Over 120 digital signage companies – buyers, system integrators and hardware vendors – attended the Open Digital Signage Forum at Computex on Friday, June 6 to discuss moving towards a standards-based digital signage industry to accelerate market growth.
The event was hosted by IAdea Corporation, a digital signage platform software company whose technology is available through over a dozen third-party hardware models displayed at the forum. Attendees at the event included Intel, NCR, Samsung, Scala, 3M, and top-tier Taiwan-based hardware vendors: Advantech, Advansus, AU Optronics, Chilin Technology, Coretronic, Delta Electronics, Flytech, Litemax, Qista, and VIA.
The focus of the event is to address the needs of mainstream digital signage users: compatible control protocols across products from different digital signage hardware vendors. This allows the mainstream customers to build digital signage networks incrementally and to combine various levels of hardware performance/features under one managed digital signage network. Industry organizations including POPAI and OAAA have formed committees to address this need. Host company IAdea is a member of POPAI and speaks at this event to help drive the concept of standardization across media players and player-integrated displays.
In the demonstrated digital signage project scenario, the 84-inch welcome sign video-wall at the entrance lobby displays high frame-rate dynamically generated vector graphics, while dozens of smaller eye-level video displays play back simple MPEG video clips. All devices in the scenario are controlled using a common protocol based on the open standard SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language), an XML-based command set. System integrators are encouraged to develop their own version of the control software based on SMIL to drive all compatible players and integrated screens. Invited guest SpotProduction of Aarhus, Denmark demonstrated their domain-specific SpotView management system built on top of IAdea's control protocol.
Vendors at the forum demonstrated early prototypes of media players and integrated displays from 7-inch LCD to 84-inch video wall, with 4:3 and 19:6 screen ratios and landscape/portrait orientations. The SMIL protocol is becoming available to control all displays. Commercial products will become available early 2009.
For more information on IAdea products/services, visit www.IAdea.com.
