand. One of SageNet's other big pillars is cybersecurity. Are you finding that's helpful in the pitch and in the ongoing effort for clients in that you have that pedigree, you have that understanding? It's not, “Yeah, we do have a cyber guy. His name is, let me look it up.” It's part of your DNA.  IV Dickson: Exactly. It's one of the greatest parts of our extended portfolio. So, about a year ago, I took the role of chief innovation officer, and it's been a journey for me, not only to understand some of the technologies that I didn't understand well but also to understand some of the technologies and wrap my brain around how do customers see that footprint and to your point about cyber security if you look not only at cyber, but you look at how cellular is affecting the market and you also look at the pure infrastructure that's going into one of these restaurants or into one of these retailers, and you start to realize that the POS that used the point of sale that used to be one of the primary network consumers, and by the way, it's still one of the primary from a cyber perspective.  However, it's a very small footprint compared to all the other aggregate devices that they now have talking on the network, whether that be IOT monitoring devices or whether it be digital signage and digital experience devices, or whether it be guest and or brand WiFi, all of a sudden the cyber level or the management of that connectivity becomes even more important than it was maybe ten years ago. And now you have changes in that market around not only how it's managed, but also around protocols that are being utilized, and you start to look at PCI 4. 0, and all of a sudden the brands are getting that much more intense in their needs, but also smarter in their requirements. And so when you bring in a media player and a screen, they no longer say, “Hey, we're going to stick this on the network.” They want a deep dive into how that's going to communicate and communicate with what and for what purposes.  Yeah. I think many more traditional pro IV integration companies and solutions providers lack that perspective and experience. When you look at something like a restaurant or a retail operation, as you just said, all the different business systems and sensors and everything falling into it, it's just a big chart to be able to try to understand all that.  IV Dickson: It is, and luckily I have fantastic team members, right? We've brought in folks with senior-level capabilities from the industry, not only from pure restaurant retail but also from the I.T. on the side. We have fantastic folks in our organization to be able to tackle that because, to your point, one of the differences, and I talked to many of our partners about this in the industry. One of the differences in our business that a lot of people don't recognize from a traditional integrator perspective is when we walk in the door as SageNet, we make two near assumptions.  If we're talking to a restaurant or even a retailer, we make the assumption that you're geographically dispersed, which means you're probably over at least 5, if not 10, or 50 States. So you're all over the country. But the second assumption we make is that your ownership environment is potentially variable. What that means is it could be a franchise, a dealer, or some qualification of the licensee, and in that scenario, you're then adding a layer of complexity to that individualized brick-and-mortar environment that you're servicing, and that creates major complexity in the process.  Yeah, cause they might not all

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company called NowSignage. He'd seen a lot of different options, but these guys he said, had something that was very modern and nimble. I finally got my act together and scheduled a chat with founder Nick Johnson. Now's roots are in pushing social media messaging to big screens at live events - like concerts and big games. Requests started evolving, both in terms of what could be done with screens and how long they'd be used - which led in part to him concluding the future business was in permanent installations and revenue that was recurring and predictable, versus periodic. Now markets its product as being affordable and not focused on a particular market segment, like QSR, workplace or whatever. That generalist approach tends to worry me, because buyer decisions tend to get focused on price, as in who costs the least. But in my chat with Johnson, he explains that their market focus is on what he calls multi-screen management - networks with a lot of locations and a lot of screens. Most companies would also say they want that and do that, but as Johnson explains in our chat, that's easy to talk about, but much harder to do well. I also had to ask about the Frankenstein'd Rolls-Royce that was the eye candy for the NowSignage stand at ISE in Barcelona. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Nick, thank you for joining me. I know NowSignage reasonably well. I suspect a lot of other people do as well, but could you maybe just give me a rundown on the background of the company, what it is you do, what's distinct, that sort of thing?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, sure. Cheers for having me on, Dave. And, yeah, nice to be here. Yeah, so NowSignage, for those who don't know who we are, is a UK-based business that has been around since 2013. A lot of people thought we launched a market and were in a big whirlwind storm about six years ago, but actually, the tech has been being developed since 2013 now, and then we really honed in on the permanent signage market around seven or eight years ago, really. In terms of signage, we position ourselves as a multi-screen management platform that allows our users to effectively and efficiently manage large networks of screens. So, we don't really focus on a specific vertical specialism. So, with IE, we're not a specific sector, like a corporate sector outright or anything like that. Our specialism is really around meeting the needs and demands of projects that have multiple screens, often in multiple locations or multiple sites, so those large-volume projects are our specialism.  Now, I would imagine most software companies would say: we can fully support large enterprise level, big footprint projects across multiple locations and all that, so that doesn't immediately hit me as a distinction, but I'm guessing you're going to tell me that it's easier said than done?  Nick Johnson: Exactly. So normally, as you say, with CMSs, and we found it ourselves in the early days, we had an eye on those bigger projects, but in reality, as soon as it got above 50 screens, that becomes a challenge for a CMS. It's got a different thought process that needs to go into the CMS from an intuitive nature, but also, your platform needs to be built to kind of balance those enterprise features alongside the simplicity, flexibility, and scalability of the platform.  So yeah, there are some nuances that, for sure, where if you want to manage those large scale projects, you really need to nail the ability to make it as easy as possible for those end users to target specific screens with specific promotions or specific content and that's quite a powerful and hard to achieve thing within a CMS. It's all about bringing those features to enable that functionality.  So, if I'm an end user or even a reseller integrator looking at different options out there, what's my sniff test (or smell test) to determine who can genuinely support large-scale networks like that?  Is it data integration, you know, is it elasticity, at the server level? What are those things?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, both of those, obviously, come into consideration. The way we position our product is that we ultimately want it to be self managed by the user. So if it can't be easy to be managed by the user, then you've got a problem, and to make it easy to be managed by the user, you do need those features in the platform like very advanced targeted tags or roles and permissions for locking down areas of the platform. The targeted tags will allow people to target localized stores with localized messages based on the tagging functionality. I'd probably say the most important thing is just giving that flexibility throughout the platform. You can't say that all scheduling has to be done in the scheduling area. You need to be more flexible on that. So in the NowSignage CMS, we enable certain degrees of different types of scheduling to happen, whether it's in the content area, the actual playlist area, the scheduling area, and even at the screen’s level, there are different types of tools that you can use to meet the requirements of the customer.  So, it's not always one size fits all. You have to go to that customer and say, look, we've got this feature set here that makes it easy to manage large networks. What's your specific requirement here? And we may turn around and go, great. You want to use our targeted tags and our override functionality, or we might say you want to use nested playlists and the ability to set assets to show and remove at set dates and times. So, it's giving that broader flexibility within the CMS to adapt to their needs.  I'm curious as well about the whole idea of affordability. It's one of the things that comes across on your site pretty quickly that you talk about it being cost effective and affordable. But it's also pretty sophisticated, like a lot of the platforms that say they're affordable, it's because, they do the basics.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I'm glad you used the word affordable there because I don't like the word cheap. So, for us, it's not a race to the bottom. We're not about being the cheapest. We're about being what you get out of our package, which is the most affordable. It's the most cost-effective. So you get the most amount of performance out of our platform for the cost and ratio. So yeah, it's all about affordability. So, with the platform, we don't charge for add-ons within the platform.  When you get access to NowSignage, you get access to all our features and functionality, and you even get access to them as we roll out new features and functionality; they become free for all end users to use. So that's why we appeal, as I said at the start there, we don't really have a sector specialism; we focus on the type of customer that we want to work with, and then often those customers we find because we operate, let's say with lots of supermarkets, a supermarket isn't just a retail requirement in the front of the store. A true requirement for a supermarket is actually they want to centralize that CMS and they have a retail requirement. They have a retail media network requirement. They have a digital out-of-home requirement. They have a back office requirement. They have a factory and manufacturing plant requirement. So all of these requirements are completely different, and the NowSignage platform allows those users to pull on different features and functionalities in the platform. So they may in their manufacturing plant use our Microsoft Power BI integration for showing dispatch information and fleet management, whereas in the retail media network, they might be using our proof of play functionality, which, as you've alluded to, is very much an enterprise feature and it normally very often doubles the cost of a license. We absorb all of those costs, from our servers and so on because we spread that across our whole customer base. So, yeah, it's absolutely the most affordable is how we position ourselves, not the cheapest in the race to the bottom.  Yeah, I've often said that if you're going to be a generalist, that can be a little deadly because you are just competing on price by and large, but what you're saying is, we go across a number of vertical sectors, but we're not really a generalist because our specialty is large, multi-screen networks. Nick Johnson: Yeah, and what you will get with those networks as well, because of the types of brands and customers that you're working with for those projects, it's not really about just selling features and competing on cost for those large networks. Now, obviously, they will be price-driven because often they go out to tender, so you do need the ability to really come down on your price, which we have that capability to do so we can be very competitive on price, but equally, what the brands wanna see is they really want to build a partnership with that CMS to get confidence from you that you are advising them on how to structure their account to maximize the usage of your platform, to meet their goals and of what they require from the network. So if you can communicate and instill that confidence, I think that's really where you find the winning edge to things.  You also, as a company, say that your hardware is agnostic. I have seen all kinds of companies go down that path, and many of them then almost surrender and come up with their own dedicated player devices.  I don't think it's because they're making extra hardware margin; it's just that they grow wary of trying to support all these different types of hardware, and the much easier path is to just have their own, which they can control because they know

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays. In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes. So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass? That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings. Unlike other products on the market, Clear Motion's LED displays are sandwiched inside sheets of laminated safety glass - so when a building goes up or is being retrofitted, the glass panels that go in are also active, highly-transparent displays. I had a good chat with Todd Stahl, a glass industry veteran who runs both the established and start-up businesses. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Todd, thank you for joining me.  Todd Stahl: Hey Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. It's going to be a pleasure to talk about some LED glass with you.  David: Yeah, tell me about the company. I saw you guys at DSE back in December. You were busy almost the whole time. So I didn't really have the time or the chance to have any kind of a detailed LED conversation, but I know that the company has not been around that long, but it's grown out of a pretty well-established “performance glass company.” Todd Stahl: Yeah. A little bit about the history there. So, at Clear Motion Glass, we're making the LEDs inside of the glass. I came across the LED glass around June of 2022, so I've had it for just about two years. The parent company is William Penn Performance Glass, and that's another company I started in 2011. We deal with high-end architectural Glass.  So, a cliffnote version: We go to the top architects in the country, and they're like, “Hey, who are you designing for?” And they'll say to us, “Hey, we want some really cool glass to go in the elevators for the Empire State Building.” So we got into the architectural space with glass, and actually, we'll William Penn, who was just voted one of the top 50 glass producers in North of North America. So something that we're definitely pretty proud of around here.  Then I came across LED glass around 2022, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen put inside a glass, and I wanted to be a part of it. David: So when you say you came across it, what do you mean by that?  Todd Stahl: So, there's another product in glass, another glass product that's been around, I'm going to say right around since 2000. It’s a glass that goes frosted to clear from the turn of a switch, Switchable glass. So there's a company called Smart Film Blinds, and they were an applied film company that would actually take that, what we would call switch glass, but they just took the film and applied it to existing glass, and it was owned by Alan and Tracy Ackerman, and then they had this connection with LED Glass they weren't quite sure what to do with it. They knew it was really cool. And it had a chance to be really something big, but they were more of a film company, and then he and I got introduced, through a need that we had for some smart film, the switchable film, and then eventually we had a partnership for a while. Then we decided basically that I'll stick with the glass part, what I'm best at, and he'll stick with the film part, which was what they were best with. But that's how I got introduced to it, right around two years ago.  David: What you're marketing now is Clear Motion Glass. Is that your own product or are you reselling somebody else's manufactured product?  Todd Stahl: We have partners overseas, such as a company called Filmbase. That's where we get the actual LED grid or LED mesh. We bring that to my facility in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the south-central Pennsylvania area, we're 20 minutes south of Hershey, close to Harrisburg, and then we actually fabricate everything as a finished panel here. So we'll make the glass, we'll get the interlayer components. We have a laminating machine that actually works by pulling a vacuum and heating it up to certain temperatures. After that, it comes out, and we have a clear LED glass display.  David: So laminated glass is something that's been around forever. So this is just basically sandwiching the mesh in between sheets of laminated glass?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely making a sandwich component. We start with a piece of glass, say that's your component number one. Then, we start with the inner layer materials.  In a case like this, we use a couple of different techniques, but we use EVA, which is ethyl vinyl acetate. Then we'll actually put the LED mesh grid on top of that, then we put another piece of EVA, then we go with the finished component of the sandwich, another piece of glass, and we stick them in an oven, we run a certain cycle, and about four hours later, we have a laminated piece of glass, exactly how you described. It's a sandwich makeup for sure.  David: Was there a lot of R&D work involved in it? Because I would imagine if you're putting an LED mesh inside of an oven, then going to a very high temperature and all that, I'm thinking if I didn't know much about this stuff, I'd be wondering, what's all that heat going to do to this thing? Todd Stahl: Yeah. You know, we have to make sure that it can withstand certain temperatures, obviously, and if you don't heat, and just in general, if you don't get laminated glass hot enough, it doesn't bond, it does not bond correctly. What you have to achieve is cross-linking and cross-linking is basically the interlayer material to the glass itself, and that happens at a temperature of around 110 degrees Celsius, so it's not getting hot enough to cook a Turkey in there, so we're not really dealing with extremes. I think a lot of people might think when you're actually making glass out of what we call a batch, you know that's where the glass is heated up to 2000 degrees and you're really dealing with some extreme temperatures. It's not quite the same extremes at all when you're dealing with laminated glass.  David: So tell me what performance glass is, and what high-end performance glass is because I don't know the glass world terribly well.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, sure. So, so what William Penn performance glass is the performance name kind of all started because our glass looks great and it, but it's an all safety rated glass. So that's kind of the performance part of the glass. So, if you're looking at our glass, say that's used for glass handrails, that's a very specific glass that's chosen to withstand the certain load requirements of a structural application, and typically most of our handrails are tempered, and laminated glass. So there are two ways on this planet to make a piece of glass safety-rated. You either temper it or you laminate it. We happen to do both of those things in a lot of our projects, and it's kind of funny like obviously safety-rated glass is strong, but the only thing that's really taken into consideration when you're referring to safety glass are you automatically assume it's going to break and what happens when it breaks, right? So with tempered glass, you put a lot of stress on the glass itself through a heating and cooling process, and whenever that glass breaks, it breaks into small panels that would not be able to potentially cause a life-threatening wound, and then you have the exact opposite with laminated where if a rock hits your car, if that's ever happened to you the rock doesn't come through and the pieces of the glass, the shards don't come through, they stay together. So you got those two things to the requirements when you're thinking about what is safety rated glass.  David: With the Clear Motion product, is it an indoor product only, an outdoor facing product, or what are the use cases?  Todd Stahl: So what's really cool about our LED glass is that almost wherever you're using architectural glass right now, you can now use our LED displays. So it can be used in exterior applications, a building facade, glass canopies, and railings that may be exterior. All of the components are kind of encapsulated inside that glass, and that glass is making a nice, really safe, cozy home for the LED display inside of it. David: And it's bright enough that it can be on a glass curtain wall like an auto dealer?  Todd Stahl: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the really cool applications for it. In fact, you had mentioned at the trade show and boy, were we busy? I think I was just talking about this yesterday. We scanned around 450 people in that short show. Our voices were a little strained by the end of the evening. So, the brightness of our display at the show, Dave, was only running around 4%, and I thought that was one of the more amazing things about the product because it was still kind of bright at 4%. Later we started bringing that up because a few potential clients wanted to see it at 50-60% brightness. So yeah, you can totally use this as an exterior sign and get whatever brightness you need. I think some of the products are well over 10,000 nits depending on the needs, and I think one actually lasted up to 15,000 nits, so plenty bright for the outside.  David: Yeah, once you get to 3,500, you're good.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, exactly. David: On transparency. I see on your website that it says there

