BrightSign, the digital signage media player manufacturer, is showing its new 4K digital signage media players at NAB 2014 in both the Elemental Technologies and Tightrope Media Systems booths. The company announced at the show that its 4K players will support MPEG-DASH, which enables high-quality streaming of media content over the Internet.
Eric Henry, in charge of signage solutions at Tightrope Media, was demo’ing his company’s digital signage software and hardware at their booth at the NAB show. BrightSign’s media players were in use in the booth. Henry said that NAB attendees, including university digital signage and media professionals, were also interested in Tightrope’s broadcast production tools on display in the booth. The digital signage screen shown in the photo is using a BrightSign XD230 Media Player from BrightSign using a HTML5 rendering engine for 1080P.
"4K opens up so many possibilities in digital signage and other industry applications, but it’s important to understand and avoid the potential pitfalls of a wrongly deployed 4K system," said Jeff Hastings, BrightSign’s CEO. “As BrightSign continues to expand into the 4K market, we are working with a wider range of partners and demonstrating new technology for supporting the 4K ecosystem at NAB.”
MPEG-DASH is critical when it comes to broadcasting 4K content via the Internet. The protocol takes content from standard HTTP servers and separates that content into individual segments, enabling network bandwidth optimization in real time for maximum streaming efficiency. Efficiencies are maximized because the highest possible bit rate segment will be streamed at any given time, depending on the network resources available at that time. And because network resources fluctuate constantly, MPEG-DASH continuously evaluates those resources to maximize playback quality, without causing stalls or requiring re-buffering. Optimizing playback quality and eliminating the risk of network overload are important, especially when broadcasting movies, live sporting events or other lengthy content
This past weekend BrightSign demonstrated the latest 4K video technology at the JB&A Video Workflow Pre-NAB Event. BrightSign demonstrated its new 4K player – the industry’s first sub-$1,000 commercial-grade solid-state digital signage media player, for delivery of 4K, with H.265 encoding and HDMI 2.0 for playback at 60 fps.
