Bulletin boards of all kinds are being changed to digital signage because it is easier to send pictures and notices to an LCD screen on the wall from the computer on your desk than it is to cut out Valentine’s Day hearts and pin them to a cork bulletin board on the wall.
One popular job of a bulletin board is displaying department personnel. Digital signage screens display pictures. If you want a screen with many head shots on it that looks like the picture at the right, you can have it, but depending on the system, the collage of pictures might have to be created in Photoshop and uploaded as one big picture. You would have to change the collage in Photoshop every time a person was hired or left the company.
Our multi-zoned system allows each picture to be uploaded by itself and displays each person in a separate zone on the screen. This way when a new person was hired or someone left the company, there is no collage to create. The screen creates the composite picture from the individual head pictures. The limitation however is that the number of zones is limited to seven and can’t be raised because it is a hardware requirement of the chipset. So this means you could only have six heads and a banner on the screen (any size screen) at one time without creating a collage.
I say “at one time” because pictures can rotate. For example, our accounting department could have twelve employees in the same screen layout, but each space would be shared by two people. If you had the pictures changing every 15 seconds, then David would show for 15 seconds and then change to Sam who would show for 15 seconds and then back to David, etc. Each space would do the same. Heads are not showing continuously but you now have twelve heads on your screen and you don’t have to make a collage in Photoshop.
You can play video in one of the zones too. The picture at the right is a typical advertising screen playing a music video and ads. If the system was not multi-zoned, the music video would need to be re-rendered to attach the ads and be made into a new composite video. With the multi-zoned system however, the video is sent to the screen in its original form. Each ad is a simple jpeg picture and is sent to the system individually. In out example there are four jpeg picture zones, one video zone and a text scroller on the bottom.
Each jpeg picture zone can have more than one picture in that location and will rotate like our head picture example above. Each jpeg zone can contain a different number of pictures so as they rotate, the screen seems more random with the complete screen composite picture having the pattern of jpegs always changing relative to each other. If one zone has three jpegs and the next zone four pictures, there will twelve combinations. With four jpeg zones like our example, there is the potential for hundreds of combinations.
Considering the whole screen composite picture of the video, the rotating jpegs and scrolling text; you have a very complex signage display; but you only uploaded a stock video, some simple jpeg pictures and a text file. The text file can also be an RSS feed from the internet displaying real time news, sports scores and stock quotes; all inputted without any work from you. If your screen is connected to the internet you can also have the local weather report in one of the screen zones.
Multi-zoned signage systems are best for digital signage because the programming is easy. The zones in the screen layout can be customized to your needs in case one of the standard layouts doesn’t work for you. The management software is user friendly and the user interface changes as you change layouts to show you what artwork you have available for each zone and remind you to put something into each zone.
If your goal is to create top quality digital signage without becoming video editors or media experts, you should call us to learn more.