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Using data is pretty much integral to just about any ambitious and involved digital signage network being spun up these days, but for a lot of vendors and their customers, it's still a relatively new concept and approach. That's definitely not the case for the Toronto-area CMS software firm Omnivex, which has been around for more than 30 years and has always made data-driven communications central to what it does. More than 20 years ago, the core Omnivex solution included a module called DataPipe. I know, because I was using the thing way back then for a digital ad network I launched ... probably 10 years too early, but that's a story for another time. While a lot of its competitors have developed and marketed platforms that are pretty and loaded with bling, Omnivex has resolutely stuck to its technology guns with software that's quite involved and very powerful. The net result is Omnivex gets involved in a lot of the more complicated jobs in which real-time data, and the context it provides, shapes what shows up on screens. Airports, for example, are a very active vertical. I had a long, detailed chat with Neil Chatwood, a transplanted Brit who runs the global transport file for Omnivex. We could have gone on for hours, as he has a lot of insights about data, security, and programming content for large, very involved environments. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Neil, thank you for joining me. For those people who don't know Omnivex, can you just give a quick rundown on the company?  Neil Chatwood: Yeah, for sure. So, Omnivex was established back in the dark ages of digital signage, 1991. It’s a privately owned organization, just outside of Toronto, Ontario and Canada. Oh, come on. It's in Toronto. Like, Toronto goes on forever.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah, it's right. Pretty much right on the border. Well, it's on the subway line now. They've expanded the subway, so that finally happened.  Yeah, it's not like you see countryside on the other side of the parking lot though. Neil Chatwood: Not anymore. In the last 10 years, there's been a Vaughan skyline, as depressing as that may be. But yeah, I've been around a long time in a private family owned organization and it's really grown off the back of our focus on leveraging real time data, integrating with basically any system we could possibly think of. And that pedigree has kept us in the business for over 30 years now.  Yeah, I have a history in a network I started more than 20 years ago using Omnivex. So I was familiar with Omnivex products and datapipe and everything. So we were talking before we turned on the recording. I found it amusing that a lot of the software side of the industry has awakened to the idea of data integration and data handling for the last four or five years when it's something you were doing like 25 years ago.  Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Back in around 2009-2010 when a lot of the industry was yelling Content is King. Right. Don't say that.  Neil Chatwood: I know. You see. I do. Yeah, it's a classic. And our ownership at the time, you know, they like to have fun and they took that and changed it into Context as King and we've really kind of run with that since inception. But I joined the organization in 2010 and data and complexity is where we've always really hung our hat. We're a software vendor but the majority of our revenue comes from licensed sales. But we really do find ourselves in the trenches with our partners and our clients getting in there and providing pseudo consultancy on what data do you have in house?  Like, how has it been stored? What methods can we use? And figuring out the solution in parallel with all of the stakeholders, even though at the face of it we're just slinging CMS licenses. So that's our heritage and when I'm when I start talking to someone who's interested in looking at the market or you get a lead or you're talking to someone at a trade show, my advice is always to take a look at a bunch of companies. Take a bunch of companies, look at all these CMSs. In all the old guard, there's a good handful of companies that I might say some names, Navori, for example, StrataCash, Scala, right. They're all pretty old guard, when we talk about the digital signage industry.  I encourage people to take a look at all the products that are on the market and once you start to get those demos and you start to go through the sales process, you can really see the DNA of where that company's come from, right? Like, are they focused on a really pleasant UX/UI experience? Are they focused on performing high end post processing within the platform itself and are good at asset generation as opposed to creating it in a third party piece of kit and bringing it in. Our DNA has always been on the data side our position is that if you're going to make good images and assets that you're going to bring into the CMS, trying to ask a creative to use a tool, that's not something they're already comfortable with, you know you're kind of paddling upstream on that. So we've always taken the position of let people use the software that they're already comfortable with. Let's not introduce a knowledge gap, bring it in. And that leads us to, well, if we're not going to focus on the asset side, let's focus on the data side. So yeah, that's where we've come from. And it's where goals are set for in the future as well.  Well, when you have literally hundreds of software options out there these days and I would suspect most of them in some way say, yes, we do data handling, we have data integration, we have APIs or whatever it may be. How does an end user discern what's real versus just you the bare essentials? Neil Chatwood: That's a good question. When the user is going through that sales process and they're doing their comparisons, they have to show you it works right? Like, we're in an industry that is extremely visual, very creative. And you and I have been to a lot of trade shows and a lot of the DSEs in our time and if you're walking around there on setup day, I've seen plenty of CMS vendors running their showreel on windows media player, right. Before the crowds arrive and it's like, well if your stuff's that good, why are you using that? Like, why are you doing it that way? So if I was a buyer or if I was a third party consultant trying to guide someone through this, I'd be like the first couple of calls you're going to have with them. You're going to get the dog and pony show, right. They're going to show you all the sexy stuff, right? Oh yeah, all works great. Do you want to bring this plug in? Get your IT team involved, right? The people who know where your data lives and what format it's in, how accessible it is. And get them to sit down with the sales engineers of these CMS companies and get them to POC and get your data into their product, right? Most CMSs at this point, they're cloud hosting their software as a service, right? If they're sitting there and they're saying this is really easy. We can just go bing bong bop and it comes in, alright then show me. Just don't accept it at face value if you really want to dig into this stuff. I don't know any software vendor out there that isn't going to entertain the idea of a proof of concept or at least won't say, yeah, sure like any salesperson just wants to get the sale. Right.  So, if you've got this accessible data, right. Let's say it's up on Azure, right. It's some kind of blob storage or if it's accessible through an API. Can you just give me the keys? Like, let me in and I'll show you it in real time and then we'll bring it in. Once they can prove that to you, then it's not about data accessibility anymore. It's then you need to start looking into the assurances that they're going to be ethical and they're going to have the same levels of governance and control over that data that is being ingested into their system. That's where a lot of our focus is now. And you've really kind of touched on that with APIs. Back in the nineties, when we were asked to integrate with all these different data sources. We were lucky if there was documentation, it was probably RS232, serial cables.. David:That's a term I haven't heard in a long time. Neil Chatwood: Yeah. Using Telnet to get in. So like, a lot of the solution building was just kind of banging your head against the wall just to even access the data and make it legible to processing that data into information and then getting that information down onto the screen. That is less of a concern now because we're at the point where any data provider, they've probably got a fully or semi documented API or they've got an SDK, a software development kit where for the most part, if we're looking to POC a data integration. It probably takes us two to four hours, right? But based on how well documented it is, if the data structure is easy to work with and more often than not, the biggest part that takes the most time is liaising with the third party organization to let us in, right?  Because the client will say, Oh yeah.we use such and such for this and we're using this product for our bus timetables, our bus scheduling. Can you guys hit that? So it's like, well, there's a good chance we've already hit it because we've got clients there already but if we haven't, then we need to start up an engagement and start talking to that third party organization. This is the sticking point, right? Because when we start talking to that third party organization that controls that data, that the client is already paying for and leveraging it in house. Depending on the attitude and market position of that third party, they might not want to let us in, right? Like there's a bunch of organizations out there that sell digital signage as a value add, right? So, a good example of that would be, the historic vendors for flight information display systems, right? Screens in airports

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed. Screens are sync'd, and content is carefully timed and triggered based on data and all kinds of variables. While most integrators and solutions providers are focused on executing on ideas and needs, the New York company ANC has for years being delivering services and software for what it calls branded entertainment. The work started with collegiate and professional sports, but more recently the company has branched into areas like retail and mass transportation - including the multi-venue, many screens experience that stretches between the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan and underground to the World Trade Center complex. I had a great chat with Joe Occhipinti, ANC's Chief Operating Officer. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Hey Joe, thank you for joining me. I've chatted with ANC in the past with Mark Stross but that's going back like six years or something like that. I'm curious, first of all, what your company does and maybe we could get into a little bit about the background of basically buying the company back from prior owners that started as a family company and now it's going back as a family-driven company, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  It was a good five or six year run we had with them. And I was with the ANC for a lot of those years. I started back in 2012. So I saw the end of Jerry's initial ownership and then into the Learfield, and then I kind of parted ways with ANC in early 2022 and found my way into a company called C10 with Jerry's son, Jerry Cifarelli Jr. and shortly into 2022, Learfield reached out to us and was interested about looking into a potential acquisition and I think Learfield's business has changed a lot, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  They were in multimedia rights and they've kind of shifted into a data-driven company with all their fans and engagement and I don't think it was core to them any longer and obviously with Jerry's father, having started the business, it was very near and dear to our hearts. We felt that ANC had all the right foundation but due to its success over 25 years, we can kind of take it back and change a few things, get the parts back together, streamline things, and get after it once again to bring the band back together. And that all happened in early 2023. We couldn't be happier to kind of be driving the boat again.  David: So, anybody if you meet at a cocktail party or a neighborhood party or whatever, says, what do you do? And more to the point, what does your company do? What do you tell them? Because it's quite involved. Joe Occhipinti: The loaded question. Hopefully they have like two drinks like one in each hand or something. But basically, the ANC consists of four business lines, we like to call it. So, the kind of the moneymaker, the thing that gets the most press is LED Technology installations and that could be the things that catch everyone's attention is obviously the large format LED displays but we're really a technology integrator, throughout the entire venue. So we have installed IPTV, we've installed TVs, we've installed full control rooms, things of that nature. And those are the apps which have a large format. I keep going back to that but the main video center hungs and arenas, center field boards and baseball. We have a 280 foot display at Westfield world trade center. Some of those marquee kinds of displays that you guys have heard and seen. Then we also have a services department or venue solutions we like to call it. After which all the pretty lights go up, we have to then maintain it and make sure it works for the life of that display or until the next renovation happens. So we actually have a fleet of operators out in the field who are going on pregame off days and making sure that modules are fixed and things are corrected. The proper content's loaded into the software and they're ready for the game presentation or for the next event or for the next change in scheduled content that's going to happen in an out of home venue. So we do a ton of that as well and then we also have our ad agency business. So that goes back to when Jerry started the whole business of TV visible signage, where we are acquiring inventory from teams that we work with or we go out and purchase it and then we also represent brands. So we'll place a discount tire behind home plate at a specific market that they would like to see or a number of different advertisers that we've been working with for years that really want to have that TV visible signage in sports our ad agency is mostly on the sports side we do some and out of home but obviously those are kind of owned by the properties and things like that so it's a little bit different and then what ties it all together is our software business. So It's called LiveSync now. It started as FasciaSoft, VisionSoft, VSoft and now it's LiveSync and it's all in the name. We specialize in syncing all your displays throughout the venue. So, somewhere like Westfield World Trade and Fulton Center, they're kind of one venue to put together. I think they have upwards of 75 or 80 displays between LCDs and LEDs and we have a constant stream of scheduled content. That's looping every 10 or 20 seconds 24*7 and you can sit there and watch in one area 5 to 10 displays all changing at the same exact time, frame to frame, everything running pixel to pixel. But the beautiful thing about live sync is what it does is we're wide open, open API, open source. If you want to play ball with everybody else that might be in the control room and we want to be able to trigger whatever else you might want to trigger with that piece of content. So if you wanted to run a home run graphic at Fenway park and you want to get your LED lights for a night game to flicker, you know when the guys around the bases. ANC Live Sync can trigger that software and it can all run synced and simultaneously. So, we really like to say that we can be the quarterback of the venue like somewhere like Wells Fargo Center. We trigger an IPTV program to have a goal animation run in the suites over whatever TV broadcast is being shown.  So, we've really come a long way in that regard. The software has come. Leaps and bounds, probably even from six years ago when you talk to Mark and we're really proud of the software that he's developed with his team. David: And this is your own software. It's not something you sell, right? It's software that you use when you're working with various customer venues.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. A lot of times our software is installed when we are doing the full install. Right. We don't really sell it out of cart. We have started to look into that, right? Like we think the software is at a point where it can do that and can be that. We did a deployment this year at I think it's PPG paints arena at Pittsburgh Penguins where another LED manufacturer got the LED job but they came to us for the software. So that was just a software standalone installation where we went in there into the control room and installed the servers and had it integrate with everything else they had there and it runs their live game presentation now. David: Right and when you're talking about being known for LED or being known for LED display control and so on but you're not a manufacturer or reseller of somebody else's product, right?  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we're not a manufacturer at all. So we do have competitors in this space, right? You know, big name, LED installers but they're all manufacturers. So, even though we were competitors, we're kind of not, you know what I mean? Like you can see a world where we can come together with some of these and enhance their business. Right. We feel

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players. They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment. So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage? That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic. I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about?  Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on. So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices.  David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV.   Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management. So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players. David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market.  Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world. There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a lot of the endpoints for Triple Play, Vitech and some of the IPTV streaming guys. So we've got loads of boxes out there in circulation and they're coming up for renewal or people wanting to upgrade to 4k, et cetera.  So that gives us a natural pull off. Okay, let's look at this market in isolation rather than just bolting onto our existing business. And then there's actually looking at the experience that we've gained in the pay TV world which has become a very competitive environment to be in. We can take a lot of that experience and truly add some value within the pro AV space with the gravitas of products and devices that we've managed previously and importantly, bringing over our video expertise onto the media player, rather than just looking at signage. We've done well where we integrate the two and we're finding a lot of customers are wanting both of them to run side by side on one device. So we can pull the huge expertise we have in enterprise video and actually put it on the same device next to, for instance, the CMS platform,  David: The markets and the use cases are, in some respects, very similar in terms of both needing very high quality of service. Like the stuff can't go down, right? Rowan Brunger: Sure. Yeah. We look at that from a number of different angles in terms of the physical player itself is truly enterprise grade, steel case designed to work in all environments 24 seven and some would argue we've even over engineered it. I mean, we've literally got boxes that have been running 24 seven in the field for 10 or 12 years solid and they're still displaying every single hour of the day.  But then there's the actual total robustness of the system and that's the inevitably when something does go wrong and things obviously do go wrong, the ability to fix that very quickly and also the ability to make sure the ongoing security and updates of that device are easy to get onto it, is as important as it running really. David: Yeah, I would say any number of CMS software companies in the industry have only in the last few years sort of realized the importance of remote device management, whereas it would have been inherent in what you do right from the start, right?  Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it's absolutely an upfront thought in where we've come from. And inevitably like a lot of things, you only realize how much you need something when you don't have it and when there's a problem. So certainly a lot of the signage projects that were involved with it, it's not their first signage project at all. They're learning from the deployments they've already made and what the pinch points were and what the really painful bits about it. And I think we're in a world now where people are taking their signage a lot more seriously with a big emphasis and cost push to get people back to the high street. For instance, when we're looking at retail, it's not just a tick box, we have a signage system in place. It's got to be absolutely robust. You've got to be able to rely on it and certainly, in times where people are paying to have their content advertised within the stores or the settings, they want to know it's actually been on the screen.  David: So you're competing in a few ways with different kinds of companies. You've got the consumer/prosumer android set top boxes that have come over from Shenzhen or whatever. You've got special purpose media play out boxes like a bright sign box and then you've got companies like SPINX who have their own box and other companies that have their own boxes and then you have PCs. So how do you kind of position yourself?  Rowan Brunger: It's a really good question. So, if I cover the first section early on, I'll probably include system on chip in that as well. So we've got a system on chip users, people have realized that there's value in having a player but maybe not as necessarily selected. One that hits all their objectives, I'm sure we say and then we've got the likes of the guys that do really high end boxes with multiple outputs. We've liked to keep this really simple, we have two products in our portfolio, for instance, we have a POE model and we have a Wifi model. So we keep it really simple. It's at a price point where we're stretching the people from the cheap consumer devices and the system on chip operators but add enough value to make that extra investment to move towards an enterprise grade player but we're underneath a lot of our true competitors that you know do fit for purpose signage players because we don't try and do everything. So I'll give you an example of that. We like to partner with specialists in areas that aren't familiar to us. So if somebody needs a four output player, we've got a partnership with the likes of Matrox to give you that. So those guys specialize in multiple output play, cards and players, we feed into it. But what that gives the customer is one platform for pretty much whatever they want to do. So our device management and the reliability is right up there with the top end competitors. But we've got a really simplistic view and what our customers like is no matter what they're displaying or what they're using the player for, it's the same player that does it all. So we've got one customer that has probably six use cases for our player within their stores. So a large rollout of about 650-700 stores in the UK and they're doing multiple things with it but they know it's a H 200 player,  that is just programmed in different ways for those different use cases and they really liked that from a maintenance point of view. So we've kept things really simple. We are definitely a step up and a professional grade player to challenge the lower end operators in the market and in terms of the higher end guys, I think we're hitting a price point. They can't, so we can get mass adoption from our product and we've got the right partnerships in place to cover all use cases with the guys that lead the industry in those areas. David: So for the age 200 pl

