Digital signage strategies for SMBs

If your are an SMB and ever wondered, "Boy, that digital signage stuff sure sounds exciting, I only wish that we could afford it?" Now, there might be an answer for you.

Cilutions' VP of Marketing & Business Development has written an article, "Digital signage strategies for small-to-medium businesses" that dispels some of the myths surrounding digital signage for the SMB. Here is an excerpt:

It is apparent that to penetrate the SMB market, digital signage solution vendors at an advantage have the following characteristics:

1. It is small or medium business
2. It is able to play the dual role of a one-stop shop and a systems integrator.
3. It can hold down costs by leveraging the SMB’s existing hardware and network infrastructure, where possible.
4. IT is able to provide a proof-of-concept pilot that convinces the SMB of the technical and financial viability of the total solution.
5. It provides the SMB with assistance on the content creation and management aspects of the total solution.

To read the full article, please visit the Digital Signage Today site at:

www.digitalsignagetoday.com/article.php?id=19532&na=1

DMB’s Role in Bridging the Media Divide

So what do we mean by “bridging the media divide?” First and foremost it is the Cilutions corporate tagline, which is now also being used as the name of this corporate blog. Cilutions’ flagship product is called the Digital Media Bridge (DMB). DMB is a content and video distribution software product that enables a secure and reliable digital asset delivery service for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). DMB actually consists of a set of sending and receiving platforms that provide for the simultaneous transfer of any type of digital information from one centralized sender to any number of desired receivers. DMB schedules deliveries in accordance with business needs by enabling staggered transmissions in either unicast or multicast modes. DMB also allows an SMB to select recipient(s) based on pre-defined business rules.

Since our core product basically enables an SMB to transmit digital media assets across a desired business footprint, we empower the SMB to bridge the media divide, as it were. Some of the competitive advantages that DMB provides an SMB are as follows:

1. Managed distribution of digital content.
2. Customized management of bandwidth.
3. Simultaneous transmission of multiple channels.
4. Seamless integration with business systems.
5. Co-existence with current network infrastructure.

DMB provides key benefits that make it a valuable resource in digital asset management. It is a transport and platform independent solution that drops easily into commonly-deployed network infrastructures. More importantly, DMB is scalable and highly available, which is critical in content storage and distribution platforms.

Several feature enhancements are in the works for DMB that will make it even more appealing to an SMB. On the sending platform, DMB will provide video streaming enhancements that will enable locally stored video files to be streamed as MPEG Transport Streams (TS) supporting both, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 formats for playback on downstream receivers.

On the receiving platform, DMB will include support for Microsoft Vista, UDP plug-n-play, and a couple of “top secret” features, which will prove especially useful in the distribution of very large video files.

Thus, DMB users will be pleased to note that Cilutions is constantly striving to live up to its motto of bridging the media divide!

Benefits of Digital Signage

Cilutions is pleased to announce the launch of its corporate blog. With this inaugural post, we want to welcome all our Digital Media Bridge users to regularly read and comment on articles that will be posted here. We intend for this blog to be an interactive forum, wherein we request feedback from not only our user base, but also from subject matter experts in the content delivery domain.

Cilutions especially wants to assist the small medium business (SMB) community in better understanding content delivery applications such as corporate communications, distance learning, digital signage and IPTV (a.k.a. business TV). These applications are transforming the SMB world by making them more competitive through increased productivity and enhanced customer satisfaction.

So is your business reaping the benefits of digital signage? Digital signage means different things to different people. However, we simply define it as the delivery of desired digital content to specific audiences at a preferred time. Among the top two concerns that SMBs have when considering deploying digital signage are:

* What is going to be the ROI?
* What makes for an effective content strategy?

Based on deployments in various market segments over the past several years, it has been noticed that digital signage applications have been able to provide an average sales lift of over 15%. On the cost side, digital signage hardware and service costs have been falling on average about 10 to 15% annually. One has to only look at the cost of flat panel LCD displays and broadband network charges to know that this is a fact. More importantly, the costs of creating and managing digital content have also been coming down every year. Given these revenue and cost numbers, the ROI on a typical digital signage deployment has halved from about 3 years barely a couple of years ago to under 18 months now.

As far as the considerations for a content strategy go, the SMB needs to look at the following factors:

1. What is your targeted audience or market segment for digital signage?
2. What is your message going to be for this targeted audience?
3. At what specific locations will your business be placing the digital signage?
4. What are your business’ performance criteria for the digital signage?
5. Who is going to be responsible for digital signage content design and management?

Once the SMB has a content strategy in place, digital signage becomes a cinch.