Sixteen:Nine - All Digital Signage, Some Snark
00:00:00 · Dave Haynes
[00:00:00] S0: This is Sixteen:Nine the Podcast. I'm Dave Haynes. Sixteen:Nine has been covering the digital signage industry since the dawn of man, first online and now as a podcast. The goal on here is to make listeners aware of interesting companies, smart people, and new technology developments, All of them meaningful in making digital signage projects happen. I try to help listeners understand sometimes complicated subjects and why they should care. The podcasts are free and I try to get a new one out weekly, but things happen now and then. The Sixteen:Nine podcast has been gratefully sponsored and supported since the start by Jeremy Gavin and the fine folks at Screen Feed, the digital signage content store. Screen Feed makes beautiful looking, totally automated content for signage and digital out of home networks. Check them out at screenfeed.com. Sixteen:Nine has been around since 2006, and the publication and podcast are now owned by Spectrio, which provides customer engagement solutions for business. You can find them at spectrio.com. I managed to talk to the AV team running the main conference room at the recent Digital Signage Summit in Munich to give me the audio off the board for three of the sessions I either moderated or spoke on. The third of three that I did was an unscripted chat with conference hosts Florian Rotberg and Stefan Schieker that was billed as a wake up call for the digital signage industry. And the three of us floated a series of issues that don't get enough attention and work. My big ones are, as always, having to deal with all the day to day BS put out by marketers, and related to that the terrible job many to most of the marketers and business communicators do in this sector. Sorry, but it's true. Florian and Stefan get into other important topics. It all sounds quite serious, but we tried to make it a fun worthwhile thirty minutes.
00:01:39 · Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[00:01:39] S1: A wake up call for the industry: revisit. We started this segment last year and you all loved it because we showed you all the, you know, the failed projects, the photos and everything, and we got so much positive feedback. So Stefan and I decided we will never do a standard keynote again. We would just, you know, show you all the failures. But as you know, we could show a lot of photos. We see a lot of stuff, but it's not always fair. Know, if you have 10,000 screens and one screen fails, I mean, that's life or that's something. But Stefan, who will join us in a few seconds, Dave and I, we sat down and said, you know, what are things, you know, in the past twelve months when we looked at project, when we talked to the industry, which really bothered us, right? That's something we want to go through. So the first thing is... [00:02:24] S0: Black screens. [00:02:25] S1: Black screens. [00:02:28] S0: Stop fitting, yes. [00:02:29] S1: That's yours.
00:02:29 · Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[00:02:29] S1: That's yours. [00:02:30] S0: Yeah, okay. If you don't know who I am, my name is Dave Haynes. I write something called Sixteen:Nine. I've been doing that for about eighteen years now. I get emails every day, hundreds of them literally from PR companies, marketers and so on telling me about their products, telling me about their projects, everything else. And it gets so frustrating because there's so much fibbing going on about what they're doing. The one that's bothering me the most lately is micro LED. That's something that has been around for three or four years now. Different companies saying here's our micro LED display. Reality is almost none of those manufacturers is actually making micro LED displays. They're mini LED or there's some other technology. And there's a good argument to be made that like who cares and I'm kind of coming around to that but then I also think this is a specs driven industry. All these manufacturers give you a very long list of all their specifications. They talk about pixel pitch and everything else, but then they say it's something that it isn't actually. And I just find that frustrating. I don't know how you guys feel about it. [00:03:49] S1: There's even one more. You hate even more. I think it's holograms, [00:03:52] S0: right? Oh, [00:03:54] S1: Yes. It's rotor LEDs, you hate that, right?
00:03:54 · Florian Rotberg, Dave Haynes
[00:03:54] S1: Yes. It's rotor LEDs, you hate that, right? [00:04:00] S0: They have a point. Those little spinny wand things, I always worry about people walking up to them and losing a finger or the tip of their nose or something but all these companies and there was that little portal thing for the one of the early sessions today that's also not a hologram. There's so many companies saying what they have are holograms. They're not. They're transparent LCDs or they're spinning LED rotors with no depth to them. In order for it to be a hologram and there are very very very few companies that actually have something that you could equate to a hologram or light field display. So just like say what it is, say what it does. You don't need to call it something that it isn't. And the other one is like there's a Chinese company, Muxwave, that doubles down on it. They call their product a hologram and they call it invisible and it's neither. I actually think it's quite a good product, but just like sell it on what it is and what it can do, that's enough.
00:04:59 · Florian Rotberg
[00:04:59] S1: Stefan, I'm a little more relaxed with that. I know you hate that, but I think micro LED, mean, let's face it, it's below one millimeter or whatever pitch. And I know it's a different technology. I fully agree with you, but, you know, just for the purpose of having some standards, you know, it just, you know, people are having a hard time anyway to understand what LEDs and what's the difference between COB is and everything, so they need something which has some quality to it. So I understand where you're coming from. I totally support you, but I think, you know, at the end of the day, if everyone uses it, maybe people, like digital signage. That is an awful term. Mean, I it's really an awful term, you know, and people still, we still get everyday mailings, oh, do you want to write about our digital signature? Said, no, it's digital signage. So it's not ideal and it was called narrow casting in The Netherlands for many years. I still think they still use it today. So sometimes you have these terms which are not precise, know, and Stefan here, he's always, you know, he's a physicist, he knows everything about precision and data and everything and holograms, sometimes I think we can be a little bit more relaxed, but I understand where you're coming from.
00:05:57 · Dave Haynes, Stefan Schieker, Florian Rotberg
[00:05:57] S0: I think it's a bit of an evolution as well. When I was walking around Integrated Systems Europe back in late January, early February looking at all the LED displays out there and in particular I remember the one that Long, the German company had and it was actually i5 LEDs displayed. Amazing looking display and it was chip on board so not micro LED technology and at that point I just kind of came to the conclusion maybe the technical definition doesn't matter. Does it look good or not? And at some point everybody's thinking that we're all waiting for micro LED. That's gonna be the moment when these huge video walls are gonna look amazing. Fact is they already look amazing. We don't need to wait for micro LED to get to that point. [00:06:42] S2: I think I think Florian's making a marketing point [00:06:46] S1: of view or he's taking a marketing point of view [00:06:48] S2: in this case, and you need to call it something. Yep. That... That's the issue. And there there are also these nice terms and holograms and neutrality, but they are not precise. That's the issue and you should probably choose another term for that. But that's why you're relaxed, you're a marketing guy. [00:07:08] S0: Yeah, the company that kind of innovated on the whole idea of transparent LCDs to create these what they call holograms. It was portal and became proto. [00:07:20] S1: I