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are lots of reasons why digital signage and digital out of home ad networks don't have audio - the biggest reason being that the majority of people (especially staff who are in that environment all day) don't want to hear messages over and over. Many speakers have been stabbed with forks or seen their audio cables snipped by workers who could not take it day after day. But there also cases in which audio would be welcomed, and very useful. There are different technologies out there that can enhance and complement the messaging on screens, and headset devices that can be borrowed or rented, so that audio can be added to things like museums and attractions or live sports events. The challenge is that the technology used might be old and limited, or the set-up requires maintaining, cleaning, charging and keeping track of a lot of hardware. A Montreal company called DVOX is taking a different approach - making audio streams from live events and from screens available over local area networks and WiFi, so that anyone with a smartphone and headphones of some kind can launch a simple web app and start listening. The primary markets, I think, are with big sporting events and conferences, but it's also the sort of thing that has applications for digital signage and digital out of home. I spoke with DVOX president Sebastien Boulanger. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Sebastien, thank you for joining me. I know very little about DVOX. Could you give me a rundown of what the company is?  Sebastien Boulanger: DVOX is a fast-growing startup at the moment that is offering a new generation technology for live audio streaming purposes in several domains.  How does it work? Sebastien Boulanger: Easy enough. DVOX is taking and acquiring any analog audio source, that might be coming from a live microphone, sound desk, broadcasting trailer, audio extractor devices, or whatever you please. We're acquiring analog audio input and then converting it to digital to stream it directly over the local area network, meaning that guests or visitors have to be connected to the right WiFi to be granted access to the audio stream. We're doing so that the stream goes out through a webpage, so the end user doesn't have to install any mobile apps or whatever. It's only a web browser page, basically.  So the idea is you're seeing stuff on a screen at whatever venue you're in, whether it's a sports bar or a sports stadium or some other place, you can basically hear the audio without, the having to crank the speakers to 11 for, that to happen? Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Let me give you a couple of examples here that might be helpful here. Let's say you are in a sports bar, as you were just mentioning, and you have plenty of screens in front of you. So, which of those screens will be on the speaker boxes? So basically you can have ambiance, music, whatever for all the other guests, but if you feel like you want to hear a football match, you simply have to have the audio of that screen.  So with DVOX what you can do is have all the different audio feeds running inside of the system And then by being connected to the right WiFi, you will be able to choose which audio feed you want to hear, so basically, through a regular webpage,, as simple as browsing, you have access to all of the audio feed that the venue is offering in live, in real-time. You only need a QR code to get onto the event page, and if you're on the right WiFi, there you go; you have all the feeds.  You're using a smartphone and a web app to get this, as opposed to asking people to download our special app and go through a bunch of hoops?  Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. And that's why we're having a lot of pull these days in the sports industries, in the congress center industries as well, educational because any audio source can be streamed through WiFi. We're just back from Detroit, where we're showcasing our technology to a league, which is called the UFL, and in the meantime, we present it to the NFL Lions and the Active Forward Field, and basically, what these guys are offering is having a 60,000 seats venue with powerful WiFi coverage. So now, with DVOX, they can have any exclusive content because it's not a broadcast. It's a local stream. It's a huge difference here. So basically, they can have any audio feed, and give it to all of the attendee's, ticket owners that are inside of the building to have exclusive content. So, while your eyes are looking at a football game, you can have an audio description, you can have a quarterback microphone, you can have a bench microphone, you can have anything you please, basically.  As long as the organizer decides to make that available, you can capture it through your devices and then use it. Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, that is correct. Mainly what we're doing is installing physically the device, the DVOX hardware piece of equipment next to the broadcasting trailer, let's call it in the loading dock, if you please, because all the audio feeds run through that truck, basically broadcasting trailer. But before getting those streams to the sound desk and on air, we can have those same feeds and put them back in the venue for the guests that are attending.  If we rollback a little bit of discussion to the digital signage here, just to give you another example, it might be helpful to understand with another example. Let's say you are in an airport. So you are here two hours, three hours prior to your flight. You already have your headphones. There's already WiFi in the airport, and there's, I don't know, in between 600-2000 screens all over the airport. All of those screens are on mute. But why? Because it would be a mess to try to have sound coming out of those. That's for sure.  So now, you have plenty of apps that could be available, and some of them are really neat. I'm not arguing these, but you might be a tourist with a foreign SIM card, not having a data plan or whatever. With DVOX, basically, you log into the WiFi, simply browse to the airport webpage that is offering sound, and if all of those are video feed or backed by an audio feed that the airport wants to give you, then all of a sudden you have access to the audio feed for all the screens without the need to install anything, no latency, and then, basically, you choose whatever you want to hear without reading the subtitles all the time.  I travel a lot. I go through a lot of airports, and the quality of the WiFi varies pretty widely, from airport to airport, sometimes it's amazing, and sometimes it's dreadful. What kind of impact does introducing these audio streams to an airport that maybe already has as much demand as it can handle, what's that going to do? Sebastien Boulanger: That's actually a really good question, and here's one thing I would like to explain in detail here, if I may. WiFi is one thing, internet access is another one. So, in your example here, when you're saying the WiFi is weak, is it the WiFi strength, the coverage, or the internet access? Because sometimes, the issue is not necessarily the strongness of the signal, meaning you have good reception over the WiFi antennas that are installed all over the airports. There are so few nets, but yeah, you're right, sometimes the administrator just locks to a certain speed, the up and down traffic to avoid having a bottleneck to the networks for somebody with, I don't know, streaming live or whatever.  The thing is, with DVOX, when you are on to the WiFi, you simply download, if I could say, the visual of the event page. So, simply by browsing, you're accessing a webpage. Same thing as when you are asking for google.com, and you have the search bar popping in. So basically you only have a visual that's coming in. But as soon as you click on play, all the audio feeds are kept local. Your cell phone has a direct path to the hardware, which is inside the building. So to answer your question, having slow internet is not even a problem as long as you have WiFi coverage, and even with only one bar of signal, that says we're enough because we're only carrying audio around on purpose. So here, in that scenario, we are using 48 kilobits per second per user per listener. 48 kilobits is nothing. Those antennas are built to manage one gigabyte of data transfer. Everything stays local. So there is no round-time trip latency with the cloud or internet, whatever. So we have less than 0.04 seconds delay. So on the WiFi, it's really light.  Unlike if you're trying to send video around, which should be very heavy on a network if there was a lot of demand, audio is nothing.  Sebastien Boulanger: Yeah, absolutely. Plus I'd like to add that since we know that we are only audio for obvious reasons, all the web browsers are behaving the same way. And for any network, might it be public or private or whatever WiFi infrastructure, we are considered as voice over IP. So, therefore, there's already pre-configured, quality of servicing because, of course, people sometimes are having Messenger calls or FaceTime or whatever. So the audio goes smoothly through any network, and all the web browsers, such as Safari, Chrome, Edge, whatever browser you might be using are behaving the same way because they think it's a web radio.  So you can kill your screen put your cell phone in your pocket and keep listening for hours without dragging down your battery. If we were to have video content or subtitles or video bumper or whatever, we would be having issues with being polyvalent with all the web browsers they are not behaving the same way.  So this concept and need has been around for a while now. The idea that I wish I could hear what was on that screen, but they've kept the sound down for whatever reason, or I wish I could hear this or that.  There have been other attempts in the past to do this sort of thing. I remember t

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I'm not really joking when I write about needing to find my decoder ring if I am going to write something about an announcement from a digital out of home ad tech company. There are exceptions, of course, but more often than not, I read this stuff and I just go cross-eyed. So I was pleased to learn of a new education-focused initiative called DOOH Academy, which exists to raise the level of understanding of how things work for operators, end-users and the people who make ad-buying and planning decisions. I was also pleased to learn - though I pretty much knew - that I'm not the only one confused as hell by how technology like programmatic is marketed. The Academy is the smiling, weeks-old baby of ad industry veteran Jeff Gunderman, who saw a need to get quality, vendor-neutral educational material out there that helps people get up a steep and slippery learning curve. He has an interesting model - in that the academy is subsidized by companies in this business who also understand everyone benefits from better awareness and deeper knowledge. We had a really good chat about the roots of the online academy, how it works, and also how the industry has responded. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jeff, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown on what DOOH Academy is all about?  Jeff Gunderman: Yes, the DOOH Academy is the Digital Out of Home Academy, and it is an education initiative I started that is designed to help people understand all of the advances going on in digital and programmatic media for the out-of-home media industry.  I had been a media operator for about 15 years running a company called Eye Corp Media, which was an Australian-based media company, we did both static and digital signage around the country and places like shopping malls, bars, restaurants, and cinema lobbies, and when I sold that business, I essentially was talking with a number of individuals in the industry and recognized that there was a real gap in education and understanding around digital and place-based media, and at the same time, when I sold my company, I started to have some requests from media companies and ad tech firms for consulting work and that clarified for me, really the gap that existed in our industry as we are moving to more of a digital and programmatic world, people are very confused, and so after talking with a number of people in the industry, I felt that we really needed a single point of education to help people understand digital place-based media. I get asked quite a bit if I'm doing any consulting, I don't really do much these days, but when I get asked specifically about doing consulting around digital out-of-home networks, I just say, I really can't help you because I don't fully understand what's going on, I don't understand the nomenclature, everybody seems to market themselves a little bit differently, even if they're doing the same damn thing. It's just overwhelmingly complicated to me, so I do one of these things with my hands up beside me going, I don't even want to touch that.  Jeff Gunderman: You know what? It's much simpler than it seems, but because it's such a massive change from the way we used to plan media with spreadsheets we used to sell a location, or a billboard on the side of a street corner,  You used to sell location and audience. Jeff Gunderman: Location and audience, and now, really what we're selling is I'll use the term audience again, but audience and impressions. So it used to be more boards and ad loops and you'd sell a flip on a board, and nowadays people, especially advertisers, and marketers are really looking to maximize their reach of a very particular audience and the beautiful part about it is that data companies have come in and enabled out-of-home media operators to sell their media based on the audience that's in front of that media, they've enabled the ability to understand the measurement of the audience that actually goes by their boards, and so with all this data and measurement that has come into the space, out-of-home media operators can now, especially digital ones, can now sell their media the same way that social, mobile, online media is sold today, and by the programmatic partners that have come in, have enabled the transactional component of that to happen the same way that digital, social, mobile is being transacted today. S we really are in an amazing position as an industry now to gain a share of the marketing spend. But to do that, we've got to better understand programmatic, especially digital out of home and all the data that sits behind it, and that's what the DOOH Academy is really designed to do to elevate the knowledge level of both media operators and agencies or buyers of place-based, digital and programmatic media. Now, if it's increasingly similar to the way that you plan and buy online and the way you plan and buy mobile, why then are media planners confused by digital out-of-home if it's the same sort of process and everything else? Are they using different naming conventions and things?   Jeff Gunderman: There are a few reasons behind that. The first one is that, especially in the United States, a lot of the people buying this media are out-of-home media specialists. Out-of-home media used to be so complicated to buy, and in some cases, it's still not as smooth as you would like, but it used to be so complicated to buy because there were so many different media operators and so many different options that putting together a plan was a massive undertaking.  Now with digital and especially with the programmatic infrastructure that's out there, you can actually go into a tool and a planning tool or a demand-side platform and you can actually program in the audience you want to reach, the locations you want to be in, all kinds of criteria, and it will connect and pull down the inventory that's available that meets those demand criteria and with the push of a button, essentially you can book a campaign across many different media operators, many different locations, many different boards, and many different media types. And it's so much simpler than it used to be, and it's so much more accurate in your ability to reach an audience. So what we're finding is that out-of-home media, which used to be mainly for branding, can be much more part of the full funnel of audience conversion.  Which gives access to more, better budget, right? Before, it was just gross impressions, like I know that a hundred thousand cars go down this highway every week, and therefore we can estimate that many people are going to see it. Now you can get into much richer data that will tell you, you know, give you a much better sense of how many people actually did look as opposed to that gross number. Jeff Gunderman: That's exactly right. So not only you're tapping into bigger budgets because now, all of a sudden, those digital budgets were designed for activities other than branding, such as store visits, web traffic, or driving conversions. All of that is now trackable within the digital out-of-home space and so we're seeing people who may be used to spending with social, mobile, and online, take a much more serious look at digital out-of-home, not only for that reason, but also because digital out-of-home has such a lower density for fraud and it's a safer place to advertise, and now you can measure it, which is really driving an opportunity for space. I have a theory, and you can tell me it's stupid or spot on. God knows I have no pride of ownership of it. But I get a ton of press releases every week from different digital out-of-home ad tech companies, and they'll say, we've just done this, or we've partnered with these people, and so on, and I will try to read the things and decode what on earth they're going on about, and I've sent notes back to him saying, I've read this five times, I still don't know what the hell this is about, and you're saying it's a lot simpler than maybe I think it is, or the world thinks it is. But my theory is that the marketers are having to change their descriptions, their naming, and everything else about their product versus the other ones just to make it sound distinct. Jeff Gunderman: There are nuances within digital and place-based, specifically within programmatic that are really the catalyst for why the DOOH Academy is in such high demand right now, and it's because if you look at my model, I am funded primarily through sponsorship of companies, unbiased, and nobody can have any kind of exclusivity and when they talk in an educational format that has to be generic and not self-promoting. But what I've found is these competing ad tech agencies, trade associations, media operators, and companies have all come together to support foundational learning that enables people to get to a level of understanding of how the entire ecosystem works together. And then what it has allowed is the same, let's say ad tech companies that are sponsoring, to not have to focus on getting people up to a basic level of education, but then they can focus on really educating on the nuances of their specific platform and the benefits that they drive. And so I think that email communication that you're getting or the other communications you're getting are today confusing. If you went through a digital out-of-home academy course, you learned the full infrastructure of how everything works together from A to Z. Now, all of a sudden, it's going to make sense what that specific company's particular value proposition is and many of these ad tech companies have very specific value propositions that make sense, but they make sense in the context of greater knowledge of what's going on across the industry, and that's where we're really designed to do is to bring the entire industry up to a specific level of education and knowledge base. Is this aimed primari

