5 Key Digital Signage Components

Digital Signage Essentials Series - Part 1

Welcome to the Digital Signage Essentials series - your go-to guide for understanding, implementing and scaling Digital Signage in your business. With the global digital signage market expected to be worth $27.8 billion by 2026, there’s never been a better time to explore this powerful communication tool.

In this first installment, we’ll break down the five key components that form the foundation of any digital signage setup so you can get started with confidence.

What Is Digital Signage?

Before we begin, it’s vital to understand what digital signage refers to. Digital Signage is a powerful communication tool for displaying dynamic, multimedia content on electronic displays, whether screens, kiosks, or video walls. It can be used to inform and communicate with your audience, for advertising purposes, or even entertainment.

Why Should Small to Mid-Size Businesses Use It?

Unlike traditional static signs, digital signage allows for real-time content updates, customisation, and audience personalisation. The benefits are wide-ranging:

• Boost sales and customer engagement with dynamic promotions, product information, and targeted advertising
• Strengthen internal communication by displaying company news, KPIs, and motivational content
• Enhance communication with students and staff through real-time updates, schedules, and emergency alerts

Education, retail, workplace - no matter the sector, digital signage can revolutionise your communication. When digital displays capture 400% more views than static displays, it’s clear that the potential digital signage for your business is huge.

Getting Started

With this in mind, how do you get started in digital signage? For this, you’ll need to consider 5 key components:

Hosting

First, you’ll need to decide where to host your CMS. You’ll want to look for flexible, secure, and scalable infrastructure so you can focus on what matters most: your content.

Cloud hosting your digital signage CMS offers a range of advantages such as seamless updates, simplified management, greater scalability and a more out-of-the box solution.

Self-hosting your CMS on-premise meanwhile gives you full control over your implementation but will require in-house servers and maintenance and involves a higher total cost of ownership. This is best suited to organisations with strong technical requirements/resources.

Included as part of our plans, you’ll have everything you need to get started, no matter your size or budget. An open-source solution such as Xibo allows you the flexibility of either cloud-hosting or self-hosting the Xibo CMS depending on your business requirements.

Content Management System

The CMS is the heart of your digital signage setup. It allows you to create, organise, schedule, and publish content across your display network.

You’ll want to look for a simple, intuitive, and secure CMS that offers the following:

• Flexible scheduling and playlist management
• Multi-user support (with user authentication)
• Integration capabilities with calendars, data feeds, etc.
• Support for different media types (images, video, RSS feeds)
• Remote display management
• Display grouping

The Xibo CMS offers all of these features and more while remaining user-friendly and cost-effective.

Content Creation

Of course, the content itself is key to engaging and inspiring your audience. The best CMS platforms allow you to create and edit content with ease, with a variety of integrations to make it as easy as possible. Some also offer standard templates by industry so you can create eye-catching content without advanced design skills. Whether you need calendars, promotional announcements, or dashboards, you’ll find them included in your CMS solution.

You then just need to use built-in scheduling tools to assign content to play at specific times or days, so you can reach your audience in the moments that matter. Rotate content in playlists or set them to play based on time zone, events, or user interaction. You can even dynamically adjust content in real-time - perfect for news, weather, or status updates.

Player Software

To actually display your content on screens, you’ll need player software. This, put simply, connects your CMS to your display.

Options vary depending on your desired operating system, however some popular choices include:

• Windows
• Android
• ChromeOS
• webOS
• Tizen
• Linux

Your choice will of course depend on your budget, scale, and existing infrastructure. With Xibo’s CMS, you can find the perfect player for your business needs.

Hardware

Lastly, you’ll need to consider your hardware options. Of course, your displays themselves matter, whether in terms of type, for example, LCD or LED, resolution such as Full HD or 4k, or orientation, portrait vs landscape.

You’ll also need to consider your media player hardware. Fortunately, Xibo is agnostic and supports a wide range of platforms. With a System-on-Chip (SoC) device, the player is directly integrated into the hardware itself, simplifying installation and reducing costs. Otherwise, external media players (such as the DSCS9X) are suitable for customers with more complex digital signage requirements.

Be sure to consider the speed of your Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or mobile network to allow for optimal use of advanced features such as content synchronisation (to sync content across 2 or more displays).

With all 5 components ready, you’ll have everything you need to engage your audience and transform your business!

Up Next

In the second part of Digital Signage Essentials, we’ll be exploring what a digital signage CMS does, why they’re critical for scheduling and creating your content, and how to choose the right one for your needs.

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Sources:

PR Newswire, Digital Signage Market worth $27.8 billion by 2026, 2021
Digital Signage Today, 100 Proven ROI-Driven Digital Signage Statistics, 2022