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When Terminal C was opened at Orlando's sprawling main airport, I was intrigued from a distance by the experiential digital features integrated into the new space. They got my attention because they were genuinely interesting, but also because they were put together by a company completely unfamiliar to me - Gentilhomme, from Montreal. In the time since that project went live, and won numerous awards, Gentilhomme (which is French for Gentleman) has also delivered experiential work for Nashville's airport. And the team is in the middle of a job for Houston's airport, and another airport on the US east coast that's NDA'd for now. I've been trying to organize a podcast chat with founder Thibaut Duverneix for a while now, and we finally got it together recently. We spoke about signature projects, and the ideation and design process. But we also get into the background of the company, which has roots in things like rock band tours, and has some direct ties to a couple of very well-known Montreal companies that are also all about experience - Cirque du Soleil and Moment Factory. NOTE - This interview was recorded before ISE, where the company picked up an armload of trophies at the global Digital Signage Awards. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thibaut, thank you for joining me. You describe Gentilhomme as an Earth-based multimedia studio. What does that encompass? Because you guys are into a whole bunch of things.  Thibaut Duverneix: Hey David, It's a really good question. The idea is that the studio was built around my own practice as an artist and as a multimedia director at first, and I come from fine arts and computer science, so I like to do all things that are very different and, it's been very hard to describe what the studio does because the studio was built using that philosophy, and most of the time people would ask you, don't you want to specialize in anything, like video content and I was like, no, I don't, we like to do a lot of different things and they go from interactive sculpture or inflatables to building placemaking for airports and content for rock shows.  So I guess the best description was, around that, we want to create experiences, and the medium doesn't really matter.  So when people come into the office, they never quite know what they're coming into, right?  Thibaut Duverneix: Pretty much, but luckily, the casting at the studio is very broad, and everybody's like a Swiss Army knife.  How and why did it get started? Thibaut Duverneix: This is my second studio. I had another one before, and we were doing a lot of the first experiential work on the web in Flash at the time.  I had forgotten about Flash, for a good reason.  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, exactly. But I was also doing music videos and rock shows, and eventually, I wanted to focus more on directing and doing things in real life with people. So I went my own way, and I built Gentilhomme more like my holding company in a way for what I was doing, and one-day Cirque du Soleil called me, and they had this show in France they wanted to do it for a theme park, which was a multimedia show while heavily relying on multimedia and I thought I was just going to direct it. but then they were like, no, we have five weeks, and we need turnkey. Can you also just make it happen? So I built a pop-up studio to do that, and then they said, Hey, do you want to do our next big top tour? And I said, yeah, and then I had a choice of do I keep doing my director work or do I build a studio with the people that I want, and do it the way I want it because it's never a one-man show, you need a team to do that, and that's what I did because I wanted to capitalize on my knowledge.  And Cirque is in Montreal as you are.  Thibaut Duverneix: Exactly. We're all children of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal.  Yeah. I was going to ask about that later, but we might as well get into it. What is it about Montreal, because, in my world, in multimedia digital signage world, there's Jean Théon, there's the big guy, Moment Factory, and there's also Arsenal Media and so on, and there's a real creative community in that city and it's particularly strong when it comes to the digital signage place-based work.  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. I always say it comes from Cirque, I don't know if I'm right. I think it's one reason Cirque du Soleil was the first to push the boundaries of what can be done, and it created a lot of side studios, people that actually build highly complicated stages and animatronics and stage equipment, but also people like Moment Factory, who started doing parties for Guilherme Liberté and stuff, and then, they turned out to be who they are now, but, I believe like Cirque was a big part of it and also all of the tech, there was like, a big tech ball, it started with the web and engineering, and now it's a lot of AI, and tax credits help with that a lot too, and there was a big VFX industry also. VFX is part of it. There are a lot of gaming companies in Montreal, right?  Thibaut Duverneix: VFX and gaming, yeah. Ubisoft is here, and all of the big VFX shops are here, too.  So at one point, for a while there, you were working with a Moment Factory. How long were you there?  Thibaut Duverneix: I was never there. I was always freelancing and part of the family. My first project with them was when I was the Interactive Multimedia Director for the Nine Inch Nails show when I was 28. I think that was the first time we started collaborating together., and I helped them with a lot of projects.  So when did you start Gentilhomme?  Thibaut Duverneix: 2014.  And where are you now with it? Is it still a freelance collaborative, or is it like a full company with offices and full-time staff and all that stuff?  Thibaut Duverneix: It's a full-on operation now. We are about 25 people full-time, and we expand depending on the projects. So obviously, when we do airports and things like this, we could be 80 on the project, but I like to keep it small and do only a few projects at a time. Everybody is very senior here. So that was my idea of the studio being small with highly competent people and doing only a few projects at a time. Yeah, it was, I went to Moment Factory’s offices about, I'm thinking six years now, pre-COVID and I met with the folks there, and one really interesting comment that they made was they were so busy that they couldn't even deal with all the inbound opportunities that they had. So they were quite happy to pass along work for jobs that they either just didn't have the bandwidth to do, or weren't really in their wheelhouse or whatever. I'm curious if your company collaborates at all with your former contractor at Moment Factory.  Thibaut Duverneix: It's been a while, but we're always happy to collaborate. Montreal is a very small community.  Let's talk about some of the work that you do. We could talk about music videos and Cirque du Soleil and all those sorts of things, but given this is a digital signage podcast, we should probably talk about that. The projects that come to mind for me that I'm most familiar with would be Orlando Airport and then Nashville Airport. Can you describe both of them or describe one of them?  Thibaut Duverneix: Yeah, absolutely. It was a game-changer for us. We entered the pandemic, we were finishing a stadium tour for Fall Out Boy, Weezer, and Green Day, and obviously, that got shelved in March, at the same time we won the RSP for the Orlando Airport Terminal C which was very big for us. For anybody, it would have been big, but especially for us, and yeah, we went full-on with it. We created more than five hours of content that's across all styles of content, there is a lot of live-action content, a lot of computer-generated content, and a lot of interactive content.  So, we designed and created all of the multimedia content across those three giant media features. I think ultimately they only built two, but there is one that's called the Movement Vault, which is a double-sided circular media feature. Each panel is about 4k inside of it, and outside, it's 4millimeters so I think they are about two gauges, and so outside it’s only video, and we wanted to create that sense of place and oasis, something very calm and the trompe of a wall that would transform into a garden to invite you to get inside of it, and inside of it, we created a full 360 degree, interactive scenery in Unreal, that's using AI body tracking, so basically the people would use their movements to interact with the scenes, and we also created a lot of underwater 360 degrees, live-action footage of manatees and landmarks, from central Florida. On the second media feature, it's three giant flat LED screens that look like windows in the corridor, and here the idea was to create something that looks like a window with a lot of live action. So we created those trompe l'oeil effects where you really feel like you're looking through a window, and again, we wanted to showcase more the unknown of Orlando than the known. So we didn't really focus much on amusement parks and entertainment, and we really focused on nature and things that people don't necessarily expect from Central Florida.  Was there a brief of any kind or, like, how did you arrive at what was done there? Thibaut Duverneix: Oh yeah, for sure. So they had a multimedia architect, Marcella Sardi, and she was in charge of the vision, and the RFP came after. So she designed the media features, and she had a vision for what the content should be. As an architect, basically, the brief was the known and the unknown of Orlando, right? And so we went with that, and we collaborated with her very closely, and it turned out pretty good, I think.  It's challenging working in airports, is it not?  I'm assuming the lead times involved, but also some of the nuts and bolts stuff like getting access into post-security are

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The UK startup PassageWay operates with the interesting mission of using technology that nudges people to make well-informed and more sustainable decisions about how they get from A to B. That's done by thinking through and developing the presentation layer for Real-Time Passenger Information content that's then run on digital signs, most notably for the bus systems around the city of London. PassageWay's business model is - in simple terms - taking the rich, real-time data available for routes and stops and making it presentable and digestible for transport authorities, like Transport For London, which pays the start-up to do so. The logical notion is that the more that good, real-time information is made available to people, the more the transport services will be used. While London Underground stations are well-equipped with information and the services are pretty predictable, there's not as much available to the millions who use less-predictable surface transport services like the iconic double-decker red buses. I had a good chat about all this recently with PassageWay co-founder Chris Johns. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Chris, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what PassageWay is all about?  Chris Johns: Thanks so much for inviting us to your podcast today. PassageWay is all about generating demand for public transport by leveraging real-time information. We do this by putting it onto digital signs that are displayed on host-supplied screens and typically these screens only require a modern browser to display the digital sign.  You made a point of saying the host supplied. There's been a history through the years of companies who've done things like put in the infrastructure, the screens, and so on and then run content on them with the idea that content would be Interrupted so to speak by advertising. You're not going down that path.  Chris Johns: No, we're not. Typically those sorts of plays are similar to JC Decaux or Clear Channel who have long had this relationship with transport authorities whereby they will fund the deployment of bus shelters in return for an ad revenue share. We supply transport for London with digital signs that are displayed at bus shelters but also within their other infrastructure like bus stations. But really we're more citywide about putting digital signs into places such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, offices, and such in order to generate demand from the sort of non-traditional locations and encouraging the people within those locations to consider public transport. So this doesn't sound like a traditional business, you said, this is about generating demand to use public transport services and so on versus, more traditionally, this is about making money somehow or other.  Chris Johns: Yeah. I think that's the difference, a lot of those traditional plays actually put the real-time information secondary to their primary objective which is to earn revenue from the display of ads. And to my mind, that means a poor customer experience and the poor customer experience means reduced demand. If you think about traditional bus shelters, they are actually incredibly complex for many people trying to navigate the public transport information. If you're coming to London, for example, trying to find out which is the right bus? Is it going to go to your preferred stop? How long is it going to take? Is there any disruption information? If you don't have it, it will make you want to go and choose a different mode of transport. So, you probably take a taxi or you may end up using your own car, for example. Actually what we're trying to do is to show people that public transport is really easy to use. It's really accessible. It can get you from A to B pretty fast. And if you're aware of the onward travel information from the stop you're trying to get to, then actually, you can make the whole journey much easier and less stressful, for many people. So this almost seems like a community initiative but there is a business model behind this, right?  Chris Johns: Yeah, there is. The business model is pretty straightforward, to be honest. We are paid by the transport authority or their contract partners and our job is to provide these digital signs and the digital signs generate demand. So in a different way of thinking, you might consider the real time information as being the best form of advertising for public transport. Certainly better than a static advert, in my opinion, anyway.  Your company's efforts are to aggregate the data, make sure it's handled accurately and always up to date, and so on. Why would transport for London not do that themselves?  Chris Johns: Yeah, they do. Transport for London is the world's largest integrated transport network and they have the global leading data strategy. And they're famed the world over for their open API strategy. That means we can access their data and we pretty much have unfettered use of that data. And so do many other developers as well and we can Be sure that the data we've got is true and accurate. What we do is that we take that information and we plot it around a particular location and we bring it together with a legible London-style wayfinding map, where we plot the access points onto it and then we bring it all together into a sort of nice looking digital sign that's easy to understand and act upon.  So we're not generating data or we're not modifying data, all we're doing is bringing data together into an easy-to-understand format.  So you're doing the presentation layer that in theory, transport for London could do themselves but you're good at it. it's not what they want to focus on. So they're happy to work with you to do that part of it.  Chris Johns: That's right. Yeah. We are a supplier to TFL and they use lots of other different tech suppliers whether it's to build their award winning TFL go app or to build bus shelters whatever it may be. They have lots of different suppliers bringing their individual skill sets into play and that's basically what we do. But I think that one of the things that we do bring to the party because we're a tech startup is innovation and the ability to pivot quickly and come up with sort of entrepreneurial new ideas that we can bring into play and throw them out to TFL and say, listen, what do you think about this? And so we can move quite quickly.  Did you have to go to them to sell into this or is your company kind of a result of being in discussions with them and starting the company because this opportunity existed? Chris Johns: It's a mix between the two actually. So TFL actually issued a tender some time ago that we want to produce the platform and we've taken it on from there and given it a life of its own and extended the service beyond London as well. So working with other transport authorities and other partners outside of London.  So this is audio, so it makes it a little difficult to visualize things. But can you give me some sense of how this manifests itself within the transport system? And then in public and private buildings.  Chris Johns: Okay. I'll give you a couple of examples. For example, in every bus station across London, there are digital totems. And those digital totems are a bit like an airport or a train station where you've got a central totem and it shows all the services where they're going and whereabouts within the bus station they're leaving from and if there's any disruptions. So we look after all of those for London. Another example would be smart bus shelters, whereby you could have a large format digital screen with detailed route maps for each of the services that are running via that bus shelter with real time information on all those routes plotted not on a fixed JPEG of a route but actually plotted live onto a legible London style map. With onward time estimation to reach all the onward stops, onward travel information such as the tube status, any disruption notifications and more so that people can quite easily contextualize their journey and see if it's going to be running smoothly all the way through. Another example, could be at a bus stop itself. So across London, there are about 18,000 bus stops and only about 2000 bus shelters. So only about 2000 of these locations have any real time information. So what we can do for those ones is put in QR codes and customers can scan the QR codes and open up a real time digital sign on their personal device with no registration, no login, no heavy download. It's just a purely web based solution that shows all the upcoming departures for that particular stop with detailed route information, onward stop information et cetera and then links to download the official apps. So it's like an interstitial page where it's easy for everyone to access. Hopefully you're going to convert more people into downloading the official apps. Now the official app is the TFL official app or yours?  Chris Johns: No, we don't do apps. I'm afraid. One of the points about what we're doing is about trying to make everything as open and as accessible as possible. So there is no registration, there's no login, there's no download. All you need Is a modern web browser and you can access the information. We don't ask anything from the customers. We don't track them. We don't do anything really about that.  Yeah. That's one of the problems when you go to an unfamiliar city and you decide I'm going to use their transport system. You go to the app store to find the app for the mass transport system in that city. And there's five or six of them and you don't know which one is official or which one's riddled with ads or not updated or God knows what. Chris Johns: Yeah. In London, I can't really speak for other cities because our primary focus is London, that's our area of expertise. But there are hundreds of thousands of people who are digital

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT A LOT of digital signage software companies have identified education as a key vertical market, but very few have the history, experience and platform for education like Carousel Digital Signage, which got into the business in 1997 because of an ask from a public school system. I had a really good chat, one that flew by, with Eric Henry, the president of Carousel, which is the digital signage side of a larger Minneapolis company called Tightrope Media Systems. The Tightrope side of the business focuses on broadcast. In our chat, Eric and I get into the opportunities and challenges of working with K-12 schools, what typically goes in, and the types of content that help create a sense of community. He has some interesting thoughts about taking marketer's approach to messaging in schools, and getting beyond the predictable. We also touch towards the end on the higher ed market, which has some core similarities in terms of need, but is also quite different. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Eric, thank you for joining me. Happy New Year. Eric Henry: Happy New Year.  I've done a podcast in the past with your colleague, JJ, but it's been a few years. For those who don't know much about Carousel, can you give me the background? I know that you grew out of tightrope media systems. Some people will know that, but others won't. You've been around since 1997, maybe not you personally but the company.  Eric Henry: Yeah, correct. Personally, I haven't been at the company since 97, but I've certainly been around since 1997. But yeah, Carousel started out as Tightrope Media Systems, actually still a division of Tightrope Media Systems.  So there are two divisions of the company, Carousel, which is the digital signage group and then Cablecast, which is actually our community television broadcast, part of the company and so I actually run the Carousel business. We did start in 97. 1996-97, It's debatable in terms of paperwork and those types of things, but after a long time, it actually came out of the education space. So, our first customer was Wayzata Public Schools in Minnesota for Carousel some 26 years ago, and we've been in that space for quite a long time. Obviously signage lends to many other vertical markets, so we are certainly in other verticals but our founder story is rooted in the education space  And going way back to the late nineties, what was a school district looking for at that point? And is it pretty much what they're looking for today? Eric Henry: Quite a bit different today. So back in the late nineties, there were certainly much more tube televisions and we could update lunch menus and those types of things and that was really very early days of putting content on screens that wasn't broadcast.  So that was really the early days where schools were looking for a solution that wasn't really hard because there were only a couple of things that could actually put content on screens but they were fairly prohibitive because a lot of them were designed for much more retail, graphic intensive folks and not necessarily teachers. Right. Yeah. I remember back to the mid to late nineties, there were early-stage quasi digital out of home companies that were in the business of going to school districts and schools in general and saying, Hey, we'll put a TV in the classrooms of your school and you can run school messaging on there. But by the way, there's going to be advertising there too, to pay for the technology. That's a model that didn't work.  Eric Henry: No, it did not. And I think we've really been trying to find our way as an industry, for quite a long time. If you look at the early days, I remember being at a trade show and there were two higher eds from the same state. And I asked them why they wanted to do a digital signage project and the answer was basically because the other one was going to do it. So, that's not a very compelling reason, nor is that really a sustainable industry. If we don't really understand what the value is that we're going to bring, why are we doing this thing? And I think that has really been a long journey for us and we've been searching and wrestling with that question. We did a signage project because it was cool and because nobody else was doing it or because we wanted to put something on these new flat panel displays we wanted to buy but it's very different now in terms of what's important and what schools are thinking about when they're putting content on screens. And what a K-12 environment does versus what a higher ed environment does can be very different, correct?  Eric Henry: They can be the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the same. How you reach that goal may look a bit different, right? In a K-12 versus a higher ed. I would say one of the major things, so the thing that is the same, what we see and this is true for any organization, our corporate customers as well in the retail space. This idea that people feel connected to their community, like the heart of us, is what we can do to give an organization tools to keep their people connected. Ironically, we're suggesting more use of technology but using technology to actually bring people together in a relationship face to face. So the more that people are aware of what's happening within their school and things they can participate in. So extracurricular clubs or the sports scores from last night from the football team or the auditions for the play coming up. Those types of things or recognizing people within their community is really creating more sense of community through visual communication is really at the core of what K-12s do and higher eds do. Now it varies a little bit. Higher ed, for example, the big challenge is getting students on campus and getting students registered for classes and those types of things. So the campus visits weekends and promotes what that university has to offer. So it is a bit more of a marketing tool for prospective students and those types of things, when you're trying to attract them to campus. And then the signage becomes a tool that says, Hey, you're in the residence hall, just so you know, seven o'clock on Thursday, this math club is meeting or you can go into the writing lab and get a review of your paper. So, that is how across education it is creating community and creating awareness of all the services and things that we're providing to help you be successful. So, let's talk first about K-12. What does that environment or what does the build typically look like for a school within a larger school district? And I guess I'm also asking, do you sell to a school district or is it school by school? Eric Henry: We certainly have had both approaches. So in the K-12 space, what is interesting is it really depends on the district. And now there are districts that have standardized on the Google ecosystem. There are school districts that have standardized on the Apple ecosystem and there are school districts that actually split between Google ecosystem and primary grades and Apple for higher secondary schools. So, in terms of environments that we see, we see typically a Google or an Apple environment or a mixed environment between those two, sometimes Microsoft.  So does that matter to you?  Eric Henry: It matters a little bit in terms of how we're thinking about a deployment, not a ton to us directly at the Carousel. We obviously have to be mindful of customers' choices, right? So, there are certainly relationships that we have that are more ingrained or stronger or support devices that we have. We do have opinions around what devices we feel work best but if you've already made device choices, as Carousel, we need to work to support those devices. So with that said… In a Chrome OS environment.  Eric Henry: Yes. But the qualifier on that environment, is it to the same level of support and performance as the Apple ecosystem or the BrightSign ecosystem? No. They run on Chrome but we don't invest top tier resources in terms of making sure that's the prime environment. And honestly, because we don't have a lot of customers running on Chrome. That's what it comes down to for us. So as far as a K-12, what we see most often is common area signage and so not necessarily in the classroom. So when you ask a school, Hey, are you doing digital signage? They would say, yes, we have five devices in common areas. So in each of the main hallways or however they break out their building. Sometimes they've had it at a district but many times it started at one school because there was a champion within a school. Sometimes we have a district that has three or four different solutions. Some every once in a while, we have district-wide initiatives and we prefer that because whether you're going with us or a competitor, we think it makes more sense to think about your communication strategy more holistically. So it's a little bit challenging if you have three or four different solutions. And I would say we see more individual schools choosing than we see full districts choosing. We've seen mostly common areas and sometimes, Hey, can we do something in the lunchroom? And what we've really tried to encourage schools to be thinking about is how can we get into the classroom? beyond the common areas because the reality is when I observed my kids in school they're cruising through the hallway as quickly as they can to get to class. So, there wasn't a lot of dwell time in common areas unless you're at lunch. So how can we get into the classroom in a way that's affordable?  And that's been a big challenge over the years with the devices that we have and especially the mix. As I mentioned, there's Google and there's Apple. There's also Lots of other devices that we see in the classroom. We have Immersive, we have Screenbeam, all these other multi-purpose devices that we see in classrooms, we've really tried to thi

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Interactive floor projections and video walls have been around for well more than a decade now, but  there hasn't really been widespread adoption for a bunch of reasons - like cost, complication and the simple reality that a lot of what's been shown to date hasn't had much of a point. A Canadian company, Lumo Interactive, is in a nice position to change all of that. The hardware is simple, the software is affordable and scalable, and the solution comes with some 300 templated content apps that help users tune the visual experience to the needs of the venue and audience. Instead of visual eye candy, these apps are  things like fun, engaging games. The straightforward pitch for the product, LUMOplay, is that the software can make any digital display interactive. The top-end for the software side of the solution is $74 US a month, so it is very affordable. And the developers have put years of work into ensuring the set-ups are hyper-stable and can be managed remotely. We've all walked through flagship retail spaces and seen one-off experiential set-ups that were hung up or sitting unused because they were more about short term bling than ongoing usage. The other interesting aspect of LUMOplay is that the main intended use-case is classrooms, with these interactive pieces used as a way to engage kids in schools, particularly kids who have sensory issues, autism or ADHD. I had a great chat right before Christmas with Founder and CEO Meghan Athavale. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Meghan, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what LUMO does, and is LUMOplay the product and LUMO Interactive the company?  Meghan Athavale: Yes, LUMO Interactive is the company, LUMOplay is the product, and what we do is we make it easy to scale large-scale interactive digital experiences. These are experiences on digital displays that react either through motion, touch, or gesture. Okay, this would be everything from something on a video wall to something on the floor, and a lot of digital signage people, if they've been around this space for a good long time, they may recall through the years seeing “activations” where there's a floor projection. I remember there was a company called Reactrix back in the mid-2000s that was doing this sort of thing. So it's like that, but I'm sure a lot more advanced and different, just because of the years and technology.  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, it's pretty much exactly like that; where it comes from the days of Reactrix and the early days of companies like GestureTek and Eyeclick is that we've moved more towards a software-only platform.  When this technology first hit the scene, you needed to have special hardware. You couldn't just go down to Best Buy and buy a 3D camera. Now that the hardware is more ubiquitous and more affordable, it's possible to have a hardware-agnostic, software-only solution, and that's what we are. So this kind of, to borrow a phrase, democratizes this whole thing in that in the old days, it would have been incredibly expensive and complicated to do, and now it's not, right?  Meghan Athavale: That's right, yeah. I think we also just have multiple decades of information about what people are using this technology for so we're able to templatize a lot of the experiences so that companies don't need to have development teams in order to make some of these simpler interactions, they can just do an asset swap.  It's the natural progression of a lot of these things where websites used to be hand-coded and then we went into WYSIWYG and then we went into systems like Wix and Squarespace. We're like the Wix or Squarespace of interactive digital displays. So if I want to do an interactive digital display, it's like me using WordPress and buying a theme?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, to a certain extent, exactly.  So you guys have done all the heavy lifting, so to speak, in terms of the backend coding, how everything maps, but also, I think I saw there were something like 200 different apps in a library?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah. There are 300 pre-made experiences, which they're constantly turning over. So we have some in there that have been there for 10 years that we will replace with something new. We're constantly rolling over those apps, and we take requests from our community, and that's one of the things that our business model gives us the freedom to do because we're not reliant on selling hardware and our community is very vast. We represent everything from education to large brands. Our community can make requests for new apps and we'll just make them and add them to our market. So we don't have the restrictions of having to charge through the nose for custom content development because we've developed these systems that make it very easy to pump out new content, and then the other thing that we offer as far as content goes, like out of the box content is we have an SDK for the companies that do have in house developers, and then we've got a number of different templates. So you can just say, I want to make a Koi Pond, and I want to throw my business's logo behind it, and you could whip something like that off in five minutes.  So are the templates purely done in-house or do you have third-party designers who are contributing? Meghan Athavale: That's a great question. At this point, they're all done in-house. We are working towards outsourcing a lot of our content development just because it'll give us a wider breadth of content and make that content more available. We're just at the very beginning of seeing rollouts that are large enough to make joining a third-party content development team attractive.  We see this in gaming consoles all the time, where you'll have a new fantastic console that comes out, it's low cost, and they're trying to get game developers to create games for that console, but unless thousands and thousands of people have that console and are buying games for it, it's not really worth making a game for it so we're at the stage where we're starting to see enough of a widespread and permanent deployment of systems running on our platform that it makes sense to have those conversations with third-party development teams now and we're starting to have those conversations. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about scale because one of the particularly compelling things about your company and your offer is cost, in terms of, it's not very expensive at all to use this.  Can you walk through that and not really how the financials work, you're not charging a lot per instance of this on a monthly basis, so you need to have a lot of them out there, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's right. We still make a percentage of our revenue on five or six big custom projects a year. I would say that our MRR represents about half of our revenue. The goal is to reach a point in scale where we can just focus on the platform, but I do get asked pretty frequently why it costs so little.  There are a couple of reasons for it. The biggest one, I think, is just we want to make this, as you mentioned, democratizing the technology, we want to make this technology available and affordable to schools, that’s our primary business goal. I and my business partner, our moms were both special needs teachers, we've seen firsthand the struggles that teachers and educators have in getting technology into their classrooms they need it for kids with sensory issues or children with autism or ADHD, and we've seen how effective interactive digital displays can be in those environments, particularly for things like increasing social skills. A lot of these kids come in, and they're really stuck on screens. They're very stuck on virtual experiences, and so it becomes a bridge, where they can engage with one another and with their teachers socially while still having that digital feedback. It's just very important to us that our pricing reflects our values as a company and that's one of our core values is making this accessible for education, but the other is that we really don't need to charge a lot for what we want to do. So at this point, our company's main work on the platform is around supporting hardware. So, as new devices come out, we're adding support for them so that you can download our software and you can plug in any of the commercially available 3D cameras, and it'll automatically recognize and calibrate that camera for you and take out the computer vision steps and specific requirements for each individual device, like DirectX. I think that would probably be the closest analog, you want something that you can plug and play regardless of which device you're using to achieve the tracking. So we want to focus on that.  We also want to focus on the tools that allow people to scale these projects to multiple locations. If you have an interactive display in a flagship store and you want us to put it into all of your stores, the step from running your proof of concept to scaling it to a hundred locations is very simple using our platform, and it's because we're constantly pushing updates and we do health management, we have a content management system, and those are the things that we want to focus on the long term. We don't necessarily want to focus on developing the individual games. We want to make the game development stuff as easy for other people to do as possible because we don't have all the ideas in the world, but we are really good at making sure that other people's ideas continue to run and don't go down.  Just so people understand, your top end cost is, if you work it out on a monthly basis, it's $74 a month, right?  Meghan Athavale: Yeah, that's as high as it gets.  If I'm an agency and I decide I have a beauty brand client that wants some sort of activation that's an interactive floor or wall or whatever, that's going to cost like five-six figures probably, right? Meghan Athavale: Yeah, I mean

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have written and blabbered away about how LED technology is maturing to a level that it is becoming a design consideration for architects and the people who create the look and feel of built spaces. But that thinking always assumed that clever creative could make the black surface of a big video wall, loaded with the right content, take on the look of its surroundings. Now a spin-out from a company with deep roots in LED display tech has gone the next step, by coming up with LED display tiles that look like wall finishes. Imagine a building lobby wall that, in its off state, looks like stone or tile or decorative wood, but lights up - with animations or messaging that appears out of that decorative surface. That's the pitch for a new company called CECOCECO, which is a subsidiary of Chinese LED giant Unilumin. The company was founded by Jason Lu, who years earlier founded ROE, which is widely considered top of the heap for rental LED displays used by touring acts. Lu was getting bored with that business and wanted to innovate again. So with his wife Grace Kuo, they've come up with and are now marketing something called ArtMorph. We get into a good discussion here about the origins of the product, how it works, and who is interested. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jason and Grace, thank you for joining me. First of all, can you tell me what Cecoceco is all about?  Jason Lu: I'm very happy to share the story about Cecoceco with you. I think, 16 years ago, I founded a company named ROE, and this company develops and manufactures LED displays, so we have 16 years of experience in that industry. To be honest, after 16 years, I got a little bit bored with that traditional business, and I wanted to do something different, but I didn't know what kind of product I could develop. So, one day, I found out that the traditional LED is always a black cabinet. It's difficult to put it in an indoor environment. So I hope we can do something new and put a traditional cabinet with some new masks together to 100 percent match. Grace Kuo: So the story is, one day, Jason came into a hotel and he suddenly said, “Oh, that LED looks so ugly. Why do these beautiful hotels have this ugly black LED? It's not really part of this hotel. You can really tell this is not a part of the hotel.” So he thought, why can't we build these kinds of things that have the lighting or video source but you won't see that ugly? You can take it as part of these decorations. You can make it as part of these buildings, which is how the idea came out. He thinks, oh, I should create some innovation, stuff which can make this environment look more material and beautiful and not only for the hotels, but also for restaurants, and also for libraries, every place should have those kinds of stuff, instead of the ugly black LED for atmosphere. So, for context, just so people understand, ROE is very highly regarded as the best rental temporary LED displays on the market, and your company was acquired by Unilumin, correct?  Grace Kuo: Yes.  Were you still with the company until recently? Grace Kuo: Jason's still with the company because you know the story is like he said two years earlier, when he felt bored with this traditional business, he felt oh I should stop it. I should get out of this business and continue my passion for innovation so he left for two years, but at the end of last year, he came back and continued his leadership at ROE and then he also brought back the Cecoceco  team to ROE Visual. So, right now, Cecoceco is a subsidiary company of ROE Visual as well.  So ultimately you're owned by Unilumin?  Grace Kuo: Yes.  So we'll make the assumption then that the underlying LED infrastructure technology is Unilumin?  Grace Kuo: We are very independent. We develop everything and do everything by ourselves, even the manufacturing, so they're basically only financially part of the group, but, besides that, everything is independent.  So as I'm looking at this on your website, it appears to be relatively low-res LEDs with a veneer front to them, and the veneer can be stone, it could be fabric, it could be wood, or it could be something else, correct? And how do you push the light through the veneer? Is it microscopically thin?  Grace Kuo: So this is a good question. This is a key technology we have on these products, but Jason, can I give you more explanations, about how we make lighting come through those kinds of materials? Jason Lu: Oh, yes. We tried a lot of different materials but finally we found out very special 3D printing technologies so e use these technologies to print the different masks. But it looks very real. When you touch it, you will feel this is real wood but it's still printing technologies. Oh, okay. if I see a stone wall where there's light coming through, and I'm thinking to myself, how did they cut the granite or whatever that thin, they didn't? It's 3D printed to look like stone? Grace Kuo: Yeah, there are two different ways we are doing this. One way is as Jason explained to you, but we also, actually, find out it's really, goldstone, the real stone, that can work with our products which also can have very high lighting or display transparencies.  Oh, so you can do it with real stone?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, we can do it with real stone.  Jason Lu: But the basic version is a print version.  Grace Kuo: Yeah, so we have two versions. One is, the printing version, in which you can choose everything you want, you can choose wooden, you can choose stone or you can choose a different kind of texture, but we also have the real materials that can work with our products. So we're working with one of the companies in the US, which is making a very special stone. They have very high lighting transparencies, which can work with our products very well.  Jason Lu: But we start from the printing direction first because this is an easy way. But if some customer needs customizing, we will choose some real material, but I think we start from the basic printing idea.  So you have a number of different faces or veneers or whatever that you already have available. But if you had an existing building and a lobby that was wood lined, you could color and tone match whatever the look of that would to create a custom veneer, right? Grace Kuo: Yes, that’s possible to customize.  Interesting. So, how bright is it?  Jason Lu: It's 700 nits, which is more than bright enough for what you're trying to do, right?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, I think so. We also discussed this with a lot of scientists and designers, and they felt 700 nits, for those kinds of motion products is more than enough.  Yeah, I have seen some instances of low-res LED walls where they put a diffusion fabric layer in front of it to create something visually interesting without going to the full expense and everything associated with a full video wall to fill a whole lobby. This created the experience without all that cost and all the maintenance and everything. Is that kind of what you're going for?  Grace Kuo: No, actually we are approaching different way to achieve this goal because, yes, you can see there are several projects that already happened, with different materials on top of the traditional screen, but there are a lot of works on a project site, so you always get two layers, separately and you need to have a lot of completed works on the project side.  So it's gonna cause a lot of unpredictable problems and also cost a lot in labor, so our goal is to integrate these two ideas together and make one a finished product when the customer gets it, they get finished products and just make the quick install. They don't have actual onset costs.  Okay, and there's a whole mounting system that you apply to the wall, fairly shallow by the looks of it, and it looks like the tiles themselves are less than an inch, and each of the tiles is ten by ten, I think, right?  Grace Kuo: Each tile is 500 millimeters by 500 millimeters.  So these things go together like a traditional LED video wall and you can stack them, tile them, and so on?  Grace Kuo: Yeah, so you can build them as big as you want.  And there's no physical dimensional limit? Grace Kuo: There is no physical dimension limit so it's just units you can combine together.  Jason Lu: And we also did some optic design to try and reduce the gap between the two modules. To reduce the gap between the modules?  Grace Kuo: With those kind of upper masks, visually, you've got some optical visible lines. So we also use some technologies to reduce these optical visible lines to make people feel this is really one picture, there are no optical lines, between units. Right, because you want to make it disappear and just feel like the wall, the furnishings of the building. what typically is going to show on these... Is it immersive, it's ambient, you're not really doing messaging or anything, correct?  Grace Kuo: What do you mean by messaging?  You wouldn't run text. You wouldn't run a logo or something like that, probably? Grace Kuo: It's possible, because the resolution is more than enough to play the characters or any content.  So you could read something, or would it be more of a large logo or something?  Grace Kuo: No, you can read some things.  If you were describing the pixel pitch, what would it be? Grace Kuo: Objective. Grace Kuo: Because we are not selling this as an LED display, we are selling this whole concept as a totally new experience that we are bringing to this market, so it's based on the display technologies, but it's not a display, it's totally a mode product, emotional products, bring the different lighting or visual experience, to the people so that's why we're not selling on the resolution.  So the people who you'd be accustomed to selling to and partnering with at ROE are the very different people for this product because I suspect you're dealing w

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When cannabis started being legalized in US states like Colorado, and more recently across Canada, it struck me that it was a very interesting new vertical for digital signage companies to chase - because it was a greenfields industry that had retail environments offering up products wholly unfamiliar to a lot of the people walking in the door. It's grown pretty clear, though, that while there may indeed be big long-term opportunity, cannabis retailing is also a very complicated industry - with rules and regulations changing by jurisdiction, a whole bunch of vendors and SKUs, and widely variable supply chains. While there might be a common perception that getting the OK to sell cannabis is a license to print money, a lot of operators are struggling financially, and both retailers and the tech ecosystem underpinning cannabis are coming in and dropping out all the time. A Canadian company called BudSense has a particularly interesting story to tell. The company, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, started out as a retailer, but found its way into technology to fill the gaps in what they needed to effectively manage stores and communicate to customers. Now, software is the main business, and BudSense has a SaaS software product that is all about managing menus and other screens around dispensaries, and is very specifically tuned to cannabis retailing - as opposed to general digital signage software that could also drive cannabis store menus. Canada has been the main focus to date, but co-founder David Thomas says BudSense has business in the US, and plans to grow that. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a little bit about BudSense? David Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Dave. BudSense is a menu merchandising company in the cannabis industry. It solves the problem for our retailers of menu management. And are you focused just on menus or are you doing in-store promotion, all kinds of other things within these dispensaries?  David Thomas: Yeah, we do some in-store promotion tool sets as well, pretty much anything that involves merchandising is the solution that we want to solve.  Your company's in Saskatchewan, right? David Thomas: Yes, we're based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, where we got our start in dispensary operation.  So when you say dispensary operations, you mean you're actually running a dispensary?  David Thomas: We were, and we still are. I partnered with my brother, John, around legalization in Canada. We started by running four stores in Saskatchewan. We've since sold those stores and moved on to other retail footprints but that's when we started developing the software that is now BudSense.  What set you down that path? Because being a retailer is very different from being a software company? David Thomas: Absolutely. So I have a background in engineering. My brother has a background in pharmacy. We actually started our business partnership before cannabis in real estate and we have an entrepreneurial spirit. We were always looking for opportunities and when cannabis was announced for legalization, we saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and we wanted to participate so that was the catalyst that pushed us into the cannabis space. We went into retail because of our real estate and pharmacy background. I have a lot of experience running teams and building systems. So we just put our skill set to use in a brand new industry.  So did you write your own software to run your store and that's what got you down the path or was it the absence of good software to do what you needed?  David Thomas: It was both. We solved whatever problem was directly in front of us. So it wasn't like we wanted to solve digital menus. It was more of a necessity and then we had the skillset to do it in that way. So when we started, we had four stores to run and that's very atypical from a normal business where you start with one and then progress if you're successful. So from day one, I knew that we needed a system to manage merchandising from a central location. So we could know what was happening in the stores and there were some solutions on the market but they were pretty flimsy at that point and we just felt more comfortable building our own. So, that's where we started down the path of digital menus. At what point did you decide that you'd rather be a tech company than a retailer?  I think the perception when cannabis was legalized in Canada was if you managed to get permits, particularly in those provinces where they allowed for private operators, it was a license to print money. David Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. The markets are very interesting with cannabis. I've watched them develop in our region, in the U.S., and other places and that's certainly the perception from the outside looking in and that happens a lot in an early market, whereas some of the permits are protected and ours were in the early days. We actually sold what turned out to be the peak of the market which was an excellent catalyst for our next chapters. So now a lot of the markets in Canada are oversaturated. I've heard numbers thrown around something like 70% of dispensaries in Canada are unprofitable and that has to do with market saturation, but it also has to do with operations being a little bit bloated and not really having the efficiency needed.  BudSense is focused on driving some extra revenue but also tries to make sure your costs are under control and you're running an efficient operation. I've also heard a number of times that the big challenge of a lot of the people who get into launching dispensaries is they know they're cannabis, but they don't really know retailing.  David Thomas: You've hit on something really interesting because even if they do know retail, which is very rare, cannabis is different. So you have this situation where no one has the perfect skillset so it's going to take innovation and learning regardless of what your background is because it's new and it has new problems.  So what happens is, regardless of your background, you go into it, you start trying things and if you're not mindful then your first go at it isn't going to be perfect. You're going to need to change your strategy. That's where people get into trouble with switching costs, with building systems that aren't necessarily malleable enough to change. So there's a ton of different backgrounds. Some people are more experienced with the product. Some people are more experienced with retail. Some people are more experienced with purchasing. It's really interesting because you essentially have to lean on your strengths while understanding your weaknesses and kind of build the business that way. There are a lot of different paths to success in cannabis and we see that with our different customers of BudSense where there's not one way to do this but it is challenging regardless of what your background is.  One of the big challenges that I've perceived is how things are licensed and regulated changes by jurisdiction. So for instance, In Saskatchewan, where your company is based, it sounds like it's privatized. Where I live in Nova Scotia, it's run by the Provincial Liquor Corporation. So it's very much regulated and I can go in and buy a bottle of wine around the corner and buy whatever you buy there, I don't terribly know but it's all incorporated and much more heavily regulated perhaps than in a private situation and I guess it's the same in the states where it can change state by state.  David Thomas: Yeah, you've hit on another one where it's interesting because your operation depends on the municipality (based on zoning) and the region you're in because one of the most important parts of it is your location and how protected it is from other competition, and then your purchasing is different based on your region. But one thing that we excelled at is it's very simple. We read the rules, and we read the regulations, and we understood them. And a lot of other times people would go in based on what they're doing in the U.S. or what they're doing in another market.  The problem with that, like a concrete example, was when we opened our stores in Saskatchewan, we didn't have a security guard at the front door because the regulations didn't say you had to, we were treating our customers as customers and a lot of people looked at what the U.S. was doing and they saw these security guards at the front door and they didn't necessarily understand the purpose of the security. The security guards were there because it's not legal federally. So it's purely a cash business and the insurance is extremely expensive. So when you have a cash business, your store is filled with cash, and it's a target for crime. So for those reasons and the illegality of it at a federal level, that's why the security guard is there. But when you read the regulations, there's no reason for one. So it's little things like that where if you're not focused on the details of the regulations and respect the regulations, it's really hard to create a dynamic business without understanding them.  So if I'm a cannabis dispensary and I've just opened up, or I'm about to open up, and I determine I need digital menu displays and I would like some promotional displays as well, could I just use any old digital signage CMS software to run the store or would I be just buying into a whole bunch of work that I don't need to?  David Thomas: It depends how large your organization is and it depends how highly you value your menus. If it goes back to our conversation earlier, what is your skill set what do you value and how are you going to create value in your business? If you're willing to enter all of your product information daily and keep it up to date on your menu, which some people do, there is a viable reason to do that if you want expanded information that says som

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Dise is an acronym for Digital In Store Experience, and that nicely sums up what the Swedish software firm Dise is all about. Around for 20 years now, the company is heavily focused on a retail-centric communications platform sold through solutions providers and other partners in its channel. Now everybody and their sister identifies retail as a main target vertical solution for their platform, but most software options are designed to serve a wide variety of interests that might include everything from factories and airports to hospitals and schools. Dise says it's all about retail. I had a good chat with CEO Sebastian Kryh about what makes his company's product offer distinct, and how Dise defines retail experience. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Sebastian, thank you very much for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of your company?  Sebastian Kryh: Sure thing. Thank you for having me, Dave. So Dise (Digital in-store experience) is a Swedish company that was founded back in 2003. So we've been at it for a while. For digital signage, we like to distinguish that by saying in-store experience or digital in-store experience, right? Because it's so much more than just a digital poster it's sold purely through a network of selected partners with the goal of connecting the online and physical world to the physical space by improving the customer experience. With the mission to build a user experience to love with intuitive and easy software as a tool. So would you describe Dise as a software company or more of a solutions company that has software?  Sebastian Kryh: Interesting distinction there, I would describe it as a software company where we build on a product company. So, we build the platform or the suite, which has three parts, CMS being the shining star in the playout. We work with partners to create their experiences their offers, and opportunities to work with their brands and their customers.  Okay. So, if you say you have a suite, what else is in the suite?  Sebastian Kryh: There’s the CMS. It's a cloud-based and intuitive CMS. We have a design tool to build dynamic content and templates in general, used in the CMS and then we have the software that runs on the media players. Both external ones like Windows, Linux, and Brightside and SOCs like the big ones, Samsung and LG. So when you're working with largely retail customers and you start an engagement with them. What does your company take on, and what's taken on by partners?  Sebastian Kryh: So what we do is that we only work with partners. So, from time to time, of course, we interact with the brands and do that. The perfect Dise partner is a full-service partner that takes care of all the pieces in the offering to the brands. Everything from creating the content to the consultancy of creating the concepts, installation support for all the partners. And what we supply is the in store experience platform and the support to the partners..  So, it would be a bit like, I know, I understand it's very different, but Broadside is they're UX, Their everything is all focused around digital out-of-home advertising. That's what they're there for, versus probably, the high 90s percentile of CMS software companies are general offers that have some specialty aspects to them, but they're pretty broadly focused. It sounds like you're saying that Dise is very much retail UX, designed for retail that's where you're going to shine.  Sebastian Kryh: That's where we're going to shine. Exactly, and that decision was made quite a number of years back where it wasn't more of a general feel to it. You could do basically everything you still can, but the main focus would be retail, and how we interact with the retail needs of campaign management and structuring of all the stores and the remote management you would need for that. So, we feel that we are the ones who are focusing on retail and marketing ourselves as such and that's where we shine, and that's where we have the best results.  So, you have in-store experience. How do you define experience, and how does the company define it? Because it's a very broad term and used quite a bit when I don't think there's a real experience to what is being floated.  Sebastian Kryh: Yeah, sure. But it's also our way of thinking about combining the brand of the product experience together with them. What we can add is personalized communication and interaction that could be through an improved sales conversation or creating customer engagement. From everything, getting the correct feeling and vibe in the retail space to be able to have that really pointy and specialized content or communication for any given period of time or any use case in some sense, right? So you've been doing this for 20 years. I realize you haven't been there the whole 20 years, but the company has been doing it. What has changed? Obviously, there's a lot more adoption of digital in store than there was 20 years ago, but I suspect that your target customers are also a lot more sophisticated and understanding of how to best use this. Sebastian Kryh: Exactly, and beginning in the early days and as you said, I've been in the company before, for almost four years in different roles but it started out as really tech focused and the technology and the power that could be found 20 years ago was not where it is today, of course. Reading that it took more tech savvy and innovation to make stuff happen. But we're seeing it more and more moving from really focusing on what the tech is and what the CPU power and stuff is. It’s more about what you can do with it and how you utilize the power that's available. I don't know if that was an answer to your question though, but we're of course seeing it from a perspective of also seeing it being a lot of Windows install or BrightSign installs where we're seeing external media players. Now of course, we’re seeing the SOC devices being much more capable and powerful and being something that's growing faster, at least for us, than the external media players, which is still a clear majority of all the installs we have but we're getting more and more requests for advanced features to be connected with triggers and sensor to screen itself. I get a sense in a lot of cases, let's say 15 years ago, if a retailer decided to incorporate digital signage into their in store experience. Quite often there were a whole bunch of screens and put on walls where there was available space. And it seems now that it's way less about the sheer idea of having a bunch of screens in a store. Maybe it's one or two screens but really thoughtfully positioned as, this screen behind the sales counter is for this reason and this one in the entry area is for this other reason and so on. So, there's a lot more strategy behind it than before. Sebastian Kryh: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's exactly right. If we're going back a couple of years, it'd be okay. Now the 98 inch screen was put to market and everybody wanted to use it first. It's a cool piece of tech and that's also one thing, of course, that could bring attention but it's just, what do you do with it? You might get a better experience or the message getting through more, even if it's a 55 inch, right? So we're trying to take a step back from the actual screen size for tech or led wall. This is what is the content and working through a channel strategy. It's not just, what do you want, what's the message and what do you want your end users to see and react to and how you could compile that to be having a synchronized story.  Also the old ways we've been talking about omnichannel for many years but how are we seeing? What's communicated in the digital world on websites or on social media? How do you bring that in and make it feel natural when it comes in store? So you have a connected customer journey. We're getting more and more of those and what our partners are working towards, it's more and more connected to that journey.  That's correct. So if I was to ask you, give me a good example of a company that you and your partners are working with, where they're really doing a nice job of applying digital in their stores, without putting you on a spot with the retail and making sure they're ones that you're allowed to talk about. Sebastian Kryh: Yeah. So what are you saying that you want a partner we're working with or what was your question? Are there things that are done in retail settings that are always reliably impactful and other ones that have been tried? And I'm thinking about some interactive things I see that are more like Novelty than actually having an impact. I'm curious what works and what doesn't. I guess it is a shorter way of saying it.  Sebastian Kryh: Help me understand what you're meaning.  I have seen some interactive screens put into retail environments, particularly athletic retailing sporting goods stores, where I don't know why they did that other than the simple fact that, Hey, it's an interactive, you can boycott this screen and something will happen versus just the right position, the right sort of scale of screen and everything that just there is nothing fancy about it, it just works. Sebastian Kryh: And coming back to what we said a couple of minutes ago is that you gotta think about what you want to communicate and what do you want to send and how is that to be used in the flow of the customer journey? So in some sense just getting a touch application or interactivity. Working might sound like a cool thing on the design board, but how it's then implemented if it's not used by the sales team to be a sales companion, for example, how to utilize it then it might be just as you say, might be a gimmick or something that's not really encompassed and used in the day-to-day work life in the retail space. When you're working with partners, are you directly involved with the customers o

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Everybody who is active and experienced in the digital signage space knows the big evergreen challenge for solutions providers and end-users is content production - keeping programming on screens fresh and relevant, but also attractive. A lot of companies in the ecosystem - and not just the software guys - have some degree of template libraries and finished content that can be updated or pushed straight to screens. That's a piece of the solution. But there's also a demand for tools that make it easy and efficient to produce good-looking material for screens. In looking over the exhibitor list for the upcoming DSE trade show, I came across Design Huddle, and wondered, "Who is that and what do they do?" It's a small West Coast US startup that has B2B graphic design software that allows brands, agencies, and other platforms to create what it describes as lockable digital, video, print, and presentation templates for their users. There are some similarities to solutions like Canva, but also a lot of distinctions. The one that would particularly interest a lot of tech companies in this industry is the ability to fully integrate and white label the Design Huddle toolset inside something like a CMS. I haD a great chat with CEO and co-founder Dave Stewart, who is based (I'm jealous) in Huntington Beach, California. Yeah, there's LA traffic, but it's lovely by the water ... Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Dave, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what the Design Huddle is all about? Because it's unfamiliar to me.  Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. Ultimately, we are an enterprise focused on software as a service platform that focuses on templating and content creation in an easy and accessible way. We're definitely API-first, so we have a big focus on platform integrations where our customers are programmatically creating content, but then we're also really focused on end-user experience so people who are actually designing, whether that's static content or motion content in a browser, are able to really easily fill in pieces of a video template or create content really for any purpose. What kind of content would they be creating in the context of digital signage, which is obviously what I'm interested in?  Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we were actually really surprised. We're relatively new to digital signage, and within the last year, we had to get up to speed ultimately because a couple of players in this industry came to us and really expressed, “Hey, content is a big issue for us, right? We can sell these really expensive screens and they're great, but our customers are just really struggling with what are we going to put on them and how's that going to look good, right? We can have a great-looking screen without good-looking content, so there's a problem.”  So, I've been educating ourselves on this very recently, and it's really a combination of things like static content where it's like, I'm just displaying basic information that might be somewhat real-time or just informational, then also, motion content for things like, imagine the signs that are up on a football stadium or in a basketball gym, where you want to show basic animated content, that's talking about whatever the context is for that sport or things like that. So it's been a little bit of everything, but imagine anything that can be shown on a sign, someone's creating that somewhere, right?  Right. Is the core idea that the end user, the operator would be selecting from a template library or are they creating stuff from scratch or how does it work? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. We are actually just the software. We're not actually playing in the content game ourselves. We just make it really easy to create content on our platform, and generally, that's going to mean importing from existing design files and animation files that you've created elsewhere. We can import PDFs and maintain all the layers. So any static content that's generated in any Adobe product or Figma, we can essentially just import it in and maintain that. In After Effects, you can now export to a format called Lottie files and Lottie files can be imported into our system and now essentially we can have really rich animations generating After Effects that are really easily customizable by an end user and also programmatically via API. So that's the starting point for most of our customers is generating their content on their side, whether they're contracting with an agency or they have a team internally, it's building these things. The main thing they're focused on is, we just don't want to have to do these customs per customer. I was super surprised to find out that some of the initial interest from us, these hardware companies have content teams that are literally generating content individually for their customers and to me, that was crazy. but they had to, because that was the way they were going to sell their hardware.  So we're just changing that a bit where it's like, just do that once, right? Generate some templates for them and then give them the power, empower them to actually make the changes for themselves, or, again, do it programmatically for them. So I'm curious. Is this the sort of thing that is best suited to somebody who's already a motion graphics designer, an animator, somebody with quite a deep set of creative skills or maybe technical skills?  Dave Stewart: I would say a big focus of ours is when it comes to who we are going to sell to. Definitely, software companies are high up on that list who have a general system that's trying to do a lot of things and specifically in digital signage, that might be a CMS or any of these other acronyms that we've come to find out exist here where they're trying to do a lot of things. We're just the content piece, and we feel like we can really stand out by creating a best-in-breed, seamlessly integrated white-labeled product that can fit into their platform in a way that feels proprietary but adds best-of-breed, innovative content creation ability. Now, when it comes to who's creating that content whether they have an internal design team with some expertise or whether they contract an agency just to initially create them a set of templates, it can work either way. I will also say, though, that we do work with brands directly, where brands are creating branded content that might be shown on lots of screens but they want to empower regular users to be able to make changes to those templates while still adhering to brand consistency and their brand guidelines and so like our locking feature is big in that situation because someone creates a template but then now anybody can actually make basic adjustments to it. So it sounds like it's a little reminiscent of what I've been hearing in the last year about AI and how generative AI isn't going to really replace designers, but it does add a considerable layer of efficiency in that you can remove some of the drudgery and some of the building block stuff and automate that or streamline that but it's not meant to just take designers out of the equation. Dave Stewart: No, definitely not. I feel like we're really excited about AI and everyone says that, but I'll get more specific for you. I think, for us right now, we actually just sent out an AI survey to our customers to try to prioritize the main things that they're really interested in. For us, the basic stuff, like background removal, like removing background from images, which we already do, and background from videos. You have things like speech-to-text to provide like auto captioning and things like that. Obviously, generative AI, where you're prompting via text to say, “Hey, I want an image that shows this, or I want to alter this one image to include this”, all those things fit in really well with what we do, but where we want to take that even further is, okay, let me generate a whole bunch of template ideas for you that are basic iteration changes from a set of templates that we may train a model on. So we're actually gonna take all your content you've made and the holy grail for us is, let us shoot out and show you a bunch of previews of a bunch of similar-looking templates that follow the same kind of styles, maybe themes or layouts. But in a new way you're still starting with the designer that needs to set the standard but you're able to generate content in a much quicker way and remove a lot of the monotonous activity that's usually involved there.  So what would be involved in using it? Dave Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. So typically what will happen is, again, two sides of our business. We have a platform side where we're going to be very hands-on with our customers and integrate this into some platform that they already have, where there are already users where they need to add on templating or improve some existing content creation suite that they have inside that. So, we would inherit those users and they seamlessly became part of that platform. The other side of the business is, okay, their turnkey solution where we might work with an agency or brand directly. We white label it and they log into a portal that like we create, but it's white labeled for you on your domain. and the idea is that a user is just signing up and accessing a template in a way where you are just a distribution mechanism to provide them content that way. Either way, it's going to be in the context of a browser, whether that's on desktop or mobile and generally it's going to be filling out a template that someone has gotten you, let's call it 80 percent of the way there. Okay. So like you were saying earlier, it's not really that you would go in and say, I want to do a 15-second promotional spot for a car dealer and I would go find a template that seems to be about retail or car dealers or whatever it may be and I can monkey around

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Bars and restaurants have long been a targeted venue for digital OOH media start-ups, the attraction being scale, dwell time and lots of products and services that could be put in front of people sitting around having a drink or three. But there's been a lot of roadkill through the years, because selling in to these kinds of venues was time-consuming and hard, the cost of installs was substantial, and most of the operators didn't want to pay for anything. Much of that has changed, except for the evergreen fact that venue operators are highly attracted to free, with benefits. A couple of ambitious start-ups have emerged in recent years chasing the space, and arguably the most aggressive has been the LA firm Loop Media, which markets a service called Loop TV. The selling proposition is very straightforward and familiar - qualified venues get a free media player and free video and music content. What's different from the past is Loop's service is all built around streaming, and uses the connectivity and TVs already in a venue. So the capital cost to Loop is just an Android set-top box, and that gets put in a box or envelope and sent to the venue - which then plugs it in, connects to the Internet and uses an activation code to get things rolling. Minimal hardware costs and zero labor. The company is now north of 71,000 screens, with venues in all 50 US states. And it's now expanding beyond the U.S. I had a great chat with CEO and founder Jon Niermann, talking about the company, how ads are sold, what content resonates, and how he found his way from high-level executive jobs with Disney and Electronic Arts into connected TVs in places like bars, health clubs and small retail. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT John, thank you for joining me. Can you give me the rundown of what Loop TV is all about?  Jon Niermann: Sure Dave, you bet. We provide streaming TV for businesses. It's free, ad-supported or you could do a subscription if you like, but a majority of the businesses are free ad-supported. Think about what you do at home as a consumer using Roku or perhaps Firestick and then do streaming on that. The difference is you're watching TV series and movies primarily. In public venues, like we support, it's premium short-form content, Think of music videos. We're the largest provider of music videos, for example, across the nation. So very contextualized, customizable type of content.  What's the business model? Jon Niermann: So we provide it for free, it's ad-supported. Especially coming out of the pandemic, a lot of these public venues were looking for ways to cut costs. So what we've done is we've taken the cost of what you might have to provide for cable and satellite, for digital signage if you're doing menu boards for licensing if you're doing it correctly and we've taken that all away and put it into the loop player. If you don't mind showing ads, which a lot of public venues don't, because they're already doing that anyway, you could get this content for free.  Our model then, is the ads that we get for the content that we work with various ad supply partners, or if it's a subscription, then we have a set price per month if you don't want ads to change the vibe of your venue.  I'm guessing a hell of a lot of people are willing to have ads if they don't have to expend the operating expenses on the service.  Jon Niermann: You guessed right, it’s over 90%. That's typically the way the model goes and people are more than happy to have that experience because like I said, you're out there anyway, you're partially distracted at a bar and restaurants or the doctor's office, or you're just captive. So they don't really mind it as much as they do at home ironically.  What's the footprint that you have right now?  Jon Niermann: We're in all 50 states. We're in Canada, we're testing in Australia, New Zealand, and soon in the UK. But we started in the US here in 2020, we rolled out and we've got all the major metro areas. So we've got anything as small as a corner pub all the way up to a university campus. Think of everything in between. It could be an airport, it could be a mall, It could be a gymnasium. You think of it as a public venue and that's what we cover.  And does it tend to tilt quite a bit to bars and pubs instead of fitness facilities?  Jon Niermann: The largest percentage of our business for sure are bars and restaurants. But gyms, I'd say are probably one of the top three, doctor's offices are great. For gyms, think of it this way, we provide music. So even if you're at a place where you watch sports and you have multiple screens, chances of having one of those screens on audio is pretty low. So venues will still play music. So why not have a screen showing music videos, you just play it overhead and it covers that aspect of the business. So really anything.  If you could think of changing your oil in a Jiffy Lube, for example, thinking of sick of the junk that they have on some of the TVs, you like sitting there in a bar and having Judge Judy scowl at you, Dave, it's no fun. You don't need that. You're out having a good time. You just don't need Wolf Blitzer, it just doesn't kill the vibe.  And do you hear that from your venue operators, they just want something that's just inoffensive? It's not Fox News. It's not CNN or MSNBC, and it's not Judge Judy or anything. It's just providing passive entertainment.  Jon Niermann: Exactly. It really enhances the environment, so I talked earlier about contextualizing. If you're at an Italian restaurant, and you want nothing but Italian music or Sinatra and drone footage of Italy all day, you could do that. So it really just adds to the atmosphere. And if you've got local news or something playing, a bunch of talking heads. It's not exactly that escapism moment that you're looking for when you're going out and enjoying that time away from reality.  You mentioned that it can cut out some of the costs of digital signage. Do you enable a venue operator to have some time to put in, such as Thursdays are happy hours, starting at three and running until seven or whatever? Jon Niermann: Absolutely, and it's super easy to just get on your laptop. It's very intuitive how to walk through it and throw your logo on the screen. So if you're Billy's bar and Grill. You got the old Billy's logo up at the corner and happy hour, as you said, every Tuesday and Wednesday night, on Saturdays we've got Billy and the Beaters here on Saturday. So everything that you used to do with digital signage, you could have crawlers underneath. You could have full screens. You could have a split screen. You're able to do that with your Loop system, all part of it for free.  That was going to be my question. It’s not a fee-based one that's included in what you're doing if you get the media player for free in the whole bit.  Jon Niermann: Exactly. So we provide the media player for free. We try to make it as very low cost and low barrier as possible for people just to plug this Loop player up and get going.  The players are Android boxes, right? Jon Niermann: Yes. Correct.  So low cost. When you do a deployment, all you're really doing is sticking in a UPS envelope or whatever and sending it off to the site and you're done.  Jon Niermann: Yeah, that's it. And if you think about how, a lot of these bars and restaurants, especially worked in the past and still many of them today. You've got these giant AV racks full of computers and big expensive equipment that's bulky, and our players like it a little, it's about the size of a Roku player and Apple TV. You can Velcro it to the back of your screen. You can put it on a rack underneath. It's just something you're used to, and it's odd because this really never existed over the past few years until then because it's just the AV stuff, but everybody's used to using that at home. So it's quite easy for them to take that into their businesses and get it hooked up.  Yeah, if you buy an Apple TV box and plug it into the back of your TV, then it loads and you find the application. In this case, you'd find a Loop app, and then there's probably an activation code or something.  Jon Niermann: Yeah. We have for us, you have to have a specific Loop player. So we don't want to have other types of content or anything that may not be licensed. But yeah you load it, you sign in, you put in your code that you get from us, and you're good to go. And there's a bunch of channels, right? Jon Niermann: Yeah, we've got about a hundred music channels, so think of them as playlists. One of our popular ones, for example, is Beach Country. Who knew, right? Yeah, I don't know what that is, but okay.  Jon Niermann: So you get all these. We have Darcy Fulmer; she is fantastic, just in terms of customizing and putting all the playlists together for us and curating and really on the pulse, long-term time music industry executive, a great relationship with all the labels. So she really knows how to customize these things, and we weekly look at what are popular channels, we could adjust, we put in seasonal channels, we put in celebratory type channels. Obviously, with a bunch of Halloween ones now coming up, Christmas is always a popular time. So the venue has over a hundred of those to choose from, and then you've got about 50 non-music channels.  So if you want everything from Looney Tunes, believe it or not, it is a popular one for people to choose from because again, you are just looking at the visual type of stuff. But for failed videos, viral videos, we got the TikTok channel. So it's a great brand, World Surf League. So if you're at a surfing store, hunting, fishing, anything that, again, is contextual and customizes that environment, if you're in autos and cars and you want that type of playing all day, you can do that too.  So, I'm guessing you have a pretty big content edit team and als

I bumped into Gil Matzliah at a conference this summer, and told the software executive we were long overdue to do a podcast about what's happening with his company, Novisign. We finally nailed down a date and time, and as it turned out, it was just days after the horrendous violence that broke out in Israel - where Matzliah and his company are based. We chatted about the situation and the impacts on his company. He's fine, his family and staff are fine, but everyone is understandably rattled. We then got into the roots of Novisign does, what's different about its CMS solution, and what they're seeing and hearing in the marketplace. Novisign was an early adopter of Android and it remains its primary go-to operating system. Though Israeli, more than half of its business comes from the US and another quarter from Europe. And now the company is growing business in Japan. Transcript Gil, thank you for joining me. You’re in Israel, where a few days later things went crazy there. I have to ask, how are things going? How are you? And I assume the family's fine and everything?  Gil Matzliah: Yeah. Thank you for your concern. Yes, me and my family are all good, also the team members that are here in Israel are good. Last Saturday was a very hard day in Israel. It's something we never expected would happen. But now we are good. Your offices are pretty close to the West Bank, aren't they?  Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, Israel is a small and tiny country. It's not too big. So everything is close to everything. Our office is close to the West Bank, the conflict and all the issues you hear now in the news have been in the south area of Israel with the border of the Gaza Strip. I hope everything continues to be fine for you and things settle down there. Gil Matzliah: Yeah, we also hope so. At the end of the day, we like to work, we like to have peace, everybody wants to build good things together and so do our neighbors. In NoviSign, we have Arab Muslims, Christians from all around the world, Jewish people, we all work happily together and that's what we hope the world will go for. It's just this thing with the Gaza Strip that... and there's an organization called Hamas, who is making the issues and challenges for our regions, which I hope will be better moving forward.  Has staffing been affected at all? Have you had members of your staff be called up to the military? Gil Matzliah: Yeah, in many countries, they call some of the stuff but you can say it's less than 10% for a team all the time one or two people in total. Yeah, it's just one of those things which you can't help but be directly affected in some way because of the size of the country and the way things operate, right? Gil Matzliah: Exactly. Yes.  All right. So enough of that. I don't want to dwell on it and no doubt by the time that things will have changed and hopefully gotten better.  Just for the benefits of people who maybe don't know your company, can you run down what you do, how long you've been around and how you distinguish yourself in the marketplace as NoviSign. Gil Matzliah: Perfect. So, we are NoviSign. We do digital signage software. Our company is based in Israel and provides services from all around the world. We have people in the US, Germany and Japan. With a team of more than 200 partners all around the world, we give a global software as a service for digital signage. I started a company with my colleague, Avi 12 years ago. It was 2011. We established it here in Israel, with the dream to be a great startup, changing the world and leading the digital signage software.  Have you changed the world?  Gil Matzliah: It's not so easy but we're sure we'll do it. We are making changes. We are progressing. Opening a startup 12 years ago, that's a long journey and like a roller coaster, you go up, you go down, but you keep going forward all the time. And after a few years, we started to see the good results coming and since then we are growing and growing constantly every year.  Good. So if you were lined up against, let's say, 10 other CMS software companies out there and somebody said, all right, I've looked at all these other ones. What is it about you guys that's distinctive and different and important? What would you say? Gil Matzliah: Yeah. So, first it's the team. We came with a lot of experience in software programming. We are technical people. We are software programming people. We have opened the company to lead in the platforms that enable people to do that. So, it's the team that you work with. It's the technology behind the servers, the player, the communication, the integration and it's the offering that we have. We have a wide offering, which is very reliable and secured and trusted by thousands of customers around the world.  You mentioned security and I know you're SOC 2 certified. Was that important to do?  I'm hearing more and more from a variety of different companies saying that the security piece of this is really important, maybe much more so than it was even a couple of years ago.  Gil Matzliah: That's correct. So more and more organizations are looking at security, but also it's the maturity of the company. So when NoviSign started with few installations, what you are busy with is just building software that works. And then after it works, you start adding more and more features. And when we started, we were looking at a small and medium businesses. But slowly, as people saw, we have a nice, easy to use platform, then the bigger companies started wanting it. But when you go for a bigger company, and as time changes, all these medium and large companies today want better security, they looki at all these RFPs, abd you really need good security in order to get these customers. Have you evolved like a lot of companies have, where they started with the small to medium business market and now they're more focused on enterprise? Gil Matzliah: We are not focusing on enterprise yet, but this is the growth engine that we have. So if you had asked me like five years ago, we wouldn't work with banks, insurance companies or bigger Fortune 500 companies. But if you look recently in the last five years, we started to work with a few banks and corporations and insurance companies worldwide and there is the bigger number of bigger business we work with now. I'm curious when you say five years ago, you wouldn't have worked with a big bank or somebody like that. Is that because your platform wasn't ready for it or a very large customer, as I've said to some other people in the past, they could be great, but they can kill your company because they just get so involved and they can be so needy? Gil Matzliah: It's a good point. So if I look at that, I can tell you an interesting story. Like a year or two after we opened the company and we have the website and we started to do promotions and we started to go to shows and I'm sitting in my home and suddenly I'm getting, today we have people in the US, but back then we were just in Israel, and a call was redirected for me from the US and it was the MTA of the New York transportation company asking about our platforms.  And you're not really ready for these types of companies when you are less than 10 people, a small company with a new product. But once you are in almost 10 years or so, and you have enough people to support, enough understanding of the security, the features, the integrations, the platforms, then you get ready to serve the bigger companies.  You work with a lot of different platforms and therefore hardware partners. I know you're on Android, you're on different SOC platforms for smart displays, all that sort of thing. Is it a challenge to manage the variety of, they're all are just similar in certain respects, most of them are Linux in some way or another, but how easy or hard is it to stay on top of all those different ones?  Gil Matzliah: It is a good point. It is a good challenge because looking at that, when you're a small company and at the beginning we started with Android. I think we've been one of the first, if not the first, to develop an Android based player, an APK back in 2011. There are more and more people on Android, it's not the most of them. And then we started to add ithers, we added Windows, we added Chrome, we added Linux, now we are adding HTML Player, we are adding Tizen, we are adding WebOS, and we're adding more and more features. It's becoming very complex to support them all because once you have a change, you need to see it's working on all the platforms.  And when you speak about the Android platforms, just the Android platform has so many versions. And we even have, lately, forced all our customers with Android that is less than 6.0 to stop using the system because until half a year ago, there were people that were still using Android 4.4 with us and the difference between Android 4 and Android 12 is huge. So imagine that fixed security support, as you say it's becoming to be more and more challenging and you need to grow the team and it's slower for you to add new features because you need to see that it's working on all the platforms, but we do believe we should be always hardware agnostic because what is differentiating a CMS software from a Samsung LG and all the other display manufacturers that are doing the software is that we work with all the platforms and they work just with their platforms. So we keep it as a focus for us.  Is technology enabling you to go towards being operating system agnostic without having to make compromises in terms of, yes, we can work across all of these different platforms, but we can't do everything on each of them or whatever, which I've heard versus, natively written software that's native to Tizen, native to WebOS and so on. Gil Matzliah: Yeah, it's hard to do 100 percent of your features on all the platforms. Not all the platforms, not all the OS work equally. So our main player from the first day until today is the Androi

The opening seconds sound a little scratchy and distorted, probably because I was talking more loudly than I needed to, but the majority of the audio from Monday night's Cocktails and Controversy event sounds pretty good. I have uploaded the file to my podcast platform, so that folks who couldn't make it to the Digital Signage Federation event at Sony's NYC offices can have a listen. Consider this a bonus podcast, and I have not added an intro or exit ... so it's a bit raw, but just fine for listening. The topic was AI in digital signage, and you will hear from me, but much more usefully from Chris Grosso, CEO of Intersection, Jeffrey Weitzman of Navori and Jim Nista, who has a boutique creative agency out in LA. We covered a lot of ground and tried to zero in, very much, on what AI means to digital signage and how it is already being applied. Thanks to the folks at Sony for getting me the file!  

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT What if you could use AI to make digital signage screen content relentlessly relevant? That's the premise and promise of what Korbyt calls Machine Learning Broadcast, new capabilities in the Dallas-based software firm's CMS platform. Using computer vision and machine learning, the idea is that if the platform can get a sense of what's making people stop and watch in a defined environment, then content can be optimized based on that interest. The system finds and schedules content to push to screens based on engagement metrics. How it all technically works is a bit over my shiny head, but I had a good chat with Korbyt CTO George Clopp about what's going on and its implications. We also get into what the future looks like for AI in digital signage. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Geroge, thank you for joining me. We've chatted in the past. For those who don't know Korbyt, can you give me a rundown of what the company's all about?  George Clopp: Hi, Dave. It's a pleasure to speak with you again. Yeah, Korbyt is at its root an employee engagement company. So we've got roots in digital signage, but our typical use case is using digital signage at corporate campuses and to communicate to employees, to increase employee engagement as well as to communicate real-time mission-critical stats as well.  Is that pretty much the core vertical that you guys chase, workplace?  George Clopp: It is. We are heavily into the workplace, meeting rooms as well. We do a lot with retail banks, a little bit into the retail space, but it's primarily corporate campuses. For those who don't know the company, it actually goes back a long way to Symon Communications days, right? You guys were doing workplace communications long before the digital signage industry discovered that.  George Clopp: Yeah, exactly right, Dave. It precedes me. I've been here for seven years now. I can't even believe it, but that's how much I enjoy this space and the industry. I enjoy the company so much, but we had Target Vision, Symon Communications, and we've just evolved. I joined at the tail end of 2016 to develop the Korbyt platform, and obviously, we have to meet the needs of the digital signage industry, but we've had a really heavy focus on employee engagement as well. Is it interesting to see all these other companies who have more general offers, find their way into the workplace because they see that as an opportune vertical?  George Clopp: Yeah, I view it as exciting. I think it's definitely a macroeconomic trend with the pandemic, post-pandemic, the modern workplace, everything is reimagining and reinventing and re-everything these days. I think it's good. It's a legitimate macro problem that everyone's looking to provide solutions to. So, I'm really excited. I love the industry myself.  In some respects, you guys have been doing back-of-house, a lot longer than most companies would have. I mean, you're not just working in the offices, you're working in production areas and so on.  George Clopp: That's correct. Heavy in manufacturing and heavy in the contact centers, anytime where you're doing mission-critical real-time data, you're connecting to an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or yard management system, and you want to change or orchestrate the display and the surroundings based on data changing, we've got a deep background in that.  Yeah, for contact centers, if I recall, years ago pre-arrival with the company, you were doing low-resolution LED readouts that were just telling people in the contact center about the average wait time on calls and things like that.  George Clopp: Exactly, and that's matured over the years and now we're doing that on the desktop and on the mobile device as well. We still have some supply chains and some yard management systems in a warehouse, where we'll do the little blinky boards over the dock doors themselves. We range from the dock doors all the way to your mobile device now.  The PR that came out about a new piece of functionality, your marketing talks about a million endpoints, 250 cloud migrations, and 100+ native integrations.  A million endpoints, that's like a lot. George Clopp: It is. Yeah, scalability and being able to expand out to touch desktops, normal, typical digital science screens, and mobile endpoints. It's been a real focus on us for the last four or five years. So we're really proud to announce that, and then the back end, like you were talking about those native data integrations, I think that's really what sets us aside from a lot of our competition is making those really hardcore authentications and then that real-time pipe between us and the source systems.  I know a lot of other software in our space that we run into, they talk about integrations. A lot of times it's really just a file, they're taking data from a source system. They're putting it into a CSV format or any kind of other format and then they're pulling that in. So that's really where we shine with that real-time data integration.  Is that important in terms of a distinction when solutions providers and users are looking at data integration and they see that a CMS says, yeah we do data integration, we can integrate with your platform? It sounds like you're saying there are different tiers of that, and there's real integration and there's just like a baseline.  George Clopp: Yeah, exactly. That's the right way to pick up on that day, for sure. When you need to orchestrate and change things in a 911 center or in a manufacturing-type environment and definitely in a contact center, speed is really the key there. So having something on a five-minute loop that's pulling a file, it's just not fast enough. So you need that real-time data, you need that high availability so that something was to break that you've got a backup in place and you can make sure that contact center, that supply chain, that 911 center is rolling smoothly. They're not just getting their data, but they're changing the experience of the data. That's another thing that we do, we pull in stats, but we also augment those stats and do value-added calculations on the stats, and then we trigger on those values to change the screen, or change the mobile device or change the desktop. So if you've got too many calls in the queue or you're running behind on this loading dock here, we'll change the entire experience for you based on that value-added stat that we do.  I also assume that when companies talk about integrations, for very logical reasons, they're going to go to the most used platforms out there, whether it's Teams or God knows what. But if you have a hundred plus native integrations you're probably talking about some pretty exotic things that nobody's ever heard of, and if a company went in and said, we can integrate with their systems and they say, what those systems are, their eyebrows are going up, because they're thinking, I have never heard of that. George Clopp: Absolutely, Dave. There are some low-level protocols where we just integrate at a TCP level with a very proprietary protocol, but I would say the bulk of it is more modern, JSON-based RESTful interfaces, for sure and we like to distinguish between data integrations, business application integrations, and SSO integrations, in three categories there. So, like a Power BI or a Tableau or something like that would be more of a business application integration, and when we're talking data integration, we're talking more low level, running SQL against a data store, running web services, running SOAP-based web services, and to that extent. And again, that's why we call it out in our marketing because we do think that's a core differentiator for us.  So just to go back to something, when you talk about a million endpoints, you're including desktops..  George Clopp: That's correct. Desktops and mobile devices, basically all of the endpoints that we talk to. Good. Back at the start of summer, you guys introduced something called, Machine Learning Broadcast. What is that? George Clopp: Yeah, fantastic question. We were involved with machine learning, and AI before it was really cool, so this was actually something we developed in 2018. We've been honing the model, and then we re-released it this year. But machine learning is a subset of AI, and we all know AI is a super big buzzword these days and when you peel that onion, there's levels of accuracy involved there, and there's a lot of hype around the world. But the reason why we called the feature machine learning broadcast is really to focus on the ML aspects of it, and it's a great business problem to solve because, at the end of the day, what we're really creating is a recommendation engine. And I think everybody's familiar with the Amazon recommendation engine, Instagram, and other social media platforms that are just, they're recommending content for you. That's essentially what we're doing here. We're using KNN Analysis, which is supervised machine learning to look at content that has some engagement with it, and that engagement could be measured by computer vision on a digital signage screen, it could be measured by interactivity with it on a desktop or interactivity with that content on the mobile device and then behind the scenes, all we're doing is we're finding out second, third, fourth-degree order content, that's related to the content that was engaging and then it's a feedback loop. We go ahead and automatically schedule that content and see how that content is engaged with so it's a self-learning feedback loop there and the whole purpose of it is to find content that's engaging and show more of that content to your employees. Could you give me a real-world kind of example of how that might work? George Clopp: Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Let's say a company's opening up a brand new office in Buenos Aires and for whatever reason, people really grav